- Table View
- List View
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
by Daniel J. LevitinWinner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-FictionWinner of the 2017 National Business Book AwardShortlisted for the 2016/2017 Donner PrizeFrom the bestselling author of The Organized Mind, the must-have book about how to analyze who and what to trust in the age of information overload. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions and outright lies from reliable information? In A Field Guide to Lies, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin outlines the many pitfalls of the information age and provides the means to spot and avoid them. Levitin groups his field guide into two categories--statistical infomation and faulty arguments--ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. It is easy to lie with stats and graphs as few people "take the time to look under the hood and see how they work." And, just because there's a number on something, doesn't mean that the number was arrived at properly. Logic can help to evaluate whether or not a chain of reasoning is valid. And "infoliteracy" teaches us that not all sources of information are equal, and that biases can distort data. Faced with a world too eager to flood us with information, the best response is to be prepared. A Field Guide to Lies helps us avoid learning a lot of things that aren't true.
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method
by Daniel J. LevitinWinner of the National Business Book AwardFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some weasels in their tracks!
A Field Guide to White Supremacy
by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. GutiérrezDrawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the definitive field guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness—and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past—joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States. Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities. A Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.
A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times
by Athena AktipisA common sense field guide to understanding, surviving, and thriving in our time of complex chaos and crises. Is this finally it? The end times?Because from COVID-19 to climate catastrophe to the looming AI revolution—not to mention the ever-growing background hum of rage, fear, and anxiety—it&’s starting to feel like the party we call civilization is just about over. The good news? It&’s always felt that way. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, history, brain science, game theory, and more, cooperation theorist (and, coincidentally, zombie expert) Athena Aktipis reassuringly explains how we, as a species, are hardwired to survive big existential crises. And how we can do so again by leveraging our innate abilities to communicate and cooperate. Pack a ukulele in your prep kit. Practice your risk-management skills. Enlist your crew into a survival team. And embrace the apocalypse. You might just enjoy it. Plus, it will help us build a better and more resilient future for all humankind.
A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England
by James Sharpe*Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, History Today and the Sunday Telegraph*‘Wonderfully entertaining, comprehensive and astute.’ The Times‘Genuinely hard to put down.’ BBC History MagazineFrom murder to duelling, highway robbery to mugging: the darker side of English life explored.Spanning some seven centuries, A Fiery & Furious People traces the subtle shifts that have taken place both in the nature of violence and in people’s attitudes to it. How could football be regarded at one moment as a raucous pastime that should be banned, and the next as a respectable sport that should be encouraged? When did the serial killer first make an appearance? What gave rise to particular types of violent criminal - medieval outlaws, Victorian garrotters – and what made them dwindle and then vanish? Above all, Professor James Sharpe hones in on a single, fascinating question: has the country that has experienced so much turmoil naturally prone to violence or are we, in fact, becoming a gentler nation?‘Wonderful . . . A fascinating and rare example of a beautifully crafted scholarly work.’ Times Higher Education‘Sweeping and ambitious . . . A humane and clear-eyed guide to a series of intractable and timely questions.’ Observer‘Deeply researched, thoughtfully considered and vividly written . . . Read it.’ History Today‘Magisterial . . . The outlaw’s song has surely never been better rendered.’ Times Literary Supplement
A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus
by Mimi Nichter Nicole TaylorA Filtered Life is the first comprehensive ethnographic account to explore how college students create and manage multiple identities on social media. Drawing on interviews and digital ethnographic data gleaned from popular social media platforms, the authors document and make visible routinized practices that are typically hidden and operating behind the scenes. They introduce the concept of "digital multiples," wherein students strategically present themselves differently across social media platforms. This requires both the copious production of content and the calculated development of an instantly recognizable aesthetic or brand. Taylor and Nichter examine key contradictions that emerged from student narratives, including presenting a self that is both authentic and highly edited, appearing upbeat even during emotionally difficult times, and exuding body positivity even when frustrated with how you look. Students struggled with this series of impossibilities; yet, they felt compelled to maintain a vibrant online presence. With its close-up portrayal of the social and embodied experiences of college students, A Filtered Life is ideal for students and scholars interested in youth studies, digital ethnography, communication, and new forms of media.
A Fine Line: Painkillers And Pleasure In The Age Of Anxiety
by George C. DertadianAre painkillers mundane medications safe for use to ease human suffering? Or are they drugs of abuse that cause addiction and death? Do they ameliorate pain, or do they cause it? This book explores growing interest among medical practitioners media outlets about the ‘misuse’ or ‘abuse’ of pharmaceutical pain medications. It contextualizes these emerging discourses of pharmaceutical ‘abuse’ within the social and political histories from which they have emerged by exploring the role of pleasure and pain in shaping individualized modes of medication consumption in a neoliberal age of anxiety.The book is divided into two parts: the first addresses the discursive construction of painkiller (ab)use as articulated in research and policy accounts; the second part provides an empirical investigation that draws on the lived experience of those who engage in non-medical consumption. This book argues that, contrary to the stereotype of the ‘seductive’ drug that coaxes its user into a life of dysfunction, there appears to be an intimate relationship between the motivations of pleasure seeking, health practice and productive citizenship among people who use painkillers for non-medical reasons.
A Fire In Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists In New York
by Tony MichelsIn a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. <p><p> The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. <p> Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. <p> The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.
A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis
by Susan MurphyAt a time of climate emergency, Zen koans show us how crisis itself can reveal the regenerative openness of life, mind, and being.Zen koans are a tradition of holistic inquiry based on &“encounter stories&” from East Asia&’s most radical Buddhist tradition. Turning this form of inquiry toward the climate crisis, Susan Murphy contends that koans can help us enter the mind of not-knowing, from which acceptance and possibility freely emerge. Koans reveal intimate, mythic, artful, playful, provocative, humorous, and fierce ways to engage the work of protecting and healing our world.The koans point firstly at ourselves—at the very nature of "self." Until we hold &“self&” as a live question rather than its own unquestioned answer, we&’re stuck looking on from the &“outside,&” hoping to engineer change upon a problem called &“climate crisis,&” all the time oblivious to the fact that we&’re swimming in a reality with no outside to it, an ocean of transformative energy. Do we dare relinquish our wish for absolute control and fearlessly surf the intensity of our feelings about the suffering earth?In addition to her use of dozens of traditional and new koans, Murphy illuminates the little-known Zen resonance with the oldest continuous body of indigenous wisdom on earth, summed up in the subtle Australian Aboriginal word Country. Murphy draws from her study and coteaching with Uncle Max (Dulumunmun) Harrison, a distinguished Yuin Elder, to show how this millennia-deep taproot of intelligence confirms the aliveness of the earth and the kinship of all beings.
A Fire Strikes the Chicago Stock Yards: A History of Flame and Folly in the Jungle (Disaster Ser.)
by Alex A. Burkholder John F HoganThis compelling history chronicles some of the most intense and tragic fires in Chicago&’s storied meatpacking district.Chicago&’s Union Stock Yards made the city &“the hog butcher of the world,&” but the notoriety came at a grievous cost. From their opening on Christmas Day of 1865 to their final closure in July of 1971, The Yards were the site of nearly three hundred extra-alarm fires. That infamous history includes some of the most disastrous conflagrations of a city famous for fire. In 1910, twenty-one firemen and three civilians were killed in a blaze at a beef warehouse—the largest death toll for an organized fire department in the nation prior to 9/11. The meatpackers who ran the yards considered the constant threat of fire as part of the cost of doing business, shrugging it off with an, &“It&’s all right, we're fully covered.&” For the firefighters who were forced to plunge into the flames again and again, it was an entirely different matter.
A Fire at the Center: Solidarity, Whiteness, and Becoming a Water Protector
by Karen Van FossanA firsthand account of two colonial pipelines and their resistance: the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and the Line 3 pipeline on Anishinaabe lands. This is a story of becoming and un-becoming. When the living waters that crisscrossed the Standing Rock reservation came under threat, minister of the nearby Unitarian Universalist congregation Karen Van Fossan asked herself what it means, as a descendent of colonialism, to resist her own colonial culture. When another pipeline, Line 3, came to threaten Anishinaabe ways of life, the question became even more resounding. In A Fire at the Center, Van Fossan takes readers behind the scenes of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict, to penitentiaries where prisoners of war have carried the movement onward, to the jail cell where she was held for protesting Line 3, to a reimagining of decolonized family constellations, and to moments of collective hope and strength. With penetrating insight, she blends memoir, history, and cultural critique. Guided by the generous teachings of Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, she investigates layers of colonialism—extractive industries, mass incarceration, broken treaties, disappearances of Indigenous people—and the boundaries of imperial whiteness. For all those striving for liberation and meaningful allyship, Van Fossan’s learnings and practices of genuine, mutual solidarity and her thoughtful critique of whiteness will be transformational.
A First Course in Bayesian Statistical Methods (Springer Texts in Statistics)
by Peter Hoff<p>1. A self-contained introduction to probability, exchangeability and Bayes’ rule provides a theoretical understanding of the applied material. <p>2. Numerous examples with R-code that can be run "as-is" allow the reader to perform the data analyses themselves. <p>3. The development of Monte Carlo and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in the context of data analysis examples provides motivation for these computational methods.</p>
A First Nations Perspective: Stories of Nanda Resilience as Told by Elders
by Steven KellyThis book is an extrapolation of the research I conducted for my doctoral thesis about my people’s struggle to come to terms with native title claim processes, in which we are required to prove our connection to land, culture and kin.This book offers a compelling and profound journey of Nanda people’s existence over time. It gives a robust understanding of the kinship and culture of my family group. It differs from others in the same field as it has been produced from an insider’s perspective; it is about my family, who are of the Murchison region of Western Australia. The book presents the ways in which my family continues to hold strong connection to kin and Country through traditional practices that have survived and flourished, regardless of colonialism. This has been achieved through the privileging of my family’s lived experiences and perceptions as told by Elders. In addition, I focus on the small details of our everyday lives to capture aspects of Country and kin. Further, insider positioning is incorporated in a critically reflexive way, based on auto-ethnographic accounts. Each chapter of the book focuses on particular ideas that were developed over the course of the study. The research provides examples of the historical and contemporary struggle of this Nanda family group’s survival and recognition as traditional owners in a native title claim. Particular themes were recurrent features in many of my conversations with Elders. The theme of identity, pertaining to how members of this family group identify with each other and with others, was consistent throughout the process and is based on the love and respect between family members.Readers interested in Australian history, anthropology, cultural studies and Indigenous studies will appreciate this book.
A Fishery for Modern Times
by Miriam WrightIn the early 1990s, the northern cod populations off the coast of Newfoundland had become so depleted that the federal government placed a moratorium on commercial fishing. The impact was devastating, both for Newfoundland's economy and for local fishing communities. Today, although this natural resource - exploited commercially for over 500 years - appears to be returning in diminished numbers, many fisheries scientists and fishers question whether the cod will ever return to its former abundance.In A Fishery for Modern Times, Miriam Wright argues that the recent troubles in the fishery can be more fully understood by examining the rise of the industrial fishery in the mid-twentieth century. The introduction of new harvesting technologies and the emergence of 'quick freezing', in the late 1930s, eventually supplanted household production by Newfoundland's fishing families. While the new technologies increased the amount of fish caught in the northwest Atlantic, Wright argues that the state played a critical role in fostering and financing the industrial frozen fish sector. Many bureaucrats and politicians, including Newfoundland's premier, Joseph Smallwood, believed that making the Newfoundland fishery 'modern', with centralization, technology, and expertise, would transform rural society, solving deep-seated economic and social problems.A Fishery for Modern Times examines the ways in which the state, ideologies of development, and political, economic, and social factors, along with political actors and fishing company owners, contributed to the expansion of the industrial fishery from the 1930s through the 1960s. While the promised prosperity never fully materialized, the continuing reliance on approaches favouring high-tech, big capital solutions put increasing pressure on cod populations in the years that followed. As Wright concludes, 'We can no longer afford to view the fisheries resources as "property" of the state and industry, to do with it as they choose. That path had led only to devastation of the resource, economic instability, and great social upheaval.'
A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857
by Matthew D. O'HaraCatholicism, as it developed in colonial Mexico, helped to create a broad and remarkably inclusive community of Christian subjects, while it also divided that community into countless smaller flocks. Taking this contradiction as a starting point, Matthew D. O'Hara describes how religious thought and practice shaped Mexico's popular politics. As he shows, religion facilitated the emergence of new social categories and modes of belonging in which individuals--initially subjects of the Spanish crown, but later citizens and other residents of republican Mexico--found both significant opportunities for improving their place in society and major constraints on their ways of thinking and behaving. O'Hara focuses on interactions between church authorities and parishioners from the late-colonial era into the early-national period, first in Mexico City and later in the surrounding countryside. Paying particular attention to disputes regarding caste status, the category of "Indian," and the ownership of property, he demonstrates that religious collectivities from neighborhood parishes to informal devotions served as complex but effective means of political organization for plebeians and peasants. At the same time, longstanding religious practices and ideas made colonial social identities linger into the decades following independence, well after republican leaders formally abolished the caste system that classified individuals according to racial and ethnic criteria. These institutional and cultural legacies would be profound, since they raised fundamental questions about political inclusion and exclusion precisely when Mexico was trying to envision and realize new forms of political community. The modes of belonging and organizing created by colonialism provided openings for popular mobilization, but they were always stalked by their origins as tools of hierarchy and marginalization.
A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (Great Lakes Books Series)
by David W. Blight Karolyn Smardz Frost Veta Smith TuckerAs the major gateway into British North America for travelers on the Underground Railroad, the U.S./Canadian border along the Detroit River was a boundary that determined whether thousands of enslaved people of African descent could reach a place of freedom and opportunity. In A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland, editors Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker explore the experiences of the area's freedom-seekers and advocates, both black and white, against the backdrop of the social forces--legal, political, social, religious, and economic--that shaped the meaning of race and management of slavery on both sides of the river. In five parts, contributors trace the beginnings of and necessity for transnational abolitionist activism in this unique borderland, and the legal and political pressures, coupled with African Americans' irrepressible quest for freedom, that led to the growth of the Underground Railroad. A Fluid Frontier details the founding of African Canadian settlements in the Detroit River region in the first decades of the nineteenth century with a focus on the strong and enduring bonds of family, faith, and resistance that formed between communities in Michigan and what is now Ontario. New scholarship offers unique insight into the early history of slavery and resistance in the region and describes individual journeys: the perilous crossing into Canada of sixteen-year-old Caroline Quarlls, who was enslaved by her own aunt and uncle; the escape of the Crosswhite family, who eluded slave catchers in Marshall, Michigan, with the help of others in the town; and the international crisis sparked by the escape of Lucie and Thornton Blackburn and others. With a foreword by David W. Blight, A Fluid Frontier is a truly bi-national collection, with contributors and editors evenly split between specialists in Canadian and American history, representing both community and academic historians. Scholars of the Underground Railroad as well as those in borderland studies will appreciate the interdisciplinary mix and unique contributions of this volume.
A Flurry of Fun: Quebec's Winter Carnival (Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, Guided Reading Grade 3)
by Maxine SchurNIMAC-sourced textbook
A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change
by Rodger StreitmatterAmerica’s news media are relentlessly criticized as too negative, sensationalistic, profit-oriented, and biased, not to mention unpatriotic and a miserable failure at reflecting the nation’s diversity. The author argues, print and broadcast journalists have propelled significant social topics onto the public agenda and helped build support for change. This text draws on both historical and contemporary examples from a wide range of social contexts; the result is a fascinating tour of American history, social change, and the benefits of a robust media. To simply put, this book is driven by the thesis, that journalism has improved this country in an impressively broad range of areas.
A Forensic Approach to Political and State Violence: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Risk (New Frontiers in Forensic Psychology)
by David CrightonA Forensic Approach to Political and State Violence applies a forensic lens to the study of risk in relation to political and state violence.Divided into three parts, the book outlines the nature and function of political and state violence and the historic development of contributions from forensic practice. It then considers the distinction between political and state violence and the foundations for this. This is followed by a review of developments of current research and practice looking at future development and the ways in which forensic practice might more effectively contribute to risk reduction and management. The text will argue that the basis of much current forensic practice, in relation to political and state violence, is unduly limited and has failed to integrate relevant scientific research into practice. The role of market-led approaches to work in these areas will also be considered, in relation to the way this has influenced and distorted practice and delayed progress. Drawing on theories derived from psychology and other areas of research, the book considers how evidence might inform improvements, using the risks and uncertainties that surround politically motivated violence to illustrate this. Real cases of political and state violence are considered, with topics including military conflict, terrorism, use of torture and hostage taking to highlight current failings and weaknesses. Barriers to implementing better forensic practice in terms of both professional, economic and policy interests are also explored.It will be an essential read for all students or practitioners in the areas of forensic psychology, criminal justice or violence risk management.
A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship
by Travis W. Stanton M. Kathryn BrownDavid Freidel and Linda Schele’s monumental work A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (1990) offered an innovative, rigorous, and controversial approach to studying the ancient Maya, unifying archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic data in a form accessible to both scholars and laypeople. Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown’s A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents a collection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history. These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms. Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology. Contributors: Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube
A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States
by Ali BehdadIn A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is "a nation of immigrants," welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others. Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known--J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass--and lesser-known--such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country's violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant "aliens" today, particularly along the Mexican border.
A Formula for Eradicating Racism: Debunking White Supremacy
by Earl Smith Timothy McGettiganA Formula for Eradicating Racism.
A Formula for Eradicating Racism: Debunking White Supremacy
by Earl Smith Timothy McGettiganIn this book, Tim McGettigan and Earl Smith make the unprecedented argument that racism is a remediable form of suggestion-induced sadism. The authors explain in plain terms how societies like the USA construct racism, and put forward a practical plan to eradicate racism in the USA and all over the world.
A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
by Nathaniel Deutsch Michael CasperThe epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn"A rich chronicle of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg. . . . This expert account enlightens."—Publishers Weekly&“One of the most creative and iconoclastic works to have been written about Jews in the United States.&”—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg&’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.
A Foul and Pestilent Congregation: Images of Freaks in Baroque Art (Routledge Revivals)
by Barry WindFirst published in 1998, this volume explores how in the seventeenth century depictions of human oddity, hunchbacks, cripples, dwarfs, appeared regularly in the work of both minor and major artists including Veláquez, Rubens, Van Dyck and Rivera. In this, the first comprehensive study of these images, Barry Wind starts with the topoi for the mentally and physically infirm established in antiquity and traces their development into the Baroque period. A delight in the unusual was consonant with the contemporary collection of other exotica, convoluted shells and strange animals, but human ‘freaks’ provoked more than curiosity. Their representation ranged from taxonomic fascination to derisive mockery. They were frequently cast as imperfect foils to the fashionable courtiers who sought aggrandizement through juxtaposition. The images were also exploited as metaphors for a favourite theme of the period ‘the world turned upside down’. In this synthesis of repulsion and fascination, mockery and dread, the portrayal of these ‘others’ reveals a dark underside of Baroque culture that has never been thoroughly investigated or understood. With the support of 75 reproductions of works from Italy, Spain and Northern Europe, Barry Wind examines representations of human deformity throughout the baroque period. He pursues his account into the eighteenth century and the expression of a new sympathetic understanding and compassion. His study, written with great clarity, makes available hitherto obscure and inaccessible material gathered from diverse sources such as medical treatises, literary texts, popular ballads and court documents to set these images in their context and explain this obsession with difference.