A wide-ranging history of rickets tracks the disease's emergence, evolution, and eventual treatment--and exposes the backstory behind contemporary worries about vitamin D deficiency. Rickets, a childhood disorder that causes soft and misshapen bones, transformed from an ancient but infrequent threat to a common scourge during the Industrial Revolution. Factories, mills, and urban growth transformed the landscape. Malnutrition and insufficient exposure to sunlight led to severe cases of rickets across Europe and the United States, affecting children in a variety of settings: dim British cities and American slave labor camps, moneyed households and impoverished ones. By the late 1800s, it was one of the most common pediatric diseases, seemingly an intractable consequence of modern life. Starved for Light offers the first comprehensive history of this disorder. Tracing the efforts to understand, prevent, and treat rickets--first with the traditional remedy of cod liver oil, then with the application of a breakthrough corrective, industrially-produced vitamin D supplements--Christian Warren places the disease at the center of a riveting medical history, one alert to the ways society shapes our views on illness. Warren shows how physicians and public health advocates in the United States turned their attention to rickets among urban immigrants, both African Americans and southern Europeans; some concluded that the disease was linked to race, while others blamed poverty, sunless buildings and cities, or cultural preferences in diet and clothing. Spotlighting rickets' role in a series of medical developments, Warren leads readers through the encroachment on midwifery by male obstetricians, the development of pediatric orthopedic devices and surgeries, early twentieth-century research into vitamin D, appalling clinical experiments on young children testing its potential, and the eventual commercialization of all manner of vitamin D supplements. As vitamin D consumption rose in the mid-twentieth century, rickets--previously a major concern for doctors, parents, and public health institutions--faded in its severity, frequency, and as a topic of discussion. But despite the availability of drugstore supplements and fortified milk, small numbers of cases still appear today, and concerns and controversies about vitamin D deficiency in general continue to grow. Sweeping and engaging, Starved for Light illuminates the social conditions underpinning our cures and our choices, helping us to see history's echoes in contemporary prescriptions.
Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult. In this book, anthropologists Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere examine the moral panic over a perceived rise in homosexuality that engulfed Cameroon and Gabon beginning in the early twenty-first century. As they uncover the origins of the conspiratorial narratives that fed this obsession, they argue that the public's fears were grounded in historically situated assumptions about the entanglement of same-sex practices, Freemasonry, and illicit enrichment. This specific panic in postcolonial Central Africa fixated on high-ranking Masonic figures thought to lure younger men into sex in exchange for professional advancement. The authors' thorough account shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation became a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption of the national regimes. Unraveling these tensions, Orock and Geschiere present a genealogy of Freemasonry, taking readers from London through Paris to Francophone Africa and revealing along the way how the colonial past was articulated with local assumptions linking same-sex practices to enrichment.
A reintroduction to the myth of Amphion, recovering an overlooked sphere of lyric tradition. Amphion is the figure in Greek mythology who played so skillfully on a lyre that stones moved of their own accord to build walls for Thebes. While Amphion still presides over music and architecture, he was once fundamental to the concept of lyric poetry. Amphion figured the human power to inspire action, creating and undoing polities by means of language. In contrast to the individual inspiration we associate with the better-known Orpheus, Amphion represents the relentless, often violent, play of order and disorder in human social life. His lyre was a powerful metaphor in the age of European imperial expansion. In this wide-ranging study, Leah Middlebrook introduces readers to Amphion-inspired poetics and lyrics and traces the tradition of the Amphionic from the Renaissance through modernist and postmodern poetry and translation from the Hispanic, Anglophone, French, Italian, and ancient Roman worlds. Amphion makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the connection between poetry and politics and the history of the lyric, offering an account well-suited to our times.
How corporations used mass media to teach Americans that capitalism was natural and patriotic, exposing the porous line between propaganda and public service. Business As Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games--what Caroline Jack calls "sponsored economic education media." These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to "sell America to Americans," found their way into communities, classrooms, workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of "free enterprise" under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant--a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility--and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.
A philosopher excavates the origins of our state of permanent crisis and charts a more promising path forward. Crises abound--so many that it can be easy to lose perspective. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui traces the intellectual development of ideas about crisis and identifies four distinct forms a crisis might take: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and ecocriticism), A Philosophy of Crisis offers new conceptual tools for both understanding and avoiding the dangers of our crisis-saturated time.
How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers' visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa's climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren't disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers' agricultural practices--an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari's basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick's timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz's plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.
Enriches contemporary debates about gender and language by probing the histories of the philosophy and sciences of language. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistories of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adaptors of the notion of gender and language's interrelation. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated "women's languages" and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined "feminine" sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex a necessary category of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines. Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England. Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren't distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler's needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right. Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.
A wide-ranging examination of how policies, parties, and labor strength affect inequality in post-industrial societies. Not all countries are unequal in the same ways or to the same degree. In Challenging Inequality, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens analyze different patterns of increasing income inequality in post-industrial societies since the 1980s, assessing the policies and social structures best able to mitigate against the worst effects of market inequality. Combining statistical data analysis from twenty-two countries with a comparative historical analysis of Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, Huber and Stephens identify the factors that drive increases in inequality and shape persistent, marked differences between countries. Their statistical analysis confirms generalizable patterns and in-depth country studies help to further elucidate the processes at work. Challenging Inequality shows how the combination of globalization and skill-biased technological change has led to both labor market dualization and rising unemployment levels, which in turn have had important effects on inequality and poverty. Labor strength--at both the society level and the enterprise level--has helped to counter rising market income inequality, as has a history of strong human capital spending. The generosity of the welfare state remains the most important factor shaping redistribution, while the consistent power of left parties is the common denominator behind both welfare state generosity and human capital investment.
An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education. Institutions of higher education are often described as "ivory towers," places of privilege where students exist in a "campus bubble," insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that's simply not the case. Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.
An in-depth exploration of the style and influence of Pat Metheny, a truly distinctive musical voice of our time. Guitarist and composer Pat Metheny, among the most acclaimed visionary musicians of our time, has for five decades toured with his many creative musical projects, most prominently the Pat Metheny Group, while collaborating with artists as celebrated as Charlie Haden, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, and Steve Reich. Metheny's career-long crossing of musical genres has produced a style that transcends categorization, while maintaining his strong foundation in jazz, revealing the productive ends of embracing musical horizons. Bob Gluck, whose perspective as pianist, composer, and educator has illuminated the music of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis in his two previous books, now focuses his lens on the music of Pat Metheny. Neither a biography nor chronological record of Metheny's musical output, Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words instead captures Metheny's self-conception as a musician and the threads that unite and distinguish his creative process. Drawing upon a wealth of new interviews and close readings of musical examples, Gluck offers a bird's eye view of Metheny's musical ideas. Among these are the metaphor of storytelling, the complementarity of simplicity and complexity, and the integrated roles of composer, performer, and band leader. Much like Metheny's signature style, this book is accessible to a wide range of readers, presenting new clarity, musical insight, and historical perspective about the legacy of Metheny's groundbreaking music.
A surprising look at the 28 Catholic radicals who raided a draft board in 1971--and got away with it. When the FBI arrested twenty-eight people in connection to a break-in at a Camden, New Jersey, draft board in 1971, the Bureau celebrated. The case should have been an easy victory for the department--the perpetrators had been caught red-handed attempting to destroy conscription documents for draftees into the Vietnam War. But the results of the trial surprised everyone, and in the process shook the foundations of American law, politics, and religion. In Spiritual Criminals, Michelle M. Nickerson shares a complex portrait of the Camden 28, a passionate group of grassroots religious progressives who resisted both their church and their government as they crusaded against the Vietnam War. Founded by priests, nuns, and devout lay Catholics, members of this coalition accepted the risks of felony convictions as the cost of challenging the nation's military-industrial complex and exposing the illegal counterintelligence operations of the FBI. By peeling away the layers of political history, theological traditions, and the Camden 28's personal stories, Nickerson reveals an often-unseen spiritual side of the anti-war movement. At the same time, she probes the fractures within the group, detailing important conflicts over ideology, race, sex, and gender that resonate in the church and on the political Left today.
A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline's most influential thinkers. Michael Taussig's work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven essays in this new collection, Taussig reflects on the act of writing itself, demonstrating its importance for anthropological practice and calling for the discipline to keep experiential knowledge from being extinguished as fieldnotes become scholarship. Setting out to show how this can be done, And the Garden Is You exemplifies a form of exploratory writing that preserves the spontaneity of notes scribbled down in haste. In these essays, the author's reflections take us from his childhood in Sydney to trips to Afghanistan, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Along the way, Taussig explores themes of fabulation and provocation that are central to his life's work, in addition to the thinkers dearest to him--Bataille, Benjamin, Burroughs, and Nietzsche, among others. This collection is vintage Taussig, bound to interest longtime readers and newcomers alike.
A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold's vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the "land community" or the "biotic community"--communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta Millstein reexamines Leopold's land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold's ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.
An enlightening examination of what it means when Americans rely on family and friends to stay on top of politics. Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? What are the consequences for political attitudes and behavior? Drawing on evidence from experiments, surveys, and social media, Taylor N. Carlson finds that, as information flows first from the media then person to person, it becomes sparse, more biased, less accurate, and more mobilizing. The result is what Carlson calls distorted democracy. Although socially transmitted information does not necessarily render democracy dysfunctional, Through the Grapevine shows how it contributes to a public that is at once underinformed, polarized, and engaged.
A thought-provoking history of touch in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. This book tells the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain through a single sense--touch. In this time and place, historian Simeon Koole argues, our sense of ourselves and others as physical bodies changed as new encounters made us both more intimate and more vulnerable. Taking us inside different spaces--subway cars, tea shops, classrooms, police stations, foggy London streets--Koole shows how the experience of touch was transformed. At its core, Intimate Subjects is about the nexus of embodiment and modernity. In addition to analyzing specific spaces, he also examines how the emerging disciplines of neurology and experimental psychology sought to understand the connections between sensation and selfhood. Tracing understandings, experiences, and practices of touch, this book shows us how personal space--and its disruption--shapes history.
An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy. In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra "So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble." For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their "supervisor," and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children's lives changed dramatically. Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody's Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.
Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central--if unacknowledged--force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been "good to think with" an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.
An annual peer-reviewed law journal covering the legal implications of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States. Since it first appeared in 1960, the Supreme Court Review (SCR) has won acclaim for providing a sustained and authoritative survey of the implications of the Court's most significant decisions. SCR is an in-depth annual critique of the Supreme Court and its work, analyzing the origins, reforms, and modern interpretations of American law. SCR is written by and for legal academics, judges, political scientists, journalists, historians, economists, policy planners, and sociologists.
"Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo by the Afro-Cuban poet NicolaáI p1 ss GuilleáI p1 sn (1902-1989) is a wry political project structured as though a fantastical bestiary of ideas and ideologies. Parodying the perceived authority and objectivity of zoological grammar, the poems present taxonomic-imagistic descriptions of caged entities in the voice of a dispassionate zoo tour guide explaining to the reader-as-visitor what appears inside each enclosure. These captive inhabitants include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers as transmogrified snakes; a winged, singing guitar; clouds from around the world; a temperamental atomic bomb; blue-pelted police; and a bloodthirsty KKK. Newly translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen eye toward histories of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition of The Great Zoo establishes a creative mode in which the authority of language born of racial-colonial regimes in the so-called New World is critically, at times even comically, exposed and rewritten"--
"Every year, most forcefully when winter turns to spring, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhãone Valley of southern France over the northwest coast of the Gulf of Lion into the Mediterranean. Sometimes the winds are brisk and sustained, other times they are unleashed in violent gusts. Trees are knocked over or permanently bent to the east in the path of the wind, trains are swept off their tracks, crops are destroyed. Afterward the sky is clear and blue, as Provence is often pictured. The legendary wind is central to the area's regional identity, inspiring artists and writers near and far for centuries. This force of nature is the focus of Dunlop's Windswept, a beautifully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular the ways it has challenged central tenets of 19th century European society: order, mastery, predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community"--
"Norman Holmes Pearson was a scholar and a spy. His scholarship brought him close to poets like Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and W. H. Auden. But he also was close to the CIA, where he sponsored the careers of ambitious young men like James Jesus Angleton, the eventual director of counterintelligence during the cold war. Pearson's conception of American Studies meshed with the agendas of the CIA and other agencies that promoted American culture to the world. Greg Barnhisel gives us a clear and thorough understanding of the unassuming Pearson, a linchpin of America's cold war culture"--
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