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The The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Morality and Society Series)
by John D. SkrentnyAffirmative action has been fiercely debated for more than a quarter of a century, producing much partisan literature, but little serious scholarship and almost nothing on its cultural and political origins. The Ironies of Affirmative Action is the first book-length, comprehensive, historical account of the development of affirmative action. Analyzing both the resistance from the Right and the support from the Left, Skrentny brings to light the unique moral culture that has shaped the affirmative action debate, allowing for starkly different policies for different citizens. He also shows, through an analysis of historical documents and court rulings, the complex and intriguing political circumstances which gave rise to these controversial policies. By exploring the mystery of how it took less than five years for a color-blind policy to give way to one that explicitly took race into account, Skrentny uncovers and explains surprising ironies: that affirmative action was largely created by white males and initially championed during the Nixon administration; that many civil rights leaders at first avoided advocacy of racial preferences; and that though originally a political taboo, almost no one resisted affirmative action. With its focus on the historical and cultural context of policy elites, The Ironies of Affirmative Action challenges dominant views of policymaking and politics.
Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand
by Graeme Callister Rachael WhitbreadWhat are the critical factors that determine the outcome of battles? Which is more decisive in a clash of arms: armies or the societies they represent? How important is the leadership of the commanders, the terrain over which the armies fight, the weapons they use and the supplies they depend on? And what about the rules of war and the strategic thinking and tactics of the time? These are among the questions Graeme Callister and Rachael Whitbread seek to answer as they demonstrate the breadth of factors that need to be taken into account to truly understand battle. Their book traces the evolution of warfare over time, exploring the changing influence of the social, political, technological and physical landscape on the field of battle itself. They examine how the motivation of the combatants and their methods of fighting have changed, and they illustrate their conclusions with vivid, carefully chosen examples from across a range of Western European military history, including the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion, the Napoleonic Wars and the world wars, and beyond. By exploring the wide range of interconnected factors that influence the results of battles, the authors broaden the study of this aspect of military history from a narrow focus on isolated episodes of conflict. Their original and thought-provoking writing will be fascinating reading for all students of warfare.
First, You Cry: The Classic, Inspiring Story of One Woman's Triumph over Breast Cancer
by Betty Rollin"Every woman. . . should read it. Her book has the simple touch of truth." —Gail Sheehy, Author of The Silent PassageNBC News correspondent Betty Rollin, glamorous, successful, and happily married, had it all—and then she learned that she had a malignant tumor in her breast. Written with wit, warmth, and soul searching honesty, First, You Cry is the inspiring true story about how one woman transformed the most terrifying ordeal of her life into a new beginning. With a new introduction and epilogue, this unique memoir serves as a fascinating retrospective of the twenty-five years since Rollin's first mastectomy and, given the continuing threat of breast cancer, tells a story that will inform all women as it touches them with its honesty and even, humor.
Military Air Power in Europe Preparing for War: A Study of European Nations' Air Forces Leading up to 1939
by Norman RidleyThe First World War had seen the mechanization of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilized in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France’s Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a ‘twenty-year truce’. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts. Military aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by revolutionizing warfare. It would not only augment the effectiveness of ground forces in a tactical role, but it also had the means of reaching out strategically beyond the battlefronts to strike at the enemy’s trade, supplies, communications and industrial production. All through the war, military aviation had been firmly under the control of army commanders but there was soon a fierce debate over the way it should develop. The development of an ‘air doctrine’ within each of the major European powers was fraught with difficulty as the nascent air arms struggled, with varying degrees of success, to free themselves from army control to find a new, independent identity. This book examines the way in which these air arms competed for prominence within the military structures of six major European nations – Germany, Britain, France, Soviet Union, Poland and Italy – with different resources, ambitions and philosophies, in the years from the beginning of aviation right up to the start of the Second World War.
Before Mrs Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England's Most Influential Housekeeper
by Neil ButteryThe great Elizabeth Raffald used to be a household name, and her list of accomplishments would make even the highest of achievers feel suddenly impotent. After becoming housekeeper at Arley Hall in Cheshire at age twenty-five, she married and moved to Manchester, transforming the Manchester food scene and business community, writing the first A to Z directory and creating the first domestic servants registry office, the first temping agency if you will. Not only that, she set up a cookery school and ran a high class tavern attracting both gentry and nobility. She reputedly gave birth to sixteen daughters, wrote book on midwifery and was an effective exorciser of evil spirits. These achievements gave her notoriety and standing in Manchester, but it all pales in comparison to her biggest achievement; her cookery book The Experienced English Housekeeper. Published in 1769, it ran to over twenty editions and brought her fame and fortune. But then disaster; her fortune lost, spent by her alcoholic husband. Bankrupted twice, she spent her final years in a pokey coffeehouse in a seedy part of town. Her book, however, lived on. Influential and often imitated (but never bettered), it became the must-have volume for any kitchen, and it helped form our notion of traditional British food as we think of it today. To tell Elizabeth’s tumultuous rise and fall story, historian Neil Buttery doesn’t just delve into the history of food in the eighteenth century, he has to look at trade and empire, domestic service, the agricultural revolution, women’s rights, publishing and copyright law, gentlemen’s clubs and societies, the horse races, the defeminization of midwifery, and the paranormal, to name but a few. Elizabeth Raffald should be revered, not unknown. How can this be? Perhaps we should ask Mrs Beeton…
Dictionary of Fortifications: An Illustrated Glossary of Castles, Forts, & Other Defensive Works from Antiquity to the Present Day
by Jean-Denis LepageThis Dictionary of Fortifications is an attractive and convenient reference for anyone with an interest in castles, forts, walled cities and any other defensive architecture, including temporary structures, of any period. The heart of the book is a useful glossary of over 1,200 terms relating to fortifications through the ages. Drawn from many languages besides English, each has at least a concise definition or description, while more significant entries take the form of short articles. Many are accompanied by a clear sketch, diagram, cross-section, floor plan or map skillfully executed by the author himself. In all, there are over 400 of these black and white illustrations. Although the glossary is organized alphabetically (from Abatis to Zwischenwiderstandnet), cross references allow the reader to easily follow themes of interest through the book. Buttressing the glossary there is a section giving an overview of the historical development of fortifications from prehistory to the present day. A further chapter outlines the concomitant development of siege warfare over the same long span, detailing the evolution of siege engines and other tactics used to overcome fortifications. This is a fascinating reference for anyone with the slightest interest in military architecture.
Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series On Mental Health And Development)
by Mark MonmonierMaps with the News is a lively assessment of the role of cartography in American journalism. Tracing the use of maps in American news reporting from the eighteenth century to the 1980s, Mark Monmonier explores why and how journalistic maps have achieved such importance. "A most welcome and thorough investigation of a neglected aspect of both the history of cartography and modern cartographic practice."—Mapline "A well-written, scholarly treatment of journalistic cartography. . . . It is well researched, thoroughly indexed and referenced . . . amply illustrated."—Judith A. Tyner, Imago Mundi "There is little doubt that Maps with the News should be part of the training and on the desks of all those concerned with producing maps for mass consumption, and also on the bookshelves of all journalists, graphic artists, historians of cartography, and geographic educators."—W. G. V. Balchin, Geographical Journal "A definitive work on journalistic cartography."—Virginia Chipperfield, Society of University Cartographers Bulletin
Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec
by Geneviève ZubrzyckiThrough much of its existence, Québec’s neighbors called it the “priest-ridden province.” Today, however, Québec society is staunchly secular, with a modern welfare state built on lay provision of social services—a transformation rooted in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s. In Beheading the Saint, Geneviève Zubrzycki studies that transformation through a close investigation of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist of June 24. The celebrations of that national holiday, she shows, provided a venue for a public contesting of the dominant ethno-Catholic conception of French Canadian identity and, via the violent rejection of Catholic symbols, the articulation of a new, secular Québécois identity. From there, Zubrzycki extends her analysis to the present, looking at the role of Québécois identity in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage—issues that also offer insight on similar debates elsewhere in the world.
No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Decolonization
by Yoav Di-CapuaIt is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism’s non-Western history.
Before I Let Go: A Novel
by Darren ColemanAn Essence bestseller, Before I Let Go is the sexy story of three male best friends' dramatic search for love, intimacy, and the perfect relationship.Nate is a D-O-G with an obsession for conquering as many women as possible. But when he breaks his own rules and falls for two women at the same time, all hell breaks loose. Brendan is the type of man every woman claims to want -- at least until she gets one. Will he ever find a woman as sweet as he is, or is he doomed to be the poster child for "Good Guys Who Love Bad Girls"? Cory is successful, smart, and handsome. He's never gotten over his first love, and when he moves back to his hometown, he has to face secrets and make decisions that will change his life forever.Before I Let Go is a sizzling, entertaining tale of how men come to terms -- in the most startling ways -- with lust, love, and life.
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
by John GuilloryAn enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”
The Sinking of the Titanic: Eyewitness Accounts from Survivors
by Jay Henry Mowbray“I ran out on the deck and then I could see ice. It was a veritable sea of ice and the boat was rocking over it. I should say that parts of the iceberg were eighty feet high, but it had been broken into sections, probably by our ship.” “There fell on the ear the most appalling noise that ever human ear listened to — the cries of hundreds of our fellow-beings struggling in the icy-cold water, crying for help with a cry that we knew could not be answered.” First published in 1912, Jay Henry Mowbray’s Sinking of the Titanic was hugely influential in the aftermath of the maritime disaster, recording the harrowing, first-hand accounts of the survivors - from sailors, to stewards, to passengers – throughout the ordeal, from when the iceberg first hit to when the Carpathia eventually arrived, and honoring those who were lost on that fateful night in 1912. Mowbray’s text even follows the survivors when they make it back to land - a lesser-known, riveting aspect of the tragic saga that deals with the investigation and the hearings that took place in the US and UK in the months that followed. The swiftness of the publication of Mowbray’s text, the sheer number of first-hand witness accounts therein and the intensity of the chaos and fear that their accounts convey makes for a unique compilation which, together with new notes, maps, images and expert introductory material in this new, updated edition, will fascinate, educate and deeply move contemporary readers as much today as the original publication would have back in 1912.
The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms
by Iain OvertonIn this gripping tour de force of investigative reporting, an award-winning journalist travels through America and beyond to understand the brutal reality—and consequences—of a world in which twelve billion bullets are produced every year for almost a billion guns.According to the United States Bureau of Justice, more than 4.5 million Americans became victims of gun crime between 2004 and 2013. With the highest global rate of gun ownership and gun imports and exports—not to mention the controversial Second Amendment—America is justifiably the focus of a growing gun debate. But the five hundred thousand people around the world killed by guns every year suggest that it is far from the only nation in the cultural, political, economic, and lethal grip of the gun. Over a hundred countries have their own firearm industries, and twenty nations recently saw children carrying guns into conflicts.The Way of the Gun is a shocking, eye-opening exposé of the global gun ecosystem and its long-reaching impact. Traveling to America, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and Asia, veteran journalist Iain Overton meets murderers and law enforcement marksmen, gun fetishists and weapons smugglers, gun manufacturers and grieving relatives of victims. He unearths the sobering scale of the international gun economy, explaining the relationships between its legal and illegal players, and powerfully portrays its effects on health care, religion, law enforcement, politics, and, most of all, individuals. Driven by firsthand research and objective reporting, The Way of the Gun is not a polemic. Overton, who works for the international nonprofit Action on Armed Violence but also hunts and once ran a gun club, eschews heated rhetoric for a compelling factual narrative that puts America’s unique relationship with guns into an international context—providing a sobering perspective on the arguments dividing our nation and, increasingly, the world.Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award for NonfictionPraise For The Way Of The Gun“Every page is packed with emotional power and startling statistics. . . . A passionate mix of rhetoric and travelogue, Overton’s book takes the gun debate into impressive new territory.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Adventurous, ambitiously tracing the often devastating impact of guns around the world. . . . Punctuated with thoughtful discussions on issues from the Second Amendment to the US Constitution to women’s attitudes toward guns . . . contains moments of great poignancy.”—Financial Times“Riveting . . . poignant. . . . This book is more than just facts, it’s insight and revelation on a very human level.”—Independent“Shocking. . . . Overton has supped full of horrors and is not reticent about sharing them.”—Newsweek“Gripping reportage that’s as disturbing as it is enlightening . . . without—crucially—lapsing into an antigun diatribe.”—GQ Magazine
Anti-Racist Ally: An Introduction to Activism & Action
by Sophie WilliamsJoin the fight for racially marginalized people with this pocket-sized guide filled with practical insights from one of the leading voices of the movement for equality and founder of the @officialmillennialblack Instagram.As the tragic murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated, not being racist is not enough. To fulfill the American ideal, to ensure that all people are equal, you must be actively anti-racist. In this essential guide, Sophie Williams, goes beyond her popular Instagram @officialmillennialblack, providing sharp, simple, and insightful steps anyone can take to be a better ally in the fight against racism. While the book’s focus is on race, it also touches on sexism, classism, ableism, oppression, and white supremacy. Written in her iconic Instagram style, this pocket-sized guide is a crucial starting point for every anti-racist ally, covering complex topics at the heart of anti-racist principles. Whether you are just finding your voice, have made a start but aren’t sure what to do next, or want a fresh viewpoint, Anti-Racist Ally introduces and explains the language of change and shows you how to challenge the system, beginning with yourself. Sophie reminds you that this is a learning process, which means facing difficult truths, becoming uncomfortable, and working through the embarrassment and discomfort. The fight for justice isn’t easy there aren’t any shortcuts or quick wins. But together, anti-racist allies can use their power to truly change the world and lives.
Radical: Fighting to Put Students First
by Michelle RheeIn Radical, Michelle Rhee, a fearless and pioneering advocate for education reform, draws on her own life story and delivers her plan for better American schools.Rhee’s goal is to ensure that laws, leaders, and policies are making students—not adults—our top priority, and she outlines concrete steps that will put us on a dramatically different course. Informing her critique are her extraordinary experiences in education: her years of teaching in inner-city Baltimore; her turbulent tenure as chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools; and her current role as CEO of the education nonprofit StudentsFirst. Rhee draws on dozens of compelling examples from schools she’s worked in and studied, from students who’ve left behind unspeakable home lives and thrived in the classroom to teachers whose groundbreaking methods have produced unprecedented leaps in student achievement.An incisive and intensely personal call-to-arms, Michelle Rhee’s Radical is required reading for anyone who seeks a guide to not only the improvement of our schools, but also a brighter future for America’s children.
The Highbinders: An Ash Tallman Western (The Ash Tallman Series #1)
by Matt BraunIn California, The Southern Pacific Railway was prying the West wide open, and the land was worth its weight in gold. While some men got in on the action, and some got out of the way, one group of settlers was making a stand-and holding up the railway. Turning to Alan Pinkerton's Chicago detective agency, the railroad robber barons hired the perfect agent to penetrate the settler's organization, a man who had learned a spy's trade in the Civil War. Tall, debonair, and pleasure-loving Ash Tallman can fight when he has to, lie when he needs to, and make love when he wants the right kind of woman on his side. But as Tallman enters the lush San Joaquin Valley in the company of a risk-taking beauty, he finds a fight with no clear battle lines, no sure enemies, and only one way out-by hunting the killers who are hunting him...
The Secrets of Mary: Gifts from the Blessed Mother
by Janice T. ConnellThrough the centuries, the Virgin Mary has appeared to ordinary people of every race and culture, bringing forth her messages of love, peace, and comfort. In these trying times, Mary's protection is needed more than ever. In The Secrets of Mary, Janice T. Connell chronicles messages Mary has brought from God, drawn from scripture, experts, and eyewitness accounts. Mary's voice provides a guiding light for modern times, as she explains how to solve problems that are surfacing throughout the world. Janice T. Connell's newest collection of stories includes: • Saint Augustine's discovery of Mary's power • Insight from the world-famous children of Medjugorje in Bosnia • A famous Washington, D.C. media anchor's touching encounter with the Blessed Mother • The author's own awe-inspiring experience with Mary in Japan • And much more. Filled with beauty, wonder, and joy, The Secrets of Mary provides comfort and inspiration to all those who desire Mary's gifts.
Taxidermy Gone Wrong: The Funniest, Freakiest (and Outright Creepiest) Beastly Vignettes
by Rob ColsonWARNING! WEIRD WACKY AND WONDERFUL TAXIDERMY OVERLOAD. A perfect gift for fans of Crap Taxidermy and taxidermy in general, Taxidermy Gone Wrong takes you inside the strange and hilariously horrifying world of taxidermy from around the globe. From musical mice and basketball playing bengals to gun-toting rodents and lawnmowing moles, Taxidermy Gone Wrong is a wonderfully weird collection of curiosities that will amuse and astonish. Bringing together scenes nature never intended, this full-color volume showcases a wide range of bizarre creations on display and available for sale around the world. From a swearing squirrel in a London antiques shop to a murderous mouse serving arsenic in a New York storefront, no animal—or macabre tableau—is off-limits. Taxidermy Gone Wrong presents the very best—or perhaps the very worst—of these bizarre anthropomorphic reconstructions.
Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950
by Helen TilleyTropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.
Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance)
by Emanuele SeniciIn the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.
Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office: Essential Wisdom from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Entrepreneurs
by Todd G. BuchholzNew Ideas from Dead CEOs uncovers the secrets of success of great CEOs by giving readers an intimate look at their professional and personal lives. Why did Ray Kroc's plan for McDonald's thrive when many burger joints failed? And how, decades later, did Krispy Kreme fail to heed Kroc's hard-won lessons? How did Walt Disney's most dismal day as a young cartoonist radically change his career? When Estée Lauder was a child in Queens, New York, the average American spent $8 a year on toiletries. Why did she spot an opportunity in selling high-priced cosmetics, and why did she pound on Saks's doors? How did Thomas Watson Jr. decide to roll the dice and put all of IBM's chips on computing, when his father thought it could be a losing idea? We learn about these CEOs' greatest challenges and failures, and how they successfully rode the waves of demographic and technological change.New Ideas from Dead CEOs not only gives us fascinating insights into these CEOs' lives, but also shows how we can apply their ideas to the present-day triumphs and struggles of Sony, Dell, Costco, Carnival Cruises, Time Warner, and numerous other companies trying to figure out how to stay on top or climb back up. The featured CEOs in this book were not candidates for sainthood. Many of them knew "god" only as a prefix to "dammit." But they were devoted to their businesses, not just to their egos and their personal bank accounts and yachts. Extraordinarily fresh and deeply thoughtful, Todd G. Buchholz's New Ideas from Dead CEOs is a truly enjoyable and fun—yet serious and realistic—look at what we still have to learn and absorb from these decomposing CEOs.
Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
by Benjamin R. CohenBenjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides? In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed. In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.
The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom
by Gregory NoblesA perceptive and inspiring biography of an extraordinary woman born into slavery who, through grit and determination, became a historic social and educational leader. The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance. When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities. In this first book-length telling of Betsey Stockton’s story, Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own.
Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives
by Lori LeibovichTo breed or not to breed? That is the question twenty-eight accomplished writers ponder in this collection of provocative, honest, soul-searching essays. Based on a popular series at Salon.com, Maybe Baby offers both frank and nuanced opinions from a wide range of viewpoints on parenting choices, both alternative and traditional. Yes: "I've been granted access to a new plane of existence, one I could not have imagined, and would not now live without."—Peter NicholsNo: "I can sort of see that it might be nice to have children, but there are a thousand things I'd rather spend my time doing than raise them."—Michelle GoldbergMaybe: "As we both slip into our mid-thirties, my own personal daddy dilemma has quietly taken on an urgency that I frankly didn't expect."—Larry SmithFrom infertility to adoption, from ambivalence to baby lust, Maybe Baby brings together the full force of opinions about this national, but also intensely personal, debate.
Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America
by Diane RobertsOne overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football.Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault.In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.