This enthralling book begins in the vast forests of Cyprus, whose wood fuelled the ancient Mediterranean, and extends through the Elizabethan era, in which the Hostmen guild of Newcastle exerted political influence by monopolizing the British coal supply. The central thread of this well-researched book, which draws upon a vast array of archival sources and an extensive list of secondary texts, picks up centuries later with the competition in the American automotive market between electric power and oil-fuelled internal combustion. The definitive blow in favour of oil comes with WWI, which prompted increased demand for gas-powered vehicles at the very moment Thomas Edison and Henry Ford aborted plans to develop an affordable electric car. The decades-long "General Motors conspiracy" solidifies the demise of electrically powered mass transit in American cities. Through it all, the author manages to keep this complex history compelling. By the time the author makes his final, impassioned plea for a bold new solution to the world's energy crisis, he has already made his case with devastating clarity.

Examines the problems and possibilities facing the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, from the threat of nuclear war and the military's strategic thinking, to the interplay of politics, personality, and history

This is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century. David Rieff has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.

In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats. You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity, David Rothkopf offers an entirely new perspective into the hidden struggles, the surprising triumphs, and the shocking failures of those charged with leading the United States through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Thanks to his extraordinary access, Rothkopf provides fresh insights drawing on more than one hundred exclusive interviews with the key players who shaped this era. At its core, National Insecurity is the gripping story of a superpower in crisis, seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing world, sometimes showing inspiring resilience -- but often undone by the human flaws of those at the top, the mismanagement of its own system, the temptation to concentrate too much power within the hands of too few in the White House itself, and an unwillingness to draw the right lessons from the recent past. Nonetheless, within that story are unmistakable clues to a way forward that can help restore American leadership.

Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things—coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation." Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch." Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father .

Looks at the relationship between power and sex, using history and literature to explore the trophy wife, the harem, the political marriage, and other evidence of a link between these two forces.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren’t straightforwardly opposing forces. In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an “informal empire” promoting free trade and capital movements. Through a powerful historical survey, they show how the US has superintended the restructuring of other states in favor of competitive markets and coordinated the management of increasingly frequent financial crises. The Making of Global Capitalism , through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.

" Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history. It is a brilliant and elegant exercise in model building that provides new insights into some of the old questions about philosophy of history, historical narrative, and what is called straight history."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps , we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of our collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past in our minds and the mental strategies that help us string together unrelated events into coherent and meaningful narratives, as well as the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, from Columbus to Lucy, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most people think the Roman Empire ended in 476, even though it lasted another 977 years in Byzantium. Challenging such conventional wisdom, Time Maps will be must reading for anyone interested in how the history of our world takes shape.

This Oxford Handbook offers a broad critical survey of the development of phenomenology, one of the main streams of philosophy since the nineteenth century. It comprises thirty-seven specially written chapters by leading figures in the field, which highlight historical influences, connections and developments, and offer a better comprehension and assessment of the continuity as well as diversity of the phenomenological tradition. The handbook is divided into three distinct parts. The first part addresses the way phenomenology has been influenced by earlier periods or figures in the history of philosophy. The second part contains chapters targeting prominent phenomenologists: How was their work affected by earlier figures, how did their own views change over time, and what kind of influence did they exert on subsequent thinkers? The contributions in the third part trace various core topics such as subjectivity, intersubjectivity, embodiment, spatiality, imagination etc. in the work of different phenomenologists, in order to explore how the notions were transformed, enriched, and expanded up through the century. This volume will be a source of insight for philosophers, students of philosophy, and for people working in other disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, who are interested in the phenomenological tradition. It is an authoritative guide to how phenomenology started, how it developed, and where it is heading.

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this latest book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal to take. Words and Life offers a sweeping account of the sources of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present, and of why some of those problems are not going to go away As the first four part tides in the volume-"The Return of Aristotle," "The Legacy of Logical Positivism," "The Inheritance of Pragmatism," and "Essays after Wittgenstein"-suggest, many of the essays are concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history of these problems. The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of continuing interest in certain past approaches to them. Various supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances, while there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle's, Peirce's, Dewey's, and Reichenbach's work on some of the problems that continue to exercise us. A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism, scientism, and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be obstacles to philosophical progress. The titles of the final three parts of the volume-Truth and Reference," "Mind and Language," and "The Diversity of the Sciences-indicate that the sweep of the problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of contemporary analytic philosophy Rich in detail, the book is also grand in scope, allowing us to trace the ongoing intellectual evolution of one of the most significant philosophers of the century.

Collects more than thirty previously published essays on a diverse range of topics, including food habits, art, politics, history, and travel.

Explores the psychology of victims and oppressors. Discusses the victimization of Jews, especially Jewish women. Ch. 2 (pp. 16-34), "Jew-Hate/Woman-Hate", discusses hatred of Jews in general, and that of women, including Jewish women specifically; Jewish self-hatred is included. Ch. 3 (pp. 35-58), "Pogrom/Rape", discusses some of the main pogroms in modern history, elucidating psychological aspects of both victim and perpetrator, and how rape was often a feature of anti-Jewish pogroms. Ch. 7 (pp. 133-170), "Hate Literature/Pornography", discusses antisemitic writings throughout history, but mainly in the 19th-20th centuries, and the dehumanization of Jews, including by the Nazis, who abused Jewish and non-Jewish women sexually, both bodily and via language and images. Argues, also, that Israeli men oppress Palestinians as a reaction to the history of oppression of Jews.

During the Soviet years, Russian science was touted as one of the greatest successes of the regime. Russian science was considered to be equal, if not superior, to that of the wealthy western nations. The Perversion of Knowledge, a history of Soviet science that focuses on its control by the KGB and the Communist Party, reveals the dark side of this glittering achievement. Based on the author's firsthand experience as a Soviet scientist, and drawing on extensive Russian language sources not easily available to the Western reader, the book includes shocking new information on biomedical experimentation on humans as well as an examination of the pernicious effects of Trofim Lysenko's pseudo-biology. Also included are many poignant case histories of those who collaborated and those who managed to resist, focusing on the moral choices and consequences. The text is accompanied by the author's own translations of key archival materials, making this work an essential resource for all those with a serious interest in Russian history.

"This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century"--

"Science is often thought of as a methodical but dull activity. But the finest science, the breakthroughs most admired and respected by scientists themselves, is characterized by elegance." "What does elegance mean in the context of science? Economy is a considerable part of it; creativity too. Sometimes, a suggested solution is so simple and neat that it elicits an exclamation of wonder from the observer. The greatest science, whether primarily theoretical or experimental, reflects a creative imagination." "In this book, the distinguished physiologist and writer Ian Glynn explores some of the finest examples of elegance in science: the delightful simplicity of the laws discovered by Kepler and Newton in the motion of the planets; Galileo's experiments with an inclined plane; the remarkable work of Thomas Young on light; dazzling insights into the counterintuitive workings of our perception demonstrated by Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran; and the several breakthroughs that led to Crick and Watson's unravelling of the structure and function of DNA. The result is a fascinating tour through some of the most important episodes in the history of science."--BOOK JACKET.

Once upon a time 'The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as 'the master narrative' serves rather as a strait-jacket - so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Floris Cohen now comes up with precisely such a replacement. Key to his path-breaking analysis-cum-narrative is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years' duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome --

What is good science? What goal--if any--is the proper end of scientific activity? Is there a legitimating authority that scientists mayclaim? Howserious athreat are the anti-science movements? These questions have long been debated but, as Gerald Holton points out, every era must offer its own responses. This book examines these questions not in the abstract but shows their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies of this century. Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific thematathat he has pioneered, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on twentiethcentury physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengier over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be "complete." In a masterful final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the "anti-science phenomenon," the increasingly common opposition to science as practiced today. He approaches this contentious issue by examining the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as well as those of its opponents-the critics of "establishment science" (including even those who fear that science threatens to overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of "alternative science" (Creationists, New Age "healers," astrologers). Through it all runs the thread of the author's deep historical knowledge and his humanistic understanding of science in modern culture. Science and Anti-Science will be of great interest not only to scientists and scholars in the field of science studies but also to educators, policymalcers, and all those who wish to gain a fuller understanding of challenges to and doubts about the role of science in our lives today.

Known to physicists as the "miracle year," 1932 saw the discovery of the neutron and the first artificially induced nuclear transmutation. However, while physicists celebrated these momentous discoveries--which presaged the era of big science and nuclearbombs--Europe was moving inexorably toward totalitarianism and war. In April of that year, about forty of the world's leading physicists--including Werner Heisenberg, Lise Meitner, and Paul Dirac--came to Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Institute for their annual informal meeting about the frontiers of physics. Physicist Gino Segráe brings to life this historic gathering, which ended with a humorous skit based on Goethe's Faust--little knowing the Faustian bargains they would face in the near future. Capturing the interplay between the great scientists as well as the discoveries they discussed and debated, Segráe evokes the moment when physics--and the world--was about to lose its innocence.--From publisher description.

A protean look at the science establishment-as well as the personalities behind the scenes-in such fields as behavioral psychology, linguistics, and economics.

This provocative new collection of essays by a Pulitzer Prize winner deals with the challenging themes of discovery and surprise in history. Cleopatra's Nose is not a miscellany but rather a selection of recent essays illustrating specific subjects that have preoccupied Boorstin for several decades. Tantalizing themes all: How sometimes discovery only increases our ignorance. What were the specific historical opportunities in the New World? How has the fourth kingdom - the kingdom of machines - contradicted Darwinian expectations, contributed to a confusion of statistics, created the need for the unnecessary, and highlighted the paradoxes of science and the politics of common sense? In a "personal postscript," Boorstin gives us a memorable and affectionate portrait of his father and optimistically celebrates the United States as the Land of the Unexpected.