Steve Fitch is among America’s most well-known chroniclers of the American West since the days of Easy Rider. He has been photographing examples of the West’s changing vernacular landscape and vanishing roadside landmarks for more than 40 years. In his new book, he presents both the ancient and the modern by way of petroglyphs, neon motel signs and hand-painted business signs, drive-in movie theater screens, and radio and cell towers. All of them are now endangered because of the advent of the Interstate Highway System and corporate franchises.In this fascinating and comprehensive account, we are able to join in Fitch’s expansive journey, truly an odyssey, as represented in the book’s 120 unforgettable photographs, all sequenced to mimic the open road—both during day and night. Fitch explains the project in his informative introduction, in which, interestingly, he suggests that the petroglyphs of the ancient Pueblo people have endured far better and longer than anything made during the last sixty years. Curator Toby Jurovics, in his insightful concluding essay, positions Fitch’s work in relation to that of the practitioners of the photographic style known as the “New Topographics” and Fitch’s own view of photography as a visual form of cultural anthropology. Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks is sure to become a modern-day classic, a book that will be all the more revered as America and Americans move farther away from the highways of the past. That economy and roadside culture are vanishing like endangered species, but Fitch was along for the ride. In sharing that past, he has been witness to his own form of historic preservation.

Increasingly resistant to lessons on international politics, society often turns to television and film to engage the subject. Numerous movies made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect political themes that were of concern within the popular cultures of their times. For example, Norman Jewison's The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) portrays the culture of suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, while several of Alfred Hitchcock's movies as well as the John Wayne film Big Jim McLain (1952) and John Milius's Red Dawn (1984) helped to raise and sustain skepticism about the Soviet Union. World Politics on Screen: Understanding International Relations through Popular Culture uses films and television shows like these as well as contemporary including 24, The Simpsons, South Park, and The Daily Show to guide readers to a deeper understanding of enduring issues in international politics.In this unique and insightful volume, author Mark Sachleben demonstrates that popular culture reflects societal beliefs about the world, and that the messages captured on television and film transcend time and place. Using films such as Secret Ballot (2001), Under the Bombs (2007), and Wall•E (2008), he addresses topics such as international relations and diplomacy, the study of war, nuclear weapons, poverty, immigration and emigration, human rights, and genocide. An engaging read for students and for anyone with a general interest in politics and popular culture, World Politics on Screen succeeds in its argument by illuminating unexplored assumptions about international policy.

The Weinstein affair in Hollywood has grabbed the headlines for months. Controlling behavior, particularly of men towards women, is far more common in all walks of life than we have been led to believe.In this easy-to-read guide, best-selling author Don Hennessy offers advice to all those dealing with violent or controlling behavior in their own lives, based on his experience of dealing with hundreds of such people in a therapeutic setting. Most important, he explains to the reader how they can throw off the shackles and live lives free from fear and intimidation.

From 1964 to 1980, the United States was buffeted by a variety of international crises, including the nation's defeat in Vietnam, the growing aggression of the Soviet Union, and Washington's inability to free the fifty two American hostages held by Islamic extremists in Iran. Through this period and in the decades that followed, Commentary, Human Events, and National Review magazines were critical in supporting the development of GOP conservative positions on key issues that shaped events at home and abroad. These publications and the politicians they influenced pursued a fundamental realignment of US foreign policy that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. Paving the Way for Reagan closely examines the ideas and opinions conveyed by the magazines in relationship to their critiques of the dominant liberal foreign policy events of the 1960s and 1970s. Revealed is how the journalists' key insights and assessments of the US strategies on Vietnam, China, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), the United Nations, the Panama Canal, Rhodesia, and the Middle East applied pressure to leaders on the Right within the GOP who they believed were not being faithful to conservative principles. Their views were ultimately adopted within the conservative movement, and subsequently, helped lay the foundation for Reagan's "peace through strength" foreign policy.Incorporating primary sources and firsthand accounts from writers and editors, Jurdem provides a comprehensive analysis of how these three publications played a fundamental role influencing elite opinion for a paradigm shift in US foreign policy during this crucial sixteen--year period.

The Odyssey is rightly celebrated as a story that goes far beyond the scope of epic poetry. It is an open window to an entire era and its social systems as well as its theological, cultural, economic and political structures, while running simultaneously in the register of the earthly and of the divine. Within The Odyssey, the episode of the Sirens stands out as an exceptionally evocative example of this kind of achievement. This volume is dedicated to exploring the myriad levels of analysis that are allowed by this famous episode, following in the footsteps of celebrated readers of The Odyssey such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukàcs, Auerbach, Kerény, Bloch, Auden, Pound, Tolstoj, Elster and Steiner. By looking at the brief encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens, the reader of this volume will discover the roots of our modern concept of middle class rationality and its profound ramifications stretching between economy, politics, and the divine.

Surprisingly, jihadi groups like ISIS do not only attract female supporters coming from Muslim communities, but also Western women who grew up in non-Muslim environments. Trauma, depression and the need for a more exciting life outside the constraints of Western society brought some women to embrace the political cause of waging jihad and supporting terrorism. This book discovers the hidden psychological and sociological drivers that can lead young Western women to support jihadi ideology, violence and sometimes suicide. Through real and uncanny stories, supported by reliable official data, the book provides a scientific analysis of the mechanisms that can lead any “girl next door” to approve and passionately fall for a destructive movement, which she perceives as a heroic, romantic and empowering act.

A&P is a multidiscilinary journal which gathers international scholars and thinkers to analyse the latest debates in the field of philosophy and anthropology.

Ever wish you could push the "reset" button on the world in which you live as well as the one you carry inside your head? Are you tired of a culture that seems infatuated with wealth and the superfluous, where people can become famous simply by being outrageous or otherwise well known?If that world is not working for you, perhaps you should consider a trip to the desert, just as holy men, mystics, prophets, and eccentrics have done for thousands of years, seeking solitude and inspiration, wisdom and direction in a land of extremes. This is what author Jim Barbee did, seeking Inner Space in the expansive California Desert that lies just 100 miles east of Los Angeles and the other coastal cities of Southern California.Sin Sombras is Barbee's attempt, in photographs and stories, to relive the California Desert: a landscape where there are no shadows (sin sombras), no shade, no place to hide or find relief. It is a wild, arid, and sparsely populated region, "flyover" country for most travelers, a place to pass through or endure, but also home to hardy individuals who live in one of the harshest climates on Earth.The photographs were taken largely between El Centro and Barstow, California, including the famous Salton Sea. They depict the land, towns, people, and human artifacts that tell a visual story of pilgrimage, survival, and adaptation. The accompanying stories walk the boundary between fact and fiction and are offered as reflections on themes inspired by the pictures: awe, mystery, longing, death, mistakes, and the power of chance in our lives.Sin Sombras is a unique work of artistic and spiritual exploration. One might even say it is a sojourn to find the meaning of life, if there is one, in the unforgiving but awe-inspiring world of the California Desert. Enjoy the ride.

What can Montesquieu still teach us today? Montesquieu was the first political writer who formulated the principles of separation of powers and the independence of justice. He was the first to scientifically study human institutions, both ancient and modern, Asiatic and European, African and American. Again, he was the first thinker to theorize Federal Democracy, systematically tracking down the root causes of human events in its environmental, cultural, historical, and geographical aspects. Analysing several aspects of Montesquieu’s philosophical and political thought, this volume highlights his stoicism, realism, anti-despotism as well as his staunch defence of human dignity. Introducing one of the sharpest thinkers of modernity, this book offers fundamental tools to understand the very ground of our contemporary times.

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order -- especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

In the sixties and seventies, the public sphere in Western countries was a place of critique. Through their activism in the public sphere, various kinds of social movements democratised institutions and political culture. Today, neoliberal politics and populist movements have transformed this place into a perilous arena, hosting many serious threats to democracy. The outcome of this challenge and confrontation will depend on how democratic political actors will make their presence felt in the public sphere.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Memphis, Tennessee, had the largest metropolitan population of African Americans in the Mid-South region and served as a political hub for civic organizations and grassroots movements. On April 4, 1968, the city found itself at the epicenter of the civil rights movement when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. Nevertheless, despite the many significant events that took place in the city and its citizens' many contributions to the black freedom struggle, Memphis has been largely overlooked by historians of the civil rights movement.In An Unseen Light, eminent and rising scholars offer a multidisciplinary examination of Memphis's role in African American history during the twentieth century. Together, they investigate episodes such as the 1940 "Reign of Terror" when black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city's culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis's place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom.

Neoliberalism changed the face of Latin America and left average citizens struggling to cope in many ways. Popular sectors were especially hard hit as wages declined and unemployment increased. The backlash to neoliberalism in the form of popular protest and electoral mobilization opened space for leftist governments to emerge. The turn to left governments raised popular expectations for a second wave of incorporation. Although a growing literature has analyzed many aspects of left governments, there is no study of how the redefinition of the organized popular sectors, their allies, and their struggles have reshaped the political arena to include their interests—until now. This volume examines the role played in the second wave of incorporation by political parties, trade unions, and social movements in five cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The cases shed new light on a subject critical to understanding the change in the distribution of political power related to popular sectors and their interests—a key issue in the study of postneoliberalism.

Exploring human nature takes the reader deep into the human experience of being in nature. Our current ecological predicament highlights the need to change people’s nature awareness and behaviour. This pioneering mixed methods study investigates a method to do this through facilitated Solo time in the wilderness. Solo time is an ancient, ritualised and pan-cultural practice of spending time alone in nature, that has been reintroduced into our current time and culture. The study focuses on the phenomenology of young adults’ immersive experiences in nature and the evaluation of long term impact on their personal development, their relationship with nature, community participation and ecological behaviour. However, this work is not only about the content of research, it is also about how research is done. On a methodological level the study takes a systemic approach: it explores and integrates an expanded, interconnected worldview and methodology. In practice, this encompasses working with participants’ dreams as data and including different ways of knowing in an expanded view on validity. It also includes collecting data on the researcher’s own experience and integrating it as a parallel narrative in the thesis. In this manner the book not only tackles the pressing issue of an increasing psychological and physical separation between humans and nature. It also calls into question how conventional research and its prevailing tendency to investigate the world in isolated pieces may contribute to the problem. Overall, this book provides a practical example of how a systemic approach may be integrated in the research process and in academic writing. It also serves as a valuable reference point for future work on promising triggers for change and highlights powerful elements for prospective programmes focussing on individual empowerment, sustainability and nature awareness. It addresses all researchers interested in ecopsychology and experiential education but also those who are curious to explore subjectivity as part of an expanded worldview and methodology in research.

The book is focused on parenthood and generativity, considered by the authors not only as biological functions, but above all as human and socio-cultural capabilities able to overcome gender differences.Therefore, the authors reconsider motherhood, emphasizing the historical and social function of women; the accent on socio-cultural gender role of women as mothers and wives also inspires an undeniable reflection on male identities and fatherhood. The book insists that parenthood and care are human characteristics, and not only a specific female frame, and suggests to the reader a new focus on gender relationships, by adopting a gylanic perspective.