University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822960751
Pub Date: 15 May 2010
Description:
In Philosophical Inquiries, Nicholas Rescher offers his perspectives on many of the foundational concerns of philosophy and reminds us that the purpose of philosophy is to \u201cquestion the questions.\u201d Rescher sees the need to inquire as an evolutionary tool for adapting to a hostile environment and shows how philosophy has thus developed in an evolutionary fashion, building upon acquired knowledge and upon itself. In a historical thread that informs and enriches his overview, Rescher recalls the contributions of Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Laplace, Bertrand Russell, and others.
Among his many topics, Rescher discusses knowledge and the unattainablity of absolutes, skepticism and its self-defeating nature, the limits of science vs. the limits of cognition, refuting reality as mind-independent, and idealism and divining our role in nature. He considers the universe and intelligence as the product of intelligent design, science and religion as non-conflicting and purposeful pursuits, and determinism and other fallacies surrounding the concept of free will. Rescher views morality in its hierarchal structure, its applicability to human coexistence, and its ontological commitment to the enhancement of value for ourselves and our world. He examines questions of authority and the problem of judging past actions or knowledge by present standards. Overall, he argues for philosophy as an unavoidable tool for rational, cogent responses to large questions.
Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822961260
Pub Date: 01 May 2010
Description:
Eugenics movements gained momentum throughout Eastern Europe between World Wars I and II. Maria Bucur demonstrates that the importance of the eugenics movement in Romania rests not so much in the contributions made to the study of science as in the realm of nationalist ideology and social policy making.The notion that the quality and quantity of the human species could and should be controlled manifested itself through social engineering projects ranging from reshaping gender roles and isolating ethnic undesirables to introducing broad public health measures and educational reform.
Romanian eugenicists sought to control such modernization processes as urbanization and industrialization without curbing them, yet they also embraced attitudes more typically identified with anti-modernists in Romanian politics and culture. Bucur is the first historian to explore the role of eugenics as a response to the challenges of nation- and state-building in Eastern Europe. She presents a balanced assessment of the interwar eugenics movementÆs success and failures and identifies connections and discontinuities between the movement and the post-war communist regime.
Electing Chavez
The Business of Anti-neoliberal Politics in Venezuela
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780822960645
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2010
Description:
Venezuela\u2019s Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was the first anti-neoliberal presidential candidate to win in the region. Electing Ch\u00e1vez examines the circumstances that facilitated this pivotal election. By 1998, Venezuela had been rocked by two major scandals—the exchange rate incidents of the 1980s and the banking crisis of 1994—and had suffered rising social inequality.
These events created a deep-seated distrust of establishment politicians. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s 1998 victory, however, was far from inevitable. Other presidential candidates also stood against corruption and promised a clean break from politics as usual. Moreover, business opposition to Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s anti-neoliberal candidacy should have convinced voters that his victory would provoke a downward economic spiral. In Electing Ch\u00e1vez, Leslie C. Gates examines how Ch\u00e1vez won over voters and even obtained the secret allegiance of a group of business \u201celite outliers,\u201d with a reinterpretation of the relationship between business and the state during Venezuela\u2019s era of two-party dominance (1959-1998). Through extensive research on corruption and the backgrounds of political leaders. Gates tracks the rise of business-related corruption scandals and documents how business became identified with Venezuela\u2019s political establishment. These trends undermined the public\u2019s trust in business and converted business opposition into an asset for Ch\u00e1vez. This long history of business-tied politicians and the scandals they often provoked also framed the decisions of elite outliers. As Gates reveals, elite outliers supported Ch\u00e1vez despite his anti-neoliberal stance because they feared that the success of Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s main rival would deny them access to Venezuela\u2019s powerful oil state.
Wit's End
Women's Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822960744
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2010
Description:
In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others.
For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes.Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society.Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.Zwagerman contends that women\u2019s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women\u2019s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an \u201cattitude\u201d or slant on one\u2019s relation to society.Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822943891
Pub Date: 23 Apr 2010
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822962816
Pub Date: 06 Nov 2013
Description:
Carved from eight square miles of Bucks County farmland northeast of Philadelphia, Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a symbol of postwar suburbia and the fulfillment of the American Dream. Begun in 1952, after the completion of an identically named community on Long Island, the second Levittown soon eclipsed its New York counterpart in scale and ambition, yet it continues to live in the shadow of its better-known sister and has received limited scholarly attention. Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history.
The volume offers a fascinating profile of this planned community in two parts. The first examines Levittown from the inside, including oral histories of residents recalling how Levittown shaped their lives. One such reminiscence is by Daisy Myers, part of the first African American family to move to the community, only to become the targets of a race riot that would receive international publicity. The book also includes selections from the syndicated comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, in which Bill Griffith reflects on the angst-ridden trials of growing up in a Levittown, and an extensive photo essay of neighborhood homes, schools, churches, parks, and swimming pools, collected by Dianne Harris. The second part of the book views Levittown from the outside. Contributors consider the community's place in planning and architectural history and the Levitts' strategies for the mass production of housing. Other chapters address the class stratification of neighborhood sections through price structuring; individual attempts to personalize a home's form and space as a representation of class and identity; the builders' focus on the kitchen as the centerpiece of the home and its greatest selling point; the community's environmental and ecological legacy; racist and exclusionary sales policies; resident activism during the gas riots of 1979; and "America's lost Eden." Bringing together some of the top scholars in architectural history, American studies, and landscape studies, Second Suburb explores the surprisingly rich interplay of design, technology, and social response that marks the emergence and maturation of an exceptionally potent rendition of the American Dream.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822960607
Pub Date: 16 Apr 2010
Description:
"Sometimes we have questions that seem to defy answers or even suppositions but then we find Love and Strange Horses to help us map out a course to continue loving life. A really wonderful, thoughtful read by an intriguing new voice."—Nikki Giovanni
Unequal Partners
The United States and Mexico
Format: Paperback
Pages: 184
ISBN: 9780822960584
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2010
Description:
Since Mexico\u2019s defeat in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, the United States has continued to dominate Mexico economically, militarily, and politically. This long history of asymmetry has created a Mexican distaste for \u201cAmerican arrogance,\u201d and an American vision of Mexico as its \u201cbackyard.\u201d The imbalance has damaged political negotiations, trade pacts, and capital flows, as suspicions and protectionism have undermined diplomacy.
Despite these events, the two nations remain joined at the hip: more than 80 percent of Mexico\u2019s exports are to the United States, and the majority of foreign investment in Mexico comes from America.In Unequal Partners, Sidney Weintraub examines the current relationship of Mexico and the United States as one of sustained dependence and dominance. The chapters examine the consequences of this imbalance in six major policy areas: trade; investment and finance; narcotics; energy; migration; and the border. The book begins in 1954 when the Mexican \u201cgrowth miracle\u201d was at its apex, and proceeds to the present. Special attention is paid to the post-1982 debt crisis era, when Mexico began a more outward-looking trade policy.As this study reveals, Mexico has often been its own worst enemy in foreign relations. Over the past thirty years, the country has been plagued by debt, currency fluctuations, tax collection problems, political corruption, and state-controlled business monopolies that block foreign investment and importation. These factors have created an environment of instability, damaged outside perceptions, and weakened Mexico\u2019s bargaining position.Weintraub considers future policy changes that would help Mexico to level the playing field. Improving the education system, he argues, will benefit nearly every other activity and institution, and opening the oil market to private investment and technology will help develop deep-water drilling and revitalize this significant export commodity. In foreign relations, Mexico must be assertive—as it has been in easing U.S. restrictions on goods traded through NAFTA, and demanding U.S. aid to fight drug cartels—not passive, as it currently is on U.S. anti-immigration policy and the proposed border wall. Perhaps most importantly, the study points to the deeper development of policies that are proactive and outward looking.
Planning and the Urban Community
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822960461
Pub Date: 23 Mar 2010
Description:
This book presents a broad overview of the planning profession, and discusses many of the major problems encountered in urbanism and planning. The essays discuss topics that include education, the urban community, the place of planning in governmental hierarchy, and its relationship to urban political dynamics.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822960591
Pub Date: 05 Mar 2010
Description:
“I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America. Her aesthetic and artistic choices consistently invoke a complex hybrid poetics that radically reimagines the shape of our poetic discourse. The brilliant, shattering, and disturbing poems of Noose and Hook are not only wry critiques of recent poetic and cultural activity in this country but also compelling signposts to what yet might be possible in our future.
This is Lynn Emanuel's most exquisite and powerful book yet.”—David St. John
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822960775
Pub Date: 05 Mar 2010
Description:
"As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can’t help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work."—Corduroy Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822960454
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2010
Description:
After the revolutionary period of 1910-1920, Mexico developed a number of social protection programs to support workers in public and private sectors and to establish safeguards for the poor and the aged. These included pensions, healthcare, and worker's compensation. The new welfare programs were the product of a complex interrelationship of corporate, labor, and political actors.
In this unique dynamic, cross-class coalitions maintained both an authoritarian regime and social protection system for some seventy years, despite the ebb and flow of political and economic tides.By focusing on organized labor, and its powerful role in effecting institutional change, Workers and Welfare chronicles the development and evolution of Mexican social insurance institutions in the twentieth century. Beginning with the antecedents of social insurance and the adoption of pension programs for central government workers in 1925, Dion's analysis shows how the labor movement, up until the 1990s, was instrumental in expanding welfare programs, but has since become largely ineffective. Despite stepped-up efforts, labor has seen the retrenchment of many benefits. Meanwhile, Dion cites the debt crisis, neoliberal reform, and resulting changes in the labor market as all contributing to a rise in poverty. Today, Mexican welfare programs emphasize poverty alleviation, in a marked shift away from social insurance benefits for the working class.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 364
ISBN: 9780822960546
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2010
Description:
Thomas Kuhn is viewed as one of the most influential (and controversial) philosophers of science, and this re-release of a classic examination of one of his seminal works reflects his continuing importance. In World Changes, the contributors examine the work of Kuhn from a broad philosophical perspective, comparing earlier logical empiricism and logical positivism with the new philosophy of science inspired by Kuhn in the early 1960s. The nine chapters offer interpretations of his major work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and subsequent writings.
The introduction outlines the significant concepts of Kuhn's work that are examined and is followed by a brief appraisal of Kuhn by Carl Hempel. The chapters discuss topics that include: a systematic comparison of Kuhn and Carnap viewing similarities and differences; the disputation of absolute truth; rational theory evaluation and comparison; applying theory to observation and the relation of models in a new conceptualization of theory content; and interpreting Kuhn's plurality-of-worlds thesis. The volume also presents four historical papers that speak to Kuhn's views on lexical structures and concept-formation and their antecedents. The afterward, by Kuhn himself, reviews his own philosophical development, his thoughts on the dynamics of scientific growth, and his response to issues raised by the contributors and other interpreters of his work.
Strangers to the City
Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822951353
Pub Date: 23 Feb 2010
Description:
Leonard Plotnicov offers a fascinating study of the urbanization of tribal Africans. His study is based on extensive interviews with residents of Jos, Nigeria over a two-year period. The participants come from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, and Plotnicov portrays the difficulties associated with assimilation into a Westernized society.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822961154
Pub Date: 20 Feb 2010
Description:
Dancing Into Darkness is Sondra Horton Fraleigh's chronological diary of her deepening understanding of and appreciation for this art form, as she moves from a position of aesthetic response as an audience member to that of assimilation as a student. As a student of Zen and butoh, Fraleigh witnesses her own artistic and personal transformation through essays, poems, interviews, and reflections spanning twelve years of study, much of it in Japan. Numerous performance photographs and original calligraphy by Fraleigh's Zen teacher Shodo Akane illuminate her words.
The pieces of Dancing Into Darkness cross boundaries, just as butoh anticipates a growing global amalgamation. \u0022Butoh is not an aesthetic movement grafted onto Western dance, \u0022 Fraleigh concludes, \u0022and Western dance may be more Eastern than we have been able to see. \u0022
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822960768
Pub Date: 15 Feb 2010
Description:
The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture explores the transformation of Yiddish from a low-status vernacular to the medium of a complex modern culture. David Fishman examines the efforts of east European Jews to establish their linguistic distinctiveness as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora. Fishman considers the roots of modern Yiddish culture in social and political conditions in Imperial Tsarist and inter-war Poland, and its relationship to Zionism and Bundism.
In so doing, Fishman argues that Yiddish culture enveloped all socioeconomic classes, not just the proletarian base, and considers the emergence, at the turn of the century, of a pro-Yiddish intelligentsia and a Yiddishist movement.As Fishman points out, the rise of Yiddishism was not without controversy. Some believed that the rise of Yiddish represented a shift away from a religious-dominated culture to a completely secular, European one; a Jewish nation held together by language, rather than by land or religious content. Others hoped that Yiddish culture would inherit the moral and national values of the Jewish religious tradition, and that to achieve this result, the Bible and Midrash would need to exist in modern Yiddish translation. Modern Yiddish culture developed in the midst of these opposing concepts.Fishman follows the rise of the culture to its apex, the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925, and concludes with the dramatic story of the individual efforts that preserved the books and papers of YIVO during the destruction and annihilation of World War II and in postwar Soviet Lithuania. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, like those efforts, preserves the cultural heritage of east European Jews with thorough research and fresh insights.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822960294
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2010
Description:
Current global estimates of children engaged in warfare range from 200,000 to 300,000. Children's roles in conflict range from armed and active participants to spies, cooks, messengers, and sex slaves. Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States examines the factors that contribute to the use of children in war, the effects of war upon children, and the perpetual cycle of warfare that engulfs many of the world's poorest nations.
The contributors seek to eliminate myths of historic or culture-based violence, and instead look to common traits of chronic poverty and vulnerable populations. Individual essays examine topics such as: the legal and ethical aspects of child soldiering; internal UN debates over enforcement of child protection policies; economic factors; increased access to small arms; displaced populations; resource endowments; forced government conscription; rebel-enforced quota systems; motivational techniques employed in recruiting children; and the role of girls in conflict.The contributors also offer viable policies to reduce the recruitment of child soldiers such as the protection of refugee camps by outside forces, \u201cnaming and shaming,\u201d and criminal prosecution by international tribunals. Finally, they focus on ways to reintegrate former child soldiers into civil society in the aftermath of war.
