Who are the happiest Americans? Surveys show that religious people think they are happier than secularists, and secularists think they are happier than religious people. Liberals believe they are happier than conservatives, and conservatives disagree. In fact, almost every group thinks it is happier than everyone else. In this provocative new book, Arthur C. Brooks explodes the myths about happiness in America. As he did in the controversial Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism , Brooks examines vast amounts of evidence and empirical research to uncover the truth about who is happy in America, who is not, and-most important-why. He finds that there is a real happiness gap" in America today, and it lies disconcertingly close to America's cultural and political fault lines. The great divide between the happy and the unhappy in America, Brooks shows, is largely due to differences in social and cultural values. The values that bring happiness are faith, charity, hard work, optimism, and individual liberty. Secularism, excessive reliance on the state to solve problems, and an addiction to security all promote unhappiness. What can be done to maximize America's happiness? Replete with the unconventional wisdom for which Brooks has come to be known, Gross National Happiness offers surprising and illuminating conclusions about how our government can best facilitate Americans in their pursuit of happiness.

This book offers a full-scale study of angels and angelology in the Middle Ages. Seeking to discover how and why angels became so important in medieval society, David Keck considers a wide range of fascinating questions such as: Why do angels appear on baptismal fonts? How and why did angels become normative for certain members of the church? How did they become a required course of study? Did popular beliefs about angels diverge from the angelologies of the theologians? Why did some heretics claim to derive their authority from heavenly spirits? Keck spreads his net wide in the attempt to catch traces of angels and angelic beliefs in as many portions of the medieval world as possible. Metaphysics and mystery plays, prayers and pilgrimages, Cathars and cathedrals-all these and many more disparate sources taken together reveal a society deeply engaged with angels on all its levels and in some unlikely ways.

In From Socrates to Summerhill and Beyond: Towards a Philosophy of Education for Personal Responsibility, Ronald Swartz offers an evolving development of fallible, liberal democratic, self?governing educational philosophies. He suggests that educators can benefit from having dialogues about questions such as these: 1). Are there some authorities that can be consistently relied upon to tell school members what they should do and learn while they are in school? 2.) How should the imagination of social theorists be both used and checked in the development and implementation of innovative educational reforms? 3.) How can teachers in personal responsibility schools help their students learn? These questions are representative of problems that Swartz raises in his book. Swartz identifies four educational programs as personal responsibility schools. These are Little Commonwealth (Homer Lane); Summerhill (A.S.Neill); Orphans Home (Janusz Korczak) and Sudbury Valley School (Daniel Greenberg). Swartz then suggests that these learning environments create social institutions that are liberal, democratic, and self?governing and therefore endorse the policy of personal responsibility. This policy states: All school members, students included, are fallible authorities who should be personally responsible for determining their own school activities and many policies that govern a school. Schools which incorporate this policy can interchangeably be referred to as personal responsibility, self?governing, or Summerhill style schools. In providing an historical and philosophical understanding of Summerhill style schools, Swartz suggests that these educational alternatives have intellectual roots in the ideas associated with Socrates as portrayed in Plato's Apology. Specifically, in personal responsibility schools teachers are not viewed as authorities who attempt to transmit wisdom to their students. Rather, self?governing schools follow the Socratic tradition which claims that teachers can be viewed as fallible authorities who attempt to engage students in dialogues about questions of interest to students. The interpretation of Plato's works used by Swartz can be found in Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Swartz has also been significantly influenced by the educational writings of Bertrand Russell and Paul Goodman. Goodman's Compulsory Miseducation makes it clear that schools which follow in the tradition of Summerhill compete with the educational programs that are an outgrowth of John Dewey's writings. In summary, Swartz's book aims to engage educators in dialogues that will lead to improved educational theories and practices.

Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective contributes to the continuing debate on the encounter of the classical anarchisms (1860s 1940s) and the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the same period, probing its dimensions and limits. Case studies on Dadaism, decadence, fauvism, neo-impressionism, symbolism, and various anarchisms explore the influence anarchism had on the avant-gardes and reflect on avant-garde tendencies within anarchism. This volume also explores the divergence of anarchism and the avant-gardes. It offers a rich examination of politics and arts, and it complements an ongoing discourse with theoretical tools to better assess the aesthetic, social, and political cross-pollination that took place between the avant-gardes and the anarchists in Europe.

Taiwanese society is in the midst of an immense, exciting effort to define itself, seeking to erect a contemporary identity upon the foundation of a highly distinctive history. This book provides a thorough overview of Taiwanese cultural life. The introduction familiarizes students and interested readers with the island's key geographical and demographic features, and provides a chronological summary of Taiwanese history. In the following chapters, Davison and Reed reveal the uniqueness of Taiwan, and do not present it simply as the laboratory of traditional Chinese culture that some anthropologists of the 1950s through the 1970s sought when mainland China was not accessible. The authors examine how religious devotion in Taiwan is different from China in that the selected deities are those most relevant to the needs of the Taiwanese people. Literature and art, particularly of the 20th century, reflect the Taiwanese quest for identity more than the grand Chinese tradition. The Taiwanese architecture, festivals and leisure activities, music and dance, cuisine and fashion, are also highlighted topics. The final chapter presents the most recent information regarding children and education, and explores the importance of the Taiwanese family in the context of meaningful relationships amongst acquaintances, friends, and institutions that make up the social universe of the Taiwanese. This text is a lively treatment of one of the world's most dynamic societies.

This is the first English version of Tadao Umesao's classic, published first in Japanese in 1957, with a full description of his "ecological theory" of civilizations of Eurasia. Dividing the Eurasian continent into three major ecological zones consisting of Western Europe, Japan, and the region between them, he shows how the first two are basically similar and demonstrates fundamental differences between Japan and China. In 1964 a jury of ten intellectuals chose this treatise as one of the 18 most influential treatises since 1945 from among more than a hundred which were considered. In 1998, when an influential monthly, Bungei Shunju, solicited "the ten most impactful books" in the twentieth century from more than 170 intellectuals in Japan, this book won the third highest vote among 67 books that were nominated.

The geopolitical history of the Middle East in the twentieth century, which falls into three relatively distinct phases, is best understood when approached simultaneously from the global and the regional perspectives. The imperialist phase, which began in the nineteenth century and lasted until the end of World War II, was followed by the cold war between the Soviet Union and the West that continued to the beginning of the 1990s. The last phase, which began with the demise of the Soviet Union, is still taking shape. These stages may overlap and, in some instances, unfold simultaneously, developments within the region being shaped and constrained by extra-regional forces for extra-regional purposes.

The sovereignty and independence of the states of the region has been limited in varying degrees by the wishes, needs, interests, and ambitions of the major powers. The geopolitical considerations have varied over time, being very different in the period between the world wars than in the period of intense East-West rivalry that followed, with the present post-cold war era being radically different from what preceded it. These changing geopolitical realities constitute the framework for this examination of the Middle East in the twentieth century, and the organizing principle for the selection of materials from the truly vast amount of information available. An important resource for scholars, students, and researchers involved with Middle Eastern history and international relations.

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

Ninety-nine years ago, a new form of storytelling emerged from the ruins of World War I. Different in scope and power from theater or literature, and unlike any film that had come before, F. W. Murnau's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari addressed a direct challenge to its audience, demanding to be viewed as something other than what was immediately presented. Unfortunately, criticism has not risen to the challenge. Relegating the film condescendingly to the horror genre, or treating it merely as a case study in style, critics have failed to look at it with due seriousness. On the other hand, the film's ambiguity, structural devices, and psychological depth gave cinema a number of tools that other filmmakers were quick to start using. This book examines a spectrum of narrative films that can be seen in new ways with methods derived and evolved from the techniques of Caligari. The intention is not only to offer new interpretations of classic and neglected films, but to open further discussion and exploration. It is written with optimism that movie lovers will see more in the movies they love, that critics will find new paths of investigation, and that filmmakers will benefit from greater awareness of what movies can do. Secrets of Cinema began in 1994, in discussions among friends after weekly movie nights hosted by the late Lawrence N. Fox on the 73rd floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago. The movies selected are not necessarily the greatest ever made (although some of them surely are), but rather movies that offer new and useful lessons in how movies work. Among the secrets of cinema revealed in this book are at least three movies that are stealth remakes of The Wizard of Oz, hidden meanings behind films made under political repression, and why Hitchcock's Psycho is a remake of his Vertigo. Persistent enigmas are clarified, including the logic of Persona, the riddle of Last Year at Marienbad, and the endings of Blow-Up and The Shining. More importantly, by showing how much there is to discover in movies, the book encourages its readers to continue in their own ways the quest to see movies whole.

Designed for both academic and lay audiences, this book identifies the characteristics of ritual and, via multiple examples, details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohesion by enacting cultural-or individual-beliefs and values. It also shows what happens when ritual fails.

Using a three-part structure focused on the major historical subjects of the Inquisition, the Reformation and witchcraft, Christopher Kissane examines the relationship between food and religion in early modern Europe. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe employs three key case studies in Castile, Zurich and Shetland to explore what food can reveal about the wider social and cultural history of early modern communities undergoing religious upheaval. Issues of identity, gender, cultural symbolism and community relations are analysed in a number of different contexts. The book also surveys the place of food in history and argues the need for historians not only to think more about food, but also with food in order to gain novel insights into historical issues. This is an important study for food historians and anyone seeking to understand the significant issues and events in early modern Europe from a fresh perspective.

Decades of Western Cold War propaganda were designed to depict socialism as inimical to genuine aesthetic acheivement. Now, in the wake of the Cold War, it is becoming possible to reassess the past and present cultural productions of artists with socialist inclinations. The essays in this volume begin such a reassessment, finding that socialist cultural production in the 20th century, both as the official culture of the socialist East and as an oppositional culture in the capitalist West, has been rich and varied.

The volume focuses on socialist culture in the industrialized world, primarily Eastern Europe and the West. An introductory essay overviews socialist cultural productions of the 20th century, while the chapters that follow address a wide range of topics. These include Soviet socialist realist fiction and film musicals, the socialist drama of Bertolt Brecht, and British and American leftist fiction. The volume demonstrates that propagandistic Cold War depictions of socialism as a threat to artistic expression were inaccurate and misleading.

Urban agriculture is increasingly considered an important part of creating just and sustainable cities. Yet the benefits that many people attribute to urban agriculture-fresh food, green space, educational opportunities-can mask structural inequities,thereby making political transformation harder to achieve. Realizing social and environmental justice requires moving beyond food production to address deeper issues such as structural racism, gender inequity, and economic disparities. Beyond the Kale argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change. Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City's most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity. Addressing a significant gap in the urban agriculture literature, Beyond the Kale prioritizes the voices of people of colour and women-activists and leaders whose strategies have often been underrepresented within the urban agriculture movement-and it examines the roles of scholarship in advancing social justice initiatives.

During the Cold War, the West typically represented socialism as a threat to genuine aesthetic achievement. Nonetheless, socialist cultures have produced a rich and varied body of creative works, and socialism continues to be a living force in China and in many regions of the Third World. The essays in this volume begin to reassess the legacy of socialist cultural production in such areas of the world, which were outside the specific scope of influence of either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.

The contributors give special attention to the strong anticolonial legacy of socialism and the important role played by socialism in subsequent attempts to build viable postcolonial cultural identities. Included are chapters on creative works from China, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as the works of multicultural artists from the United States who stand in relation to Third World cultures. The essays show that global socialist cultural production was rich and varied during the twentieth century and continues to be so, despite the tribulations experienced by socialism itself. While some of the chapters address theoretical concerns central to all socialist cultures, the volume focuses primarily on socialist cultures in those parts of the globe that were never fully inside either the Soviet or the American bloc.

A comprehensive bibliographic survey of the West Indian presence in the United States, this book covers over 500 articles, books, and other studies on the West Indian immigrant experience. The primary goal is to cite titles examining both the impact of the immigration experience on West Indians and the way West Indians have changed the nature of many communities in the United States. The work outlines the long history in the United States economic life, education, ethnicity and race relations, family relationships, health care, patterns of immigration and settlement, and political expression.

Drawing on books, scholarly journal articles, dissertations, research reports, and significant articles from general interest magazines and newspapers, the book's goal is to lead interested students to material that examines how the United States does and does not meet the hopes and dreams of Caribbean immigrants of African descent. Providing bibliographic leads for exploring new avenues of research on West Indian Americans, the book will be especially valuable for those seeking to expand their knowledge base on this major component of our country's urban landscape.

This insightful volume explores the experiences of ethnic migrants returning to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Israel. Return migrants who were exposed to the western culture and society undergo personal transformations that significantly impact their views on values such as gender, individualism, democracy, tradition, and individual autonomy. To evaluate how well these individuals are able to reintegrate back into their native countries, the authors conducted a thorough comparative study between returnees in the three research sites through in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and analyses of government policies. Among the topics discussed: Family as a strategic middle ground between the individual and society The social psychology of coping and adaptation Public, outer historical, and macro forces that shape returnees' experiences Comparisons and contrasts between two primarily Chinese societies, along with one racially and culturally different Western society Cost-and-benefit analyses of decision-making in migration Return Migrants in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Israel is a compelling new perspective on the migrant experience drawn from in-depth research on returnees across three countries and a variety of circumstances.

Is jazz a universal idiom or is it an African-American art form? Although whites have been playing jazz almost since it first developed, the history of jazz has been forged by a series of African-American artists whose styles caught the interest of their musical generation--masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. Whether or not white musicians deserve their secondary status in jazz history, one thing is clear: developments in jazz have been a result of black people's search for a meaningful identity as Americans and members of the African diaspora. Blacks are not alone in being deeply affected by these shifts in African-American racial attitudes and cultural strategies. Historically in closer contact with blacks than nearly any other group of white Americans, white jazz musicians have also felt these shifts. More importantly, their careers and musical interests have been deeply affected by them. The author, an active participant in the jazz world as composer, performer, and author of several books on jazz and Latin music, hopes that this book will encourage jazz lovers to take a rhetoric-free look at the charged issue of race as has affected the world of jazz.

A work about the formulation of identity in the face of racial difference, the book considers topics such as the promotion of black Southern culture and inner-city styles like rhythm and blues and rap as a means of achieving black racial solidarity. It discusses the body of music fostered by an identification to Africa, the conversion of black jazz musicians to Islam and other Eastern religions, and the impact of a jazz community united by heroin use. White jazz musicians who identify with black culture in an unsettling form by speaking black dialect and calling themselves African-American is examined, as is the assimilation of jazz into the wider American culture.

This collection of essays explores how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (paleontology, mining, archeology, seismology, oceanography, evolution, etc.) impacted on contemporary French culture. They reveal that geological ideas were a much more pervasive and influential cultural force than has hitherto been supposed. From the mid-eighteenth century, with the publication of Buffon s seminal "Theorie de la Terre" (1749), until the early twentieth century, concepts and figures drawn from the earth sciences inspired some of the most important French philosophers, novelists, political theorists, historians and popularizers of science of the time. This book charts the original and influential ways in which French writers and thinkers, such as Buffon, d Holbach, Balzac, Sand, Verne, Gide and Malraux, exploited the earth sciences for very different ends. This volume will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of French literature in the modern period, cultural historians of modern France, scholars of European studies, of French political history, of the History of Ideas or the History of Science as well as researchers in landscape and physical geography.

This guide helps readers to engage with the major critical debates surrounding literary modernism.
A judicious selection of key critical works on literary modernism
Presents a critical history from the earliest reviews to the most recent theoretical assessments
Shows how modernist writers understood and constructed modernism.
Shows how succeeding generations have developed those constructions and brought new interpretations to bear on the subject
Discusses how modernism relates to modernity and odernization, and to other literary and cultural movements
Texts have been selected for their relevance to the questions surrounding modernism, and for their accessibility to readers with a limited knowledge of the modernist canon
Includes a glossary and an annotated bibliography.

Although family members sometime engage in monitoring as an extension of governmental surveillance, they also monitor each other, other families, and their own borders to preserve norms about what a family should be and what family members should do. Whether it is the seemingly benign surveillance of using baby monitors, the more obviously intrusive use of home drug tests on teenagers, or the way people in public feel free to judge and comment on the family composition of others, monitoring goes on all the time -- and even (or maybe especially) when there seems to be no monitoring going on at all.

This book explores the emerging concept of cultural DNA, considering its application across different fields and examining commonalities in approach. It approaches the subject from four different perspectives, in which the topics include theories, analysis and synthesis of cultural DNA artefacts. After an opening section which reviews theoretical work on cultural DNA research, the second section discusses analysis & synthesis of cultural DNA at the urban scale. Section three covers analysis & synthesis of cultural DNA artefacts, and the final section offers approaches to grammar-based cultural DNA research. The book places emphasis on two specific axes: one is the scale of the object under discussion, which ranges from the small (handheld artefacts) to the very large (cities); and the other is the methodology used from analysis to synthesis. This diverse approach with detailed information about grammar-based methodologies toward cultural DNA makes the book unique. This book will serve as a source of inspiration for designers and researchers trying to find the essence, archetype, and the building blocks of our environment for the incorporation of social and cultural factors into their designs.

This volume asks how the current Information Technology Revolution influences archaeological interpretations of techno-social change. Does cyber-archaeology provide a way to breathe new life into grand narratives of technological revolution and culture change, or does it further challenge these high-level theoretical explanations? Do digital recording methods have the potential to create large, regional-scale databases to ease investigation of high-level theoretical issues, or have they simply exposed deeper issues of archaeological practice that prevent this? In short, this volume cuts beyond platitudes about the revolutionary potential of the Information Technology Revolution and instead critically engages both its possibilities and limitations. The contributions to this volume are drawn from long-term regional studies employing a cyber-archaeology framework, primarily in the southern Levant, a region with rich archaeological data sets spanning the Paleolithic to the present day. As such, contributors are uniquely placed to comment on the interface between digital methods and grand narratives of long-term techno-social change. Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives provides a much-needed challenge to current approaches, and a first step toward integrating innovative digital methods with archaeological theory.

"Priest and Parish in Vienna, 1780 to 1880 is a bold, new social and cultural history of religion in modern Europe. By establishing some of the most important parameter of religious life, such as parish demographics, the economics of parish life, the social and national background of priests, and the world of Catholic sacrament and feastdays, this book contextualizes for the first time the contentious social and cultural relationship between religion and society in nineteenth-century Vienna.
In the nineteenth century, parish priests confronted tumultuous social changes such as industrialization and urbanization, which eroded clerical influence in Austria. Priests did not react well to this development and by the 1880s turned to party political activity in defense of their position within Austrian society. Eventually, many of the parish priests were mobilized into Karl Lueger's Christian Social movement. Parish priests, a very important and influential group in Austria, were therefore changed from servants of the state into political activists.