one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal

    Professor Gellner asserts here that a society's affluence and economic growth depend on innovation, occupational mobility, the effectiveness of the mass media, universal literacy, and an all-embracing educational system based on a shared, standard idiom. These factors, taken together, govern the relationship between culture and the state. Political units that do not conform to the principle, one state, one culture feel the strain in the form of nationalistic activity.

    Fully updated and now in two colour, the text is accessible and well structured with numerous real life examples and student learning aids. The text is also accompanied by a fully comprehensive companion web site.

    Portraits of 'the Whiteman': linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache investigates a complex form of joking in which Apaches stage carefully crafted imitations of Anglo-Americans and, by means of these characterizations, give audible voice and visible substance to their conceptions of this most pressing of social 'problems'. Keith Basso's essay, based on linguistic and ethnographic materials collected in Cibecue, a Western Apache community, provides interpretations of selected joking encounters to demonstrate how Apaches go about making sense of the behaviour of Anglo-Americans. This study draws on theory in symbolic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the dramaturgical model of human communication developed by Erving Goffman. Although the assumptions and premises that shape these areas of inquiry are held by some to be quite disparate, this analysis shows them to be fully compatible and mutually complementary.

    Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out--but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.In stories both humorous and touching, Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students' discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.

    With expanded coverage of ethics, analysis processes, and approaches, authors Catherine Marshall and Gretchen B. Rossman, have updated this highly popular text to reflect the advances and challenges presented by provocative developments and new applications since the previous edition.

    McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA). These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now ′mainstreamed′ in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed.McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies.These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including- the UK government′s ′new sexual contract′ to young women,- popular TV makeover programmes,- feminist theories of backlash and the ′undoing′ of sexual politics,- feminism in a global frame- the ′illegible rage′ underlying contemporary femininities.

    An examination of the structure of the thought of primitive' peoples, and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the way the human mind works.

    The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain because in many cases they were achieved by using firearms against spears. Alfred Crosby, however, explains that the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. Now in a new edition with a new preface, Crosby revisits his classic work and again evaluates the ecological reasons for European expansion. Alfred W. Crosby is the author of the widely popular and ground-breaking books, The Measure of Reality (Cambridge, 1996), and America's Forgotten Pandemic (Cambridge, 1990). His books have received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Medical Writers Association Prize and been named by the Los Angeles Times as among the best books of the year. He taught at the University of Texas, Austin for over 20 years. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-32009-7 First Edition Pb (1987): 0-521-33613-

    Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today.

    Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life-and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of affordances from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms-wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks-have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

    In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.

    First published in English by Duquesne in 1969, this has become one of the classics of modern philosophy. Fully indexed.

    Using well-chosen examples, insightful commentaries, and an engaging writing style, this text traces the development of jazz, blues, country, rock, Motown, hip-hop, and other popular styles, highlighting the contributions of diverse groups to the creation of distinctly American styles. It combines an in-depth treatment of the music itself--including discussions of stylistic elements and analyses of musical examples--with solid coverage of the music's attendant historical, social, and cultural circumstances. The authors incorporate strong pedagogy including numerous boxed inserts on significant individuals, recordings, and intriguing topics; coverage of early American popular music; and a rich illustration program. Detailed listening charts explain the most important elements of recordings discussed at length in the text. The charts are complemented by two in-text audio CDs and--new to this edition--an iMix published at iTunes, which makes most of the songs immediately available to students and instructors. Features of the Second Edition * Integrates full color throughout * Provides more coverage of women artists, with new material on women in rock 'n' roll in Chapter 8 and a box on Queen Latifah in Chapter 14 * Reorganizes the discussion of post-1970s music: disco is now included with mainstream 70s pop, while hip-hop is treated in two chapters (12 and 14) in order to emphasize its significance and diversity * Adds new material on the recent alternative country music explosion * Includes new developments in music technology in the thoroughly revised concluding chapter * Offers revised and more vivid visual elements, including more than 100 new photos (most in full color) and an illustrated timeline * Provides redesigned listening guides, enhanced by an iMix published at iTunes (accessible at www.oup.com/us/popmusic) * Supplemented by a Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/popmusic (containing both student and instructor resources) and an Instructor's Manual and a Computerized Test Bank on CD * FREE with the purchase of this book: a 6-month subscription to Grove Music Online (www.grovemusic.com)--a $180 value Remarkably accessible, American Popular Music, Second Edition, is ideal for courses in American Popular Music, the History of Popular Music, Popular Music in American Culture, and the History of Rock 'n' Roll. Its welcoming style and warm tone will captivate readers, encouraging them to become more critically aware listeners of popular music.

    These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism — and certain minority group rights in particular — make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world's leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate.Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government's giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives' own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened.In reply, some respondents reject Okin's position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin's focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays — expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions — are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today.The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir.