29 results for "Educational"

The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time

Polanyi, Karl
"In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi tracks the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. He pays particular attention to capitalism's rise and its role in fundamentally altering life after the Industrial Revolution. This seminal analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism"-- Provided by publisher.
Beacon Press 2025-07-08 360 pages

Language City The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Ross Perlin
From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City , Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ("the place where we get bows"), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of "killer languages" like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.
Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated 2025-02-11 432 pages

Second class: how the elite betrayed America's working men and women

Ungar-Sargon, Batya
A personal, journalistic ethnography of the modern American working class, based on the travels and interactions of the author through the American heartland. " Second Class is the most important book you will read all year. A political realignment is coming, and it's my hope that the end result will work in favor of our all-too-neglected American working class. When that realignment comes, Batya and her book will help lead the way." --Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working class who are fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class , working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories--cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives--as well as what policies they think would improve them. Second Class combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinions on America's emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education. America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land, where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? It's not that hard actually. All it would take, as this book illustrates, is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work--and the American worker.
Encounter Books 2025 248 pages

Motherland: a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy

Ioffe, Julia
"Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow-only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up-doctors, engineers, scientists-had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate-and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak-and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women"-- Provided by publisher.
Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers 2025-10 489 pages

The drowned and the saved

Levi, Primo
"In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit."--Publisher description.
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks 2017-06-20 190 pages

Genocide bad: notes on Palestine, Jewish history, and collective liberation

Kern, Sim
"Part activist memoir, part crash course in Jewish and Palestinian history, Genocide Bad dismantles Zionist propaganda and maps a course towards collective liberation in ten unapologetic essays. Drawing connections between Biblical promises and exploding pagers, medieval dress codes and modern-day apartheid, Kern sketches a sweeping history of imperialism with their characteristic blend of far-ranging research, pop-culture insights, and scathing humor. Kern, a former teacher, journalist, novelist, and book influencer, gained international recognition as an anti-Zionist Jewish activist in the days after October 7th, 2023. At a time when social media was flooded with 'I Stand with Israel' posts, Kern started sharing content encouraging their followers to read Palestinian books, learn Palestinian history, and question Western reporting on Palestine--videos which went viral into tens of millions of views. Despite facing hate messages, death threats, and exile from the Zionist Jewish community, Kern has remained steadfast in their advocacy over the past year. They've posted daily videos on Palestinian, Jewish, and colonial history, and they've raised over $500,000 in direct aid for families in Gaza--all while navigating the challenges of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting a newborn. In Genocide Bad, Kern reflects on the life experiences that led them to anti-Zionist activism, while capturing and expanding upon their online educational content. Kern doesn't flinch when confronting the horrors of genocides past and present, but there is also tremendous hope contained in these pages--hope that springs from examples of courage and resilience in the face of extreme violence, and from the kinds of resistance that might just lead to our collective liberation."--
Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc 2025 241 pages

They Who Knock at Our Gates A Complete Gospel of Immigration

Mary Antin
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2022-10-27 160 pages

Each Mind A Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, And The New Thought Movement, 1875-1920

Satter, Beryl
The New Thought Movement was an enormously popular late nineteenth-century spiritual movement led largely by and for women. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science is but one example of the fascinating range of these groups, which advocated a belief in mind over matter and espoused women's spiritual ability to purify the world. This work is the first to uncover the cultural implications of New Thought, embedding it in the intellectual traditions of nineteenth-century America, and illuminating its connections with the self-help and New Age enthusiasms of our own fin-de-siècle. Beryl Satter examines New Thought in all its complexity, presenting along the way a captivating cast of characters. In lively and accessible prose, she introduces the people, the institutions, the texts, and the ideas that comprised the New Thought movement. This fascinating social and intellectual history explores the complex relationships among social reform, alternative religion, medicine, and psychology which persist to this day.
Diane Pub Co 2004-04 382 pages

Democracy

Carl Cohen
The government of any community by the members of that community is widely praised and almost universally agreed to be the best of governmental forms. But it is not so well or so deeply understood as it ought to be. This book, DEMOCRACY, is a thorough analytical account of the philosophy of democracy, in six Parts. Part One is a discussion of the nature of democracy -- what it is, and what it is not. Democracy is government through the participation of its members or citizens. Understanding its nature fully requires an understanding of the several dimensions of participation: its breadth, its depth, and its range. Part Two explains the presuppositions of democracy. Some underlying community, and the recognition of that community by its members, is presupposed, as is also a membership exhibiting a substantial degree of rationality. Part Three analyzes the instruments of democracy. Agreed upon decision-making rules is a primary instrument. Majority rule, having many variations, is only one such rule, and there are likely to be different rules for decisions of different kinds. Equally essential in almost every democracy is some representative system, since direct democracy is feasible only in limited contexts. Part Four gives a lengthy account of the conditions of democracy -- the circumstances that must be realized if democracy is to succeed. Five kinds of conditions are analyzed. (1) The material conditions of democracy are critical. These include the environment in which democracy can thrive, the mechanical needs of an electoral system, and most important, the economic conditions of democracy. (2) The constitutional conditions of democracy protect the rights that citizens in a democracy must be free to exercise. Freedom is not identical with democracy, but is required by it. Most critical is the right to speak, criticize, and publish freely. (3) The intellectual conditions of democracy concern the capacity of the citizens to understand the issues they will confront. Even the most rational citizens must receive the education that self-government requires. (4) The psychological conditions of democracy -- the spirit of criticism and self-confidence, the willingness compromise and to accept electoral defeat, the realism and flexibility that the complexities of politics require, are all conditions without which democracy cannot succeed. (5) The protective conditions of democracy are made necessary by the reality of serious threats, external and internal. Democracies must be prepared to defend themselves in war, but must keep military institutions under control. Those who would undermine the democracy from within, even if inadvertently, must be defended against without vitiating rights that democratic citizens must enjoy. Part Five deals with the intellectual defense of democracy. Over the long run democracy is vindicated by the freedoms and other social circumstances it tends to promote. Democracy tends to produce just laws and a loyal citizenry, as well as encourage the peaceful resolution of disputes. More deeply, democracy is justified by a full understanding of its moral foundation, the fundamental equality of its members. The only system of government that can recognize this equality concretely is the one that gives to each community member the right to an equal voice in its direction. Part Six addresses the prospects of democracy over the near and long term future. In most of the nations of the world, but not all of them, the prospects for democracy over the near term are good. But over the long term increasing population and the increasing difficulty of maintaining the conditions of democracy render its prospects much less promising. Increasing material inequalities, and above all increasing educational and intellectual inequalities, make it probable that over most of the globe democracy is not likely to meet with lasting success.
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library 2013 318 pages

Time maps

Zerubavel, Eviatar
" 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.
University of Chicago Press 2003 180 pages

The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto

Hal Draper
Few documents have had more of an impact on the course of history as has the Communist Manifesto. From its famous opening lines--"A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism"--to its final rallying cry--"Workers of the world unite!"--the words of Marx and Engels have moved millions to join in the struggle against capitalism. But they have also inspired a legion of critics, detractors, and even a few despots to intentionally distort their meanings so as to sow confusion and justify untold horrors. According to Hal Draper, these mis-readings have, in part, been made possible by the enduring prevalence of translations from the original German that fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of certain key phrases. In this magisterial volume, Draper assembles the original German text, the first English translation, the officially authorized English translation--providing enlightening commentary throughout--as well as his own new translation of the pamphlet.
Haymarket Books 2019-12-03 366 pages

A history of the Jews in the English-speaking world: Great Britain

Rubinstein, W. D.
Deals also with British antisemitism from Cromwell's time to the present. There were objections against the admission of Jews to England in 1655, as well as attempts to restrict their rights in the 17th-18th centuries. Discusses pre-World War I antisemitic writers (e.g. G.K. Chesterton, H. Belloc) and the eugenics movement. Racial antisemitism was almost non-existent before 1914. Antisemitism reached a peak in Britain in 1917-22, but it was milder than in other Western countries. Relates, also, to left-wing antisemitism between the two World Wars. Ch. 3 (pp. 280-363), "Anglo-Jewry and the Holocaust, 1933-1945", deals with the reactions of Jews and non-Jews to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism aroused revulsion in British society, even among conservatives and pro-Germans. States that Britain did more for refugees from Germany than any other country. British Jewry did all it could to rescue Jews to the extent that it understood their situation. During the war and the hostilities in the Middle East, there was an upsurge of antisemitism in the country but it receded in the 1950s. Contends that antisemitism in Britain was always a marginal phenomenon.
Macmillan 1996 539 pages

The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks

Hugo Blümner,Alice Zimmern
Step back in time and explore the fascinating world of ancient Greece through "The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks" by H. Blümner. This detailed study offers a captivating glimpse into the daily routines, social structures, and customs that shaped the lives of people in ancient Greece up to 146 B.C. Delve into the nuances of domestic life, uncovering the traditions and practices that governed households. From social interactions to the intricacies of daily existence, this book provides a comprehensive overview of a bygone era. Discover the unique aspects of ancient Greek culture, meticulously researched and presented. A valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient history, social customs, and the rich tapestry of life in ancient Greece. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2025-03-29 376 pages

The Performer Art, Life, Politics

Richard Sennett
An acclaimed sociologist's exploration of the connections among performances in life, art, and politics "A thought-provoking, essayistic and touchingly personal exploration of the ethics and aesthetics of performance from one of the leading intellectuals of our time."--Lucasta Miller, The Spectator , "Best Books of 2024" "Constantly fascinating and often illuminating."--Simon Callow, New York Review of Books In The Performer , Richard Sennett explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics, and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.
Yale University Press 2025-10-28 256 pages

"Nazi fantasy": Vilém Flusser and history as site of experiment

Morris-Reich, Amos
"This book brings together Vilém Flusser and intellectual Jewish history of the second half of the twentieth century. Flusser is viewed today by many scholars as the most original theoretician of media and photography in the second half of the twentieth century, and yet this is the first monograph about him in English. Combining elements of Flusser's biography with a rigorous study of his writing, this book shows that concepts of 'virtuality', 'medium', and 'embodiment' underpin not only Flusser's understanding of technological media, such as photography, but also his understanding of evolution and of real or imaginary biological organisms. This book argues that Flusser contended with Nazism in his writings on these biological and ecological themes. Two threads - and their relationship - are explored: the first bears on Nazism as undergirded by a biological perspective - an attempt to eradicate a population taken to be parasitic; in the second, Nazism is simply viewed as 'stupid'. Such a line of inquiry necessarily leads to and includes our dealing with the 'Nazi fantasy', because fantasy was fused into Nazism's own vision. This book will not only be an ideal resource for students and scholars of intellectual Jewish history but will interest anyone seeking an introduction to Flusser and the philosophy of science within the context of Nazism"--
Routledge 2025 138 pages