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Books > Humanities
It's hard to imagine cows walking up Third Street or sheep on Innes
Avenue, yet a large portion of the area known today as Bayview
Hunters Point was once extremely rural. Called Butchertown by
locals, the neighborhood was a source of much of San Francisco's
food. Over the years, it evolved into an interesting combination of
residences, businesses, and industries. The area was home to
slaughterhouses, tanneries, tallow works, a saddle shop, the
Bethlehem Steel Corporation, numerous boat yards including the
legendary Allemand Brothers Boat Repair, and the U.S. Naval
operations at Hunters Point Shipyard. Alongside these entities
lived thousands of residents with unique stories and lifestyles.
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Columbia
(Paperback)
Friends of Columbia State Historic Park
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Columbia started life in 1850 when Dr. Thaddeus Hildreth and his
brother set up the camp known as Hildreth's Diggins in the lovely
Sierra foothills. More than 150 tumultuous years later, Columbia is
an amazing example of a true gold rush community frozen in time.
But this is no ghost town either -- the downtown area, with its
plank sidewalks, ornate hotels, and saloons, is preserved as a
California State Historic Park. The town today is a living,
breathing, modern community at peace with both its past and its
present. It's easy to imagine characters from the Old West
swaggering through these streets, which served as the backdrop to
Gary Cooper's Marshall Will Kane in High Noon. Of course, given
Columbia's frequent historical reenactments, one doesn't have to
think too hard to conjure such imagery.
Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make
sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions,
interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity.
While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on
trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how
music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing
Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing
upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s
witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical
suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the
Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and
filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory,
truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost
and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted
to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde
composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how
works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and
Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding
history and suffering through composition, performance, and
reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology,
literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of
hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ
music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses.
Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation,
fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to
psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The
physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the
ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as
film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and
trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from
academic professionals in music studies as well as an
interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and
aesthetic articulations of suffering.
Morgan Hill lies at the foot of stately El Toro Mountain in
southern Santa Clara Valley. Martin Murphy Sr. settled here in
1845, and only a generation later the Murphy family had managed to
acquire 70,000 acres. Martin's son Daniel owned over a million
acres in the western United States when his only daughter, the
beautiful Diana, secretly married Hiram Morgan Hill in 1882. Hiram
and Diana inherited part of the original ranch, where they built
their lovely Villa Mira Monte. Although the Southern Pacific
Railroad tried to name the nearby depot "Huntington," passengers
always asked to stop at Morgan Hill's ranch, a popular christening
of a community surrounded by thriving orchards and vineyards. After
World War II, Morgan Hill became a desirable suburb and has
remained so through the birth of Silicon Valley.
India is frequently represented as the quintessential land of
religion. Johannes Quack challenges this representation through an
examination of the contemporary Indian rationalist organizations:
groups who affirm the values and attitudes of atheism, humanism, or
free-thinking. Quack shows the rationalists' emphasis on
maintaining links to atheism and materialism in ancient India and
outlines their strong ties to the intellectual currents of modern
European history. At the heart of Disenchanting India is an
ethnographic study of the organization ''Andhashraddha Nirmulan
Samiti'' (Organization for the Eradication of Superstition), based
in the Indian State of Maharashtra. Quack gives a nuanced account
of the Organization's specific "mode of unbelief. " He describes
the group's efforts to encourage a scientific temper and to combat
beliefs and practices that it regards as superstitious. Quack also
shows the role played by rationalism in the day-to-day lives of the
Organization's members, as well as the Organization's controversial
position within Indian society. Disenchanting India contributes
crucial insight into the nature of rationalism in the intellectual
life and cultural politics of India.
Although their statues grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, few
tourists are aware that the founding ministers of Hartford's First
Church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (after whose English
birthplace the city is named), carried a distinctive version of
Puritanism to the Connecticut wilderness. Shaped by Protestant
interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine, and largely
developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, and as "godly" lecturers in English parish churches,
Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its
counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Focusing especially on Hooker, Baird Tipson explores the
contributions of William Perkins, Alexander Richardson, and John
Rogers to his thought and practice, the art and content of his
preaching, and his determination to define and impose a distinctive
notion of conversion on his hearers. Hooker's colleague Samuel
Stone composed The Whole Body of Divinity, a comprehensive
treatment of his thought (and the first systematic theology written
in the American colonies). Stone's Whole Body, virtually unknown to
scholars, not only provides the indispensable intellectual context
for the religious development of early Connecticut but also offers
a more comprehensive description of the Puritanism of early New
England than anything previously available. Hartford Puritanism
argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism, one where
Hartford's founding ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, both
fully embraced and even harshened Calvin's double predestination.
Introduced in 1918 as an award for bravery in the field, the
Military Medal was almost immediately open to women. During its 80
year existence, the Military Medal was awarded to women on only 146
occasions, the vast majority during the First World War. This
volume provides the definitive roll of recipients together with
citations, many of which were not available at the time, plus
service and biographical detail. Over 80% of the entries are
accompanied by a photograph. The vast majority of the recipients
were British, but the medal was open to women of all nationalities
and the names of French and United States recipients are recorded
together with allied personnel from the Empire.
Employing the classic Chinese saying "returning home with glory"
(man zai rong gui) as his title, Michael Williams highlights the
importance of return and home in the history of the connections
established and maintained between villagers in the Pearl River
Delta and various Pacific ports from the time of the Californian
and Australian gold rushes to the founding of the People's Republic
of China. Conventional scholarship on Chinese migration tends to
privilege nation-state factors or concepts that are dependent on
national boundaries. Such approaches are more concerned with the
migrants' settlement in the destination country, downplaying the
awkward fact that the majority of the overseas Chinese (huaqiao)
originally intended to (and eventually did) return to their home
villages (qiaoxiang). Williams goes back to the basics by
considering the strong influence exerted by the family and the home
village on those who first set out in order to give a better
appreciation of how and why many modest communities in southern
China became more modern and affluent. He also gives a voice to
those who never left their villages (women in particular). Designed
as a single case study, this work presents detailed research based
on the more than eighty villages of the Long Du district (near
Zhongshan City in Guangdong Province), as well as the three major
destinations-Sydney, San Francisco, and Honolulu-of the huaqiao who
came from this region. Out of this analysis of what truly mattered
to the villagers, the choices they had and made, and what
constituted success and failure in their lives, a sympathetic
portrayal of the huaqiao emerges. Returning Home with Glory
inaugurates the Hong Kong University Press book series Crossing
Seas.
Plato's "Phaedo", Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and Heidegger's
"Being and Time" are three of the most profound meditations on
variations of the ideas that to practice philosophy is to practice
how to die. This study traces how these variations are connected
with each other and with the reflections of this idea to be found
in the works of other ancient and modern philosophers - including
Neitzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and levinas. The book
also shows how this philosophical thanatology motivates or is
motivated by experiences documented in psychoanalysis and in the
anthropology of Western and Oriental religions and myths.
For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the
empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey
Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular
entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both
possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the
People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets
to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the
perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it
is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact
most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have
clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a
decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the
select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday
phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a
democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually
experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching
democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green
rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian"
alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off
the contributions of a wide range of thinkers-including Aristotle,
Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and
many others-Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on
empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear
in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of
the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of
democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy
within the sociological and technological conditions of the
twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and
students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to
political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in
search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than
repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass
society.
Could low-level exposure to polluting chemicals be analogous to
exercise-a beneficial source of stress that strengthens the body?
Some scientists studying the phenomenon of hormesis (beneficial or
stimulatory effects caused by low-dose exposure to toxic
substances) claim that that this may be the case. Is A Little
Pollution Good For You? critically examines the current evidence
for hormesis. In the process, it highlights the range of
methodological and interpretive judgments involved in environmental
research: choices about what questions to ask and how to study
them, decisions about how to categorize and describe new
information, judgments about how to interpret and evaluate
ambiguous evidence, and questions about how to formulate public
policy in response to debated scientific findings. The book also
uncovers the ways that interest groups with deep pockets attempt to
influence these scientific judgments for their benefit. Several
chapters suggest ways to counter these influences and incorporate a
broader array of societal values in environmental research: (1)
moving beyond conflict-of-interest policies to develop new ways of
safeguarding academic research from potential biases; (2) creating
deliberative forums in which multiple stakeholders can discuss the
judgments involved in policy-relevant research; and (3) developing
ethical guidelines that can assist scientific experts in
disseminating debated and controversial phenomena to the public.
Kevin C. Elliott illustrates these strategies in the hormesis case,
as well as in two additional case studies involving contemporary
environmental research: endocrine disruption and multiple chemical
sensitivity. This book should be of interest to a wide variety of
readers, including scientists, philosophers, policy makers,
environmental ethicists and activists, research ethicists, industry
leaders, and concerned citizens. "This is a timely, well-researched
and compelling book .Elliott admirably combines insights and
strategies from philosophy of science with those of applied ethics
to carefully analyze contemporary science and science policy around
pollutants and human health. There is a growing interest in the
philosophy of science community in bringing the work of
philosophers to bear on contemporary social issues. This book
stands out as a model for how to do just that." - Sandra D.
Mitchell, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Is A Little
Pollution Good For You? is a wonderfully clear and insightful book
dealing with the interplay between social values and economic and
political interests in scientific research. He articulates an
account of how societal values should and should not enter into
science and illustrates his views with an extended discussion of
research on hormesis-the hypothesis that chemicals that are toxic
at high doses may be benign or even beneficial at low doses. The
chemical industry has a strong financial interest in promoting
scientific acceptance of hormesis, as this could convince
regulatory agencies to loosen up restrictions on allowable
exposures to pesticides and other chemicals. Elliott argues that
because scientists have an obligation to minimize the harmful
effects of their research, they must be mindful of the social
context of their work and how it may be interpreted and applied by
private companies or interest groups, to the potential detriment of
public and environmental health. Elliott's book is a must read for
researchers, scholars, and students who are interested in the
relationship between science, industry, and society." - David B.
Resnik, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,
National Institutes of Health, author of Playing Politics With
Science: Balancing Scientific Independence And Government
The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women
officially or even to recognize that women are capable of
ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have
always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How
might the current debate change if our view of the history of
women's ordination were to change?
In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy offers
illuminating and surprising answers to these questions. Macy argues
that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were
in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers
references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and
theological documents of the time, and the rites for these
ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women
were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of
ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle
Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was
understood as the process and the ceremony by which one moved to
any new ministry in the community. In the early Middle Ages, women
served in at least four central ministries: episcopa (woman
bishop), presbytera (woman priest), deaconess and abbess. The
ordinations of women continued until the Gregorian reforms of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries radically altered the definition of
ordination. These reforms not only removed women from the ordained
ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's
ordination in the past.
With profound implications for how women are viewed in Christian
history, and for current debates about the role of women in the
church, The Hidden History of Women's Ordinationoffers new answers
to an old question and overturns a long-held erroneous belief.
This book provides a concise analysis of the making of Kurdistan,
its peoples, historical developments and cultural politics. Under
the Ottoman Empire Kurdistan was the name given to the autonomous
province in which the Kurdish princes ruled over a cosmopolitan
population. But re-mapping, wars and the growth of modern
nation-states have turned Kurdistan into an imagined homeland. The
Kurdish question is one that continually reappears on the
international stage because of the strategic location of Kurdistan.
In describing the ways in which Kurdistan and its history have been
represented and politicized, the author traces the vital role of
the nationalist States of Turkey, Iran and Iraq in the crafting of
political actors in the region.
In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic
American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los
Angeles's Historic Core has been "passively preserved," with most
of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the
area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and
the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many
pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings.
"Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an
agreement between Guatemala and God, ' Guatemala's Evangelical
Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan
holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians
were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying,
bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst
twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most
lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what
happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and
local and international politics that made this tragedy.
Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the
least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly
written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable
book."
-- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who
Killed the Bishop?
"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit
is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full
examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period
of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the
1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian
evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical
discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one
of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of
the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout
Latin America."
--Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University
Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla
documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and
declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett
provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule
of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests
that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that
cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class,
cultures, communities, religions, and even families. The book
examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but
it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954
and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More
significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance,
and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within
Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world."
Nigeria and South Africa account for about a third of Africa’s economic might, and have led much of its peacemaking and peacekeeping initiatives over the last two and a half decades. Both account for at least 60 per cent of the economy of their respective sub-regions in West and Southern Africa. The success of political and economic integration in Africa thus rests heavily on the shoulders of these two regional powers who have both collaborated and competed with each other in a complex relationship that is Africa’s most indispensable.
Nigeria remains among South Africa’s largest trading partners in Africa, while both countries have cooperated in building the institutions of the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Nigeria and South Africa have also sought to give Africa a stronger global voice, while competing as rivals on issues such as peacemaking in Cote d’Ivoire, Libya and Guinea-Bissau. While Nigeria is the most ethnically diverse country in Africa, South Africa is the most racially diverse state on the continent. Both countries have had a tremendous cultural impact on the continent in terms of Nollywood movies and South African soap operas.
The first three chapters of this book assess Nigeria/South Africa relations in the areas of politics, economics and culture. The second section has three essays that examine the issue of hegemonic leadership in relation to Nigeria and South Africa. The third section consists of four essays on the contributions to the bilateral relationship and leadership roles of four prominent South Africans and Nigerians: Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo and Sani Abacha. The final section of the book analyses three technocratic Nigerian and South African ‘visionaries’: Adebayo Adedeji, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
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