Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism. Through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Cros, Paul Valéry, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, Allen S. Weiss shows how sound recording's uncanny confluence of human and machine would transform our expectations of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring our intimate relation to death. Interdisciplinary, the book bridges poetry and literature, theology and metaphysics. As Breathless shows, the symbolic and practical roles of poetry and technology were transformed as new forms of nostalgia and eroticism arose.

Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart. Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city\u2019s landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place. Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.

Although the relationship between elected officials and appointed executives has often been viewed as a struggle between master and servant—with disagreements as to which individuals occupy which roles—Poul Erik Mouritzen\u2019s and James Svara\u2019s comparison of city governments in fourteen countries reveals more interdependence and shared influence than conflict over control.Mouritzen and Svara bring local government to the forefront, emphasizing the sophisticated level of city management in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their findings lead to a revision of the general view concerning the boundaries of public administration. Leadership at the Apex illustrates in practical ways how the democratic control of government and professional administration can coexist without undermining the logic or integrity of each other.

In this provocative interpretation of New Deal diplomacy, Howard Jablon challenges the view that the State Department was wiser and more expert at international maneuver than was President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early years of his presidency. These were years of growing world tension, with the preliminary shots of World War II being fired as Japan took over Manchuria, Italy made Ethiopia an extension of its new Roman Empire, and all the European great powers tried out their new weaponry in Spain. The author argues that the department's advice in this period actually led to unfortunate decisions which later had a considerable impact on events leading to World War II.Former Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote in his memoirs that the United States was at the "oriental crossroads of decision" in 1934. Hull and his colleagues in the State Department did not suggest blocking the Japanese. Instead, they recommended continuing the ineffective nonrecognition policy. Consequently, the roads taken by American diplomacy at this and other junctures were equally unfortunate.To date no one has criticized the influence of the State Department on New Deal diplomacy. Crossroads of Decision represents a timely and important contribution to our understanding of both the State Department and foreign policy in this interwar period of rapid change, when diplomatic courses were set that allowed for no turning back.

The first and most successful rural social settlement school in the United States lies at the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, Kentucky. Since its founding in 1902 by May Stone and Katherine Pettit, the Hindman Settlement School has received accolades for the quality of its education, health, and community services that have measurably improved the lives of people in the region.Challenge and Change in Appalachia is the story of a groundbreaking center for education that transformed a community. The School's farms and extension work brought modern methods to the area. At the same time, the School encouraged preservation of the region's crafts and music. Today, unique programs for dyslexic children, work in adult education, and cultural heritage activities make the School a model for rural redevelopment.

This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative. Zipes also looks at how folk tales influence our popular beliefs and the ways they have been exploited by a corporate media network intent on regulating the mystical elements of the stories. He examines a range of authors, including the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Ernst Bloch, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and J.K. Rowling to demonstrate the continuing symbiotic relationship between folklore and literature.

Fred M. Vinson, the thirteenth Chief Justice of the United States, started his political career as a small-town Kentucky lawyer and rose to positions of power in all three branches of federal government. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, Vinson earned undergraduate and law degrees from Centre College in Danville. He served 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he achieved acclaim as a tax and fiscal expert. President Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and later named him to key executive-branch positions. President Truman appointed him Secretary of the Treasury and then Chief Justice. The Vinson court was embroiled in critical issues affecting racial discrimination and individual rights during the cold war. Chief Justice

"People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of Arnold M. Ludwig's eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. The answer may seem obvious -- power, privilege, and perks -- but any adequate answer also needs to explain why so many rulers cling to power even when they are miserable, trust nobody, feel besieged, and face almost certain death. Ludwig's results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule.Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century -- over 1,900 people in all -- Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers for whom more extensive personal information was available, he compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or instability to identify the main predictors of later political success.Ludwig's penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.

In her own time and in ours, Hannah More (1745-1833) has been seen as a benefactress of the poor, writing and working selflessly to their benefit. Mona Scheuermann argues, however, that More's agenda was not simply to help the poor but to control them, for the upper classes in late eighteenth-century England were terrified that the poor would rise in revolt against Church and King.As much social history as literary study, In Praise of Poverty shows that More's writing to the poor specifically is intended to counter the perceived rabble rousing of Thomas Paine and other radicals active in the 1790s. In fact, her Village Politics was written by request of the Bishop of London as a direct response to Paine's Rights of Man. The much larger project of the Cheap Repository Tracts followed, and More was still writing in this vein two decades later. Scheuermann effectively, and perhaps controversially, places More in the context of her period's debate about the poor, proving More to be not a defender of the poor but of the conservative upper-class values she so wholeheartedly espoused.

"Impossible Dance is a highly accessible, original and engaging account of the complex and often heavily theorized debates around the body, identity and community. Focusing on gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City, this is the first book to bring together vital issues such as dance culture, queer community, sex culture, HIV identity and politics. Based on four years of field work, the book takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City into the dance clubs and onto the dance floor. Detailed interviews with club-goers capture their perspectives on how they stage their self-fashioning through dancing. Fiona Buckland argues that such dancing embodies and rehearses a powerful political imagination, laying claim to the space and to one's body as queer."--Publishers Weekly

The American essays of renowned writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) artistically chronicle the robust urban life of Cincinnati and New Orleans. Hearn is one of the few chroniclers of urban American life in the nineteenth century, and much of this material has not been widely available since the 1950s. Lafcadio Hearn's America collects Hearn's stories of vagabonds, river people, mystics, criminals, and some of the earliest accounts available of black and ethnic urban folklife in America. He was a frequently consulted expert on America during his years in Japan, and these editorials reflect on the problems and possibilities of American life as the country entered its greatest century. Hearn's work, which reflects an America that is less "melting pot" than a varied, spicy, and often exotic gumbo, provide essential background for the study of America's first steps away from its agrarian beginnings.

Violence against women is one of the most insidious social ills facing the world today. Yet governmental response is inconsistent, ranging from dismissal to aggressive implementation of policies and programs to combat the problem. In her comparative study of thirty-six democratic governments, Laurel Weldon examines the root causes and consequences of the differences in public policy from Northern Europe to Latin America. She reveals that factors that often influence the development of social policies do not determine policies on violence against women. Neither economic level, religion, region, nor the number of women in government determine governmental responsiveness to this problem. Weldon demonstrates, for example, that Nordic governments take no more action to combat violence against women than Latin American governments, even though the Swedish welfare state is often considered a leader in social policy, particularly with regard to women\u2019s issues.Instead, the presence of independently organized, active women\u2019s movements plays a greater role in placing violence against women on the public agenda. The breadth and scope of governmental response is greatly enhanced by the presence of an office dedicated to promoting women\u2019s status.Weldon closes with practical lessons and insights to improve government action on violence against women and other important issues of social justice and democracy.

This book is the doctoral dissertation of Khalil Totah, one of the most reliable authorities on scientific education in Palestine during the mid-twentieth century. His work reflected on Palestinian education for many generations.

The feminist position on abortion is little changed from thirty years ago, argues Leslie Cannold. Mired in the rhetoric of "rights," feminists have failed to appreciate women's actual experience of abortion and have ceded the debate on the morality of abortion to the anti-choice contingent. In order to counter the current erosion of abortion rights and appeal to women of Generation X, who don't remember a time when abortion wasn't safe and legal, feminism must evolve a richer, more nuanced understanding of abortion, she says, one that is premised on the right to choose, yet sensitive to the value of the fetus and the serious responsibilities of motherhood. Cannold, an American bioethicist working in Australia, seeks to forge a new ethics of abortion in her groundbreaking book. Drawing on her own study of women's actual experiences of and attitudes toward abortion, she documents the difficult choices women make and the moral and ethical reasoning they bring to bear on the question of abortion, whether they are pro- or anti-choice. In the lived experience of women, she finds a practical ethics of abortion in which termination is not only a moral response to an unplanned pregnancy, it may be the only moral response.Feminism must develop a new appreciation of what abortion means to women, Cannold argues. Women's right to choose (or reject) motherhood, rather than to "control their bodies," must be at the center of this new approach, as must the responsive, caring relationship between the pregnant woman and her fetus. Such an approach to this volatile issue speaks to the concerns of both pro- and anti-choice advocates, offering a middle ground in an often polarizing debate. Upon her book's publication in Australia, The Bulletin (Australia's weekly news magazine) declared that "a refreshingly forthright and compassionate voice has broken through the rancour and tedium of this benighted controversy." This first American edition, revised and with a new introduction, brings Cannold's new voice and perspective to a new audience.

Eighteen distinguished scholars and practicing officials address the problems of executive leadership in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Individual essays focus on cabinet government; domestic, military, and economic advisers; executive agencies; and personal staff for presidents and prime ministers. Provocative comparisons between and among systems make the discussions particularly insightful.

In this provocative and insightful new book, psychologist Michael Eigen presents a phenomenology of ecstatic states. Ecstasy is a force to be reckoned with -- sometimes creative, sometimes destructive. Eigen argues that there is an ecstasy that comes through the ever-necessary confrontation of our psychic cores with suffering and degradation, and he shows that when we can learn to be present with these feelings, they add to the tone and texture of our lives, and help us to feel real. The author draws heavily on autobiographical material, psychotherapy sessions, case studies and psychoanalytic thinking, along with literary and biblical sources, demonstrating his reputation as one of the leading creative thinkers among psychotherapists in America. The result is an extremely intelligent, lyrical work, which succeeds in being theoretically well-informed without being pedantic. Written as a subjective first-hand account, Ecstasy will appeal to psychotherapists as well as to readers and students interested in spirituality and philosophy.