At a time when the human impact on the environment is more devastating than ever, business initiatives frame the quest to «green» capitalism as the key to humanity's long-term survival. Indeed, even before the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, businesses sometimes had reasons to protect parts of nature, limit their production of wastes, and support broader environmental reforms. In the last thirty years, especially, many businesses have worked hard to reduce their direct and indirect environmental footprint. But are these efforts exceptional, or can capitalism truly be environmentally conscious? Green Capitalism? offers a critical, historically informed perspective on building a more sustainable economy. Written by scholars of business history and environmental history, the essays in this volume consider the nature of capitalism through historical overviews of twentieth-century businesses and a wide range of focused case studies. Beginning early in the century, contributors explore the response of business leaders to environmental challenges in an era long before the formation of the modern regulatory state. Moving on to midcentury environmental initiatives, scholars analyze failed business efforts to green products and packaging—such as the infamous six-pack ring—in the 1960s and 1970s. The last section contains case studies of businesses that successfully managed greening initiatives, from the first effort by an electric utility to promote conservation, to the environmental overhaul of a Swedish mining company, to the problem of household waste in pre-1990 West Germany. Ranging in geographic scope from Europe to the United States, Green Capitalism? raises questions about capitalism in different historical, sociocultural, and political contexts. Contributors: Hartmut Berghoff, Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Brian C. Black, William D. Bryan, Julie Cohn, Leif Fredrickson, Hugh S. Gorman, Geoffrey Jones, David Kinkela, Roman Köster, Joseph A. Pratt, Adam Rome, Christine Meisner Rosen.
Over the past seven decades, human rights education has blossomed into a global movement. A field of scholarship that utilizes teaching and learning processes, human rights education addresses basic rights and broadens the respect for the dignity and freedom of all peoples. Since the founding of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights education has worked toward ensuring that schools and non-formal educational spaces become sites of promise and equity. Bringing together the voices of leaders and researchers deeply engaged in understanding the politics and possibilities of human rights education as a field of inquiry, Monisha Bajaj's Human Rights Education shapes our understanding of the practices and processes of the discipline and demonstrates the ways in which it has evolved into a meaningful constellation of scholarship, policy, curricular reform, and pedagogy. Contributions by pioneers in the field, as well as emerging scholars, constitute this foundational textbook, which charts the field's rise, outlines its conceptual frameworks and models, and offers case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. The volume analyzes how human rights education has been locally tailored to diverse contexts and looks at the tensions and triumphs of such efforts. Historicizing human rights education while offering concrete grounding for those who seek entry into this dynamic field of scholarship and practice, Human Rights Education is essential reading for students, educators, researchers, advocates, activists, practitioners, and policy makers. Contributors : Monisha Bajaj, Ben Cislaghi, Nancy Flowers, Melissa Leigh Gibson, Diane Gillespie, Carl A. Grant, Tracey Holland, Megan Jensen, Peter G. Kirchschlaeger, Gerald Mackie, J. Paul Martin, Sam Mejias, Chrissie Monaghan, Audrey Osler, Oren Pizmony-Levy, Susan Garnett Russell, Carol Anne Spreen, David Suárez, Felisa Tibbitts, Rachel Wahl, Chalank Yahya, Michalinos Zembylas.
The Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school , for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives. In this election year, as Americans debate issues like immigration, crime, mass incarceration, policing, and welfare reform, and express concerns over increasing inequality, tax policy, and divisions by race, sex, and class, «SP2,» as the school is colloquially known, offers its expertise in addressing the pressing matters of our day. The practical solutions on offer in this volume showcase the judgment and commitment of the school's scholars and practitioners, working to change politics from blood sport to common undertakings. Contributors: Cindy W. Christian, Cynthia A. Connolly, Dennis Culhane, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Malitta Engstrom, Kara Finck, Nancy Franke, Antonio Garcia, Toorjo Ghose, Johanna Greeson, Chao Guo, David Hemenway, Amy Hillier, Roberta Iversen, Alexandra Schepens, Phyllis Solomon, Susan B. Sorenson, Mark Stern, Allison Thompson, Debra Schilling Wolfe.
The Pre-Columbian Maya were organized into a series of independent kingdoms or polities rather than unified into a single state. The vast majority of studies of Maya states focus on the apogee of their development in the classic period, ca. 250-850 C.E. As a result, Maya states are defined according to the specific political structures that characterized classic period lowland Maya society. The Origins of Maya States is the first study in over 30 years to examine the origins and development of these states specifically during the preceding preclassic period, ca. 1000 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. Attempts to understand the origins of Maya states cannot escape the limitations of archaeological data, and this is complicated by both the variability of Maya states in time and space and the interplay between internal development and external impacts. To mitigate these factors, editors Loa P. Traxler and Robert J. Sharer assemble a collection of essays that combines an examination of topical issues with regional perspectives from both the Maya area and neighboring Mesoamerican regions to highlight the role of interregional interaction in the evolution of Maya states. Topics covered include material signatures for the development of Maya states, evaluations of extant models for the emergence of Maya states, and advancement of new models based on recent archaeological data. Contributors address the development of complexity during the preclassic era within the Maya regions of the Pacific coast, highlands, and lowlands and explore preclassic economic, social, political, and ideological systems that provide a developmental context for the origins of Maya states. Contributors: Marcello A. Canuto, John E. Clark, Ann Cyphers, Francisco Estrada-Belli, David C. Grove, Norman Hammond, Richard D. Hansen, Eleanor King, Michael Love, Simon Martin, Astrid Runggaldier, Robert Sharer, Loa Traxler.
The American Revolution conjures a series of iconographic images in the contemporary American imagination. In these imagined scenes, defiant Patriots fight against British Redcoats for freedom and democracy, while a unified citizenry rallies behind them and the American cause. But the lived experience of the Revolution was a more complex matter, filled with uncertainty, fear, and discord. In The American Revolution Reborn , editors Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman compile essays from a new generation of multidisciplinary scholars that render the American Revolution as a time of intense ambiguity and frightening contingency. The American Revolution Reborn parts company with the Revolution of our popular imagination and diverges from the work done by historians of the era from the past half-century. In the first section, «Civil Wars,» contributors rethink the heroic terms of Revolutionary-era allegiance and refute the idea of patriotic consensus. In the following section, «Wider Horizons,» essayists destabilize the historiographical inevitability of America as a nation. The studies gathered in the third section, «New Directions,» present new possibilities for scholarship on the American Revolution. And the last section, titled «Legacies,» collects essays that deal with the long afterlife of the Revolution and its effects on immigration, geography, and international politics. With an introduction by Spero and a conclusion by Zuckerman, this volume heralds a substantial and revelatory rebirth in the study of the American Revolution. Contributors: Zara Anishanslin, Mark Boonshoft, Denver Brunsman, Katherine Carté Engel, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Travis Glasson, Edward G. Gray, David C. Hsiung, Ned C. Landsman, Michael A. McDonnell, Kimberly Nath, Bryan Rosenblithe, David S. Shields, Patrick Spero, Matthew Spooner, Aaron Sullivan, Michael Zuckerman.
Recent events—the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others—have driven a tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public universities in the postwar period, and from business opposition to the Vietnam War to the corporate embrace of civil rights, the contributors reveal an often surprising portrait of the nation's economic elite. Contrary to popular mythology, business leaders have not always been libertarian or rigidly devoted to market fundamentalism. Before, during, and after the New Deal, important parts of the business world sought instead to try to shape what the state could accomplish and to make sure that government grew in ways that were favorable to them. Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, these essays highlight the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscore the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century—and today. Contributors : Daniel Amsterdam, Brent Cebul, Jennifer Delton, Tami Friedman, Eric Hintz, Richard R. John, Pamela Walker Laird, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Eric Smith, Jason Scott Smith, Mark R. Wilson.
"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the nineteenth century—the century when, it has been said, sexuality as such (and various taxonomized sexual identities) were invented—is the period when American short stories were invented, and when they were the queerest."—Christopher Looby, from the Introduction A man in small-town America wears the clothing of his wife and sisters; satisfied at last that he has «a perfect suit of garments appropriate for my sex,» he commits suicide, asking only that he be buried dressed as a woman. A country maid has a passionate summer relationship with an heiress, the memory of which sustains her for the next forty years. A girl is carried by a strong wind to a place where she discovers that everything is made of candy, including the «queer people,» whom she licks and eats. If these are not the kinds of stories we expect to find in nineteenth-century American literature, it is perhaps because we have been looking in the wrong places. The stories gathered here are written by a diverse assortment of writers—women and men, obscure and famous: Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Louisa May Alcott, among others. Exploring the vagaries of gender identity, erotic desire, and affectional attachments that do not map easily onto present categories of sex and gender, they celebrate, mourn, and question the different modes of embodiment and forgotten styles of pleasure of nineteenth-century America.
In the third millennium B.C.E., the Oman Peninsula was the site of an important kingdom known in Akkadian texts as «Magan,» which traded extensively with the Indus Civilization, southern Iran, the Persian Gulf states, and southern Mesopotamia. Excavations have been carried out in this region since the 1970s, although the majority of studies have focused on mortuary monuments at the expense of settlement archaeology. While domestic structures of the Bronze Age have been found and are the focus of current research at Bat, most settlements dating from the third millennium B.C.E. in Oman and the U.A.E. are defined by the presence of large, circular monuments made of mudbrick or stone that are traditionally called «towers.» Whether these so-called towers are defensive, agricultural, political, or ritual structures has long been debated, but very few comprehensive studies of these monuments have been attempted. Between 2007 and 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology conducted excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman under the direction of the late Gregory L. Possehl. The focus of these years was on the monumental stone towers of the third millennium B.C.E., looking at the when, how, and why of their construction through large-scale excavation, GIS-aided survey, and the application of radiocarbon dates. This has been the most comprehensive study of nonmortuary Bronze Age monuments ever conducted on the Oman Peninsula, and the results provide new insight into the formation and function of these impressive structures that surely formed the social and political nexus of Magan's kingdom.
In the fall of 2008, the world watched in horror as the U.S. housing finance system shattered, triggering a global financial panic and ultimately the Great Recession. Now, nearly a decade later, the long and slow housing recovery has reached a critical moment. Though the housing finance system has stabilized, it remains in the hands of the federal government, leaving taxpayers exposed to the credit risk while private funding remains mostly on the sidelines. Principles of Housing Finance Reform identifies the changes necessary to modernize the housing finance system, identifying guiding principles that should underlie a rebuilt system. Contributors to the volume set out a wealth of innovative solutions that are possible within this framework, presenting proposals for long-term structural reforms that would infuse new life into the U.S. housing finance system while enhancing long-term stability. Nearly a decade after the inception of the Great Recession, reform proposals have arisen across the political spectrum. This is a moment of opportunity for rebuilding a key sector of the U.S. economy. The research in this volume represents the best thinking of policy researchers and economic experts on the challenges that lie ahead and provides a roadmap for reforms to create a system characterized by liquidity, stability, access, and sustainability. Contributors: W. Scott Frame, Meghan Grant, John Griffith, Diana Hancock, Stephanie Heller, Akash Kanojia, Patricia C. Mosser, Kevin A. Park, Wayne Passmore, Roberto G. Quercia, David Scharfstein, Phillip Swagel, Joseph Tracy, Susan M. Wachter, Dale A. Whitman, Mark A. Willis, Joshua Wright.
Hope is an integral part of social life. Yet, hope has not been studied systematically in the social sciences. Editors Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg have collected essays that investigate hope in a broad range of socioeconomic situations and phenomena across time and space and from a variety of disciplinary vantage points. Contributors survey the resilience of hope, and the methodological implications of studying hope, in such experiences as farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan's neoliberal reform during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the dynamics of innovation and replication in a West African niche economy, and Barack Obama's 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis. The Economy of Hope shifts the analytic of anthropological and sociological investigations from knowledge to hope, presents case studies on the loss of collective hope, and concludes by offering techniques for replicating hope. In the hands of Miyazaki and Swedberg and their distinguished contributors, hope becomes not only a method of knowledge but also an essential framework for the sociocultural analysis of economic phenomena. Contributors: Yuji Genda, Jane Guyer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Annelise Riles, Richard Swedberg, Katherine Verdery.