Each year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important concepts and questions. Instead, they brim with dry technical definitions and focus heavily on statistical analysis, slighting other valuable methods. This approach not only dulls potential enjoyment of the course, but prevents students from mastering the skills they need to engage more directly and meaningfully with a wide variety of research. With wit and practical wisdom, Christopher Howard draws on more than a decade of experience teaching research methods to transform a typically dreary subject and teach budding political scientists the critical skills they need to read published research more effectively and produce better research of their own. The first part of the book is devoted to asking three fundamental questions in political science: What happened? Why? Who cares? In the second section, Howard demonstrates how to answer these questions by choosing an appropriate research design, selecting cases, and working with numbers and written documents as evidence. Drawing on examples from American and comparative politics, international relations, and public policy, Thinking Like a Political Scientist highlights the most common challenges that political scientists routinely face, and each chapter concludes with exercises so that students can practice dealing with those challenges.

The first comprehensive map of the social safety net, public and private, in the United States. Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares, Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the Covid-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed during the pandemic.

How to build wealth with passion and purpose

The power to create great wealth is already within you. But monetizing that raw energy doesn't happen by itself. As Christopher Howard shows, building great wealth is a dual process. It begins by identifying your passion--the things you truly and deeply care about, whatever they may be. Next, passion needs to be endowed with purpose: a clearly defined vision of the future you intend to create.

Once this happens, money is simply the natural reward. When you bring the value of passion and purpose to the marketplace, financial prosperity is the instant result. It's like awakening to a new reality--not just for yourself, but for everyone who shares in your success. And make no mistake: sharing is a key element in the success of Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and the other billionaire entrepreneurs Chris introduces in these pages. "Instant Wealth--Wake up Rich " proves that ultimate success is by no means a matter of selling out principles in order to become rich. On the contrary, it's becoming rich in order to bring that riches to the world.

As a true entrepreneur himself, Christopher Howard has put these lessons to work in the creation of his own fast-growing international business. What's worked for him--and for so many other hugely successful entrepreneurs--can work for you too. All it takes is passion, purpose, and waking up to instant wealth. ""

Turning Passions Into Profits provides specific techniques for rapidly closing the gap between where you are today and where you'd like to be tomorrow. In this book, Christopher Howard teaches powerful, innovative tools for modeling and replicating the ultimate success of some of the world's greatest leaders and billionaires. With the ability to select and incorporate some of the traits, strategies, thought patterns, and behaviors of those already achieving results, individuals can plot a course and arrive at a chosen destination quicker than they ever thought possible. It provides concrete tools and strategies to fully understand the governing principles outstanding achievers use to realize their vision.
In addition, Turning Passions Into Profits supplies exercises to apply these communication and leadership tools to master these skills-ultimately gaining career, financial, and personal success.

Despite costing hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidizing everything from homeownership and child care to health insurance, tax expenditures (commonly known as tax loopholes) have received little attention from those who study American government. This oversight has contributed to an incomplete and misleading portrait of U.S. social policy. Here Christopher Howard analyzes the "hidden" welfare state created by such programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his work on the histories of these four tax expenditures, Howard highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies. Tax expenditures are created more routinely and quietly than traditional social programs, for instance, and over time generate unusual coalitions of support. They expand and contract without deliberate changes to individual programs.

Howard helps the reader to appreciate the historic links between the hidden welfare state and U.S. tax policy, which accentuate the importance of Congress and political parties. He also focuses on the reasons why individuals, businesses, and public officials support tax expenditures. "The Hidden Welfare State" will appeal to anyone interested in the origins, development, and structure of the American welfare state. Students of public finance will gain new insights into the politics of taxation. And as policymakers increasingly promote tax expenditures to address social problems, the book offers some sobering lessons about how such programs work.

An examination of a 1970s Conceptual art project-advertisements for fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery-that hoodwinked the New York art world. From the summer of 1970 to March 1971, advertisements appeared in four leading art magazines-Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews-for a group show and six solo exhibitions at the Jean Freeman Gallery at 26 West Fifty-Seventh Street, in the heart of Manhattan's gallery district. As gallery goers soon discovered, this address did not exist-the street numbers went from 16 to 20 to 24 to 28-and neither did the art supposedly exhibited there. The ads were promoting fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery. The scheme, eventually exposed by a New York Times reporter, was concocted by the artist Terry Fugate-Wilcox as both work of art and critique of the art world. In this book, Christopher Howard brings this forgotten Conceptual art project back into view. Howard demonstrates that Fugate-Wilcox's project was an exceptionally clever embodiment of many important aspects of Conceptualism, incisively synthesizing the major aesthetic issues of its time-documentation and dematerialization, serialism and process, text and image, publishing and publicity. He puts the Jean Freeman Gallery in the context of other magazine-based work by Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, and Ed Ruscha, and compares the fictional artists' projects with actual Earthworks by Walter De Maria, Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim, and more. Despite the deadpan perfection of the Jean Freeman Gallery project, the art establishment marginalized its creator, and the project itself was virtually erased from art history. Howard corrects these omissions, drawing on deep archival research, personal interviews, and investigation of fine-printed clues to shed new light on a New York art world mystery.

Title: Come Back from the Dead. A novel.]Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Howard, Christopher; 1893.]. viii. 140 p.; 8 . 012641.e.50.

"Forget what you thought you knew. Christopher Howard takes us on an eye-opening, mind-expanding, entirely unexpected tour of the American welfare state. He describes a big, popular, sprawling, often Republican system that--thanks to cherished American institutions like federalism--does not work very well. Smart, wise, synthetic, funny, and iconoclastic--"The Welfare State Nobody Knows" is required reading for everybody who wants to know about welfare, about politics, or about the United States."--James A. Morone, author of "Hellfire Nation" and "The Democratic Wish"

"Christopher Howard is one of the most original and provocative students of the American welfare state--and this book splendidly sums up his insights. We learn that the American welfare state is larger and more dynamic than many have believed--yet, to this day, it fails to ameliorate inequality or poverty. Scholars and citizens alike will find that this book raises questions and provides answers nowhere else to be found."--Theda Skocpol, Harvard University

"In "The Welfare State Nobody Knows," Christopher Howard compellingly reveals an American welfare state that is at once larger than previously acknowledged and yet incapable of solving the fundamental social problems confronting the nation. The book, which combines narrative accounts and quantitative analysis, is up to date but historically grounded. It is also, at times, appropriately contentious. The book is a must read for anyone committed to understanding the unique character of social policy and politics in the U.S."--Mark A. Peterson, UCLA School of Public Affairs

"Highly informative, original, and concise."--Martha Derthick, University of Virginia

"Inthis myth-busting book, Christopher Howard challenges cherished notions about the American welfare state--that it consists of two tiers with generous social insurance benefits for the middle class and stingy means-test benefits for the poor, that it emerged with two 'big bangs' in the 1930s and 1960s, that it is smaller than its European counterparts, and that the elderly usurp an unfair share of national resources. Beautifully written and clearly argued, "The Welfare State Nobody Knows" should be required reading for all students interested in American political development."--Jill Quadagno, Florida State University

"Howard provides ample food for thought-offering new perspectives on old questions, challenging prevailing stories about American social welfare policy, and sowing the seeds for more creative research and thought. The book's catchy, readable style and its attention to how to think about issues--questions to ask, data to consider, methods to use, and ways to assess our comfort or discomfort with results--engage the reader in applying the critical thinking skills that are essential to evaluating and participating in public policy."--Judith Feder, Georgetown University