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This book explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. The book looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, the book argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.

During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, this book mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected—and helped transform—a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility—a heightened moral consciousness of feeling, rooted in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Adam Smith, and including a “moral sense” akin to the physical senses—threads throughout these letters. As the book makes clear, sensibility was the fertile, humanizing ground on which the Adamses not only founded their marriage, but also the “abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity” they and their contemporaries hoped to plant at the heart of the new nation. Bringing together their correspondence with a wealth of fascinating detail about life and thought, courtship and sex, gender and parenting, and class and politics in the revolutionary generation and beyond, the book draws a portrait of a marriage endangered by separation, yet surviving by the same ideas and idealism that drove the revolution itself.

About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically is a long-term history of scientists’ methodological discussions about experimentation in the life sciences. It directs attention to working scientists’ methods discourse, its history and meanings, and its functions in scientific publications. The term “methods discourse” comprises all kinds of methods-related statements in scientific writing, including explicit commitments to experimentalism, descriptions of protocols, and justifications of methodological concepts and strategies. The book examines the complex trajectory of methods discourse from the mid-17th to the early 20th century through the history of snake venom research. Because experiments with poisonous snakes were both challenging and controversial, experimenters produced very detailed descriptions and discussions of their approaches, making venom research uniquely suitable for a long-term history of methodological thought and the various factors impinging on its development. The book offers an analytic framework for the study of methods discourse, its history, and the history of how experimenters organized and presented their thoughts about methods in writings about their experiments.

By the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln had transcended the lingering controversies of the Civil War to become a secular saint, honored in North and South alike for his steadfast leadership in crisis. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, he was invoked countless times as a reminder of America's strength and wisdom, a commanding ideal against which weary citizens could see their own hardships in perspective. But as revealed in this book, those years represent the apogee of Lincoln's prestige. The decades following World War II brought radical changes to American culture, changes that led to the diminishing of all heroes. As the author explains, growing sympathy for the plight of racial minorities, disenchantment with the American state, the lessening of patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War, and an intensifying celebration of diversity all contributed to a culture in which neither Lincoln nor any single person could be a heroic symbol for all Americans. Paradoxically, however, the very culture that made Lincoln an object of indifference, questioning, criticism, and even ridicule was a culture of unprecedented beneficence and inclusion, where racial, ethnic, and religious groups treated one another more fairly and justly than ever before. Thus, as the prestige of the Great Emancipator shrank, his legacy of equality continued to flourish. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book documents the decline of Lincoln's public standing, asking throughout whether there is any path back from this post-heroic era. Can a new generation of Americans embrace again their epic past, including great leaders whom they know to be flawed?

Abundant Earth documents the loss of biodiversity underway and lays out the drivers of this destruction. It goes beyond the litany of causes—a growing population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and trade, and spreading infrastructures—to ask the question: Since it is well-understood that humanity’s expansionism is irreparably diminishing life’s richness, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? It argues that the worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use them and their places—stands in the way, for it normalizes humanity’s ongoing expansion. This worldview is an obstacle to recognizing that the conjoined strategy of scaling down the human enterprise and pulling back from expanses of land and seas is the means for addressing the ecological crisis and preempting the suffering and dislocations of both humans and nonhumans. Scaling down calls us to lower the global population within a human-rights framework, move toward deindustrializing food production, and work to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back is the project of restoring terrestrial and marine ecologies, so that life’s abundance may resurge. The book argues that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere, but will stagnate in the debased identity of nature-colonizer and decline in the predicament of vying for “natural resources.” Instead, humanity can chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship with our Earthly wild and domestic cohort, within vibrant ecologies, nestling human inhabitation inside a biodiverse, living planet.

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, this book offers a critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people's lives. Comprising a reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases; Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, the book is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. It roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails.

Accelerating energy innovation could be an important part of an effective response to the threat of climate change. This book complements existing research on the subject with an exploration of the role that public and private policy have played in enabling—and sustaining—swift innovation in a variety of industries, from agriculture and the life sciences to information technology. Chapters highlight the factors that have determined the impact of past policies, and suggest that effectively managed federal funding, strategies to increase customer demand, and the enabling of aggressive competition from new firms are important ingredients for policies that affect innovative activity.

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences. It shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism. Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, this book is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner—variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book—first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. This history of the daily act of self-reckoning explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples are to those who use them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, the author has penned a biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, the author contends that to make sense of the contemporary, anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative mentors: Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, the author poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them. This spirit of collaboration animates this book, as the author assesses the last ten years of his career, largely spent engaging in a series of intensive experiments in collaborative research and often focused on cutting-edge work in synthetic biology. He candidly details the successes and failures of shifting his teaching practice away from individual projects, placing greater emphasis on participation over observation in research, and designing and using websites as a venue for collaboration. Analyzing these endeavors alongside his efforts to apply an anthropological lens to the natural sciences, the author lays the foundation for an ethically grounded anthropology ready and able to face the challenges of our contemporary world.

A new class of “merchant clerks” appeared on the historical stage in the middle of the nineteenth century, collectively charged with administering the most important production project in America’s emerging capitalist economy, production of the market. In so doing, they manned a labor-intensive regime of writing operations and accounting procedures that transposed a general miscellany of goods into standard sets of commensurable values, re-inventing trade as a far more universal and abstract grid of relations than anything previously known in the marketplaces and seasonal fairs of older systems of exchange. At the same time, these ambitious young men were no less devoted to producing a new version of selfhood as well, one that matched the mobility and mutability so essential to the commodity form. Crossing the thresholds that divided farm and metropolis, homestead and boarding house, and, most significantly, growing things and selling them, they redefined the relationship between “Mammon and Manhood,” and personified that most evocative of modern keywords, human capital.

French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. This book brings these “accidents” to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. The book explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the “inventor” of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, this book focuses on the people, places, and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect. With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, the book maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself.

This book develops a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel’s work, and results from a lifelong investigation on his theory of the “objective spirit”. It entails four parts. The first part demonstrates that the “abstract (i. e. private) law” plays a strategic role in the inner structure of objective spirit; it allows Hegel to overtake the alternative between natural law and history. The second part is dedicated to the "civil society", that means to the probably most inventive part of Hegel’s theory of the objective spirit. It highlights the aporias of the social space, which constitute a negative justification of the political sphere (the State); nevertheless, the State must not be conceived as a mere extension of the civil society. Starting with an analysis of the implicit discussion among Hegel and Tocqueville about the nature of political modernity, the third part investigates Hegel’s criticism of the democracy and his conception of the representation; Hegel’s “liberal constitutionalism” suggests a reappraisal of the paradigm of liberal democracy. The last part shows that Hegel’s doctrine of the objective spirit raises the issue of subjectivity in non-subjectivist terms; it provides the opportunity to reassess in a positive sense the concept of “morality”, as a normative interface between the subject and the institutionalized universe of the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). The book ends with a reflection on the “passion of the concept” that lights up the whole philosophy of Hegel.

The central question addressed in this book is this: How is the process of adaptation different if the members of a population live clustered in small groups instead of being homogenously distributed like grass on a lawn? The field is called ‘evolution in subdivided populations’ or ‘adaptation in metapopulations.’ The book covers a diverse array of topics, including group selection, family selection, kin selection and sexual selection, as well as speciation genetics, maternal and paternal genetic effects, and host-symbiont co-evolution. These topics are addressed using a combination of conceptual, theoretical, field and laboratory studies and a diversity of living systems ranging from the laboratory model of flour beetles in the genus, Tribolium, to willow leaf beetles, to other animals, plants and microbes.

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema, who, over the course of a fifty-year career, completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Rouch's practical filmmaking methods, which he developed while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvization by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, the author reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch's pioneering career, the author examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch's cinematographic legacy.

It has been the author’s conviction since Kant after Duchamp (MIT Press, 1996) that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades have forced the cultural critic who takes them seriously to rethink the “concept” of art from the ground up, but in such a way that continuity with the art of the past would not be jettisoned. The crucible for this conviction is whether the appreciation of post-Duchamp art is still “aesthetic” or not. Aesthetics at Large argues that it is, that it must be, and that there is no better account of aesthetic judgment than the one given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. Taking it from there, the book seeks to offer a contemporary update of Kantian aesthetics and its consequences for ethics and politics. The book’s guiding thread is the thesis that Kant’s sensus communis is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the admiration of beautiful nature in 1790.

Martin Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, Buber published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. This book closely analyzes his writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. The author argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As the author unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism, Buber emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in the understanding of political behavior, this book provides a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen chapters, thirty scholars approach this topic from an array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself.

This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a broader quest for social regeneration that involve negotiations of family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad as well as complicated encounters with state officials and laws hindering or facilitating their journeys. In this migratory process exchange of everything from money, goods and advice to sentiments, phone calls and assurances of belonging are part of transnational circuits that enable, block or control mobility through social networks. We call the circuits that emerge from the sending, withholding and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions affective circuits. We focus especially on how affective circuits operate in the context of contemporary African migration to Europe, following in the footsteps of migrants and their families, husbands, wives, friends, peers and lovers across African countries like Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Congo, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique and European countries like France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Germany and Denmark. Through fieldwork in both Africa and Europe the authors analyze how exchanges work, how they are socially, culturally, morally and historically embedded, and how they regenerate and reshape kin and other intimate formations in our times of worldwide migrations.