The Monongahela River Valley in Southwestern Pennsylvania is steeped with a rich industrial history. Starting with iron, brass, tin, and glass production, the river towns - from Brownsville to Braddock - ultimately helped make Pittsburgh the one-time steelmaking capital of the world. With this industrial legacy in mind, artist Ron Donoughe set out to document the small towns in this region, one painting at a time. Over a twelve-month period, he explored the forgotten towns of Brownsville, California, Donora, Charleroi, Monessen, Monongahela, Clairton, Duquesne, McKeesport, Braddock, and the Monongahela River itself. Brownsville to Braddock provides key insight on a forty-mile stretch of river towns. The post-industrial economy led to a decline in manufacturing, and with it, substantial job losses. These towns face many significant challenges, yet there is still beauty to be found. Donoughe finds it as he paints the human spirit through the mills, factories, parks, and homes. The people he meets share their stories of family joy and sorrows, along with a genuine love for the area they call the “Mon Valley.”

Around the world, established parties are weakening, and new parties are failing to take root. In many cases, outsiders have risen and filled the void, posing a threat to democracy. Why do most new parties fail? Under what conditions do they survive and become long-term electoral fixtures? Brandon Van Dyck investigates these questions in the context of the contemporary Latin American left. He argues that stable parties are not an outgrowth of democracy. On the contrary, contemporary democracy impedes successful party building. To construct a durable party, elites must invest time and labor, and they must share power with activists. Because today’s elites have access to party substitutes like mass media, they can win votes without making such sacrifices in time, labor, and autonomy. Only under conditions of soft authoritarianism do office-seeking elites have a strong electoral incentive to invest in party building. Van Dyck illustrates this argument through a comparative analysis of four new left parties in Latin America: two that collapsed and two that survived.

Giovanni Hautmann (Florence, 1927-2017) was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and trained generations of analysts. Together with numerous articles, he has published some fundamental texts, among which: La psicoanalisi tra arte e biologia (1999), Il mio debito con Bion (1999), Funzione analitica e Mente primitiva (2002). Despite the fact that during his presidency, he had promoted for the first time the bilingual (Italian-English) publication of the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, his books have never been published in other languages and therefore his thinking remains still little known abroad. Therefore, the aim of the volume is to bring attention back to his theoretical-clinical construction and to extend it, through the dialogue with other psychoanalytic cultures.

Made Free and Thrown Open to the Public charts the history of public libraries and librarianship in Pennsylvania. Based on archival research at more than fifty libraries and historical societies, it describes a long progression from private, subscription-based associations to publicly-funded institutions, highlighting the dramatic period during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when libraries were “thrown open” to women, children, and the poor. Made Free explains how Pennsylvania’s physical and cultural geography, legal codes, and other unique features influenced the spread and development of libraries across the state. It also highlights Pennsylvania libraries’ many contributions to the social fabric, especially during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Most importantly of all, Made Free convincingly argues that Pennsylvania libraries have made their greatest strides when community activists and librarians, supported with state and local resources, have worked collaboratively.

Unanimously banned and condemned, torture has been used in many countries throughout the 20th century. Ruxandra Cesereanu’s essay aims to deepen this subject, showing the unimaginable dimensions that human cruelty can sometimes reach. The Armenian Genocide, the Nazi camps, the Gulag, the Military Juntas in Latin America, the totalitarian regimes in Africa and those in Islamic states are just a few examples of the tortures that man can inflict on his fellow men. From the description of the techniques, the motivations and the moments in which acts of savage violence take place to portraits of torturers and the victim, Ruxandra Cesereanu’s book gives us an overview of the phenomenon of torture, to refresh our collective memory.

This exceedingly timely book looks at the history of black activist athletes and the important role of the black community in making sure fair play existed, not only in sports, but across U.S. society. Most books that focus on ties between sports, black athletes, and the Civil Rights Movement focus on specific issues or people. They discuss, for example, how baseball was integrated or tell the stories of individuals like Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. This book approaches the topic differently. By examining the connection between sports, black athletes and the Civil Rights Movement overall, it puts the athletes and their stories into the proper context. Rather than romanticizing the stories and the men and women who lived them, it uses the roles these individuals played - or chose not to play - to illuminate the complexities and nuances in the relationship between black athletes and the fight for racial equality. Arranged thematically, the book starts with Jackie Robinson's entry into baseball when he signed with the Dodgers in 1945 and ends with the revolt of black athletes in the late 1960s, symbolized by Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously raising their clenched fists during a medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. Accounts from the black press and the athletes themselves help illustrate the role black athletes played in the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the book also examines how the black public viewed sports and the contributions of black athletes during these tumultuous decades, showing how the black communities' belief in merit and democracy - combined with black athletic success - influenced the push for civil rights. •

"They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long."Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound by western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and the taking of property under the power of eminent domain to create the national recreation area on a narrow strip of land running between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects that came in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region, but at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns and history in the process.The narrative follows two women characters whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and goes back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories focus on the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.

On June 8, 1883, Rev. Elisha Green was traveling by train from Maysville to Paris, Kentucky, when about forty students from the Millersburg Female College crowded onto the train at Millersburg accompanied by George T. Gould, the school's president, and Frank L. Bristow, their music teacher. Gould grabbed the reverend by the shoulder and ordered him to give up his seat. When Green refused, Bristow and Gould assaulted Green until the conductor intervened and ordered the assailants to stop or he would throw them off the train. Friends advised Green to take legal action, and he did, winning his case against them in March 1884, though with only token compensation. The significance of this case lies not only in prevailing justice, but that a black man won a lawsuit against two white men. In The Assault on Elisha Green: Race and Religion in a Kentucky Community, historian Randolph Paul Runyon tells the story of Green's life and traces the network of relationships that led to the event of the assault. Tracing these three men's lives brings the reader from the slavery era to the eve of the First World War, from Kentucky to New Mexico, from Covington to the Kentucky River Palisades, with particular focus on Mason and Bourbon counties. The Assault on Elisha Green recounts one man's pursuit of justice over violence and racism in the nineteenth century. In this engagingly written tale, Runyon masterfully interweaves background information with the immediacy of the harrowing attack and its aftermath, revealing the true character of the primary actors and the racial tensions unique to a border state.

Why have the major, post-9/11, US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances, major capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories by what many observers call the world's best military, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned bloody and intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum decisive victory is an important part of the explanation why successful military operations to overthrow two developing-world regimes failed to achieve favorable and durable outcomes. In Zero-Sum Victory, Christopher D. Kolenda identifies three interrelated problems that have emerged from the government's insistence on a zero-sum victory. First, the US government has no organized way to consider successful outcomes alternative to decisive military victory and, thus, selects strategies that overestimate the prospects of such a victory. Second, the US is slow to recognize and modify or abandon losing strategies. In both cases, US officials believe their strategies are working even as the situations deteriorate. Third, once the US decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermine the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome. By making powerful historic comparisons and drawing from personal experience, Kolenda draws thought-provoking and actionable conclusions about the utility of American military power in the contemporary world.

"Chinese Internet Vernacular," a complex of novel language varieties associated with the Chinese internet, is usually thought to consist of an increasing host of linguistic memes currently or once virally spread. Focusing on the vernacular's most prominent character - meaning change, this book attempts to account for the different dimensions and aspects that contribute to the memes' meaning and function variations, based on the quantitative and qualitative data meticulously collected by following and recording the various memes' diffusions on Chinese social media over four years. Through the discussion of four comprehensive case studies, what we experience as noticeable meaning change throughout a viral meme's diffusion may in fact be indexical to, under different circumstances, interpersonal communicative effects, collective identities, and community affiliations, as well as larger sociocultural values and ideologies, all of which can be reflexively performed, enacted, and calibrated in social media interactions. With such efforts, this book hopes to do justice to the complexities and dynamics of the "Chinese Internet Vernacular" as a holistic sociolinguistic phenomenon.

The Nordic model rests on two pillars: the social safety net and the provision of services like education, childcare, and healthcare for all. It can also be characterized as an “employment model,” since its financial viability depends upon a high labor participation rate with very few working poor. Economist Torben M. Andersen lays out the model’s structure and highlights factors important for understanding its economic performance. He then looks into specific policy areas based on Denmark’s experiences and addresses the challenges arising from new technologies and globalization.

Rising inequality is one of the most prominent characteristics of the modern age of globalized economies. To some observers, inequality is a natural consequence of economic growth that ought to be accepted to ensure a prosperous future. To others, rising inequality is a cause for alarm—not just because it is unfair, but also because, as Pope Francis has said, “inequality is the root of social evil. ” By most measures, the Nordic countries consistently rank among the best not only when it comes to equality, but also when it comes to business friendliness. Political scientist Carsten Jensen delves into what is exceptional about equality in the region, and outlines “the four equalities” that set it apart: economic (the distance between the poor and rich is relatively low), inter-generational (success in life is not dependent on the status of one’s parents), gender (women are highly integrated into the labor market and independent from the family), and health (the poor have access to the same medical treatments as the well-off). All four types of equalities have their origins in unique political settlements made in the 20th century. The resulting special social market economies of these countries affect their growth and levels of equality even today.

Robert Codrington (1830-1922) trained to be a priest at Oxford University. He volunteered to work in Nelson, New Zealand, from 1860-4 and was appointed as headmaster of the Melanesian Mission training school on Norfolk Island in 1867. He spent the next twenty years in this post and for eight of these he was the head of the Mission travelling through the Melanesian region. Throughout his time in the region he attempted to gain an ethnographic understanding of the people whom he was serving. To this end he studied local languages and translated scriptures into Mota, the lingua franca of the Mission. However, for Codrington material artefacts were fundamental to his understanding of Melanesian life. He took a lively interest in material culture as a collector and donated objects to a number of museums, including the British Museum and The Pitt Rivers Museum. His specialist knowledge made him a valued informant for scholars of Melanesia who regularly consulted him. He is regarded today as one of the founding scholars of Pacific anthropology. This book intends to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how Codrington formed his collection, through the study of his written anthropological works, correspondence with other collectors and scholars and particularly through the private correspondence with his brother and his five journals written between 1867 and 1882. The book also highlights his equally important contribution to the development of material culture studies in the region and how his work has influenced Melanesian studies to the present day.

This book has two main objectives - to provide an overview of Danish research in the Afghan province of Nuristan, as well as to understand the scholar, collector, and man, Lennart Edelberg, who was crucial to its shaping. Ethnography as an academic discipline in Denmark was still in its embryonic stages, when Edelberg visited Nuristan for the first time in 1948 as a member of the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia (1947-52). Parallel to his work as an upper-secondary schoolteacher in Ribe, Edelberg developed his work in Nuristan throughout the following decades. Through different perspectives from people who worked with him, or shared his research interests, the contributions to this book constitute a mosaic. This mosaic represents Lennart Edelberg, his research interests as well as their legacy for contemporary scholarship.

Science in the Arctic changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century, when early, scattered attempts in the region to gather knowledge about all aspects of the natural world transitioned to a more unified Arctic science under the First International Polar Year in 1882. The IPY brought together researchers from multiple countries with the aim of undertaking systematic and coordinated experiments and observations in the Arctic and Antarctic. Harsh conditions, intense isolation, and acute danger inevitably impacted the making and communicating of scientific knowledge. At the same time, changes in ideas about what it meant to be an authoritative observer of natural phenomena were linked to tensions in imperial ambitions, national identities, and international collaborations of the IPY. Through a focused study of travel narratives in the British, Danish, Canadian, and American contexts, Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund uncovers not only the transnational nature of Arctic exploration, but also how the publication and reception of literature about it shaped an extreme environment, its explorers, and their scientific practices. She reveals how, far beyond the metropole - in the vast area we understand today as the North American and Greenlandic Arctic - explorations and the narratives that followed ultimately influenced the production of field science in the nineteenth century.

Translingual Inheritance tells a new story of the early days of democracy in the United States, when English had not yet become the only dominant language. Drawing on translingual theory, which exposes how language use contrasts with the political constructions of named languages, Elizabeth Kimball argues that Philadelphians developed complex metalinguistic conceptions of what language is and how it mattered in their relations. In-depth chapters introduce the democratically active communities of Philadelphia between 1750 and 1830 and introduce the three most populous: Germans, Quakers (the Society of Friends), and African Americans. These communities had ways of knowing and using their own languages to create identities and serve the common good outside of English. They used these practices to articulate plans and pedagogies for schools, exercise their faith, and express the promise of the young democracy. Kimball draws on primary sources and archival texts that have been little seen or considered to show how citizens consciously took on the question of language and its place in building their young country and how such practice is at the root of what made democracy possible.