Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2020

Permanent URI for this collection

http://repository.vlu.edu.vn:443/handle/123456789/5502

Browse

Browsing Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2020 by Issue Date

Jump to a point in the index:
  • Publication
    Amherst in the World:
    ( 2020)
    Saxton, Martha
    In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school's substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst's engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education.
  • Publication
    American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953-54:
    ( 2020)
    McCourt, David M.
    "Between December 1953 and June 1954, the elite think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) joined prominent figures in International Relations, including Pennsylvania's Robert Strausz-Hupé, Yale's Arnold Wolfers, the Rockefeller Foundation's William Thompson, government adviser Dorothy Fosdick, and nuclear strategist William Kaufmann. They spent seven meetings assessing approaches to world politics-from the ""realist"" theory of Hans Morgenthau to theories of imperialism of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin-to discern basic elements of a theory of international relations. The study group's materials are an indispensable window to the development of IR theory, illuminating the seeds of the theory-practice nexus in Cold War U.S. foreign policy. Historians of International Relations recently revised the standard narrative of the field's origins, showing that IR witnessed a sharp turn totheoretical consideration of international politics beginning around 1950, and remained preoccupied with theory. Taking place in 1953-54, the CFR study group represents a vital snapshot of this shift. This book situates the CFR study group in its historical and historiographical contexts, and offers a biographical analysis of the participants. It includes seven preparatory papers on diverse theoretical approaches, penned by former Berkeley political scientist George A. Lipsky, followed by the digest of discussions from the study group meetings.American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953-54 offers new insights into the early development of IR as well as the thinking of prominent elites in the early years of the Cold War."
  • Publication
    After the Pink Tide: Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America
    ( 2020)
    Gold, Marina ; Zagato, Alessandro
    The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.
  • Publication
    Anthropologies of Revolution: Forging Time, People, and Worlds
    ( 2020)
    Cherstich, Igor ; Holbraad, Martin
    A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length attempt to develop an anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead view them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people's lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.
  • Publication
    Among Digitized Manuscripts. Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World:
    ( 2020)
    L.W.C. van Lit
    If you work with digital photos of manuscripts or archival materials, Among Digitized Manuscripts provides the conceptual and practical toolbox for you to create a state-of-the-art methodology and workflow. No previous computer knowledge is required.
  • Publication
    Approaches to Modern Judaism:
    ( 2020)
    Raphael, Marc Lee
    This is an edited volume of essays by leading scholars in the field on the development of a distinctly modern Judaism, primarily in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  • Publication
    Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Sāmoa
    ( 2020)
    Poblete, JoAnna
    Balancing the Tides highlights the influence of marine practices and policies in the unincorporated territory of American S?moa on the local indigenous group, the American fishing industry, international seafood consumption, U.S. environmental programs, as well as global ecological and native concerns. Poblete explains how U.S. federal fishing programs in the post-World War II period encouraged labor based out of American S?moa to catch and can one-third of all tuna for United States consumption until 2009. Labeled Made in the USA, this commodity was sometimes caught by non-U.S. regulated ships, produced under labor standards far below continental U.S. minimum wage and maximum work hours, and entered U.S. jurisdiction tax free. The second half of the book explores the tensions between indigenous and U.S. federal government environmental goals and ecology programs. Whether creating the largest National Marine Sanctuary under U.S. jurisdiction or collecting basic data on local fishing, initiatives that balanced western-based and native expectations for respectful community relationships and appropriate government programs fared better than those that did not acknowledge the positionality of all groups involved. Despite being under the direct authority of the United States, American S?moans have maintained a degree of local autonomy due to the Deeds of Cession signed with the U.S. Navy at the turn of the twentieth century that created shared indigenous and federal governance in the region. Balancing the Tides demonstrates how western-style economics, policy-making, and knowledge building imposed by the U.S. federal government have been infused into the daily lives of American S?moans. American colonial efforts to protect natural resources based on western approaches intersect with indigenous insistence on adhering to customary principles of respect, reciprocity, and native rights in complicated ways. Experiences and lessons learned from these case studies provide insight into other tensions between colonial governments and indigenous peoples engaging in environmental and marine-based policy-making across the Pacific and the globe. This study connects the U.S.-American S?moa colonial relationship to global overfishing, world consumption patterns, the for-profit fishing industry, international environmental movements and studies, as well as native experiences and indigenous rights. Open Access publication of this book was made possible by the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, an initiative sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
  • Publication
    Australia’s Fertility Transition: A study of 19th-century Tasmania
    ( 2020)
    Moyle, Helen
    In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most countries in Europe and English-speaking countries outside Europe experienced a fertility transition, where fertility fell from high levels to relatively low levels. England and the other English-speaking countries experienced this from the 1870s, while fertility in Australia began to fall in the 1880s. This book investigates the fertility transition in Tasmania, the second settled colony of Australia, using both statistical evidence and historical sources. The book examines detailed evidence from the 1904 New South Wales Royal Commission into the Fall in the Birth Rate, which the Commissioners regarded as applying not only to NSW, but to every state in Australia. Many theories have been proposed as to why fertility declined at this time: theories of economic and social development; economic theories; diffusion theories; the spread of secularisation; increased availability of artificial methods of contraception; and changes in the rates of infant and child mortality. The role of women in the fertility transition has generally been ignored. The investigation concludes that fertility declined in Tasmania in the late 19th century in a period of remarkable social and economic transformation, with industrialisation, urbanisation, improvements in transport and communication, increasing levels of education and opportunities for social mobility. One of the major social changes was in the status and role of women, who became the driving force behind the fertility decline.
  • Publication
    Babylonian Witchcraft Literature: Case Studies:
    ( 2020)
    Abusch, I. Tzvi
    The studies in this volume focus on individual Babylonian magical texts while developing an overall understanding of these texts as a whole. Part One follows a diachronic approach, Part Two a synchronic one. In this sense, the studies are to be viewed broadly: while unravelling knots in individual texts, they highlight certain issues and exemplify some solutions for common problems in traditional Mesopotamian therapeutic literature.
  • Publication
    Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period: The Foundation of the New Order State (1950-1965)
    ( 2020)
    Farabi Fakih
    In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period, Farabi Fakih offers a historical analysis of the rise of an authoritarian managerialist state during the Sukarno presidency, which laid the foundation for the New Order developmentalist state.
  • Publication
    Behind the Essenes: History and Ideology in the Dead Sea Scrolls
    ( 2020)
    Davies, Philip R.
    A collection of essays by Philip Davies on aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While composed to stand along, together these essays create a strong synthetic argument about the Essenes and the production of the Dead Sea Scrolls that remains important and challenging to the present day.
  • Publication
    The Biblical Herem: A Window in Israel’s Religious Experience
    ( 2020)
    Stern, Philip D.
    The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel’s Religious Experience, was a groundbreaking, and controversial, examination of the herem, a biblical mode of declaring something (objects, people, cities) proscribed. Stern here reconstructs how the herem relates to other modes of thinking, in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere in the Ancient Near East. The book contains a new preface by the author.
  • Publication
    Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa
    ( 2020)
    Tuana, Nancy ; Scott, Charles E.
    Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history of philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility.
  • Publication
    Ben Sira’s View of Women: A Literary Analysis
    ( 2020)
    Trenchard, Warren C.
    This volume systematically analyzes all the material concerning women in Sirach, providing detailed exegesis in each case. It synthesizes this evidence to offer a fuller understanding of Ben Sira's perception of women.
  • Publication
    Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China
    ( 2020)
    Rippa, Alessandro
    Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland Infrastructures addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently, local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies. At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state, border studies, and research on transnational trade and infrastructure development, Borderland Infrastructures provides new analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced, mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China’s peripheries.
  • Publication
    Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University:
    ( 2020)
    hampton, rosalind
    The presence and experiences of Black people at elite universities have been largely underrepresented and erased from institutional histories. This book engages with a collection of these experiences that span half a century and reflect differences in class, gender, and national identifications among Black scholars. By mapping Black people's experiences of studying and teaching at McGill University, this book reveals how the "whiteness" of the university both includes and exceeds the racial identities of students and professors. It highlights the specific functions of Blackness and of anti-Blackness within society in general and within the institution of higher education in particular, demonstrating how structures and practices of the university reproduce interlocking systems of oppression that uphold racial capitalism, reproduce colonial relations, and promote settler nationalism. Critically engaging the work of Black learners, academics, organizers, and activists within this dynamic political context, this book underscores the importance of Black Studies across North America.
  • Publication
    Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War
    ( 2020)
    Phillips, Christopher
    "The war of 1914-18 was the first great conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods to the field of battle. In Civilian Specialists at War, Christopher Phillips examines the manner in which Britain's industrial society influenced the character and conduct of industrial warfare. This book analyses the multiple connections between the military, the government and the senior executives of some of pre-war Britain's largest companies. It illustrates the British army's evolving response to the First World War and the role to be played by non-military expertise in the prosecution of such a conflict. This study demonstrates that pre-existing professional relationships between the army, the government and private enterprise were exploited throughout the conflict. It details how civilian technologies facilitated the prosecution of war on an unprecedented scale, while showing how British experts were constrained by the political and military demands of coalition warfare. Civilian Specialists at War reveals that Britain's transport experts were a key component in the country's conduct of the First World War."
  • Publication
    The Citizenship Experiment: Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions
    ( 2020)
    René Koekkoek
    Focusing on the United States, France and the Dutch Republic in the revolutionary 1790s, The Citizenship Experiment explores the convergence and divergence of Atlantic citizenship ideals in light of the Haitian Revolution and the French revolutionary Terror.
  • Publication
    The Consistory and Social Discipline in Calvin's Geneva:
    ( 2020)
    Watt, Jeffrey R.
    Created by John Calvin, the Consistory of Geneva was a quasi-tribunal entrusted with enforcing Reformed morality. Comprised of pastors and elders, this body met weekly and summoned people for a wide range of "sinful" behavior, such as drunkenness, dancing, blasphemy, or simply quarrels, and was a far more intrusive institution than the Catholic Inquisition. Among the thousands summoned during Calvin's ministry were a pair of women who were allegedly prophets, boys who skipped catechism to practice martial arts, and a good number of people begging for forgiveness for having renounced Protestantism out of fear of death. This superbly researched book, reflecting author Jeffrey Watt's career-long involvement in the ongoing project of transcribing, editing, and publishing the Consistory records, is the first comprehensive examination of this morals court and provides a window into the reception of the Reformation in the so-called Protestant Rome. Watt examines the role of the Consistory in upholding patriarchy, showing that while Genevan authorities did not have a double standard in prosecuting illicit sexuality, the Consistory exhorted women to obey even violently abusive husbands. He finds also that Calvin and his colleagues vigorously promoted a strong work ethic by censuring people, mostly men, for laziness, and showed a surprising degree of skepticism toward accusations of witchcraft patterns. Finally, Watt demonstrates convincingly that, while the Consistory encountered some resistance, Genevans by and large shared the ideals it promoted and that it enjoyed considerable success in fostering discipline in Genevan society. JEFFREY R. WATT is the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. This book will be made openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
  • Publication
    Consolidated Gold Fields in Australia: The Rise and Decline of a British Mining House, 1926–1998
    ( 2020)
    Porter, Robert
    Consolidated Gold Fields was a major British mining house founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1892. Diversifying from its South African gold interests, the company invested widely during the following century. This included investments in the Western Australian gold sector from the 1920s and exploration and mining activities elsewhere in Australia and the Territory of New Guinea. In the 1960s, Consolidated Gold Fields Australia (CGFA) was formed. CGFA had ambitious plans and the financial backing from London to establish itself as one of the main diversified mining companies in Australia. Investments were held in the historic Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, in Renison, and it was one of the first groups to develop iron ore deposits in the Pilbara of Western Australia. It also acquired a major interest in mineral sands. While the London-based Consolidated Gold Fields ceased to exist in 1989, taken over and dismembered by renowned corporate raider Hanson Plc, its Australian subsidiary, renamed Renison Goldfields Consolidated (RGC), continued for another nine years as a diversified mining group before it suffered its own corporate demise, facilitated by Hanson. CGFA and RGC were important participants in Australia’s post–World War II mining sector. This book is a history of a once great British mining-finance house and its investments in Australia. Consolidated Gold Fields had a rich and broad history in Australia; its ultimate fate did not demonstrate its potential as an Australian mining company.