A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book's main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as "alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred." What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike.
A local story with profound national implications, now available as a paperback with a new preface by the author. Absentee owners. Single-minded concern for the bottom line. Friction between workers and management. Hostile takeovers at the hands of avaricious and unaccountable multinational interests. The story of America's industrial decline is all too familiar-and yet, somehow, still hard to fathom. Jamie Sayen spent years interviewing residents of Groveton, New Hampshire, about the century-long saga of their company town. The community's paper mill had been its economic engine since the early twentieth century. Purchased and revived by local owners in the postwar decades, the mill merged with Diamond International in 1968. It fell victim to Anglo-French financier James Goldsmith's hostile takeover in 1982, then suffered through a series of owners with no roots in the community until its eventual demise in 2007. Drawing on conversations with scores of former mill workers, Sayen reconstructs the mill's human history: the smells of pulp and wood, the injuries and deaths, the struggles of women for equal pay and fair treatment, and the devastating impact of global capitalism on a small New England town. This is a heartbreaking story of the decimation of industrial America.
"The American lawsuit is riddled with needless complexity. This book proposes fifty changes-that decide cases promptly-more on the facts than the law-more for the parties than the lawyers-more for the consequences to the people and the public-and in words we can all understand"--
"In an environment where a public Jewish presence was routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided for many Soviet Jews an entry to communal memory and identity. This project decodes the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put"--
A powerful argument that our current path toward progress, based on continual economic expansion and inefficient use of resources, runs contrary to three foundational scientific laws. In this compelling, cogently argued, and acclaimed book, Tom Wessels demonstrates how our current path toward progress, based on continual economic expansion and inefficient use of resources, runs contrary to three foundational scientific laws that govern all complex natural systems. It is a myth, he contends, that progress depends on a growing economy. Wessels explains his theory with his three laws of sustainability: the law of limits to growth; the second law of thermodynamics, which exposes the dangers of increased energy consumption; and the law of self-organization, which results in the marvelous diversity of such highly evolved systems as the human body and complex ecosystems. Wessels argues that these laws, scientifically proven to sustain life in its myriad forms, have been cast aside since the eighteenth century, first by Western economists, political pragmatists, and governments attracted by the idea of unlimited growth, and more recently by a global economy dominated by large corporations, in which consolidation and oversimplification have created large-scale inefficiencies in both material and energy usage. Wessels makes scientific theory readily accessible by offering examples of how the laws of sustainability function in the complex systems we can observe in the natural world around us. Demonstrating that all environmental problems have their source in a disregard for the laws of sustainability, he concludes with an impassioned argument for cultural change. This new edition has a new preface wherein the author regards The Myth of Progress as his most important work. It has been in constant demand since it was first published in 2006.
A new edition of an evergreen back-to-nature book in the tradition of Thoreau. For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the "back to the land" movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither a statement nor a protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled into a life that centered on what Thoreau would have called "the essential facts." In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. "When we look for one thread of motive," he writes, "we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves." His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. Lovely and rich, The Road Washes Out in Spring is an immersive read. A new preface by the author rounds out this new edition.
There is no planet B. Activists share how we must inform and organize ourselves to save the future. "Act as though your house is on fire. Because it is." Following Greta Thunberg, millions of young climate activists have been taking to the streets around the globe as part of the Fridays For Future movement. They demand that we "unite behind the science," as, for too long, climate scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures, tipping points, and the devastating consequences of extreme weather-but politicians do nothing. So how do you begin to end the climate crisis? Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning begin by telling stories. Neubauer cofounded the youth climate activist group in Germany and has become its most prominent voice. In this book she and Repenning weave in personal accounts of their evolution as climate activists with a thorough analysis of how climate change impacts their generation, and what every one of us can and must do about it. The young and old in the United States and around the world can learn valuable lessons from their European counterparts.
"The rhyme "Mary Had A Little Lamb" told in the style-and substance-of the great English poets from Edmund Spenser to Stevie Smith"--
An elegantly designed volume of new English and Hebrew prayers and reflections for the High Holidays from a contemporary American poet
A new edition of a landmark work on Black womenâ¿s intellectual traditions. Â An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Watersâ¿s and Carol B. Conawayâ¿s landmark edited collection, Black Womenâ¿s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Womenâ¿s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and womenâ¿s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship. Â
A new edition of a classic short-story collection. Â The stories of Where the Rivers Flow North are âsuperior work, rich in texture and character,â? says the Wall Street Journal, and âthe novella is brilliantly done.â? That novella, the title story of the collection, was also made into a feature film starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox. These six stories, available again in this new edition, continue Howard Frank Mosherâ¿s career-long exploration of Kingdom County, Vermont. âWithin the borders of his fictional kingdom,â? the Providence Journal has noted, âMosher has created mountains and rivers, timber forests and crossroads villages, history and language. And he has peopled the landscape with some of the truest, most memorable characters in contemporary literature.â? This new edition features a new introduction by novelist Peter Orner. Â
A new edition of a classic novel with a strong female lead. Â Howard Frank Mosher is one of the best-loved writers of northern New England. One of his most vivid and memorable characters is Marie Blythe. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young girl with a felicitous name immigrates to Vermont from French Canada. She grows up confronting the grim realities of life with an indomitable spiritâ¿nursing victims of a tuberculosis epidemic, enduring a miscarriage alone in the wilderness, and coping with the uncertainties of love. In Marie Blythe, Mosher has created a strong-minded, passionate, and truly memorable heroine. This edition features a new introduction by novelist Tom Barbash. Â
"A provocative interpretation of the art and architecture of a pre-modern wooden synagogue. Thomas C. Hubka immersed himself in medieval and early-modern Jewish history, religion, and culture to prepare for this remarkable study of the 18th-century Polish wooden synagogue in the town of Gwoâzdziec, now in present Ukraine"--
A classic work on farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders refreshed with a new introduction. Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. This new edition features a new preface by the author.
"A groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection. Short story collections focusing on Jewish writers have typically given women authors short shrift. This new volume represents the best Jewish feminist fiction published in Lilith Magazine and does what no other collection has done before in its geographic scope. It showcases a wide range of stories offering variegated cultures and contexts and points of view: Persian Jews; a Biblical matriarch; an Ethiopian mother in modern Israel; suburban American teens; Eastern European academics; a sexual questioner; a Jew by choice; a new immigrant escaping her Lower East Side sweatshop; a Black Jewish marcher for justice; in Vichy France, a toddler's mother hiding out; and more. Organized by theme, the stories in this book emphasize a breadth of content. Readers will appreciate the liveliness of burgeoning self-awareness captured in each tale, and the occasional funny, call-your-friend-and-tell-her-about-it moment. Skip around, encounter an author whose other writing you may know, be enticed by a title, or an opening line. You will find both pleasure and enlightenment-and even perhaps revelation-within these pages"--
Uncharitable investigates how for-profit strategies could and should be used by nonprofits. Uncharitable goes where no other book on the nonprofit sector has dared to tread. Where other texts suggest ways to optimize performance inside the existing charity paradigm, Uncharitable suggests that the paradigm itself is the problem and calls into question our fundamental canons about charity. Dan Pallotta argues that society's nonprofit ethic creates an inequality that denies the nonprofit sector critical tools and permissions that the for-profit sector is allowed to use without restraint. These double standards place the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage. While the for-profit sector is permitted to use all the tools of capitalism, the nonprofit sector is prohibited from using any of them. Capitalism is blamed for creating inequities in our society, but charity is prohibited from using the tools of capitalism to rectify them-and ironically, this is all done in the name of charity. This irrational system, Pallotta explains, has its roots in four-hundred-year-old Puritan ethics that banished self-interest from the realm of charity. The ideology is policed today by watchdog agencies and the use of so-called efficiency measures, which Pallotta argues are flawed, unjust, and should be abandoned. By declaring our independence from these obsolete ideas, Pallotta theorizes, we can dramatically accelerate progress on the most urgent social issues of our time. Uncharitable is an important, provocative, timely, and accessible book-a manifesto about equal economic rights for charity. This edition has a new, updated introduction by the author.
"The early history of the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its most famous award-the Oscar-as told by its former executive director who reveals many previously unknown stories"--
"The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff, and the first to include stories from her unpublished "memoir," which focus on the artist's early life in Ukraine, her family's move to Palestine and Orloff's life there (1905-1910), and her subsequent years between Paris and Tel Aviv"--
The first book in English to specifically address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust
A fascinating look at key aspects of visual culture in modern Jewish history
Political and military developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
