Ma?berot Immanuel is a collection of twenty-eight chapters in Hebrew of rhymed prose and poetry written by the poet and amateur philosopher Immanuel of Rome during an era of rapid political change in late medieval Italy. The final chapter, Mah?beret Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden (A Tale of Heaven and Hell), like Dante's Commedia, depicts Immanuel's visits to hell and heaven. Bridging Worlds focuses on the interrelation of Immanuel's belletristic work and biblical exegesis to advance a comprehensive and original reading of this final chapter. By reading Immanuel's philosophical commentaries and literary works together, Dana Fishkin demonstrates that Immanuel's narrative made complex philosophical ideas about the soul's quest for immortality accessible to an educated populace. Throughout this work, she explains the many ways Mah?beret Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden serves as a site of cultural negotiation and translation. Bridging Worlds broadens our understanding of the tensions inherent in the world of late medieval Jewish people who were deeply enmeshed in Italian culture and literature, negotiating two cultures whose values may have overlapped but also sometimes clashed. Fishkin puts forth a valuable and refreshing perspective alongside previously unknown sources to breathe new life into this extremely rich and culturally valuable medieval work.

Written by an experienced risk manager, this innovative new book explores the core concepts of risk management, including in-depth coverage of its scope, rationale, and practical applications. In addition to being fundamentally important to risk managers, this text will also be invaluable to senior executives, directors, regulators, and capital markets professionals. Students, lay readers, and others interested in finance will find a vast subject made engaging and accessible. Written with unusual clarity, "The Shape of Risk" makes use of graphics, case studies, and questions. The author encourages readers to develop their own intuition and judgment for identifying and managing risk. This is an excellent starting point for a new generation of readers who increasingly need a both practical and conceptual understanding of risk management.

The Electrified Mind helps therapists understand and empathize with patients who rely heavily upon cell phones and the internet for the purposes of self-expression as well as for defensive avoidance of actual interpersonal contact. The chapters by distinguished mental health professionals delineate therapeutic strategies for dealing with the dilemmas that arise in working with children, adolescents, and adults excessively involved with cyberspace at the cost of meaningful human relationships.

Featuring cases from India, China, Nepal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Mongolia and Malaysia, the authors demonstrate and compare the differing uses of public deliberation in Asia. Many countries in Asia have long traditions of public deliberation, in both democratic and undemocratic settings, some of which continue today. Yet in the face of pressures from complex governance, popular protests and democratization, certain deliberative practices - notably deliberative polling - have been 'parachuted' into the region without regard to historical or traditional practices of deliberation. And, the motivations differ. Some states have made use of public deliberation in order to contain dissent, while others have more emancipatory goals in mind. The contributors to this book take a comparative perspective on the emergence and evolution of deliberative practices in Asia, and their relationships with democracy. They analyse the main motivations for introducing public deliberation in different political regimes and the effectiveness of public deliberation in Asian countries for solving problems and improving governance. In doing so they evaluate whether deliberative democratic tools, can apply to all societies regardless of their political and cultural differences. Essential reading for students and scholars of Asian Politics, this book will also be of great use to all political scientists with an interest in deliberative democracy.

Featuring cases from India, China, Nepal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Mongolia and Malaysia, the authors demonstrate and compare the differing uses of public deliberation in Asia. Many countries in Asia have long traditions of public deliberation, in both democratic and undemocratic settings, some of which continue today. Yet in the face of pressures from complex governance, popular protests and democratization, certain deliberative practices - notably deliberative polling - have been 'parachuted' into the region without regard to historical or traditional practices of deliberation. And, the motivations differ. Some states have made use of public deliberation in order to contain dissent, while others have more emancipatory goals in mind. The contributors to this book take a comparative perspective on the emergence and evolution of deliberative practices in Asia, and their relationships with democracy. They analyse the main motivations for introducing public deliberation in different political regimes and the effectiveness of public deliberation in Asian countries for solving problems and improving governance. In doing so they evaluate whether deliberative democratic tools, can apply to all societies regardless of their political and cultural differences. Essential reading for students and scholars of Asian Politics, this book will also be of great use to all political scientists with an interest in deliberative democracy.

This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. Integrating criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative Fishkin explores the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century. These charismatic, readable essays range from explorations of feminist humor and" chutzpah, " to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of feminists' challenges to cultural paradigms. Fishkin's lively voice engages readers with the American past and leaves a bold stamp on the literary landscape.

Africans and their descendants constituted the majority of the population of the Americas for most of the first three hundred years. Yet their fundamental roles in the creation and definition of the new societies of the Onew world, O and their significance in the development of the Atlantic world, have not been acknowledged. This multidisciplinary volume highlights the African presence throughout the Americas, and African and African Diasporan contributions to the material and cultural life of all of the Americas, and of all Americans. It includes articles from leading scholars, and from cultural leaders from both well-known and little-known African Diasporan communities. Privileging African Diasporan voices, it offers new perspectives, data, and interpretations that challenge prevailing understandings of the Americas. Its fundamental premise is that the story of the Americas can only be accurately told by including the story of the foundational roles played by Africans and their descendants in the Americas

"Debating Deliberative Democracy" explores the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.
Investigates the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.
Includes focus on institutions and makes reference to empirical work.
Engages a debate that cuts across political science, philosophy, the law and other disciplines.

Equal opportunity is a powerful idea, and one with extremely broad appeal in contemporary politics, political theory, and law. But what does it mean? On close examination, the most attractive existing conceptions of equal opportunity turn out to be impossible to achieve in practice, or even in theory. As long as families are free to raise their children differently, no two people's opportunities will be equal; nor is it possible to disentangle someone's abilities or talents from her background advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, given different abilities and disabilities, different people need different opportunities, confounding most ways of imagining what counts as "equal." This book proposes an entirely new way of thinking about the project of equal opportunity. Instead of focusing on the chimera of literal equalization, we ought to work to broaden the range of opportunities open to people at every stage in life. We can achieve this in part by loosening the bottlenecks that constrain access to opportunities-the narrow places through which people must pass in order to pursue many life paths that open out on the other side. A bottleneck might be a test like the SAT, a credential requirement like a college degree, or a skill like speaking English. It might be membership in a favored caste or racial group. Bottlenecks are part of the opportunity structure of every society. But their severity varies. By loosening them, we can build a more open and pluralistic opportunity structure in which people have more of a chance, throughout their lives, to pursue paths they choose for themselves-rather than those dictated by limited opportunities. This book develops this idea and other elements of opportunity pluralism, then applies this approach to several contemporary egalitarian policy problems: class and access to education, workplace flexibility and work/family conflict, and antidiscrimination law.

"The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America" is a comprehensive reference source on the human rights and civil liberties that are legally recognized in the US. The US Consitution and the Bill of Rights define individual rights for Americans. The successive amendments to the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions further define these rights and relationships while protecting the individual citizen in an ever changing society. "The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America" presents students with lucid, enlightening essays on these fundamental documents, court decisions and laws, while examining the aspects of public and private life they serve to protect, and highlighting those individuals who are and have been influential in defining and interpreting civil rights. It is organized in an easy to use A-Z format, from Abolitionists to the contemporary Zoot Suits riots.

The son of former slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most prominent figures in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Thirty-three years old at the time of his death in 1906, he had published four novels, four collections of short stories, and fourteen books of poetry, as well as numerous songs, plays, and essays in newspapers and magazines around the world. In the century following his death, Dunbar slipped into relative obscurity, remembered mainly for his dialect poetry or as a footnote to other more canonical figures of the period. The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar showcases his gifts as a writer of short fiction and provides key insights into the tensions and themes of Dunbar's literary achievement. The 104 stories written by Dunbar between 1890 and 1905 reveal Dunbar's attempts to maintain his artistic integrity while struggling with America's racist stereotypes. Making them available for the first time in one convenient, comprehensive, and definitive volume, The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar illustrates the complexity of his literary life and legacy.

This book provides an up-to-date guide to managing Country Risk. It tackles its various and interlinked dimensions including sovereign risk, socio-political risk, and macroeconomic risk for foreign investors, creditors, and domestic residents. It shows how they are accentuated in the global economy together with new risks such as terrorism, systemic risk, environmental risk, and the rising trend of global volatility and contagion. The book also assesses the limited usefulness of traditional yardsticks of Country Risk, such as ratings and rankings, which at best reflect the market consensus without predictive value and at worst amplify risk aversion and generate crisis contamination. This book goes further than comparing a wide range of risk management methods in that it provides operational and forward-looking warning signs of Country Risk. The combination of the authors' academic and market-based backgrounds makes the book a useful tool for scholars, analysts, and practitioners.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny. The Railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out west, and helped speed America's entry onto the world stage as a modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But while the Transcontinental has often been celebrated in national memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who made up 90 percent of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The Railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little understood and largely invisible. This landmark volume explores the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny. The Railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out west, and helped speed America's entry onto the world stage as a modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But while the Transcontinental has often been celebrated in national memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who made up 90 percent of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The Railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little understood and largely invisible. This landmark volume explores the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West.

The Electrified Mind helps therapists understand and empathize with patients who rely heavily upon cell phones and the internet for the purposes of self-expression as well as for defensive avoidance of actual interpersonal contact. The chapters by distinguished mental health professionals delineate therapeutic strategies for dealing with the dilemmas that arise in working with children, adolescents, and adults excessively involved with cyberspace at the cost of meaningful human relationships.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, PERVASIVE 2006, held in Dublin, Ireland, in May 2006. The 24 revised full papers presented here are organized in topical sections on activity recognition, location, sensors, sensor processing and platforms, toolkits and gaming, security, pointing, interaction and displays, and smart homes, and beyond.

Mark Twain remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Mark Twain's work including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class and imperialism. This volume also contains a introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.

In Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, Shelley Fisher Fishkin explores how this son of slaveholders came to write one of the greatest anti-racist novels of all time -- and why this remarkable odyssey is so often erased or ignored today. Fishkin's bold original blend of personal narrative, biography, history, and criticism will change the way we look at Mark Twain and, perhaps, ourselves.

All over the world democratic reforms have brought power to the people - but under conditions where the people have little opportunity to think about the power that they exercise. Do we want a democracy inspired by Madison or by Madison Avenue? A democracy animated by deliberation or by manipulation? This book examines each of the principal democratic theories and makes the case for a democracy in which the people offer informed judgments about politics or policy. It then goes on to show how this form of democracy can be made a reality. When the People Speak describes deliberative democracy projects conducted by the author with various collaborators in the US, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, the crafting of budget solutions in a region in Italy, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Critics of deliberative democracy say that it will privilege the more educated or that the public is incompetent when it comes to understanding policy issues, and should not be consulted. Others argue that it will increase polarization. Fishkin offers rebuttals for each of these arguments. Combining theory and practice he shows how a more deliberative politics is both practical and compelling.

At the turn of the twentieth century Minnie Maddern Fiske, a New York actress, socialite, and animal rights activist, wrote to Mark Twain with an unusual request: for Twain to write about the evils of bullfighting equal to that of his anti-vivisectionist story A Dog's Tale. Twain responded with A Horse's Tale, a comic animal tale that doubled as a frontier adventure and political diatribe. A Horse's Tale concerns Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill Cody's favorite horse, as the protagonist and sometime narrator at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. When the general's orphaned niece arrives, Buffalo Bill takes her under his wing and ultimately lends her Soldier Boy so that they may seek adventure together. Twain uses the friendship between the girl and the horse as the basis for his eventual indictment of the barbarism of Spanish bullfighting. Twain's novella is unusual for its complex tone-combining a comic children's story and a dark portrait of animal cruelty. Including the themes of transatlantic relations and frontier culture, Twain offers a fresh look into the world of Buffalo Bill Cody from the perspective of one of America's most beloved authors. First published in 1906 in Harper's Monthly and as a single volume the following year, A Horse's Tale never again appeared in print except in anthologies of Twain's work. This edition includes the full text of Twain's original story, an introduction that situates the work in historical and biographical context, thorough annotations, and the addition of significant archival material related to Twain, Cody, and Fiske.

Equal opportunity is a powerful idea, and one with extremely broad appeal in contemporary politics, political theory, and law. But what does it mean? On close examination, the most attractive existing conceptions of equal opportunity turn out to be impossible to achieve in practice, or even in theory. As long as families are free to raise their children differently, no two people's opportunities will be equal; nor is it possible to disentangle someone's abilities or talents from her background advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, given different abilities and disabilities, different people need different opportunities, confounding most ways of imagining what counts as "equal." Bottlenecks proposes an entirely new way of thinking about the project of equal opportunity. Instead of focusing on the chimera of literal equalization, we ought to work to broaden the range of opportunities open to people at every stage in life. We can achieve this in part by loosening the bottlenecks that constrain access to opportunities-the narrow places through which people must pass in order to pursue many life paths that open out on the other side. A bottleneck might be a test like the SAT, a credential requirement like a college degree, or a skill like speaking English. It might be membership in a favored caste or racial group. Bottlenecks are part of the opportunity structure of every society. But their severity varies. By loosening them, we can build a more open and pluralistic opportunity structure in which people have more of a chance, throughout their lives, to pursue paths they choose for themselves-rather than those dictated by limited opportunities. Fishkin develops this idea and other elements of opportunity pluralism, then applies this approach to several contemporary egalitarian policy problems: class and access to education, workplace flexibility and work/family conflict, and antidiscrimination law.

At the turn of the twentieth century Minnie Maddern Fiske, a New York actress, socialite, and animal rights activist, wrote to Mark Twain with an unusual request: for Twain to write about the evils of bullfighting equal to that of his anti-vivisectionist story A Dog's Tale. Twain responded with A Horse's Tale, a comic animal tale that doubled as a frontier adventure and political diatribe. A Horse's Tale concerns Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill Cody's favorite horse, as the protagonist and sometime narrator at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. When the general's orphaned niece arrives, Buffalo Bill takes her under his wing and ultimately lends her Soldier Boy so that they may seek adventure together. Twain uses the friendship between the girl and the horse as the basis for his eventual indictment of the barbarism of Spanish bullfighting. Twain's novella is unusual for its complex tone-combining a comic children's story and a dark portrait of animal cruelty. Including the themes of transatlantic relations and frontier culture, Twain offers a fresh look into the world of Buffalo Bill Cody from the perspective of one of America's most beloved authors. First published in 1906 in Harper's Monthly and as a single volume the following year, A Horse's Tale never again appeared in print except in anthologies of Twain's work. This edition includes the full text of Twain's original story, an introduction that situates the work in historical and biographical context, thorough annotations, and the addition of significant archival material related to Twain, Cody, and Fiske.

An examination of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn suggesting that more than any other work, Twain let African-American voices, languages, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. Adds new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism, and the literary canon, showing how it has helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century.

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before he published his first book of poems. Mark Twain pursued a twenty-year career as a journalist before the publication of his first novel. The list of great imaginative writers whose careers began in journalism includes not only Whitman and Twain, but also Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, among others.
Fishkin's book--the first full-length study to examine this tradition in American letters--focuses on the lives and careers of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, in order to discover the roots of their greatest imaginative works and the factors that led each writer to turn to fiction. Fishkin determines that they all turned to fiction because they wished to engage their readers in ways not possible through conventional journalism, and yet not one of them found his artistic stride until he returned, in new and creative ways, to the subjects and strategies first explored as a journalist.
Fishkin weaves together threads of biography, literary criticism, literary theory, and social history to reveal the neglected role journalism has played in shaping American literary tradition since the 1830s. Her final chapter examines the attitudes toward journalism and fiction, and the division between the two in the works of such contemporary fiction writers as Norman Mailer, John Hersey, and E.L. Doctorow.
Fishkin's probing examination of the poetry and fiction that followed the newspaper and magazine work of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos both reveals how each writer transformed fact into art and how journalism has helped to give a distinctively American cast to American literature.

Democracy requires a connection to the 'will of the people'. What does that mean in a world of 'fake news', relentless advocacy, dialogue mostly among the like-minded, and massive spending to manipulate public opinion? What kind of opinion can the public have under such conditions? What would democracy be like if the people were really thinking in depth about the policies they must live with? If they really 'deliberated' with good information about their political choices? This book argues that 'deliberative democracy' is not utopian. It is a practical solution to many of democracy's ills. It can supplement existing institutions with practical reforms. It can apply at all levels of government and for many different kinds of policy choices. This volume speaks to a recurring dilemma: listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public's concerns. Instead, there are methods for getting a representative and thoughtful public voice that is really worth listening to. Democracy is under siege in most countries, where democratic institutions have low approval and face a resurgent threat from authoritarian regimes. Deliberative democracy can provide an antidote and can reinvigorate our democratic politics. Democracy When the People Are Thinking draws on the author's research with many collaborators on 'Deliberative Polling'-a process conducted in 27 countries on six continents. It contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation. It should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.