Author: Edward Ashbee The right and the recession considers the ways in which conservative activists, groupings, parties and interests in the US and Britain responded to the financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed in its wake. The book looks at the tensions and stresses between different ideas, interests and institutions and the ways in which they shaped the character of political outcomes. In Britain, these processes opened the way for leading Conservatives to redefine their commitment to fiscal retrenchment and austerity. Whereas public expenditure reductions had been portrayed as a necessary response to earlier overspending they were increasingly represented as a way of securing a permanently leaner state. The book assesses the character of this shift in thinking as well as the viability of these efforts to shrink the state and the parallel attempts in the US to cut federal government spending through mechanisms such as the budget sequester.
Author: By Luke Morgan
Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
Author: Tina P. Srivastava
Our national security increasingly depends on access to the most sophisticated and advanced technology. Yet the next time we set out to capture a terrorist leader, we may fail. Why? The answer lies in a conflict between two worlds. One is the dynamic, global, commercial world with its thriving innovations. The other is the world of national security, in which innovation is a matter of life or death. The conflict is about secrecy.Innovating in a Secret World is a detailed examination of the U.S. government and innovation landscapes and of the current trends in often secret national securityrelated research and development (R&D). Based on case studies, detailed research, and interviews with executives at Fortune 500s, startup entrepreneurs, and military directors and program managers, this accessible and timely book is a must-read. Tina P. Srivastava evaluates whether the strategy of technology innovation in the world of national securityleaves certain innovations behind or unintentionally precludes certain classes of innovators from participating. She identifies the unintended consequences and emergent behaviors of this conflict. This examination unfolds in a complex, dynamic system that includes the legal framework in which technology innovation must exist. For more than a decade Srivastava has been on the front lines of cutting-edge technology innovation. She suggests focusing on an emerging class of R&D strategy called open innovationa strategy that broadens participation in innovation beyond an individual organization or division traditionally assigned to perform R&D activities. Through compelling stories of commercial and early government applications, she shows how open technology innovation strategies can enable, accelerate, and enhance technology innovation. Successful incorporation of open innovation into the previously closed U.S. government R&D landscape can yield profound benefits to both national security and global leadership.
Author: Edited by Joshua A. Fogel
Japan and China did not begin to emerge as unified political entities until the nineteenth century. Yet scholars and politicians persistently refer to Japan and China in discussions of earlier periods, as if the modern nation-state had long been established in these regions. Joshua Fogel here brings together essays by eight renowned East Asian scholars to demonstrate why this oversight distorts our historical analysis and understanding of both countries. The nation-states of Japan and China developed much later and, indeed, far less uniformly than usually conveyed in popular myth and political culture. Moreover, the false depiction of an earlier national identity not only alters the factual record; it serves the contemporary engines of nationalist mythology and propaganda.This interdisciplinary volume asks deceptively simple questions: When did Japan and China become Japan and China? When and why do inhabitants begin to define their identity and interests nationally rather than locally? Identifying the role of mitigating factors from disease and travel abroad to the subtleties of political language and aesthetic sensibility, the answers provided in these diverse and insightful essays are appropriately complex. By setting aside Western notions of the nation-state, the contributors approach each region on its own terms, while the thematic organization of the book provides a unique lens through which to view the challenges common to understanding both Japan and China. This highly readable collection will be important to scholars both inside and beyond the field of East Asian studies.
Author: edited by William A. Wilson and Jill Terry Rudy
Composed over several decades, the essays here are remarkably fresh and relevant. They offer instruction for the student just beginning the study of folklore as well as repeated value for the many established scholars who continue to wrestle with issues that Wilson has addressed. As his work has long offered insight on critical matters—nationalism, genre, belief, the relationship of folklore to other disciplines in the humanities and arts, the currency of legend, the significance of humor as a cultural expression, and so forth—so his recent writing, in its reflexive approach to narrative and storytelling, illuminates today’s paradigms. Its notable autobiographical dimension, long an element of Wilson’s work, employs family and local lore to draw conclusions of more universal significance. Another way to think of it is that newer folklorists are catching up with Wilson and what he has been about for some time. As a body, Wilson’s essays develop related topics and connected themes. This collection organizes them in three coherent parts. The first examines the importance of folklore—what it is and its value in various contexts. Part two, drawing especially on the experience of Finland, considers the role of folklore in national identity, including both how it helps define and sustain identity and the less savory ways it may be used for the sake of nationalistic ideology. Part three, based in large part on Wilson’s extensive work in Mormon folklore, which is the most important in that area since that of Austin and Alta Fife, looks at religious cultural expressions and outsider perceptions of them and, again, at how identity is shaped, by religious belief, experience, and participation; by the stories about them; and by the many other expressive parts of life encountered daily in a culture.Each essay is introduced by a well-known folklorist who discusses the influence of Wilson’s scholarship. These include Richard Bauman, Margaret Brady, Simon Bronner, Elliott Oring, Henry Glassie, David Hufford, Michael Owen Jones, and Beverly Stoeltje.
Author: Jeremiah P. Ostriker
Heart of Darkness describes the incredible saga of humankind's quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe. Over the past thirty years, scientists have learned that two little-understood components--dark matter and dark energy--comprise most of the known cosmos, explain the growth of all cosmic structure, and hold the key to the universe's fate. The story of how evidence for the so-called Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model of cosmology has been gathered by generations of scientists throughout the world is told here by one of the pioneers of the field, Jeremiah Ostriker, and his coauthor Simon Mitton. From humankind's early attempts to comprehend Earth's place in the solar system, to astronomers' exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the realm of the nebulae beyond, to the detection of the primordial fluctuations of energy from which all subsequent structure developed, this book explains the physics and the history of how the current model of our universe arose and has passed every test hurled at it by the skeptics. Throughout this rich story, an essential theme is emphasized: how three aspects of rational inquiry--the application of direct measurement and observation, the introduction of mathematical modeling, and the requirement that hypotheses should be testable and verifiable--guide scientific progress and underpin our modern cosmological paradigm. The story is far from complete, however, as scientists confront the mysteries of the ultimate causes of cosmic structure formation and the real nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy.
Author: Molly Littlewood McKibbin
In Shades of Gray Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective struggles with multiracial identity. McKibbin weaves a rich sociohistorical tapestry around the critically acclaimed works of Danzy Senna, Caucasia (1998); Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001); Emily Raboteau, The Professors Daughter (2005); Rachel M. Harper, Brass Ankle Blues (2006); and Heidi Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). Taking into account the social history of racial classification and the literary history of depicting mixed race, she argues that these writers are producing new representations of multiracial identity.Shades of Gray examines the current opportunity to define racial identity after the civil rights, black power, and multiracial movements of the late twentieth century changed the sociopolitical climate of the United Statesand helped revolutionize the racial consciousness of the nation. McKibbin makes the case that twenty-first-century literature is able to represent multiracial identities for the first time in ways that do not adhere to the dichotomous conceptions of race that have, until now, determined how racial identities could be expressed in the United States.
Author: Carmen Pearson
Modernism and Mildred Walker is the first full-length critical study of the major fictional works of this American author whose life spanned the twentieth century (190598) and whose literary production spanned almost three-quarters of a century. A highly regarded chronicler of New England and the American West, she is also appreciated for her portrayal of women characters and the complexity of womens roles. Long beloved by readers of Montana fiction, Mildred Walkers novels have been dismissed by some critics as only of regional interest, and, as Carmen Pearson argues, have not been explored and appreciated from other critical perspectives and by other audiences.In this persuasive new study, Pearson offers a new and decidedly western interpretation of Modernism as a critical tool and proposes a variety of readings and interpretations designed to emphasize the relationship between cultural production in the West and modernism. She encourages readers and students of literature to reappraise Walkers work and to undertake further critical studies of their own.
Author: by Robert G. Netherland
Part cookbook and part memoir, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking blends staples of farm fresh, Appalachian cuisine with stories of life on a large farm in East Tennessee, where homemade biscuits and harvest vegetables were the spoils of hard work and meager earnings. Robert G. Netherland begins with the family farm: a sprawling sixty acres of fertile, rolling hills located in the small town of Surgionsville, Tennessee, situated between bends in the Holston River. From there, Netherland guides the reader through threshing wheat, churning butter, sharecroppers and country doctors, hunting and hog killing, and all the while sharing updated versions of his familys recipes for authentic farm-to-table food. From biscuits to cornbread, freshly shelled beans to red-ripe tomatoes, and savory meats to the sweetest cherry pies, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking provides the home cook with recipes and historical asides to turn any trip to the farmers market into a delicious family affair. In sharing his experiences, Netherland reminds us of a time when prepackaged and plastic-wrapped food didnt line our counters and fill our cabinets, but in its place were baskets of seasonal fruit, canned vegetables, fresh baked breads, and hot-from-the-oven cobblers. Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking is more than just a nostalgic memoir of farming and food, its also filled with healthy, simple, everyday eats for the modern cook.
Author: Thomas Doherty
Teenagers and Teenpics tells the story of two signature developments in the 1950s: the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the emergence of that strange new creature, the American teenager. Hollywood's discovery of the teenage moviegoer initiated a progressive juvenilization of film content that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture industry.The juvenilization of the American movies is best revealed in the development of the 1950s teenpic, a picture targeted at teenagers even to the exclusion of their elders. In a wry and readable style, Doherty defines and interprets the various teenpic film types: rock 'n' roll pictures, j.d. films, horror and sci-fi weirdies, and clean teenpics. Individual films are examined both in light of their impact on the motion picture industry and in terms of their important role in validating the emerging teenage subculture. Also included in this edition is an expanded treatment of teenpics since the 1950s, especially the teenpics produced during the age of AIDS.