American Literature from 1600 Through The 1850s

American Literature from 1600 Through The 1850s 

By: Adam Augustyn

The roots of American literature lie in the 17th century before there actually was an America. Early texts that originated in North American settlements throughout the 1600s consisted of religious tracts that explored the relationship between church and state, as well as works that could be referred to as “utilitarian,” since they consisted of descriptions of everyday life. These first hand accounts of traders, explorers, and colonistssoon gave way to more compelling material, and the canon of American literature began to take shape. This volume traces the progress of the written word in a land that itself was evolving as a nation. The works of Jamestown leader John Smith, who wrote about his experiences in the first permanent English settlement in North America, are considered to be where American literature originated. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

The Early Information Society

The Early Information Society

By: Alistair Black, Dave Muddiman and Helen Plant 

The information society is not so new, or so significant, as we may think. In this book, we explore the idea of an information society before the information society that is today defined by the supposedly revolutionary impact of digital technology on our culture. Whereas it is undeniable that this new wave of technological development is in itself exceptional and exciting, its social effects should be viewed more soberly, the word ‘revolution’ in this regard having been devalued by its over-use in the vocabulary of socio-technical utopianism. Our view is that such grand, transformative assessments of social change need to be treated with considerable care. For some, the contemporary information society and its positive consequences are taken for granted; for others it is a contested concept which requires detailed investigation (Mackay, 2001). [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Popular Tyranny

Popular Tyranny 

By: Kathtryn A. Morgan

The essays collected together here originated as a series of talks presented at the conference ‘‘Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Classical Athens.’’ This volume, therefore, possesses both the strengths and the weaknesses of collected conference papers. The strength is the vigorous debate occasioned by bringing together a group of historians, archaeologists, and literary critics to discuss a topic that exerts a lively fascination for audiences both ancient and modern. A potential weakness is unevenness of coverage. This volume does not, for example, contain a detailed treatment of the theme of tyranny in Attic oratory or provide even coverage of the Thucydidean material. Nevertheless, I made the decision not to try to extend the coverage of the volume by inviting extra contributions (with the exception of the concluding essay by Robin Osborne). The reasons for this decision were twofold. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Passing The Plate

Passing The Plate

By: Chistian Smith and Michael O. Emerson 

This book attempts to help solve a riddle: why is it that American Christians give away so relatively little of their money? Contemporary American Christians are among the wealthiest of their faith in the world today and probably the most affl uent single group of Christians in two thousand years of church history. They have a lot of money as we will see in chapter 1. Nearly all American Christians also belong to churches that teach believers, as stewards of the belongings with which God has blessed them, to give money generously for the work of God’s kingdom, as we will see in appendix A. Most Christians belong to churches that teach tithing the giving of 10 percent of one’s income. Most American Christians also profess to want to see the gospel preached in the world, the hungry fed, the church strengthened, and the poor raised to enjoy lives of dignity and hope all tasks that normally require money. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Terrorism in Southeast Asia

Terrorism in Southeast Asia

By: Bruce Vaughn and Emma Chanlett-Avery

Over the past year, one of the most significant developments in the war against radical Islamist militants in Southeast Asia has been the developing conflict in the south ofThailand. Ongoing separatist violence in the southern provinces has reinforced concern about indigenous and transnational terrorism inThailand. These developments have prompted action from Thai government officials and renewed questions about links to broader networks. As the death toll has mounted, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has come under fire for his handling of the situation. Most regional observers stress that there is no convincing evidence to date of serious Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) involvement in the attacks in the southern provinces. In addition, the attacks have not targeted foreigners and have remained limited to a particular geographical area. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Global Warming Trends

Global Warming Trends 

By: Julie Kerr Casper, Ph.D.

The Earth’s climate is always changing. The most obvious changes that have taken place over the course of geologic time are the shifts from glacial (ice age) periods to interglacial (non–ice age) periods. The Earth has had several “ice ages” throughout time, during which ice covered large portions of the Earth’s surface, then melted back to nearly nothing. Scientists know the Earth’s climate is always naturally changing, but with the amount of human interference today, the questions have become: How are humans changing it? Are they endangering the future? And what will the Earth be like for our children, grandchildren, and future generations? These are the very issues that I would like you the reader to ponder as you gain insight into the problem. What long-term effects will our current decisions and lifestyle choices have on future generations?. [download]  

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Dearest Pet on Bestiality

Dearest Pet on Bestiality 

By: Midas Dekkers

People love animal a stroke here. A pat there, a quick nuzzle in that gorgeous fun. The amount of cuddling they get is enough to make a person jealous. In Hollanddogs are petted more than people. Not as thoroughly, though: that one spot. Somewhere down below, generally remains untouched. The high regard in which love for animals is held is matched only by the fierceness of the taboo on having sex with them. Those who do give in to their impulses are soon as wallowing contemptibly in the mire. Hence, in spite of the dangling penises and the cries of females on heat. The eroticism of our dogs and eats is completely ignored. With these darlings we adopt the role not to lover, but of master or mistress. Yet however indecent. It does happen: sex with animals. The ultimate consequence of  love for them. Making love with them. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Caesar’s Civil War

Caesar’s Civil War 

By: Adrian Goldsworthy 

Although originally a monarchy, Romehad become a Republic near the end of the sixth century BC. Such political revolutions were commonplace in the city-states of the ancient world, but after this Romeproved remarkably stable, free from the often violent internal disputes that constantly beset other communities. Gradually at first, the Romans expanded their territory, and by the beginning of the third century BC they controlled virtually all of the Italian peninsula. Conflict with Carthage, which began in 265 (all dates are BC unless stated otherwise) and continued sporadically until that city was utterly destroyed in 146, resulted in the acquisition of overseas provinces. By this time Romedominated the entire Mediterranean world, having defeated with ease the successor kingdoms which had emerged from the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity

The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity 

By: Vojtech Masni

Rarely has the present receded into the past more quickly than in the years that followed the end of the Cold War. Normally, people sense a continuity; even after great wars that break it do they feel an urge to come to grips with their recent experience by relating it to their new condition. No such urge has grown out of the sudden and unexpected denouement of the East-West conflict, breeding instead the bizarre notion that history itself may have ended.1 Although a proliferation of crises soon exposed the fallacy of such a notion, the forty-year rivalry has continued to fade from memory. That a contest of such intensity and magnitude could safely be relegated to oblivion ‘would seem too good to be true; even if it were so, the reasons why would all the more cry for an explanation. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

The State as Utopia

The State as Utopia

By: Jurgen Georg Backhaus

When we started this project, the question was: is there a difference in the way seafaring and landlocked states visualise the commonwealth? The hypothesis was that Continental cultures develop utopias that are different from maritime cultures. This is clearly not true. In this sense, this volume follows the refutation of the Schumpeter Hypothesis. The question is discussed, if the hypothesis is refuted, why is it still relevant and useful? The answer provided in the book is that the Schumpeter Hypothesis remains important as it charts out an entire research program. The Hypothesis serves as a benchmarking instrument in defining the boundaries between public and private sectors in OECD countries and beyond. The Hypothesis may turn out to define the grammar of discourse for constitutional economic policy in the European and the OECD community. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

U.S.Leadership, History and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia

U.S.Leadership, History and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia 

By: Gilbert Rozman

In 1950, history seemed all but forgotten as the specter of communism hung ominously overNortheast Asia. The Chinese Communist Party had just fought its way to power in a revolution aimed at sweeping aside history, especially Confucianism, which was seen as leavingChinabackward and ill prepared to rise up and modernize. The Korean War had turned Koreans away from memories of the past that united them to a fateful choice about their future as part either of the wave of communism or of the U.S.-led “free world” bloc. InJapan, preparations were under way for the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which focused on putting aside the legacy ofJapan’s colonialism and wars in order to rebuild as part of the U.S.-led bloc. Large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans were inclined to condemn their past for the sorrows and weakness it had brought; few defended it. [download]  

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power

Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power

By: Donald V. Kurtz 

A while back I talked to a colleague about this prroject. He was a generation younger than :I and specialized as an economic antbropolagist. Me was surprised when I mentioned the different theoretical orientations that have directed research into political anthropology historically. And Z was surprised when he commented that political anthropology had always appeared to him to be a dispersed field kvithout a theoretical center. That has not been the case since the field was formally established in 1940 with the publication of African. Political Systems (Fortes and Evalts-Pritchard 1940)” But to a younger scholar kvho came to the practice of anthropology after the 1970s, thcr field might appear to be dispersed because since the mid-1970s the methodologies by which anthropologists study political phenomena have emanated from different theoretical centers. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Mexico

Mexico 

By: Charles F. Gritzner

When you think about Mexico, what comes to mind? What mental “pictures” do you have of its physical environment? What images do you see of the country’s people and their way of life? How important do you think Mexicois to “norteamericanos” (Anglo-Americans) and, for that matter, to the rest of Latin Americaand to the world? Take a moment to mentally list any five things that you believe to be typical of Mexico.Does your list include small, sleepy villages with mud huts and dusty streets? Or possibly poor farmers, wearing huge sombreros, plodding along beside their burros? Perhaps it includes a parched desert with searing heat, and cacti standing like lonely sentinels with raised arms. Not surprisingly, these are images held by many Anglo-Americans who are unfamiliar with their southern neighbor. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Ethics and War in The 21st Century

Ethics and War in The 21^st Century 

By: Christopher Cooker

A new discourse on war? On 3 April 2006, the British Defence Secretary, John Reid, gave a talk before a largely military audience about the rules of twenty-first century warfare. For centuries, he told his audience, conflict between tribes, cities and states had been unbridled and savage. Only gradually had mankind developed a range of conventions that could be applied to constrain and moderate what was, in essence, a brutal activity. Eventually those agreements had become rules which over time had become laws. Much had been achieved, he added, in the current legal frameworks which went by the name of international humanitarian law. However, warfare continues to evolve, and in its moral dimensions we now have to cope with the deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism. [download]  

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire 

By: David Barsamian

It is difficult to think of Eqbal Ahmad in the past tense. As I look at his words, I hear his lilting accent and mellifluous voice ringing in my ears. Eqbal was very fond of Urdu poetry and used it as a tool of analysis. One of its main motifs is paradox. So, I write with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy that we have this book and sadness that Eqbal is not with us. I remember the gleam in Eqbal’s eye and his enthusiastic response when I first proposed doing a series of interviews for a book. The idea had great appeal to him. He had written the introduction to ne Pen and The Sword, my book with Edward Said. I And he was familiar with my work with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.2 More than that, we met in a curious way, albeit he was older, on the same “kinare” or riverbank. I always felt a connection with Eqbal. I had spent some time in South Asiaand spoke his language, Urdu, and shared his appreciation of and admiration for Indo-Islamic culture. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Classical Mythology

Classical Mythology

By: William Hansen

On a hot day some twenty-five centuries ago, Socrates and one of his companions, Phaidros, were walking alongside the cool stream of the Ilissos outside the walls ofAthens. “Tell me, Socrates,” said Phaidros, “wasn’t it from the Ilissos somewhere around here that Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithyia?” He was thinking of the myth according to which a daughter of the king of Athenswas playing on the banks of the stream when suddenly the god of the north wind abducted her, carrying her off to his northerly kingdom. “Yes, that’s what they say.” “Was it from here, then?” “No,” Socrates replied, “the spot is actually some distance downstream, at the place where you cross over to the precinct of Agra. There is an altar of Boreas somewhere around there.” Phaidros asked if Socrates believed the story was true. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Black and Conflict

Black and Conflict 

By: Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee 

For the majority of William Blake’s life, Britainwas a nation at war. Countries, ideologies and individuals clashed in the ferment of the American, French and Industrial Revolutions.Britainexperienced unprecedented levels of mobilization, chronic food shortages, riots and the repression of civil liberties in ‘Pitt’s terror’. Blake recoiled with horror from ‘the English Crusade against France’ and the consequences of living in a militarized state, where freedom seemed to be crushed under ‘the Iron Wheels of War’ (‘Anns. to Watson’, E613; Jerusalem, 22: 34, E168). Yet Blake’s works do not figure conflict simply as a destructive force. If the first plate of the illuminated book Milton decried attempts to ‘prolong Corporeal War’, it also accused ‘the Camp, the Court, & the University’ of seeking to ‘depress mental [War]’ (E95). [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India

The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India

By: Shelley Seale

There is a holocaust quietly happening amongIndia’s children. The perpetrator is poverty, and its foot soldiers are disease, gender and caste discrimination, unclean water, illiteracy, and malnutrition. Its allies are corruption, ineffective government policies, and rich industrialized nations that, in an indifferent and arrogant imbalance of global power, claim exemption from a battle fought on such far lands. While there may be no Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin behind it, make no mistake it is a holocaust all the same. While this silent war is waged against millions of children, a very different Indiais the one we see and hear about. Its emergence on the international markets with leading industries such as technology, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing have put it squarely in the center of global importance, with an astounding annual growth rate of nine percent bringing an influx of new wealth daily. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

The International Law of Human Trafficking

The International Law of Human Trafficking 

By: Anne T. Gallagher

During 1998 and 1999, I participated in a series of meetings inViennaconvened under the auspices of the United Nations. Their purpose was to hammer out, as quickly as possible, an international agreement on transnational organized crime, as well as a set of supplementary protocols on the specifi c issues of traffi cking, migrant smuggling, and the trade in small arms. My job, as the representative of Mary Robinson, the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, was to use her voice in persuading States not to dilute or let go of the basic international human rights principles to which they were already committed. We had good reason to be worried. Migrant smuggling had recently been identifi ed as a security threat by the preferred destination countries in Europe, North America, and Australia, and had moved from the margins to the mainstream of international political concern.Human trafficking. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Myth and Reality in The Contemporary Islamist Movement

Myth and Reality in The Contemporary Islamist Movement 

By: Fouad Zakariyya

Fouad Zakariyya’s Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement offers a sustained critique of the intellectual, political, and social foundations and contemporary manifestations of Islamism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. This work is a genuine contribution to our social and political thought: it sensitizes us to the complex relationship between religion and society in the post colonial Arab world and the rise of new social movements that vie for power in the name of religion. Written in the aftermath of the assassination of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and at the height of the global debates about the relevance of Islamic revivalism in contemporary Muslim societies, especially after the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, this book sheds important light on the multiple voices of current Islamism. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf