..". a sweeping, analytical synethsis of collective violence from the colonial experience to the present." American Studies

"Gilje has written the book on rioting throughout American history." The Historian

..". a thorough, illuminating, and at times harrowing account of man s inhumanity to man." William and Mary Quarterly

..". fulfills its title's promise as an encyclopedic study... an impressive accomplishment and required reading for anyone interested in America's contentious past." Journal of the Early Republic

"Gilje has written a thought-provoking survey of the social context of American riots and popular disorders from the Colonial period to the late 20th century.... a must read for anyone interested in riots." Choice

In this wide-ranging survey of rioting in America, Paul A. Gilje argues that we cannot fully comprehend the history of the United States without an understanding of the impact of rioting. Exploring the rationale of the American mob brings to light the grievances that motivate its behavior and the historical circumstances that drive the choices it makes. Gilje s unusual lens makes for an eye-opening view of the American people and their history."

Barrington Moore, Jr., one of the most distinguished thinkers in critical theory and historical sociology, has long been concerned with the prospects for freedom and decency in industrial society. The product of decades of reflection on issues of authority, inequality, and injustice, this volume analyzes fluctuating moral beliefs and behavior in political and economic affairs at different points in history, from the early Middle Ages in England to the prospects for liberalism under twentieth-century Soviet socialism. The social sources of antisocial behavior; principles of social inequality; and the origins, enemies, and possibilities of rational discussion in public affairs--these are among the topics Moore considers as he seeks to uncover the historical causes of some accepted forms of morality and to assess their social consequences.

The keynote essay examines how moral codes grew out of commercial practices in England from medieval times through the industrial revolution. Moore pays special attention to conceptions of honesty and the temptation to evade that inform the volume as a whole. In the other essays, he considers particular political issues, viewing "political" in its broadest sense as an unequal distribution of power and authority that carries a strong moral charge. Free of preaching and advocacy, his work offers a rare reasonable assessment of the morality of major social institutions over time.

The first section of this book compares and contrasts "declinist" accounts of the current moral predicament with the somewhat more optimistic approach derived from recent sociological analyses. The second section is more directly devoted to the role of schools in educating about values, morality and citizenship. Specific curricular issues such as the values of enterprise and enterprise culture, educating about citizenship, and the ambiguities about the meaning of the term "spiritual" are dealt with in successive chapters.

The din and deadlock of public life in America - where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals are made and unmade - reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for "deliberative democracy" today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral and political issues. Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies - from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare - and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect.

Ethicist Marvin Ellison compellingly argues that current crises in family, personal life, and sexuality are related to our culture's prevailing attitudes about human sexuality. He proposes a liberating Christian ethic of erotic justice that goes beyond the prevailing patriarchal paradigm.

The public outcry for a return to moral education in our schools has raised more dust than it's dispelled. Building upon his provocative ideas in On Becoming Responsible, Michael Pritchard clears the air with a sensible plan for promoting our children's moral education through the teaching of reasonableness.

Pritchard contends that children have a definite but frequently untapped capacity for reasonableness and that schools in a democratic society must make the nurturing of that capacity one of their primary aims, as fundamental to learning as the development of reading, writing, and math skills. Reasonableness itself, he shows, can be best cultivated through the practice of philosophical inquiry within a classroom community. In such an environment, children learn to work together, to listen to one another, to build on one another's ideas, to probe assumptions and different perspectives, and ultimately to think for themselves.

Advocating approaches to moral education that avoid mindless indoctrination and timid relativism, Pritchard neither preaches nor hides behind abstractions. He makes liberal use of actual classroom dialogues to illustrate children's remarkable capacity to engage in reasonable conversation about moral concepts involving fairness, cheating, loyalty, truthtelling, lying, making and keeping promises, obedience, character, and responsibility. He also links such discussions to fundamental concerns over law and moral authority, the roles of teachers and parents, and the relationship between church and state.

Pritchard draws broadly and deeply from the fields of philosophy and psychology, as well as from his own extensive personal experience working with children and teachers. The result is a rich and insightful work that provides real hope for the future of our children and their moral education.

Beginning with an analysis of the general principles of ethics, the author proceeds to consider how those involved in community care might arrive at their own judgements of right and wrong in a variety of given situations. Topics include concepts of autonomy, responsibility and care.

The issue of public morality, so often at the center of heated debates about pornography, narcotics, public indecency, violent entertainment, "family values," et cetera, is at once a continuing reality and a persistent dilemma in our liberal society. With Public Morality and Liberal Society, Harry M. Clor makes an important contribution to this perennial and intensely debated theme by considering how public morality can be justified in theory and accommodated in practice within a liberal society. Clor develops his argument in five parts. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the various controversies and ambiguities about public morality in American life and public opinion. In Chapter 2 Clor presents the case for a public standard of morality and defends it against the most persistent objections. Chapter 3 covers some of the themes prominent in recent treatments of the subject of public morality, and Chapter 4 critically analyzes the two theoretically dominant liberal orientations of recent decades, the libertarian and egalitarian views. In Chapter 5 Clor compares the traditional ethical indictment of pornography with the current feminist indictment.

Teenage pregnancy is widely viewed as a significant social problem. This path-breaking book argues that much of the problem stems from simplistic or inaccurate perceptions of what the problem is. Is it pregnancy in the teen years? Adolescent childbirth? Childbirth to teenagers outside marriage? Adolescent sexual activity? Commentators in this volume believe that the problem is not so much teenagers who want sex too soon, but a society that offers too little too late-too little birth-control information, too few job opportunities, and too little reason for many low-income teenagers to stay in school and delay childbearing. Although most individuals believe that childbirth outside of marriage for women under eighteen is a cause of poverty, these essays suggest that poverty is also a partial cause of early childbirth. The authors of this collection are prominent American and British researchers from varied backgrounds including law, psychology, sociology, medicine, philosophy, and history. In spite of other differences, they generally agree that more teenagers are unlikely to "just say no" to early sex or childbirth unless they have more opportunities to say yes to something else. To alter the social conditions that simultaneously promote and punish early childbearing, the authors argue that we need a better range of health, welfare, educational, and vocational strategies. As these researchers conclude, we cannot alter adolescents' choices without also redirecting adult priorities.

In Rethinking Life and Death, Peter Singer, a world-renowned philosopher, examines the ethical dilemmas that confront us on regular basis. Singer claims that "the traditional western ethic has collasped"; thus, he presents a thoughtful reassessment of the meaning of life and death, and offers "a practical solution to problems we now find insoluble, and allow us to act compassionately and humanely, where our ethic now leads us to outcomes that nobody wants."

As the debate over values grows ever more divisive, one of the most eminent historians of the Victorian era reminds readers that values are no substitute for virtues--and that the Victorian considered hard work, thrift, respectability, and charity virtues essential to a worthwhile life. "An elegant, literate defense of ninteenth-century English mores and morals."--New York.

Since World War II the regulation of conduct in the United States has become problematic. This condition has been recognized by ordinary citizens in the soaring crime rates, illegitimate births, neglect of the public good and increase in special and individual interests, preference for fame, fortune and power, gross immoral acts by public figures, and fascination of the media and the audience with spectacles of evil. The troubled control of social behavior in the nation is suggested by the fact that our society has no commonly accepted set of standards that can guide our actions. Heslep penetrates the bazaar of competing normative principles that Americans subscribe to in search of those logical and feasible standards of behavior that will conquer our nation's moral crisis. He then constructs an idea of character education for Americans, applying it to recent policy recommendations and to cases of individuals with moral education needs.

Psychoanalysis has had a profound impact on popular morals, for Freud's discoveries have made us aware that unconscious motivations may subvert moral conduct and that moral judgments may be rationalizations of self-interest or expressions of hostility. Freud has, in fact, been called a founder of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that pervades modern attitudes toward morality. In this book, however, a psychoanalyst who is also a professor of ethics asserts that we do not accurately understand Freud on the various psychological issues relevant to morality and the ethical implications that can be drawn from his views. Ernest Wallwork offers a bold reinterpretation of Freudian theory, showing the ways in which it points toward the possibility of genuine moral behavior. Wallwork provides close textual analyses of Freud's works from a new philosophical perspective, considering such central Freudian doctrines as psychic determinism, the pleasure principle, narcissism, object-love, and defense mechanisms. He demonstrates that, contrary to widespread belief, Freud's views on determinism allow for moral responsibility, his understanding of the pleasure principle and narcissism allows for acting out of concern of others, and his critique of the cultural superego is grounded in an ethic informed by ego rationality. Focusing throughout on Freud's seminal understanding of the self-in-conflict, Wallwork finds and ethical theory suggested by Freud's work that is naturalistic and grounded in a concept of human flourishing and regard for others and concerned with the common good, special relations, and individual rights.

"The Culture of Cynicism" is the most wide-ranging and thought-provoking book yet written on American morality. It traces the intellectual history of American morality from its European origins in the Middle Ages to the 1990s.

American culture, Professor Stivers argues, is a culture of cynicism. The pursuit of the mystical values of success, survival, happiness, and health has produced a corrosive and pervasive morality which is actually an "anti-morality." The result is a world in which there are norms without meaning, and everyday life is reduced to an empty struggle for power and satisfaction. This leads to boredom, unhappiness, anxiety, depression, addiction, susceptibility to religious cults, bizarre psychotherapies, widespread divorce, and damaged personal relationships.

"The Culture of Cynicism" not only lays bare the internal contradictions of American morality, but also charts the new forms it has assumed. It demonstrates compellingly that neither liberal nor conservative commentators on America's moral decline have grasped what is really the case: that American morality itself is the source of this decline. What we need is not a "return" to higher moral standards, but a complete revision of America's foundational ethics.

One of the country's most distinguished scholars presents a brilliantly original approach to the twin dilemmas of abortion and euthanasia, showing why they arouse such volcanic controversy and how we as a society can reconcile our values of life and individual liberty.

Why does our popular culture seem so consistently hostile to the values that most Americans hold dear? Why does the entertainment industry attack religion, glorify brutality, undermine the family, and deride patriotism?

In this explosive book, one of the nation's best known film critics examines how Hollywood has broken faith with its public, creating movies, television, and popular music that exacerbate every serious social problem we face, from teenage pregnancies to violence in the streets.

Michael Medved powerfully argues that the entertainment business follows its own dark obsessions, rather than giving the public what it wants: In fact, the audience for feature films and network television has demonstrated its profound disillusionment in recent years, with disastrous consequences for many entertainment companies. Meanwhile, overwhelming numbers of our fellow citizens complain about the wretched quality of our popular culture--describing the offerings of the mass media as the worst ever. Medved asserts that Hollywood ignores--and assaults--the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large and to the industry's own interests.

In hard-hitting chapters on "The Attack on Religion," "The Addiction to Violence," "Promoting Promiscuity," "The Infatuation with Foul Language," "Kids Know Best," "Motivations for Madness," and other subjects, Medved outlines the underlying themes that turn up again and again in our popular culture. He also offers conclusive evidence of the frightening real-world impact of these messages on our society and our children.

Finally, Medved shows where and how Hollywood took a disastrous wrong turn toward its current crisis, and he outlines promising efforts both in and outside the industry to restore a measure of sanity and restraint to our media of mass entertainment.

Sure to elicit strong response, whether it takes the form of cheers of support or howls of enraged dissent, Hollywood vs. America confronts head-on one of the most significant issues of our times.

A hard-hitting and controversial book, WHY JOHNNY CAN'T TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG will not only open eyes but change minds. America today suffers from unprecedented rates of teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, suicide, and violence. Most of the programs intended to deal with these problems have failed because, according to William Kilpatrick, schools and parents have abandoned the moral teaching they once provided. In WHY JOHNNY CAN'T TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG, Kilpatrick shows how we can correct this problem by providing our youngsters with the stories, models, and inspirations they need in order to lead good lives. He also encourages parents to read to their children and provides an annotated guide to more than 120 books for children and young adults.

This book overturns the prejudices of Victorian London's middle class moralists and reformers, who equated poverty with depravity, by presenting and analyzing an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished firsthand documents: love letters and testimonies from working class women who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in Victorian London.

Rather than end the debate over artificial means of contraception once and for all, the encyclical letter ""Humanae Vitae"" only energized the debate when it appeared in 1968, and that debate continues to this day. Janet E. Smith presents a comprehensive review of this issue from a philosophical and theological perspective. Tracing the emergence of the debate from the mid-1960s and reviewing the documents from the Special Papal Commission established to advise Pope Paul V1, Smith also examines the Catholic Church's position on marriage, which provides the context for its condemnation of contraception. Smith analyzes the various moral principles that are crucial to an understanding of ""Humanae Vitae"". She offers new renderings of several traditional arguments based on natural law, among which is an argument based on personalist values. Throughout the book, Smith's observations and perceptions contribute to a thought-provoking study.

"The book is an eminently useful collection of social-scientific articles, journalistic essays and interviews, and first-person stories of violence. It makes a start at documenting the endemic hate and violence against gay men and lesbians in the United States and the need to do something about it. Beyond documenting the extent of the assaults, Hate Crimes explores their social context, the various motivations of the perpetrators and the organizations formed to support victims and help stop the violence."
--The Women's Review of Books

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships.

"Carmel Shalev presents her argument for 'a free market in reproduction,' for recognition of 'the reproducing woman as an autonomous moral and economic agent,' with intelligence, force, and erudition. This is a book that will provoke passionate response from lawyers and feminists-indeed, from anyone concerned with the social, economic, and legal aspects of reproduction in our age-and should be read for that very reason."-Nancy F. Cott

In little more than a century, industrial practices have altered every aspect of the cheesemaking process, from the bodies of the animals that provide the milk to the microbial strains that ferment it. Reinventing the Wheel explores what has been lost as raw-milk, single-farm cheeses have given way to the juggernaut of factory production. In the process, distinctiveness and healthy rural landscapes have been exchanged for higher yields and monoculture. However, Bronwen and Francis Percival find reason for optimism. Around the world--not just in France, but also in the United States, England, and Australia--enterprising cheesemakers are exploring the techniques of their great-grandparents. At the same time, using sophisticated molecular methods, scientists are upending conventional wisdom about the role of microbes in every part of the world. Their research reveals the resilience and complexity of the indigenous microbial communities that contribute to the flavor and safety of cheese. One experiment at a time, these dynamic scientists, cheesemakers, and dairy farmers are reinventing the wheel.

In his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that his friend ""dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea."" Finding Thoreau traces the reception of Thoreau's work from the time of his death to his ascendancy as an environmental icon in the 1970s, revealing insights into American culture's conception of the environment. Moving decade by decade through this period, Richard W. Judd unveils a cache of commentary from intellectuals, critics, and journalists to demonstrate the dynamism in the idea of nature, as Americans defined and redefined the organic world around them amidst shifting intellectual, creative, and political forces. This book tells the captivating story of one writer's rise from obscurity to fame through a cultural reappraisal of the work he left behind.

Looking at how nepotism and family-centric societies sacrifice the public good, Edward C. Banfield uses a study of the people of southern Italy to argue how self-interested families can lead to poverty. Analyzing families in southern Italy in 1955, Moral Basis of a Backward Society discusses how poverty is a result of the inability to trust or associate strongly outside of immediate family. Challenged and argued for years, Edward C. Banfield's study has become accept by many people in the modern age.