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Now in paperback, Forming Humanity reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. Kant's proclamation of humankind's emergence from "self-incurred immaturity" left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities? Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God. Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God. While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition. Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.

Explores the surprisingly rich early history of US-China trade and its unexpected impact on the developing republic. The economic and geographic development of the early United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China--monetarily, politically, and psychologically. Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries--a critical period in America's self-definition as a capitalist nation--and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. Trading Freedom illuminates how debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new.

For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today. Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it. Starting around 1900, researchers--convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy--began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader's eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned to read through the application of this science of reading. At the same time, workers fanned out across the land to extend the science of reading into the social realm, mapping the very geography of information for the first time. Their pioneering efforts revealed that the nation's most pressing problems were rooted in drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black--and they suggested ways to tackle those problems. Today, much of how we experience our information society reflects the influence of these enterprises. This book explains both how the science of reading shaped our age and why, with so-called reading wars still plaguing schools across the nation, it remains bitterly contested.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "A must-read, with key lessons for the future."--Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity's dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity--cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits--as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital--and indeed capitalism--in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity--and of modern economics--at the levers of contemporary political power.

A history of how, in the mid-twentieth century, we came to believe in the concept of creativity. Named a best book of 2023 by the New Yorker and a notable book of 2023 by Behavioral Scientist. Creativity is one of American society's signature values, but the idea that there is such a thing as "creativity"--and that it can be cultivated--is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel W. Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals--psychologists, engineers, and advertising people--as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism. Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin's eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.

A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state's policy-in-waiting. The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty--now known as basic income--is hardly new. Often dated as far back as ancient Rome, basic income's modern conception truly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet as one of today's most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum. In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following periods of economic tumult to its modern relationship with technopopulist figures in Silicon Valley. They chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash. An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.

A collection of texts that provide the foundation for the University of Chicago's longstanding tradition of free expression, principles that are at the center of current debates within higher education and society more broadly. Free inquiry and expression are hotly contested, both on campus and in social and political life. In higher education, the University of Chicago has been at the forefront of conversations around free speech and academic freedom since its inception in the late nineteenth century. The University combined elements of a research university with a commitment to American pragmatism and democratic progress, all of which depended on what its first president referred to as the "complete freedom of speech on all subjects." In 2014, then University provost and president J. D. Isaacs and Robert Zimmer released a statement now known as the Chicago Principles, which have since been adopted or endorsed by one hundred US colleges and universities. These principles are just a part of the longstanding dialogue at the University of Chicago around freedom of expression--its meaning and limits. The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression brings together exemplary documents that explain and situate this ongoing conversation with an introductory essay that brings the tradition to light. Throughout waves of historical and societal challenges and changes, this first principle of free expression has required re-articulation and new interpretations. The documents gathered here include, among others, William Rainey Harper's "Freedom of Speech" from 1900, the Kalven Committee's Report on the University's Role in Political and Social Action (1967), and Geoffrey R. Stone's "Free Speech on Campus: A Challenge of Our Times" (2016). Together, the writings of the Canon reveal how the Chicago tradition is neither static nor stagnant, but a vibrant experiment; a lively struggle to understand, practice, and advance free inquiry and expression. At a time of nationwide campus speech debates, engaging with these texts and the questions they raise is essential to sustaining an environment of broad intellectual and ideological diversity. This book offers a blueprint for the future of higher education's vital work and points to the civic value of free expression.

A new history of crisis responses in the central bank's formative years. The long-standing description of the Federal Reserve as a "lender of last resort" refers to the central bank's emergency liquidity provision for financial entities in periods of crisis. As Mark Carlson shows, this function was foundational to how the Fed was designed but has, at times, proven challenging to implement. The Young Fed examines the origins of the Federal Reserve's emergency liquidity provision which, along with the setting of monetary policy, has become a critical responsibility. Focusing on the Fed's response to the financial crises of the 1920s, Carlson documents the formative deliberations of central bank policymakers regarding how to assist banks experiencing distress; the lessons that were learned; and how those lessons shaped subsequent policies. Carlson depicts an early Fed that experimented with a variety of approaches to crises, ranging from bold spectacles featuring cash-filled armored cars to behind-the-scenes interventions to prevent inducing panics or bank runs. The Young Fed weaves previously unpublished material from the Fed archives into a watershed work in American economic history: a deeply sourced account of how the world's most important central bank became a lender of last resort.

Indexing A-Z from The Chicago Manual of Style-the undisputed authority for style, usage, and grammar. In this age of searchable text, the need for an index made with human input is sometimes questioned. But a good index can do what a plain search cannot: It gathers all the substantive terms and subjects of the work, sorts them alphabetically, provides cross-references to and from related terms, and includes specific page numbers or other locators or, for electronic formats, direct links to the text. This painstaking intellectual labor serves readers of any longer work, whether it is searchable or not. For searchable texts, an index provides insurance against fruitless queries and unintended results. In a word, a good index makes the text more accessible. ? Most book indexes must be assembled swiftly between the time page proofs are issued and the time they are returned to the typesetter-usually about four weeks. An author preparing their own index will have to proofread as well as index the work in that short time span. This insightful chapter-length booklet will guide both professionals and first-time indexers in assembling an index that will do justice to both the book and the reader.

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process. In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries's highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology--utopian and dystopian--and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public's understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons--positive and negative--that this period might offer us.

A bold and wide-ranging study across centuries, examining the conflict between "conventional" and "magical" nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, political theory, and photography. In this magisterial new book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces the long-standing competition between two versions of nominalism--"conventional" and what he calls "magical." According to Jay, since at least William of Ockham, the conventional form of nominalism contributed to the disenchantment of the world by viewing general terms as nothing more than mere names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they refer to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function by investing proper names, disruptive events, and singular objects with an auratic power of their own. Drawing in part on Jewish theology, it challenges the elevation of the constitutive subject resulting from Ockham's reliance on divine will in his critique of real universals. Starting with the 14th-century revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay unpacks various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself, including a magical alternative to its conventional form. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language, thought, and reality, Jay illuminates connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience. Ranging from theology and philosophy of history to aesthetics and political theory, this book engages with a range of artists and thinkers, including Adorno, Ankersmit, Badiou, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Duchamp, Foucault, Kracauer, Kripke and Lyotard. It places photography in a suggestive new discursive context. Ultimately, Magical Nominalism offers a strikingly original way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity along with its vicissitudes.

Analyzes the reasons why biologists have referred to and continue to refer to plasticity. Since the early twentieth century, plasticity has become an important topic in biology. Some even wondered whether plasticity has acquired in biology the theoretical importance that the concept of the gene enjoyed at the beginning of the last century. In this historical and epistemological analysis, Antonine Nicoglou shows how the recurrence of the general idea of plasticity throughout the history of the life sciences indicates its essential role in the way we think about life processes. She also argues that although plasticity has become a key element in new evolutionary thinking, its role in contemporary biology is not so limited. Rather, as mobilized in contemporary biology, plasticity most often seeks to account for the specific nature of living systems. The book is divided into two parts, with the first taking up the history of plasticity from Aristotle to contemporary biology. Then, the second part of the book offers an original way of distinguishing between different phenomena described by "plasticity." In the process, the author explores what has led some biologists to speak of plasticity as a way of overcoming genetic determinism.

For students and practitioners, a comprehensive primer on the key literature in stream and river ecology. The study of streams and rivers combines ecology, chemistry, hydrology, and geology to reveal factors that control the biological diversity and functioning of these unique ecosystems. Although stream ecology is a relatively young discipline, foundational papers published over the past half-century have shaped our current understanding of these ecosystems and have informed our efforts to manage and protect them. Organized thematically, each chapter of this book--on topics including the physical template, communities, food webs, ecosystem energetics, and nutrient dynamics--offers summaries of the key literature, history and context on the topic, and forward-looking discussions that examine how past research has influenced current studies and may shape future efforts.

An ancient Greek guide to the heavens, translated in a new accessible modern English edition. A poetic guide to the heavens, the Phaenomena of Aratus--dating from around 270 BCE--was widely known across the ancient world, second only in fame to the works of Homer. Beginning with an invocation to Zeus, the poem describes the constellations of the northern and southern skies, the celestial sphere, and weather signs. Aratus's vivid work offered a complete handbook of astronomy, constellations, and weather, and this treatise on the night sky was later translated or adapted by luminaries including Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. The Phaenomena remained popular throughout the Renaissance and had more than sixty printed editions by the early seventeenth century, but its notoriety has faded in the modern world. With this edition, renowned translator and amateur astronomer Stanley Lombardo renders Aratus's poem in reader-friendly vernacular English verse. Complete with endnotes, an accessible introduction, and astronomically accurate illustrations, The Sky Is Our Song brings this master poet's celebration of the sky to a twenty-first-century audience, inviting new readers to follow Aratus on a visual journey through star signs, moon phases, weather phenomena, and all wonders of the heavens.

A sweeping history of New York's urban development that chronicles the making of one of the world's great cities. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth, as nearly a million buildings, half a dozen bridges, countless tunnels and subway tracks, and miles of new streets and sidewalks were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape--jagged with skyscrapers, clamoring with transit, alive with people--made the city world-famous. Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, "Who built this and how?" Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of New York's rapid expansion. The city's towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren't just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city's largest industries. New York's development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be a national story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city-building on an epic scale. Drawing on various sources, including city archives, the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that's epic, lively, and utterly original.

A history of "priming" research that analyzes the field's underlying assumptions and experimental protocols to shed new light on a contemporary crisis in social psychology. In 2012, a team of Belgian scientists reported that they had been unable to replicate a canonical experiment in the field of psychology known as "priming." The original experiment, performed by John Bargh in the nineties, purported to show that words connoting old age unconsciously influenced--or primed--research subjects, causing them to walk more slowly. When researchers could not replicate these results, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warned of "a train wreck looming" if Bargh and his colleagues could not address doubts about their work. Since then, the inability to replicate other well-known priming experiments has helped precipitate an ongoing debate over what has gone wrong in psychology, raising fundamental questions about the soundness of research practices in the field. Anatomy of a Train Wreck offers the first detailed history of priming research from its origins in the early 1980s to its recent collapse. Ruth Leys places priming experiments in the context of contemporaneous debates not only over the nature of automaticity but also the very foundations of social psychology. While these latest discussions about priming have largely focused on methodology--including sloppy experimental practices, inadequate statistical methods, and publication bias--Leys offers a genealogy of the theoretical expectations and scientific paradigms that have guided and motivated priming research itself. Examining the intellectual strategies of scientists, their responses to criticism, and their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, Anatomy of a Train Wreck raises crucial questions about the evidence surrounding unconscious influence and probes the larger stakes of the replication crisis: psychology's status as a science.

The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago's influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest's biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance--broadcast from the city's South Loop starting in 1924--flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like "Hillbilly Heaven" in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City--celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.

A potent re-examination of America's history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding.

How humans became so dependent on things and how this need has grown dangerously out of control. Over three million years ago, our ancient ancestors realized that rocks could be broken into sharp-edged objects for slicing meat, making the first knives. This discovery resulted in a good meal and eventually changed the fate of our species and our planet. With So Much Stuff, archaeologist Chip Colwell sets out to investigate why humankind went from self-sufficient primates to nonstop shoppers, from needing nothing to needing everything. Along the way, he uncovers spectacular and strange points around the world--an Italian cave with the world's first known painted art, a Hong Kong skyscraper where a priestess channels the gods, and a mountain of trash that rivals the Statue of Liberty. Through these examples, Colwell shows how humanity took three leaps that led to stuff becoming inseparable from our lives, inspiring a love affair with things that may lead to our downfall. Now, as landfills brim and oceans drown in trash, Colwell issues a timely call to reevaluate our relationship with the things that both created and threaten to undo our overstuffed planet.