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Putting Inequality in Context : Class, Public Opinion, and Representation in the United States

Christopher Ellis

Rising income inequality is highlighted as one of the largest challenges facing the United States, affecting civic participation and political representation. Although the wealthy often can and do exert more political influence, this is not always the case. To fix political inequality, it is important to understand exactly how class divisions manifest themselves in political outcomes, and what factors serve to enhance, or depress, inequalities in political voice. Christopher Ellis argues citizens’—and legislators’—views of class politics are driven by lived experience in particular communities. While some experience is formally political, on an informal basis citizens learn a great deal about their position in the broader socioeconomic spectrum and the social norms governing how class intersects with day-to-day life. These factors are important for policymakers, since most legislators do not represent “the public” at large, but specific constituencies. Focusing on U.S. congressional districts as the contextual unit of interest, Ellis argues individuals’ political behavior cannot be separated from their environment, and shows how income’s role in political processes is affected by the contexts in which citizens and legislators interact. Political inequality exists in the aggregate, but it does not exist everywhere. It is, rather, a function of specific arrangements that depress the political influence of the poor. Identifying and understanding these factors is a crucial step in thinking about what reforms might be especially helpful in enhancing equality of political voice. -- publisher site
Bantu Africa: : 3500 BCE to present

Catherine Cymone Fourshey, Christine Saidi, and Rhonda Marie Gonzales

Combining history, archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, Bantu Africa: 3500 BCE to Present, synthesizes current scholarship on one of the most important cultural zones in world history--an area larger than the United States--whose traditions span several thousand years. The authors show how Bantu cultural ideas continue to shape modern realities in new contexts. By examining the cultural, political, religious, economic, and social issues in the Bantu world, Bantu Africa gives students an understanding of the long-term history of an immense cultural zone. The book also addresses the types of social relationships Bantu-speaking people had with people of distinct linguistic and cultural traditions, the kinds of innovations that came out of those cross-cultural interactions, the tactics they used to negotiate societal tensions, the ways in which gender and seniority dynamics influenced societal institutions, and the extent to which Bantu-speaking people shaped Atlantic and Indian Ocean History.
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Windthrow

K. A. Hays

Windthrow: a forestry term for the uprooting or breaking of trees by wind. The voices of K. A. Hays’ third volume of poetry speak out of nature’s violent transformations. At turns self-effacing and empathic, fearful and accepting, these are poems of heat: the heat of new motherhood, of uncertainty, and of grief. Here, the things of a teeming world―” the truck stacked with cut trees,” “the military jet, droning over,” and “the beachgrass, blown / with dusty miller sprout”―are bound for renewal and ruin. In poems spare and strange, Hays looks outward to lay bare the complexities of our emotional lives. -- publisher
Acting Exercises for Non-Traditional Staging

Anjalee Deshpande Hutchinson

Acting Exercises for Non-Traditional Staging: Michael Chekhov Reimagined offers a new set of exercises for coaching actors when working on productions that are non-traditionally staged in arenas, thrusts, or alleys. All of the exercises are adapted from Michael Chekhov's acting technique, but are reimagined in new and creative ways that offer innovative twists for the practitioner familiar with Chekhov, and easy accessibility for the practitioner new to Chekhov. Exploring the methodology through a modern day lens, these exercises are energizing additions to the classroom and essential tools for more a vibrant rehearsal and performance.
From Creation to Redemption: Progressive Approaches to Midrash

W. David Nelson and Rivka Ulmer

This volume contains selected proceedings of the Midrash Section sessions convened during the 2015-2016 meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. It is comprised of contributions by both leading and emerging scholars of Midrash whose research shares a common focus on early and medieval rabbinic biblical interpretation. Additionally, the research on Midrash in this volume intersects with a range of related biblical texts, religious themes, and foundational and forward-thinking methodologies and interdisciplinary academic fields of study, including: Gender Studies; Classics; Jewish Studies; Religious Studies; Literary Studies; the Aqedah/Binding of Isaac; biblical parables; and, medieval rabbinic biblical commentary.
A Squirrel's Tale of a Crow's Feat

Michael Rothan

This is a morality tale of overcoming differences among individuals in order to unite our minds and hearts against true evil in the world. So often do we allow our differences to divide us when, in reality, we have more in common with each other than we think. Rising above our perceptions and growing closer to each other, we are empowered to fully live out our humanity. Sometimes these, the most difficult lessons, can perhaps only be gleaned by observing the smaller creatures in creation. -- publisher site
A Bilingual Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati

Rivka Ulmer

The present edition and translation of the rabbinic work Pesiqta Rabbati is a critical Hebrew edition, including a modern English translation on facing pages. Pesiqta Rabbati contains rabbinic homilies for Jewish Holy Days and special Sabbaths. -- publisher site
A Bilingual Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati

Rivka Ulmer

The present edition and translation of the rabbinic work Pesiqta Rabbati is a critical Hebrew edition, including a modern English translation on facing pages. Pesiqta Rabbati contains rabbinic homilies for Jewish holy days and special Sabbaths.
Financial & Managerial Accounting

Jan R. Williams, Susan F. Haka, Mark Bettner, and Joseph V. Carcello

Financial and Managerial Accounting: The Basis for Business Decisions continues to offer a solid foundation for students who are learning basic accounting concepts. Known for giving equal weight to financial and managerial topics, the authors emphasize the need for a strong foundation in both aspects of accounting. Hallmarks of the text - including the solid Accounting Cycle Presentation, managerial decision making, relevant pedagogy, and high quality, end-of-chapter material have been updated throughout the book.
Not So 'Common' Sense : Same Words, Different Grammar

Amine Zidouh

The present study attempts to investigate what is referred to as “common sense.” More precisely, it attempts to demonstrate that not only what people tend to see as the natural order of things changes with time and space but also, and more importantly, that what we come to believe as common sense is the result of a very complex ideological enterprise. This study argues that while common sense differs from one social formation to another, its workings remain the same. -- publisher site
The Afterlife of Sai Baba: Competing Visions of a Global Saint

Karline McLain

Nearly a century after his death, the image of Sai Baba, the serene old man with the white beard from Shirdi village in Maharashtra, India, is instantly recognizable to most South Asians (and many Westerners) as a guru for all faiths—Hindus, Muslims, and others. During his lifetime Sai Baba accepted all followers who came to him, regardless of religious or caste background, and preached a path of spiritual enlightenment and mutual tolerance. These days, tens of thousands of Indians and foreigners make the pilgrimage to Shirdi each year, and Sai Baba temples have sprung up in unlikely places around the world, such as Munich, Seattle, and Austin.

Tracing his rise from small village guru to global phenomenon, religious studies scholar Karline McLain uses a wide range of sources to investigate the different ways that Sai Baba has been understood in South Asia and beyond and the reasons behind his skyrocketing popularity among Hindus in particular. Shining a spotlight on an incredibly forceful devotional movement that avoids fundamental politics and emphasizes unity, service, and peace, The Afterlife of Sai Baba is an entertaining—and enlightening—look at one of South Asia’s most popular spiritual gurus. -- publisher's site
Neoliberal Bonds : Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature

Fernando A. Blanco

“Neoliberal Bonds is a unique and vital contribution to the scholarship on post-dictatorial memory in Chile. With a diverse theoretical bibliography and analyses that are sensitive and complex, this is one of the few studies to cross gender, sexuality, and memory studies in a convincing, integrated, and enlightening way. Neoliberal Bonds demands to be known by U.S. Latin Americanists for the nuanced way in which it explores neoliberalism's regulatory mechanisms as they interface with demands for citizenship, equality, recognition, and rights.” —Michael J. Lazzara, University of California, Davis

Fernando A. Blanco’s Neoliberal Bonds: Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature analyzes the sociocultural processes that have reshaped subjectivities in post-Pinochet Chile. By creatively exploring the intersections among memory, gender, post-trauma, sociology, psychoanalysis, and neoliberalism, Neoliberal Bonds draws on Lacan’s notion of perversion to critique the subjective fantasies that people create to compensate for the loss of the social bond in the wake of a dictatorship founded on individualism, competition, and privatization.

Neoliberal Bonds vehemently criticizes how Chile’s transition governments, through a series of political and legal maneuvers, created the state’s official memory narratives. Blanco argues that the state, the media, academia, and the neoliberal market colluded to colonize and mediatize the “memory scene.” In contrast to these official narratives, Neoliberal Bonds analyzes alternative memory accounts within the visual arts and literature that push back against the state, its institutions, and its economic allies. These alternative memory narratives highlight the ontological fracture of the new neoliberal subjects; they also bring into sharp relief the urgent need for democratization that still poses a challenge to Chile a quarter century after its “transition to democracy” began. -- publisher
Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past

Karen M. Morin and Dominique Moran

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical-geographical lens to the development and evolution of correctional institutions as a specific subset of carceral geographies. This book analyzes and critiques global practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of "corrections" from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines individuals' experiences within various regulatory regimes and spaces of punishment, and offers an interpretation of spaces of incarceration as cultural-historical artifacts. The book also analyzes the spatial-distributional geographies of incarceration, particularly with respect to their historical impact on community political-economic development and local geographies. Contributions within this book examine a range of prison sites and the practices that take place within them to help us understand how regimes of punishment are experienced, and are constructed in different kinds of ways across space and time for very different ends. The overall aim of this book is to help understand the legacies of carceral geographies in the present. The resonances across space and time tell a profound story of social and spatial legacies and, as such, offer important insights into the prison crisis we see in many parts of the world today.
'Le Siège de Calais' by Pierre-Laurent de Belloy

Logan J. Connors

Le Siège de Calais, hailed by its author in 1765 as France’s ‘première tragédie nationale’, rolled into Paris like a storm. Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s play about French bravery during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) appeared on the heels of France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Le Siège de Calais was performed throughout Europe and published numerous times during the second half of the eighteenth century. De Belloy emerged as a national hero, receiving prizes from Louis XV, accolades from the city of Calais, and membership to the prestigious Académie française. Since the French Revolution, however, the popularity of Le Siège de Calais has eclipsed, owing to its overt glorification of France’s royal machine. Several hundred years later, the play warrants a fresh look from a holistic perspective. De Belloy’s tragedy and the varied responses it provoked – many of which are included in this edition – offer complex representations of French political history and patriotic sentiment. Le Siège de Calais reveals conflicting images of gender roles, political debate and family values during the twilight of the Ancien régime; it also constituted one of the last moments when serious drama asserted its role as a popular force.
Re-Collection: Art, New Media, & Social Memory

Rick Rinehart and Jon Ippollito

How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and videotapes demag- netize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist; Amiga software doesn’t run on iMacs. In Re-collection, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each en- dangered work.

New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and in- teractive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion. Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new me- dia art from both practical and theoretical perspec- tives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century creativity: tech- nology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, which complicates ac- cess with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their pres- ervation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, trans- latable into new mediums when their original for- mats are obsolete.
Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: philosophes, anti-philosophes and the polemical theatre

Logan Connors
Reference and Referring

William P. Kabasenche, Michael O'Rourke, and Matthew H. Slater

These fifteen original essays address the core semantic concepts of reference and referring from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives. After an introductory essay that casts current trends in reference and referring in terms of an ongoing dialogue between Fregean and Russellian approaches, the book addresses specific topics, balanc ing breadth of coverage with thematic unity.

The contributors, all leading or emerging scholars, address trenchant neo-Fregean challenges to the direct reference position; consider what positive claims can be made about the mechanism of reference; address the role of a theory of reference within broader theoretical context; and investigate other kinds of linguistic expressions used in referring activities that may themselves be referring expressions.
The Environment: Philosophy, Science, and Ethics

Matthew H. Slater, William P. Kabasenche, and Michael O'Rourke

Philosophical reflections on the environment began with early philosophers’ invocation of a cosmology that mixed natural and supernatural phenomena. Today, the central philosophical problem posed by the environment involves not what it can teach us about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order but rather how we can understand its workings in order to make better decisions about our own conduct regarding it. The resulting inquiry spans different areas of contemporary philosophy, many of which are represented by the fifteen original essays in this volume.

The contributors first consider conceptual problems generated by rapid advances in biology and ecology, examining such topics as ecological communities, adaptation, and scientific consensus. The contributors then turn to epistemic and axiological issues, first considering philosophical aspects of environmental decision making and then assessing particular environmental policies (largely relating to climate change), including reparations, remediation, and nuclear power, from a normative perspective.
Augsburg during the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources

B. Ann Tlusty

Edited and Translated, with an Introduction, by B. Ann Tlusty
Carving Nature at its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science

Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and Matthew H. Slater

Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should "carve nature at its joints." But is nature really "jointed"? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification.

The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.
The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems

Shara McCallum

McCallum’s poems reflect her rooting in a Jamaican experience unique for her childhood in a Rastafarian home filled with reckless idealism, the potential for profound emotional pathology, and the grounding of old folks traditions. Her work has explored what it means to emerge from such a space and enter a new world of American landscapes and values. The Face of Water collects some of Shara Mccallum’s best poems, poems that establish her as a poet of deft craft (and craftiness), whose sense of music is caught in her mastery of syntax and her ear for the graceful line. She manages in these poems to enact the grand alchemy of the best poems—the art of transforming the most painful and sometimes mundane details of life into works of terrible and satisfying beauty. McCallum demonstrates eloquently her debt to the poetics of the Caribbean and of North America, even as she establishes herself as a vital voice in the later tradition of poetry written in mutable language, English. As poet she feels no hesitation about turning that language into a very personal music. The Face of Water is an excellent introduction to the poetry of Shara McCallum, a vital and exciting poet of pure elegance.

From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. She teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University.
Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890

Karen M. Morin
Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500-1800

B. Ann Tlusty

Until recently the role of the public drinking house has been approached from elitist, folkloric and anecdotal perspectives. The work of a new generation of social historians, however, has raised the tavern’s profile in the academic consciousness and confirmed its position within the mainstream of social and cultural history. It is now recognized that an understanding of the centrality of public drinking to the development of both elite and popular culture is vital to studies of social behaviour. The study of taverns has also been at the forefront of emerging interest in the history of consumption and material culture, and has contributed to a richer understanding of economic history. Constructions of gender and identity are also visible through research into the patterns of behaviour and discourse in and around the public house.

This four-volume reset edition presents a wide-ranging collection of primary sources which uncover the language and behaviour of local and state authorities, of peasants and town-dwellers, and of drinking companions and irate wives. The documents are translated and set in their social and historical context, providing a multidisciplinary collection that will be of great importance to scholars of all areas of social and cultural history of the early modern period.

The vast majority of this material is published here for the first time, ensuring that the collection will open up new avenues of research. Volume 1 draws heavily from the Parisian police archives and includes inspectors’ reports, complaints by the general public and details of court cases to build a picture of drinking in early modern France. Volumes 2 and 3 address public drinking in the Holy Roman Empire through a variety of chronicles, civic ordinances, court records, travel reports and surveys of public houses. Volume 4 locates taverns within a broader analysis of America’s public houses, drawing on visual material as well as journal entries, business reports and newspaper articles. Each volume is accompanied by editorial introductions and is annotated to provide readers with a high-quality resource of scholarly material.
The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms

B. Ann Tlusty

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms. Because the urban citizenry, made up of armed households, represented the armed power of the state, men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides. This book shows how civic institutions, peer pressure, and the courts all combined to create and repeatedly confirm masculine identity with blades and guns. Who had the right to bear arms, who was required to do so, who was forbidden or discouraged from using weapons: all these questions were central both to questions of political participation and to social and gender identity. As a result, there were few German households that were not stocked with weapons and few men who walked town streets without a side arm within easy reach. Laws aimed at preventing or containing violence could only be effective if they functioned in accordance with this framework.
This Strange Land

Shara McCallum

These poems probe the definition of Motherland. McCallum homogenizes childhood memories of her native Jamaica with a revised understanding of danger and corruption, teasing out notions of history, language, motherhood, rupture, memory, identity. She weaves new cloth of oral tradition, struggling to arrange a comfort zone within the foreign manufactures of suburbia. Hers is the skilled music of a master.