"A lively and interesting overview of guns in American life; past, present, and future...Guns in America: A Reader will serve most promisingly as a long-awaited introduction to a complex and controversial issue."
--"Left History"

Firearms have long been at the core of our national narratives. From the Puritans' embrace of guns to beat back the "devilish Indian" to our guilty delight in the extralegal exploits of Dirty Harry, Americans have relied on the gun to right wrongs, both real and imagined.

The extent to which guns have been woven into our nation's mythology suggests that the current debate is only partly about guns themselves and equally about conflicting cultural values and competing national identities. Belying the gun debate are a host of related issues: contesting conceptions of community, the proper relationship between the individual and the state, and the locus of responsibility for maintaining order.

Guns in America documents and analyzes the history of firearms in America, exploring various aspects of gun manufacture, ownership, and useaand more importantly, the cultural and political implications which this history reveals.

Eschewing single-minded partisanship and emphasizing nuance and compromise, Jan E. Dizard and Robert Merrill Muth have assembled a diverse array of writings from all points on the ideological spectrum. The documents span the whole of American history, from Puritan sermons to contemporary NRA documents. The result is an indispensable panorama of the never-ending controversies over gun control, crime, hunting, and militias.

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the "nature" of identity in the present. Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history. This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines-biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology-to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book's essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

A collection of essays that explore the effects of modernization on Jewish self-understanding. Over the last three centurles, the Jewish experience has been profoundly affected by modernity, which Meyer defines as not only technological advance, cultural innovation, and reliance upon human reason but also as the adaptation of Jews to a modern framework within non-Jewish economies, societies, and cultures. Judaism within Modernity begins with an exploration of Jewish historiography and the problems of periodization in modern Jewish history. In these beginning essays we see the range of Meyer's thinking about what constitutes modernization and how to determine its beginning. He discusses the role of history in defining identity among Jews and suggests that finding an adequate paradigm of continuity is essential to the historian's task. The essays in the second section focus on the Jews of Germany. Here Meyer writes about the influence of German Jews on Jews in the United States, comparing the historical experience of the two communities. These essays also address the intersection of religion, scholarship, and history with politics in nineteenth- and twentiety-century Germany. A third section deals with the European Reform movement, which brought a liberal Judaism to the majority of German Jews. Here Meyer likewise presents a fresh perspective on the way the Reform movement was viewed by those outside of it, especially by non-Jews. The essays in the final section explore Judaism in the United States. In particular, they show how reform Judaism and Zionism were able to recondle their initial differences. Judaism within Modernity is an impressive collection of essays written by a renowned Jewish historian and will be a standard volume for students and scholars of the modern Jewish experience.

"A Companion to Digital Literary Studies" offers an extensive examination of how new technologies are changing the nature of literary studies. Through a series of specially commissioned articles by leading scholars, theorists, and writers creating born-digital literature, the text provides a thorough overview of the intersections between computing, literary studies, and new media. It takes a highly interdisciplinary perspective in its examination of scholarly editing and literary criticism, interactive fiction and gaming, multimedia and immersive environments, and born digital literature.

"This Companion" is the only comprehensive collection of seminal works available to meet the needs of this growing area of inquiry. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand, use, or create digital literature.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them, form the concern of this annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical discovery and change, and explores the relationship of technology to other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic. The book shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

Using the 1893 and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions as a focus for probing intercultural religious communication, this study describes more than a century's preoccupation with a provocative phenomenon called universal religion. It presents 12 enduringly significant speakers whose rhetorical effectiveness, combined with their concepts of universal religion, forge an intercultural synthesis combining Eastern religions and Western thought. This volume will interest scholars and students of both religion and rhetoric as well as the general public. It provides a deeper appreciation of such well-known communicators as Emerson and Thoreau, as well as an introduction to the significant contributions of thinkers such as Roy, Sen, Besant, Vivekananda, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Gandhi, Jenkins Lloyd Jones, John Haynes Holmes, and Preston Bradley. The 1893 Parliament of The World's Religions and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions are described by contemporary historians as watersheds in human history and turning points in humanity's spiritual progress. These parliaments are the two occasions when the world's religious leaders have gathered, and the events symbolize a growing preoccupation with an emerging universal religion evolving through interreligious communication. The 1893 Parliament is recognized for commencing interreligious dialogue and encouraging comparative religion; the 1993 Parliament is remembered for networking the worldwide religious and spiritual communities. This volume describes a little-known but highly important minority movement in which a comparatively few communicators in India and the United States have progessively synthesized Eastern religion and Western thought. The work examines these speakers and their speeches by placing this distinctive rhetorical discourse within their historical times and cultural contexts; specifying the concepts about universal religion proposed by each speaker; and indicating their contributions to an emerging and evolving religion that is universal.

"The claim 'I'm straight' is the psychosexual analogue of 'The check is in the mail': if you need to say it, your credit or creditability is already in doubt." So begins Paul Morrison's dazzling polemic, which takes as its point of departure Foucault's famous remark that sex is "the explanation for everything."

Combining psychoanalytic, literary, and queer theory, The Explanation for Everything seeks to account for the explanatory power attributed to homosexuality, and its relationship to compulsory heterosexuality. In the process, Morrison presents a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis and its impact on the study of sexuality. In bold but graceful leaps, Morrison applies his critique to a diversity of examples: subjectivity in Oscar Wilde, the cultural construction and reception of AIDS, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the practice of bodybuilding, and the contemporary reception of the sexual politics of fascism.

Analytical, witty and astute, The Explanation for Everything will challenge and amuse, establishing Paul Morrison as one of our most exciting cultural critics.

This book examines the new ways of working and their impact on employees' well-being and performance. It concentrates on job demands and flexible work emanating from current economic and organizational change, and assesses impact on workers' health and performance. The development of issues such as globalization, rapid technological advances, new management practices, organizational changes and new job skills are addressed. This book gives an overview and discusses the potential negative and positive effects of such new job demands and new forms of work.

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liege, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes-Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the 'European tribe'. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and 'habitation' in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia's 'Stolen Generations'. Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D'Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean-Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King-Aribisala, Benedicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.

"Cultural Theory: An Introduction" is a concise, accessible introduction to a complex field. Philip Smith provides a balanced, wide-ranging overview of contemporary cultural theory, covering the major thinkers and key concepts that have appeared and developed over the last century. Assuming no specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, Smith deals with some of the most sophisticated issues in contemporary social thought. Coverage includes fields such as symbolic interactionism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, and leading thinkers like Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Giddens. The book has an abundance of special features for students, with summaries, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, and extensive cross-referencing. For any student or scholar with an interest in the theoretical study of culture and society, this book is an ideal guide.

In the first half of the nineteenth century most leading French Romantic authors wrote travel books. French Romantic Travel Writing is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the travelogues they produced and the reasons for, and significance of, this trend. Whilst 'the journey' was one of Romanticism's central images, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Stael, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Merimee, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including at least four masterpieces-Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany. These include French foreign and cultural policies, as well as the particular needs of Parisian publishers. It puts forward the case for the collective achievement of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth-century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material.

"Antique', 'vintage', 'previously owned', 'gently used', 'cast-off' n the world of second hand encompasses as many attitudes as there are names for it. The popular perception is that second- hand shops are largely full of junk, yet the rise of vintage fashion and the increasing desire for consumer individuality show that second hand shopping is also very much about style. Drawing on six years of original research, Second-Hand Cultures explores what happens when the often contradictory motivations behind style and survival strategies are brought together. What does second hand buying and selling tell us about the state of contemporary consumption? How do items that begin life as new get recycled and reclaimed? How do second hand goods challenge the future of retail consumption and what do the unique shopping environments in which they are found tell us about the social relations of exchange?Answering these questions and many more, this book fills a major gap in consumption studies. Gregson and Crewe argue that second hand cultures are critical to any understanding of how consumption is actually practised. Following the life stories of goods as they travel into and through second hand sites, the authors look at the work of traders as well as consumers' investments in second hand merchandise n including gifting and collecting as well as rituals of personalization and possession. Through its revealing investigation into the practices and customs that make up these unconventional retail worlds, this much-needed study carefully unpacks the persuasive allure of the 'previously owned'.

Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville's novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville's fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville's most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville's solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.

From the first European contact with Tahiti in 1767, the myth of the South Sea maiden has endured through many incarnations. Although the maiden frequently provided an idealized antidote to Western women's self-assertion, the South Pacific also afforded a space where boundaries between the sexes could be relaxed and transgressed. From James Cook and Captain Bligh to James Michener and Margaret Mead, the Island girl has occupied a special place in the erotic imagination of the West. In a sweeping study that embraces history, literature, visual arts, anthropology and film, this study gives fresh insight into the myths and reality of a Western icon.

While women from far off lands have always been presented as exotic and alluring, the South Sea maiden has come to symbolize feminine sexuality, as an integral part of the adventure, sensuality, and romance of the South Pacific. Everyone from early explorers to 19th century writers and artists to latter day anthropologists, film makers, and tourism promoters have extolled their virtues and their bodies. Sturma looks behind the popular clich DEGREESD'es to reveal how the myth-making process reflected not only Western desires, but the cut and thrust of changing sexual politics. The result is an intriguing look at both South Sea image-makers and the women whom they found so seductive.

Describes the political structure of some of the Native American tribes of North America, as well as their social conditions and their relationship to the U.S. government.

In the humanities, the term 'diaspora' recently emerged as a promising and powerful heuristic concept. It challenged traditional ways of thinking and invited reconsiderations of theoretical assumptions about the unfolding of cross-cultural and multi-ethnic societies, about power relations, frontiers and boundaries, about cultural transmission, communication and translation. The present collection of essays by renowned writers and scholars addresses these issues and helps to ground the ongoing debate about the African diaspora in a more solid theoretical framework. Part I is dedicated to a general discussion of the concept of African diaspora, its origins and historical development. Part II examines the complex cultural dimensions of African diasporas in relation to significant sites and figures, including the modes and modalities of creative expression from the perspective of both artists/writers and their audiences; finally, Part III focusses on the resources (collections and archives) and iconographies that are available today. As most authors argue, the African diaspora should not be seen merely as a historical phenomenon, but also as an idea or ideology and an object of representation. By exploring this new ground, the essays assembled here provide important new insights for scholars in American and African-American Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African Studies. The collection is rounded off by an annotated listing of black autobiographies.

The yearning to remember who we are is not easily detected in the qualitative dimensions of focus groups and ethnographic research methods; nor is it easily measured in standard quantified scientific inquiry. It is deeply rooted, obscured by layer upon layer of human efforts to survive the impact of historical amnesia induced by the dominant policies and practices of advanced capitalism and postmodern culture. Darder's introduction sets the tone by describing the formation of Warriors for Gringostroika and The New Mestizas. In the words of Anzaldua, those who cross over, pass over . . . the confines of the normal.' Critical essays follow by Mexicanas, poets, activists, and educators of all colors and persuasions. The collection coming out of the good work of the Southern California University system relates to all locales and spectrums of the human condition and will no doubt inspire excellent creativity of knowing and remembering among all who chance to read any part thereof.

Hybrid Heritage on Screen provides a long overdue thorough analysis of the 1980s 'Raj Revival'. It examines imperial nostalgia and troubled ethnic, gender and class relations during the Thatcher Era as represented in cinema and television.

This book explores how culture functions and intersects with religious groups, particularly Christians. It explores the way electronic communications, especially film and television, shape our world of meaning. Using the theories of British thinker Raymond Williams as his framework, Warren focuses on the actual process by which versions of reality are produced, the production of signification. He also draws on the ideas of Paulo Freire pointing out that cultural agency happens when individuals decide to exercise some judgment and control over the kinds of cultural material they will accept or resist.

If culture is a signifying system, says Warren, then religion is too. Contrasting values from the wider culture create dilemmas for those trying to follow a religious life. Choices either mirror the wider culture or reflect a culture of resistance. Warren seeks to help the reader develop the skills of cultural analysis by paying attention to the images that support culture, examining the life structures that support culture, and paying attention to how any particular aspect of culture is produced. Beyond all this, however, the author calls for a stance of resistance to all that violates human dignity and unity--all the aspects of culture that persons with high religious ideals cannot accept.

Using depth psychology to develop a globally rooted psychoanalytic perspective, Jerry Kroth explores the psychological underpinnings of events, conflicts, and changes that may have deeper symbolic meanings than we generally suppose. Through his strategy of treating real occurrences as dreams arising from the collective unconscious, Kroth is able to derive clues to the significance of present happenings and identify incidents that have accurately predicted subsequent events.

Beginning with a dream interpretation approach to the Jim Jones phenomenon, Kroth discusses the power of the trickster archetype in American society. In another chapter, he connects the panic following Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells's "War of the WorldS" to a collective dream anticipating the cataclysm of World War II, which was to unfold only eleven months later. In the remaining chapters Kroth sifts through some of the omens and oracles that confront us today, finding many of the same foreboding conclusions. His examination of the Gorbachev revolution from the standpoint of Russian national character and psychohistory yields future scenarios less optimistic than have usually been anticipated. Other topics addressed are the collective dreams and portents encoded in the mass media, the Cambodian disaster as an aspect of the American shadow, and Israel's David-and-Goliath duel with the Palestinians. This incisive work is aimed at alerting us to the fact that consciously perceived events contain vital symbolic information on the psychological state of the union and suggest a number of unsettling future scenarios. Appropriate for general readers as well as classes and studies in clinical psychology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, political science, and related fields.

Against a backdrop of contemporary social and sexual concerns, and potent fears surrounding the moral and physical 'degeneration' of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century society, "'The Cruel Madness of Love'" explores a critical period in the developing relationship between syphilis and insanity. General paralysis of the insane (GPI), the most commonly diagnosed of the neurosyphilitic disorders, has been devastating both in terms of its severity and incidence. Using the rich laboratory and asylum records of lowland Scotland as a case study, Gayle Davis examines the evolution of GPI as a disease category from a variety of perspectives: social, medical, and pathological. Through exploring case notes and the impact of new diagnostic techniques and therapies, such as the Wassermann Test and Malarial Therapy, the reader gains a unique insight into both patients and practitioners. Significant insights are gained into the socio-sexual background and medical experience of patients, as well as the clinical ideas and judgmental behaviour of the practitioners confronting this disease. "'The Cruel Madness of Love'" will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore the historical relationship between sexuality, morality and disease. Gayle Davis is a Wellcome Trust University Award Holder at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on various aspects of the social history of medicine and sexuality in twentieth-century Britain, and is undertaking a Wellcome-funded research project on the history of infertility in Scotland. She is reviews editor for History of Psychiatry.

The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's famous critique of capitalism, wherein he excoriates that system in favor of anarcho-communism; a form of government he believed could ensure fairness for all. Kropotkin had an alternate vision of the way society, work, and population should be organized - in The Conquest of Bread, he interweaves his plans for a social revolution with critiques of the prevailing orthodoxy. We receive outlines of how his propositions will eliminate poverty and scarcity - conditions Kropotkin believed were artificially enforced in order to maintain control upon the working populace. As a philosopher and scientist, Peter Kropotkin abhorred the manner in which abject poverty characterized industrialized society. He also held a great resentment for centralized authority of government and the owners of capital, which he felt acted in concert to undermine the majority of humanity.

The 16th-century conquest of Mexico and its effects are best understood as cultural manifestations of animal behavior patterns which humans share with other primates. While Nahuas and Spaniards can be distinguished on the basis of learned cultural differences, such differences only exaggerated particular expressions of the universal behavioral patterns they shared. Brutality and benevolence were used in the same way by both to establish hierarchy and cultural bonding. After the conquest, a new Mexican synthesis could be constructed because of these commonalities. Alves explores the formation of that synthesis by examining such aspects of material culture as food, clothing, and shelter-especially as they manifest such universal primate tendencies as hierarchy, reciprocity, benevolence, brutality, xenophobia, curiosity, and territoriality. Alves proposes that humans are historically best understood by using current advances in the fields of primatology and ethology. This groundbreaking book will be of great interest to Latin Americanists, historians, and anthropologists.