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Discussion: Intellectual studies/history (new titles for 2009)
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GregoryKlages |
Intellectual studies/history (new titles for 2009)
Jan 14 2009, 12:03 PM EST
Items in this thread concern intellectual discussions and debates within the United States, and the development of intellectual thought in the United States throughout its history. Reviewers interested in this theme are also recommended to consult other themes that might overlap. NeoAmericanist journal seeks reviewers for all of the items listed in this thread, all of which have been posted in 2009. For more information on becoming a reviewer, please follow the “How to Submit A Review” link to the left.
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GregoryKlages |
1. Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher
Jan 14 2009, 12:06 PM EST
Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a PhilosopherAuthors: Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth 448 pages, 21 halftones 6 x 9 © 2008 University of Chicago Press Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America’s cultural and intellectual life. For more info, reviewers should visit: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=308929 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
2. An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed...
Jan 14 2009, 12:08 PM EST
An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed's "Five Years in an English University"With an Introduction by Christopher Stray and a Foreword by Patrick Leary 448 pages, 6 x 9 © 2008 Paper ISBN: 9780859898256 Published December 2008 For sale in North and South America only Charles Astor Bristed (1820-1874) was the favourite grandson of John Jacob Astor II, of Waldorf-Astoria fame. After gaining a degree at Yale, Bristed entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1840, graduating in 1845. Five Years in an English University, first published in 1852 by Putnam in New York, is a richly detailed account of student life in the Cambridge of the 1840s. The central rationale for the book, which is as appealing today as it was then, is that this is pre-eminently a book about an American student at an English university. The book belongs to a fascinating 19th century trans-Atlantic publishing genre: travel accounts designed to describe British culture to Americans and vice-versa. In this new edition, some substantial additions have been made: the Foreword and Introduction both help to contextualise the work, and point to its significance as an important historical source and as a fascinating memoir of life in Victorian Cambridge; annotation helps to identify the individuals who appear in Bristed’s text; and an index allows full use to be made of the text for the first time. For more info, reviewers should visit: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=324136 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
3. Americanization of Social Science...in the Postwar United States
Jan 19 2009, 10:33 AM EST
The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United StatesAuthor: David Paul Haney 296 pp 6x9 paper EAN: 978-1-59213-714-5 ISBN: 1592137148 Temple University Press A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology's professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline's scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists' capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology's participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1945_reg.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
4. Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America
Feb 11 2009, 7:57 AM EST
The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century AmericaAuthor: Gretchen A. Adams 240 pages, 6 x 9 © 2008 ISBN: 9780226005416 Published January 2009 University of Chicago Press As critics of McCarthyism derided the period’s anti-Communist campaign as a “witch hunt,” the 1950s Broadway drama The Crucible underscored the link between contemporary political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Specter of Salem reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of such associations, actually followed a long and colorful history of appeals to American memories of the witch trials. From the American Revolution through the nineteenth century, Gretchen Adams demonstrates, this collective memory loomed large in public life. Schoolbooks in the 1790s, for example, evoked the episode to demonstrate the new nation’s progress from a disorderly and brutal past to a rational present. Later, in the 1830s, critics of new religious movements cast them as a return to Salem-era fanaticism. And during the Civil War, Southern writers and politicians concocted images of witches burning in seventeenth-century Salem to critique what they saw as the North’s savage extremism. Shedding new light on the many episodes in which Americans have invoked Salem to represent real or imagined threats to a progressive and rational society, Adams ultimately illuminates the function of collective memories in the life of a nation. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=308977 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
5. God--or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age
Feb 11 2009, 8:09 AM EST
God--or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz AgeAuthor: Constance Areson Clark 978-0-8018-8825-0 2008 312 pp. 4 halftones, 28 line drawings Johns Hopkins University Press As scholars debate the most appropriate way to teach evolutionary theory, Constance Clark provides an intriguing reflection on similar debates in the not-too-distant past. Set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, God—or Gorilla explores the efforts of biologists to explain evolution to a confused and conflicted public during the 1920s. Focusing on the use of images and popularization, Clark shows how scientists and anti-evolutionists deployed schematics, cartoons, photographs, sculptures, and paintings to win the battle for public acceptance. She uses representative illustrations and popular media accounts of the struggle to reveal how concepts of evolutionary theory changed as they were presented to, and absorbed into, popular culture. Engagingly written and deftly argued, God—or Gorilla offers original insights into the role of images in communicating—and miscommunicating—scientific ideas to the lay public. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8923.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
7. Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000
Feb 11 2009, 8:17 AM EST
Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000 Authors: Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, and David Lindsay Roberts 978-0-8018-8814-4 2008 440 pp. 81 halftones, 3 line drawings Johns Hopkins University Press From the blackboard to the graphing calculator, the tools developed to teach mathematics in America have a rich history shaped by educational reform, technological innovation, and spirited entrepreneurship. In Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000, Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, and David Lindsay Roberts present the first systematic historical study of the objects used in the American mathematics classroom. They discuss broad tools of presentation and pedagogy (not only blackboards and textbooks, but early twentieth-century standardized tests, teaching machines, and the overhead projector), tools for calculation, and tools for representation and measurement. Engaging and accessible, this volume tells the stories of how specific objects such as protractors, geometric models, slide rules, electronic calculators, and computers came to be used in classrooms, and how some disappeared. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.press-dev.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/9570.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
8. The Cultural Turn in U. S. History: Past, Present, and Future
Mar 5 2009, 9:10 AM EST
The Cultural Turn in U. S. History: Past, Present, and FutureEdited by James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O'Malley 464 pages, 22 halftones 6 x 9 © 2008 University of Chicago Press A definitive account of one of the most dominant trends in recent historical writing, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History takes stock of the field at the same time as it showcases exemplars of its practice. The first of this volume’s three distinct sections offers a comprehensive genealogy of American cultural history, tracing its multifaceted origins, defining debates, and intersections with adjacent fields. The second section comprises previously unpublished essays by a distinguished roster of contributors who illuminate the discipline’s rich potential by plumbing topics that range from nineteenth-century anxieties about greenback dollars to confidence games in 1920s Harlem, from Shirley Temple’s career to the story of a Chicano community in San Diego that created a public park under a local freeway. Featuring an equally wide ranging selection of pieces that meditate on the future of the field, the final section explores such subjects as the different strains of cultural history, its relationships with arenas from mass entertainment to public policy, and the ways it has been shaped by catastrophe. Taken together, these essays represent a watershed moment in the life of a discipline, harnessing its vitality to offer a glimpse of the shape it will take in years to come. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=318165 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
9. C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought
Apr 6 2009, 11:44 AM EDT
Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social ThoughtAuthor: Daniel Geary 296 pages, 6 x 9 inches, April 2009 University of California Press Sociologist, social critic, and political radical C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the leading public intellectuals in twentieth century America. Offering an important new understanding of Mills and the times in which he lived, Radical Ambition challenges the captivating caricature that has prevailed of him as a lone rebel critic of 1950s complacency. Instead, it places Mills within broader trends in American politics, thought, and culture. Indeed, Daniel Geary reveals that Mills shared key assumptions about American society even with those liberal intellectuals who were his primary opponents. The book also sets Mills firmly within the history of American sociology and traces his political trajectory from committed supporter of the Old Left labor movement to influential herald of an international New Left. More than just a biography, Radical Ambition illuminates the career of a brilliant thinker whose life and works illustrate both the promise and the dilemmas of left-wing social thought in the United States. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10339.php Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
10. Notes on Sontag
Apr 13 2009, 10:25 AM EDT
Notes on SontagAuthor: Phillip Lopate Cloth | 2009 | 256 pp. | 4 1/2 x 7 Princeton University Press Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8852.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
11. Negotiating...Selective Colleges and Universities
Apr 27 2009, 9:29 AM EDT
Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and UniversitiesAuthors: Camille Z. Charles, Mary J. Fischer, Margarita A. Mooney & Douglas S. Massey Cloth | 2009 | 320 pp. | 6 x 9 | 13 line illus. 56 tables. Princeton University Press Building on their important findings in The Source of the River, the authors now probe even more deeply into minority underachievement at the college level. Taming the River examines the academic and social dynamics of different ethnic groups during the first two years of college. Focusing on racial differences in academic performance, the book identifies the causes of students' divergent grades and levels of personal satisfaction with their institutions. Using survey data collected from twenty-eight selective colleges and universities, Taming the River considers all facets of student life, including who students date, what fields they major in, which sports they play, and how they perceive their own social and economic backgrounds. The book explores how black and Latino students experience pressures stemming from campus racial climate and "stereotype threat"--when students underperform because of anxieties tied to existing negative stereotypes. Describing the relationship between grade performance and stereotype threat, the book shows how this link is reinforced by institutional practices of affirmative action. The authors also indicate that when certain variables are controlled, minority students earn the same grades, express the same college satisfaction, and remain in school at the same rates as white students. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8892.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
12. Becoming Historians
May 11 2009, 10:04 AM EDT
Becoming HistoriansEdited by James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis 312 pages, 6 x 9 © 2009 University of Chicago Press In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=351750 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
13. Completing College at America's Public Universities
Oct 20 2009, 3:32 PM EDT
Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public UniversitiesAuthors: William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson Cloth | 2009 392 pp. | 6 x 9 | 97 line illus. 9 tables. Princeton University Press Long revered for their dedication to equal opportunity and affordability, public universities play a crucial role in building the United States' human capital. And yet--a sobering fact--less than 60 percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating. Why is this happening and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line, the most important book on higher education to appear since The Shape of the River, provides the most detailed exploration ever of the crisis of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/lists/lt.php?id=YhgHV1NVDVZaSgdQXkVUA1tU Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
14. Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Revised Edition)
Oct 30 2009, 11:28 AM EDT
Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Revised Edition)Susan Neiman A New York Times Notable Book of 2008 2009 | 480 pp. | 6 x 9 Princeton University Press For years, moral language has been the province of the Right, as the Left has consoled itself with rudderless pragmatism. In this profound and powerful book, Susan Neiman reclaims the vocabulary of morality--good and evil, heroism and nobility--as a lingua franca for the twenty-first century. In constructing a framework for taking responsible action on today's urgent questions, Neiman reaches back to the eighteenth century, retrieving a series of values--happiness, reason, reverence, and hope--held high by Enlightenment thinkers. In this thoroughly updated edition, Neiman reflects on how the moral language of the 2008 presidential campaign has opened up new political and cultural possibilities in America and beyond. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9025.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
15. African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
Nov 2 2009, 12:33 PM EST
A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century AmericaAuthor: Stephen G. Hall 352 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index University of North Carolina Press The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans. Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counternarratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1668 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
16. One Hundred Years of Journalism and Mass Communication at Carolina
Nov 2 2009, 12:38 PM EST
Making News: One Hundred Years of Journalism and Mass Communication at CarolinaAuthor: Tom Bowers 296 pp., 6 x 9, 40 illus., appends., notes, index University of North Carolina Press Making News is the story of how the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill grew from a single course in the English department in 1909 to become an international leader in journalism-mass communication education. Bowers tells of strong leaders who shaped the program through their vision and personality, including one dean who was portrayed in a novel and another dean and a faculty member who were featured in newspaper comic strips. It is a story of how North Carolina newspaper editors pressured the university to change the journalism program and threatened to ask Duke University to start a journalism program if UNC did not change its program. It is a story of a dean whose dedication to academic excellence dramatically changed a school that had paid more attention to practical journalism than to academics. It is a story of another dean who transformed the school and raised millions of dollars to support its drive for excellence. The story is enriched by many personalities, including Graham, Graves, Coffin, Luxon, Adams, Cole, McPherson, Ferlinghetti, Spearman, Shumaker, Sechriest, and Morrison. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1675 Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
17. Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life
Nov 27 2009, 2:57 PM EST
No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus LifeAuthors: Thomas J. Espenshade & Alexandria Walton Radford Cloth | 2009 | 576 pp. | 6 x 9 | 55 line illus. 81 tables. e-Book | 2009 Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body? No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact each stage--from application and admission, to enrollment and student life on campus. Arguing that elite higher education contributes to both social mobility and inequality, the authors investigate such areas as admission advantages for minorities, academic achievement gaps tied to race and class, unequal burdens in paying for tuition, and satisfaction with college experiences. The book's analysis is based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience, collected from more than nine thousand students who applied to one of ten selective colleges between the early 1980s and late 1990s. The authors explore the composition of applicant pools, factoring in background and "selective admission enhancement strategies"--including AP classes, test-prep courses, and extracurriculars--to assess how these strengthen applications. On campus, the authors examine roommate choices, friendship circles, and degrees of social interaction, and discover that while students from different racial and class circumstances are not separate in college, they do not mix as much as one might expect. The book encourages greater interaction among student groups and calls on educational institutions to improve access for students of lower socioeconomic status. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9072.html Do you find this valuable? |
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GregoryKlages |
18. Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities
Dec 4 2009, 3:54 PM EST
Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the HumanitiesAuthors: Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen & Sharon M. Brucker Cloth | 2009 | 368 pp. | 6 x 9 | 19 line illus. 64 tables. e-Book | 2009 Despite the worldwide prestige of America's doctoral programs in the humanities, all is not well in this area of higher education and hasn't been for some time. The content of graduate programs has undergone major changes, while high rates of student attrition, long times to degree, and financial burdens prevail. In response, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1991 launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI), the largest effort ever undertaken to improve doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences. The only book to focus exclusively on the current state of doctoral education in the humanities, Educating Scholars reports on the GEI's success in reducing attrition and times to degree, the positive changes implemented by specific graduate programs, and the many challenges still to be addressed. Over a ten-year period, the Foundation devoted almost eighty-five million dollars through the GEI to provide support for doctoral programs and student aid in fifty-four departments at ten leading universities. The authors examine data that tracked the students in these departments and in control departments, as well as information gathered from a retrospective survey of students. They reveal that completion and attrition rates depend upon financial support, the quality of advising, clarity of program requirements, and each department's expectations regarding the dissertation. The authors consider who earns doctoral degrees, what affects students' chances of finishing their programs, and how successful they are at finding academic jobs. For more info, NeoAmericanist reviewers should visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9073.html Do you find this valuable? |
