Title: Money, expense, and naval power in Thucydides' History 1-5.24 
Author: Kallet-Marx, Lisa
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Economics and Business | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Thucydides has been found guilty of indifference toward financial matters without a consideration of all the evidence. Now Lisa Kallet-Marx examines Thucydides' treatment of financial resources by studying his comments on finance in the context of the whole work and scrutinizes other, chiefly epigraphic, evidence as well. Her comprehensive inspection of the Archaeology, Pentekontaetia, and history of the Archidamian War demonstrates that the role of financial resources is central to Thucydides' ideas about naval power and figures prominently in his speeches and narrative.Kallet-Marx's research reveals an important stage in the historical development of thought about state power, wealth, and imperialism. Her book will greatly interest scholars of ancient economics and classicists alike.   [brief]
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Title: The limits of realism: Chinese fiction in the revolutionary period 
Author: Anderson, Marston
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality.   [brief]
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Title: American literary realism and the failed promise of contract 
Author: Thomas, Brook
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | American Studies | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order - one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.   [brief]
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Title: The school of history: Athens in the age of Socrates
Author: Munn, Mark Henderson
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Ancient History | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: History, political philosophy, and constitutional law were born in Athens in the space of a single generation--the generation that lived through the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.). This remarkable age produced such luminaries as Socrates, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and the sophists, and set the stage for the education and early careers of Plato and Xenophon, among others. The School of History provides the fullest and most detailed intellectual and political history available of Athens during the late fifth century b.c.e., as it examines the background, the context, and the decisive events shaping this society in the throes of war. This expansive, readable narrative ultimately leads to a new understanding of Athenian democratic culture, showing why and how it yielded such extraordinary intellectual productivity. As both a source and a subject, Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is the central text around which the narrative and thematic issues of the book revolve. Munn re-evaluates the formation of the Greek historiographical tradition itself as he identifies the conditions that prompted Thucydides to write--specifically the historian's desire to guide the Athenian democracy as it struggled to comprehend its future. The School of History fully encompasses recent scholarship in history, literature, and archaeology. Munn's impressive mastery of the huge number of sources and publications informs his substantial contributions to our understanding of this democracy transformed by war. Immersing us fully in the intellectual foment of Athenian society, The School of History traces the history of Athens at the peak of its influence, both as a political and military power in its own time and as a source of intellectual inspiration for the centuries to come.   [brief]
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Title: Gaining ground: tailoring social programs to American values 
Author: Lockhart, Charles 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics
Publisher's Description: Social policy questions present Americans with a cruel dilemma. Most of us will confront hazards, such as illness or aging, against which private personal resources are an inadequate defense. With this in mind, it becomes clear that conditions of our contemporary society make some kinds of public social programs necessary. Yet, many Americans find difficulty with state-sponsored public programs which, though aimed at providing a safety net for our most vulnerable citizens, seem to run against such American values as individualism and self-reliance. In Gaining Ground , Charles Lockhart suggests a way to reconcile this dilemma by tailoring public social programs to prominent values of American political culture.Using the social security system as a model, Lockhart suggests that all social policy programs should draw upon five basic principles. First, they ought - as much as possible - to be based on reciprocity ; those who contribute to the social product may in turn draw on that product when social hazards confront them. Second, social program assistance should generally be aimed at supplementing recipient households' efforts at self-support. Third, programs should be inclusive ; benefits should be accessible to everyone within a particular program. Fourth, we should rely insofar as possible on social insurance for meeting the needs of those confronting various social hazards. And fifth, social merging programs incorporating features similar to those of social insurance are preferable to public assistance efforts. Lockhart uses these principles to develop an innovative plan for social policy that he calls an investments approach. Gaining Ground provides an important contribution to the discussion about the dynamics and future of social policy and should elicit a range of responses from scholars and policymakers alike.   [brief]
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Title: A certain realism: making use of Pasolini's film theory and practice
Author: Viano, Maurizio Sanzio 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films - Accattone , The Canterbury Tales , Medea , Saló - continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking.Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in theory and in practice. He finds that Pasolini's cinematic career exemplifies an "expressionistic realism" that acknowledges its subjective foundation instead of striving for an impossible objectivity.Focusing on the personal and expressionistic dimensions of Pasolini's cinema, Viano also argues that homosexuality is present in the films in ways that critics have thus far failed to acknowledge. Sure to generate controversy among film scholars, Italianists, and fans of the director's work, this accessible film-by-film treatment is an ideal companion for anyone watching Pasolini's films on video.   [brief]
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Title: L.A. city limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present
Author: Sides, Josh 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | African American Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.   [brief]
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Title: Athenian democracy in transition: Attic letter-cutters of 340 to 290 B.C 
Author: Tracy, Stephen V 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: Furthering his masterful new approach to classifying and interpreting epigraphical data presented in Attic Letter-Cutters of 229 to 86 B.C. , Stephen V. Tracy has produced a masterful study of the inscriptions from the time of King Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, and Demetrios. Detailed study of the hands in this largest group of primary documents has enabled him to offer a number of new insights, such as reassessing the career of Demetrios of Phaleron and taking issue with the commonly accepted view that Athenian democracy ended in 322 B.C. with the defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon.Tracy pieces together stone documents and shows that the "handwriting" of individual stonecutters can be identified by the way particular letters are cut into the stone. He offers new readings, redatings, joins and associations, as well as initial publication of some fragments from the excavations in the Athenian agora.   [brief]
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Title: Painters and politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 
Author: Andrews, Julia Frances
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History | Asian Studies | China
Publisher's Description: Julia Andrews's extraordinary study of art, artists, and artistic policy during the first three decades of the People's Republic of China makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern China. From 1949 to 1979 the Chinese government controlled the lives and work of the country's artists - these were also years of extreme isolation from international artistic dialogue. During this period the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in eradicating most of the artistic styles and techniques it found politically repugnant. By 1979, traditional landscape painting had been replaced by a new style and subject that was strikingly different from both contemporary Western art and that of other Chinese areas such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.Through vivid firsthand accounts, Andrews recreates the careers of many individual artists who were forced to submit to a vacillating policy regarding style, technique, medium, and genre. She discusses the cultural controls that the government used, the ways in which artists responded, and the works of art that emerged as a result. She particularly emphasizes the influence of the Soviet Union on Chinese art and the problems it created for the practice of traditional painting.This book opens the way to new, stimulating comparisons of Western and Eastern cultures and will be welcomed by art historians, political scientists, and scholars of Asia.   [brief]
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Title: Reclaiming identity: realist theory and the predicament of postmodernism
Author: Moya, Paula M. L
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: "Identity" is one of the most hotly debated topics in literary theory and cultural studies. This bold and groundbreaking collection of ten essays argues that identity is not just socially constructed but has real epistemic and political consequences for how people experience the world. Advocating a "postpositivist realist" approach to identity, the essays examine the ways in which theory, politics, and activism clash with or complement each other, providing an alternative to the widely influential postmodernist understandings of identity. Although theoretical in orientation, this dynamic collection deals with specific social groups - Chicanas/os, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, Asian Americans, and others - and concrete social issues directly related to race, ethnicity, sexuality, epistemology, and political resistance. Satya Mohanty's brilliant exegesis of Toni Morrison's Beloved serves as a launching pad for the collection. The essays that follow, written by prominent and up-and-coming scholars, address a range of topics - from the writings of Cherrie Moraga, Franz Fanon, Joy Kogawa, and Michael Nava to the controversy surrounding racial program housing on college campuses - and work toward a truly interdisciplinary approach to identity.   [brief]
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Title: Representation of places: reality and realism in city design
Author: Bosselmann, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: People live in cities and experience them firsthand, while urban designers explain cities conceptually. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann takes on the challenging question of how designers can communicate the changes they envision in order that "the rest of us" adequately understand how those changes will affect our lives. New modes of imaging technology - from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models - allow professionals to explain their designs more clearly than ever before. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe. Yet decisions on what gets built are significantly influenced by these very representations. A portion of Bosselmann's book is based on innovative experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley's Visual Simulation Laboratory. In a section titled "The City in the Laboratory," he discusses how visual simulation was applied to projects in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. The concerns that Bosselmann addresses have an impact on large segments of society, and lay readers as well as professionals will find much that is useful in his timely, accessibly written book.   [brief]
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Title: Refried Elvis: the rise of the Mexican counterculture 
Author: Zolov, Eric
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Popular Culture | Chicano Studies | Latin American Studies | Contemporary Music
Publisher's Description: This powerful study shows how America's biggest export, rock and roll, became a major influence in Mexican politics, society, and culture. From the arrival of Elvis in Mexico during the 1950s to the emergence of a full-blown counterculture movement by the late 1960s, Eric Zolov uses rock and roll to illuminate Mexican history through these charged decades and into the 1970s. This fascinating narrative traces the rechanneling of youth energies away from political protest in the wake of the 1968 student movement and into counterculture rebellion, known as La Onda (The Wave). Refried Elvis accounts for the events of 1968 and their aftermath by revealing a mounting crisis of patriarchal values, linked both to the experience of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s and to the limits of cultural nationalism as promoted by a one-party state.Through an engrossing analysis of music and film, as well as fanzines, newspapers, government documents, company reports, and numerous interviews, Zolov shows how rock music culture became a volatile commodity force, whose production and consumption strategies were shaped by intellectuals, state agencies, transnational and local capital, musicians, and fans alike. More than a history of Mexican rock and roll, Zolov's study demonstrates the politicized nature of culture under authoritarianism, and offers a nuanced discussion of the effects of cultural imperialism that deepens our understanding of gender relations, social hierarchies, and the very meanings of national identity in a transnational era.   [brief]
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Title: What makes life worth living?: how Japanese and Americans make sense of their worlds
Author: Mathews, Gordon
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | American Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Here is an original and provocative anthropological approach to the fundamental philosophical question of what makes life worth living. Gordon Mathews considers this perennial issue by examining nine pairs of similarly situated individuals in the United States and Japan. In the course of exploring how people from these two cultures find meaning in their daily lives, he illuminates a vast and intriguing range of ideas about work and love, religion, creativity, and self-realization.Mathews explores these topics by means of the Japanese term ikigai, "that which most makes one's life seem worth living." American English has no equivalent, but ikigai applies not only to Japanese lives but to American lives as well. Ikigai is what, day after day and year after year, each of us most essentially lives for.Through the life stories of those he interviews, Mathews analyzes the ways Japanese and American lives have been affected by social roles and cultural vocabularies. As we approach the end of the century, the author's investigation into how the inhabitants of the world's two largest economic superpowers make sense of their lives brings a vital new understanding to our skeptical age.   [brief]
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Title: Tragedy and enlightenment: Athenian political thought, and the dilemmas of modernity 
Author: Rocco, Christopher 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical History | Classical Literature and Language | Social and Political Thought | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Weaving together ancient Greek texts and postmodernist theory, Christopher Rocco addresses the debate between modernity and postmodernity that dominates contemporary theory. Interpreting Greek drama within a critical framework informed by contemporary theorists Foucault, Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno, Tragedy and Enlightenment makes a sophisticated argument for the continuing relevance of the classical past, focusing on the subject of democracy.The starting point for Rocco's analysis is the impasse in contemporary political and cultural theory over the possibility and desirability of democracy in a postmodern world. After explaining the competing positions in the current debate, Rocco argues that ancient Greek tragedy and dialogue - specifically Sophocles' Oedipus , Plato's Republic and Gorgias , and Aeschylus' Oresteia - suggest alternate constructions for this and other postmodern problems.Rocco gives a detailed analysis of the contemporary divide over the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault and provides a provocative reading of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. This original contribution to political and cultural discourse brings us to a new understanding of familiar texts and will alter the grounds of debate for students and scholars of the classical and the contemporary worlds.   [brief]
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Title: Genethics: moral issues in the creation of people 
Author: Heyd, David
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics
Publisher's Description: Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound . . . [more]
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Title: New York by gas-light and other urban sketches
Author: Foster, George G d. 1856
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Print Media | Urban Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum - the underground story - of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism.Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.   [brief]
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Title: Legitimate differences: interpretation in the abortion controversy and other public debates 
Author: Warnke, Georgia
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Legitimate Differences challenges the usual portrayal of current debates over thorny social issues including abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogate mothering as moral debates. How can it be said that our debates oppose principles of life to those of liberty, principles of liberty to those of equality, principles of equality to those of fairness, and principles of fairness to those of integrity, when we as Americans share all these principles?Debates over such issues are not, Georgia Warnke argues, moral debates over which principles we should adopt. Rather, they are interpretive debates over the meanings of principles we already possess. Warnke traces the structure of these debates with reference to the work of Jane Austen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Bernard Williams. In separate chapters on surrogate mothering, affirmative action, abortion, and pornography she articulates new understandings of the meanings of some of our principles and shows the equal legitimacy of some different interpretations of the meanings of others. Finally, she suggests that the orientation of American public policy ought to be directed less at finding single canonical interpretations of our principles than at accommodating different legitimate understandings of them. The perspective offered by Legitimate Differences should have a significantly beneficial effect on public discussions.   [brief]
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Title: Working-class heroes: protecting home, community, and nation in a Chicago neighborhood
Author: Kefalas, Maria
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Politics | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.   [brief]
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Title: Unsnarling the world-knot: consciousness, freedom, and the mind-body problem 
Author: Griffin, David Ray 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Philosophy | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: The mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has been a central problem for philosophy since the time of Descartes. Among realists - those who accept the reality of the physical world - the two dominant approaches have been dualism and materialism, but there is a growing consensus that, if we are ever to understand how mind and body are related, a radically new approach is required.David Ray Griffin develops a third form of realism, one that resolves the basic problem (common to dualism and materialism) of the continued acceptance of the Cartesian view of matter. In dialogue with various philosophers, including Dennett, Kim, McGinn, Nagel, Seager, Searle, and Strawson, Griffin shows that materialist physicalism is even more problematic than dualism. He proposes instead a pan-experientialist physicalism grounded in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Answering those who have rejected "pan-psychism" as obviously absurd, Griffin argues compellingly that pan-experientialism, by taking experience and spontaneity as fully natural, can finally provide a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousness - an account that also does justice to the freedom that we all presuppose in practice.   [brief]
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Title: Religion in Hellenistic Athens 
Author: Mikalson, Jon D 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Religion | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Until now, there has been no comprehensive study of religion in Athens from the end of the classical period to the time of Rome's domination of the city. Jon D. Mikalson provides a chronological approach to religion in Hellenistic Athens, disproving the widely held belief that Hellenistic religion during this period represented a decline from the classical era. Drawing from epigraphical, historical, literary, and archaeological sources, Mikalson traces the religious cults and beliefs of Athenians from the battle of Chaeroneia in 338 B.C. to the devastation of Athens by Sulla in 86 B.C., demonstrating that traditional religion played a central and vital role in Athenian private, social, and political life. Mikalson describes the private and public religious practices of Athenians during this period, emphasizing the role these practices played in the life of the citizens and providing a careful scruntiny of individual cults. He concludes his study by using his findings from Athens to call into question several commonly held assumptions about the general development of religion in Hellenistic Greece.   [brief]
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