The Measure of America, 2010-2011, is the definitive report on the overall well-being of all Americans. How are Americans doing-compared to one another and compared to the rest of the world? This important, easy-to-understand guide will provide all of the essential information on the current state of America. This fully illustrated report, with over 130 color images, is based on the groundbreaking American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of the well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by race, gender, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 435 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups. For example, overall, Connecticut ranked first among states on the 2008-2009 Index, and Mississippi ranked last, suggesting that there is a 30-year gap in human development between the two states. Further, among congressional districts, New York's 14th District, in Manhattan, ranked first, and California's 20th District, near Fresno, ranked last. The average resident of New York's 14th District earned over three times as much as the average resident of California's 20th District, lived over four years longer, and was ten times as likely to have a college degree. The second in the American Human Development Report series, the 2010-2011 edition features a completely updated Index, new findings on the well-being of different racial and ethnic groups from state to state, and a closer look at disparities within major metro areas. It also shines a spotlight on threats to progress and opportunity for some Americans as well as highlighting tested approaches to fosteringresilience among different groups. Using a revelatory framework for explaining the very nature of humanprogress, this report can be used not only as a way to measure America but also to build upon past policy successes, protect the progress made over the last half century from new risks, and create an infrastructure of opportunity that can serve a new generation of Americans. Beautifully illustrated with stunning four-color graphics that allow for a quick visual understanding of often complex but important issues, The Measure of America is essential reading for all Americans, especially for social scientists, policy makers, and pundits who want to understand where Americans stand today.

Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever you like? This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars, making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you to peep behind the scenes of international standardization committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads, and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.

Born in Pakistan to Baptist missionaries from rural Georgia, Jonathan S. Addleton crossed the borders of race, culture, class, and religion from an early age. Some Far and Distant Place combines family history, social observation, current events, and deeply personal commentary to tell an unusual coming-of-age story that has as much to do with the intersection of cultures as it does with one man's life. Whether sharing ice cream with a young Benazir Bhutto or selling gospel tracts at the tomb of a Sufi saint, Addleton provides insightful and sometimes hilarious glimpses into the Muslim-Christian encounter through the eyes of a young child. His narrative is rooted in many unlikely sources, including a southern storytelling tradition, Urdu ghazal, revivalist hymnology, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The natural beauty of the Himalayas also leaves a strong and lasting mark, providing solidity in a confusing world that on occasion seems about to tilt out of control. This clear-eyed, insightful memoir describes an experience that will become increasingly more common as cultures that once seemed remote and distant are no longer confined within the bounds of a single nation-state.

For nearly forty years, Frye Gaillard has covered the American South as a journalist, historian and writer of memoir. With Music and Justice for All is a collection of Gaillard's most compelling work, one writer's odyssey though a time and place. There are stories here of the civil rights movement, a moral, social and political upheaval that changed the South in so many ways. Gaillard has captured the essence of that drama by giving it a face--telling the stories of the ordinary people, as well as the icons. In the course of these pages, the reader not only meets Dr. Martin Luther King, but also the lesser known heroes such Perry Wallace--the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference and Thomas Gilmore, the first black sheriff in one of the toughest counties in the Alabama Black Belt, a man of non-violence, who refused, in deference to the fallen Dr. King, to carry a gun during the thirteen years he served as sheriff.

But Gaillard examines the South from other angles as well--the religious heritage, for example, that once led Flannery O'Connor to write about a "Christ-haunted" South. We meet Billy Graham, the greatest evangelist of his time, who admitted in the course of interviews with Gaillard that his ministry represented a "very narrow gift." There are profiles here of the Southern Baptist renegade Will Campbell and former President Jimmy Carter, whose commitment to his own understanding of Christianity has sometimes led him into controversy. Gaillard writes also about the revealing power of Southern music--how the great Johnny Cash, for example, became a force for reconciliation in America. In the final section of the book we meet some of the characters Gaillard has covered through the years, including John T. Scopes, whose final public appearance Gaillard wrote about as a young reporter in Nashville.

Explores how writers, filmmakers and artists have attempted to reckon with the legacy of a devastating war The Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. The memory of it may have faded in the wake of more recent wars in the region, but the harrowing facts remain: over one million soldiers and civilians dead, millions more permanently displaced and disabled, and an entire generation marked by prosthetic implants and teenage martyrdom. These same facts have been instrumentalized by agendas both foreign and domestic, but also aestheticized, defamiliarized, readdressed and reconciled by artists, writers, and filmmakers across an array of identities: linguistic (Arabic, Persian, Kurdish), religious (Shiite, Sunni, atheist), and political (Iranian, Iraqi, internationalist). Official discourses have unsurprisingly tried to dominate the process of production and distribution of war narratives. In doing so, they have ignored and silenced other voices. Centering on novels, films, memoirs, and poster art that gave aesthetic expression to the Iran-Iraq War, the essays gathered in this volume present multiple perspectives on the war's most complex and underrepresented narratives. These scholars do not naively claim to represent an authenticity lacking in official discourses of the war, but rather, they call into question the notion of authenticity itself. Finding, deciding upon, and creating a language that can convey any sort of truth at all-collective, national, or private-is the major preoccupation of the texts and critiques in this diverse collection.

The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

An introductory guide to the work of Judith Butler, a major contemporary theorist, this title includes a new interview with Butler. "Judith Butler: Live Theory" is an invaluable introduction to the work of this key contemporary theorist, guiding the student through the most complex ideas of one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary culture. Concise, accessible and comprehensive, the book explores and illuminates Butler's important and ongoing contributions to gender theory, offers new insights into the central themes of her work, and considers the extent of her impact on how the discipline of gender studies has been shaped. In particular, the book considers Butler's intellectual work in relation to issues of sexuality and performance, identity and politics, language and power - themes central to Butler's thought and writing. Vicki Kirby locates Butler in the context of contemporary theorists and thinkers and the book includes a new interview with Butler herself, in which she discusses the key themes in her work as well as future writing plans. Offering a stimulating and clear account of the work and thought of this inspiring figure, "Judith Butler: Live Theory" is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker within the context of sociology, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminism and philosophy.

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Old English language and literary style have long been a source of artistic inspiration and fascination, providing modern writers and scholars with the opportunity not only to explore the past but, in doing so, to find new perspectives on the present. This volume brings together thirteen essays on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, exploring how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by translators, novelists, poets and teachers. These afterlives include the composition of neo-Old English, the evocation in a modern literary context of elements of early medieval English language and style, the fictional depiction of Old English-speaking worlds and world views, and the adaptation and recontextualisation of works of early medieval English literature. The sources covered include W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Seamus Heaney, alongside more recent writers such as Christopher Patton, Hamish Clayton and Paul Kingsnorth, as well as other media, from museum displays to television. The volume also features the first-hand perspectives of those who are authors and translators themselves in the field of Old English medievalism.

Propaganda--so crucial to winning the battle of hearts and minds in warfare--witnessed a transformation during World War II, when film was fast becoming the most popular form of entertainment.In Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany, Jo Fox compares how each country exploited their national cinema for political purposes. Through an investigation of shorts and feature films, the author looks at how both political propaganda films and escapist cinema were critical in maintaining the morale of both civilians and the military and how this changed throughout the war. While both countries shared certain similarities in their wartime propaganda films - a harking back to a glorious historic past, for example - the thematic differences reveal important distinctions between cultures.This book offers new insight into the shifting pattern of morale during World War II and highlights a key moment in propaganda film history.

Students struggling to find information on the modern lives of those living in Eurasia need not look any farther Written for high school and undergraduate students, "Culture and Customs of the Caucasus" fills a major void on library shelves. This unique reference work explores contemporary life in three former Soviet Union republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. No other reference book offers such exhaustive material on the traditions and customs of all three nations. Students studying world culture, social studies, and multicultural issues can use this engaging and comprehensive volume to learn about the Caucasus's history, urban life, religion, literature, cuisine, holidays, and leisure activities, among many other topics.

In the early 1990's, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia emerged from the grip of the Soviet Union and stood on their own for the first time in almost a century. Today, these three nations are slowly emerging from communisM's dark cloud, thriving culturally and gaining strength economically. Written for high-school students, "Culture and Customs of the Caucasus" is the ultimate one-stop reference source that explores the three countries in the region-no other reference work provides such comprehensive and current material. Students studying world culture, social studies, and multicultural issues can use this engaging and wide-ranging volume to learn about the Caucasus's history, urban life, religion, literature, cuisine, holidays, and leisure activities, among many other topics.

Imagine the tension that existed between the emerging nations and governments throughout the Latin American world and the cultural life of former enslaved Africans and their descendants. A world of cultural production, in the form of literature, poetry, art, music, and eventually film, would often simultaneously contravene or cooperate with the newly established order of Latin American nations negotiating independence and a new political and cultural balance. In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an antislavery novel in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region. All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

The Romantic pianist-the solo pianist who plays nineteenth-century piano music-has become an attractive figure in the popular imagination, considering the innumerable artworks, literature, and films representing this performer's seductive allure. Dreams of Love pursues a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to understanding the "romantic" pianist as a cultural icon, focusing on the role of technology in producing and perpetuating this mythology over the past two centuries. Sound recording and cinema have shaped the pianist's music and image since the early twentieth century, but these contemporary media technologies build upon practices established during the early nineteenth century: the influence of the piano keyboard on early telegraphs and typewriters, the invention of the solo recital alongside developments in photography, and the ways that piano design and the placement of the instrument on stage structure our viewing-listening perspectives. The concept of technology can be broadened to include the performance of gender and sexuality as further ways of making the pianist into an attractive cultural figure. The book's three sections deal with the touch, sights, and sounds of the Romantic pianist's playing as mediated through various forms of technology. Analyzing these persistent Liebestraume and exploring how they function can reveal their meaning for performers, audiences, and music lovers of the past and present too.

The demise of the monarchy and the bodily absence of a King caused a representational crisis in the early republic, forcing the American people to reconstruct the social symbolic order in a new and unfamiliar way. Social historians have routinely understood the Revolution and the early republic as projects dedicated to and productive of reason, with "the people" as an orderly and sensible collective at odds with the volatile and unthinking crowd. American Enchantment rejects this traditionally held vision of a rational public sphere, arguing that early Americans dealt with the post-monarchical crisis by engaging in "civil mysticism," not systematic discussion and debate. By evaluating a wide range of social and political rituals and literary and cultural discourses, Sizemore shows how "enchantment" becomes a vital mode of enacting the people after the demise of traditional monarchical forms. In works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne-as well as in Delaware oral histories, accounts of George Washington's inauguration, and Methodist conversion narratives-enchantment is an experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation. Recognizing the role of enchantment in constituting the people overturns some of the most common-sense assumptions in the post-revolutionary world: above all, that the people are not simply a flesh-and-blood substance, but also a mystical force.

Visions of England is a provocative and original exploration of Englishness, in particular English class, in contemporary cinema. Class has been a central part, whether consciously or not, of much of English social analysis and artistic production for over a century. But as a way of interpreting society, class has found itself sidelined in a postmodern world. Visions of England presents a detailed analysis of the changing landscape of English class and culture. Visions of England explores a wide range of film production - from gangster thrillers like Lock, Stock Two Smoking Barrels to the period cinema of Elizabeth, from cult classics like Performance and Trainspotting to the mainstream romantic comedy of Notting Hill and Bridget Jones, from the social realist drama of Billy Elliot and The Full Monty to the multicultural comedy of Bend it like Beckham, and the experimentalism of films such as London Orbital and Robinson in Space. An extraordinarily wide-ranging and incisive study, Visions of England rewrites the relationship of film and Englishness.

Most people can't get through the day without a hit of caffeine. Chances are you're one of them. But do you really know what that daily coffee or coke is doing to you? Caffeine is a powerful stimulant. It wakes us up, boosts our mood, and offers the potential to improve both our athletic performance and our intellectual prowess. But did you know that caffeine can play a role in health problems such as obesity and anxiety, depending on how it is delivered to the body? Many purveyors of caffeine-based products have ducked regulation for decades - how have they been allowed to get away with this? And are you aware of how caffeine is used to reinforce buying patterns, sharpening our craving for it? From the coffee farms of Guatemala to the world's largest synthetic caffeine factory in China, Murray Carpenter draws on the latest research to reveal the little-known truths about this addictive, largely unregulated drug that we consume every day in coffee, energy drinks, teas, colas, chocolate, and even painkillers.

Deciding what to eat and how to eat it are two of the most basic acts of everyday life. Yet every choice also implies a value judgement: 'good' foods versus 'bad', 'proper' and 'improper' ways of eating, and 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies. These food decisions are influenced by a range of social, political and economic bioauthorities, and mediated through the individual 'eating body'. This book is unique in the cultural politics of food in its exploration of a range of such bioauthorities and in its examination of the interplay between them and the individual eating body. No matter whether they are accepted or resisted, our eating practices and preferences are shaped by, and shape, these agencies. Abbots places the body, materiality and the non-human at the heart of her analysis, interrogating not only how the individual's embodied eating practices incorporate and reject the bioauthorities of food, but also how such authorities are created by the individual act of eating. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from across the globe, The Agency of Eating provides an important analysis of the power dynamics at play in the contemporary food system and the ways in which agency is expressed and bounded. This book will be of great benefit to any with an interest in food studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

In recent years, the Sino-Tibetan frontier regions have attracted increasing scholarly interest. The region of Rebkong in Qinghai province is of particular significance because of its unique location on the Sino-Tibetan borderland, its multi-ethnic population and its complex religious history, which incorporates both large Geluk monasteries and significant Nyingma and Bonpo lay tantric communities. Covering the nineteenth century to the present, this volume brings together ten papers that explore the relationship between religion and culture in Rebkong. Using insights from anthropology, history and religious studies, the contributors offer new research and fresh interpretations of this important region on China's periphery, discussing issues of ethnicity and identity, the role of public institutions, and the role of religion and rituals.

The literature of the Irish Revival of the 1890s should be seen as a hinge between the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Its authors appropriated the 'primitive' through the lenses of comparative anthropology, mythology and colonial travel-writing and actively strove to re-establish contact with primitive modes through 'the study of mythology, anthropology and psychoanalysis'. They were engaged in was a complex and volitional primitivism, which became 'modernist' as it utilized the findings of social science. The works of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory are all analysed as the product of such influences. But Garrigan Mattar also suggests that Celticism itself underwent a sea-change during the nineteenth century, recreating itself in academic circles as an anti-primitivist science - 'Celtology'. It was only to be a matter of time before Yeats and Synge, who read widely in the works of Celtology, would look to this new science to find alternatives to the primitivism of the Twilight.

This is the first complete study of the relationship between Retranslation and Reception. Although many translation scholars have cited Reception Theory in their work, this is the first systematic study of its relationship to Retranslation. The book starts from the hypothesis that frequent retranslations of the same literary text into the same language may be indicative of its impact in the target culture. The volume encompasses both theory and practical analysis of Retranslation and Reception as mutually dependent concepts. The sixteen chapters relate the translations analysed to their socio-historical contexts in order to assess the impact that they have had on the target culture in terms of the reception of the authors studied, and also explore the relationship that may exist between the appearance of new translations and historical, social or cultural changes.

The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

Diversity in Society and Schools, edited by experts across the disciplines, provides vital, engaging readings that reposition the multiple perspectives and experiences that exist within the classroom. It supports educators in creating learning environments that scaffold learning to maximize student achievement. The goal is to clarify, demystify, and increase understandings of important aspects of culture. As educators increase in their capacity to be respectful and culturally inclusive, they contribute to the learners' construction of a healthy ethnic identity and a more productive home-school partnership. The chapters honor the epistemologies and skills that exist within marginalized communities, while proposing the inclusion of multiple perspectives in the curriculum. The 12 sections discuss polemical communities (e.g., African American, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ+, women and gender) with suggested activities. Essays by cultural experts begin each section, followed by curated articles that stimulate discussion. Pre- and post-reading questions are designed to promote critical thinking, topic engagement, and respectful dialogue. Diversity in Society and Schools is an essential resource for inclusive educational programs.

Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general.

Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks?

This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents.