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Of ashes and dust
\"He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. -- Job 30:19 (NKJV) Jim Robbins is a dead man, and he knows it. He's fought Yankee and Pawnee, fought for the love of two very different women, fought for his very survival. Now, as the scenes of his life flash before him, his greatest struggle is about to begin. Wounded in a railroad explosion, Jim reviews those moments that shaped him. From the inequities of the Antebellum South, to the horrors of the American Civil War, to the juggernaut of westward expansion, he played his part in the events that forged a nation -- and not always for the better. In his debut novel, Marc Graham explores what it is that defines a life. Is there meaning and purpose, or is it all just a series of accidents? Is a man simply the victim of circumstance, or maker of his own destiny? Perhaps most important, do his choices and actions survive him, or is his life but a stirring of ashes and dust?\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Theorizing the Restlessness of Events
This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative speech acts, the demonstrative orientational specifications, and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations. The features of political semiosis structure the flow of historical events by managing the specific media and generic forms that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11 illuminates this approach's capabilities. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
Fat nation : a history of obesity in America
The diet and weight-loss industry is worth $66 billion – billion!! The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illness are 190 billion or nearly 21% of annual medical spending in the United States. But how did we get here? Is this a battle we can't win? What changes need to be made in order to scale back the incidence of obesity in the US, and, indeed, around the world? Here, Jonathan Engel reviews the sources of the problem and offers the science behind our modern propensity toward obesity. He offers a plan for helping address the problem, but admits that it is, indeed, an uphill battle. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of the costs in years of life and vigor lost, it is a battle worth fighting.
Fat Nation is a social history of obesity in the United States since the second World War. In confronting this familiar topic from a historical perspective, Jonathan Engel attempts to show that obesity is a symptom of complex changes that have transpired over the past half century to our food, our living habits, our life patterns, our built environments, and our social interactions. He offers readers solid grounding in the known science underlying obesity (genetic set points, complex endocrine feedback loops, neurochemical messengering) but then makes the novel argument that obesity is a result of the interaction of our genes with our environment. That is, our bodies have always been programmed to become obese, but until recently never had the opportunity to do so. Now, with cheap calories ubiquitous (particularly in the form of sucrose), unwalkable physical spaces, deteriorating rituals and norms surrounding eating, and the withering of cooking skills, nearly every American daily confronts the challenge of not putting on weight. Given the outcomes, though, for those who are obese, Engel encourages us to address the problems and offers suggestions to help remedy the problem.
eBook
Fit to Be Citizens?
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
eBook
White Burgers, Black Cash
The long and pernicious relationship between fast food
restaurants and the African American community Today, fast
food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and
marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But
throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed
specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully
avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash , Naa
Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s
to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its
current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.
Fast food has historically been tied to the country's self-image
as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life's simple
pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry's
core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex
trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to
Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black
communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food's racial and
spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York
City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the
biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King,
McDonald's, and more.
Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising
details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the
inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a
national meal.
eBook
An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce's Dublin, and Ulysses
A forgotten historical figure and his influence on the
writing of James Joyce
In this book, Neil Davison argues that Albert Altman (1853 ‒
1903), a Dublin-based businessman and Irish nationalist, influenced
James Joyce's creation of the character of Leopold Bloom, as well
as Ulysses 's broader themes surrounding race, nationalism,
and empire. Using extensive archival research, Davison reveals
parallels between the lives of Altman and Bloom, including how the
experience of double marginalization-which Altman felt as both a
Jew in Ireland and an Irishman in the British Empire-is a major
idea explored in Joyce's work.
Altman, a successful salt and coal merchant, was involved in
municipal politics over issues of Home Rule and labor, and
frequently appeared in the press over the two decades of Joyce's
youth. His prominence, Davison shows, made him a familiar name in
the Home Rule circles with which Joyce and his father most
identified. The book concludes by tracing the influence of Altman's
career on the Dubliners story \"Ivy Day in the Committee
Room,\" as well as throughout the whole of Ulysses . Through
Altman's biography, Davison recovers a forgotten life story that
illuminates Irish and Jewish identity and culture in Joyce's
Dublin.
A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian
D. G. Knowles
eBook
Life beside itself
In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is \"somewhere else,\" and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.
eBook
Rise of the Modern Hospital
Rise of the Modern Hospitalis a focused examination of hospital design in the United States from the 1870s through the 1940s. This understudied period witnessed profound changes in hospitals as they shifted from last charitable resorts for the sick poor to premier locations of cutting-edge medical treatment for all classes, and from low-rise decentralized facilities to high-rise centralized structures. Jeanne Kisacky reveals the changing role of the hospital within the city, the competing claims of doctors and architects for expertise in hospital design, and the influence of new medical theories and practices on established traditions. She traces the dilemma designers faced between creating an environment that could function as a therapy in and of itself and an environment that was essentially a tool for the facilitation of increasingly technologically assisted medical procedures. Heavily illustrated with floor plans, drawings, and photographs, this book considers the hospital building as both a cultural artifact, revelatory of external medical and social change, and a cultural determinant, actively shaping what could and did take place within hospitals.
eBook
Audiological Research over Six Decades
As a pioneer in the field of audiology, Dr. James Jerger has been involved in cutting-edge resource throughout the development of the field. In his new text, Audiological Research Over Six Decades, readers can experience the evolution of diagnostic audiology through his unique perspective. By detailing case studies from his own work over the years, Dr. Jerger gives his audience a chance to be a fly on the wall for major moments throughout the history of audiology.
eBook