harvard university press jun 2016 (10 risultati)

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Biondo Flavio was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and popularized the term Middle Age to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. Rome in Triumph is the capstone of his research program, addressing the question: What made Rome great.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Timbuktu is famous as a center of learning from Islam¿s Golden Age. Yet it was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Ousmane Kane charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day and corrects lingering misconceptions about Africäs Muslim heritage and its influence.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future¿s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come.Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies¿or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction.As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Christian Raffensperger tracks the dynastic marriages of the Volodimerovi¿i, the ruling family of Rus¿. Using a modern scholarly approach and broad range of primary sources, he delivers a fully realized picture of the Volodimerovi¿i from the tenth through twelfth centuries and the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the subject in English.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Who gets to speak for China During the interwar years, when American condescension toward ¿barbarous¿ China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of Americäs leading China expert.The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth¿Pearl Buck¿s novel about a Chinese peasant family¿spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with ¿four hundred million customers,¿ as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins¿in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos¿a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place.A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. His ¿floating Chinaman,¿ unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars¿and today, as well.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In the 1960s Brooklyn¿s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was labeled Americäs largest ghetto. But its brownstones housed a coterie of black professionals intent on bringing order and hope to the community. In telling their story Michael Woodsworth reinterprets the War on Poverty by revealing its roots in local activism and policy experiments.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - A new therapeutic strategy could break the stalemate in the war on cancer by targeting not all cancerous cells but the small fraction that lie at the root of cancers. Lucie Laplane offers a comprehensive analysis of cancer stem cell theory, based on an original interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, biomedical history, and philosophy.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Science has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets¿caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors¿struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Americans are ruled by an unwritten constitution consisting of executive orders, signing statements, and other quasi-laws designed to reform society, Bruce Frohnen and George Carey argue. Consequently, the Constitution no longer means what it says to the people it is supposed to govern and the government no longer acts according to the rule of law.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Scholars have long separated a few privileged ¿religions of the Book¿ from faiths lacking sacred texts, including ancient Roman religion. Looking beyond this distinction, Duncan MacRae delves into Roman treatises on the nature of gods and rituals to grapple with a central question: what was the significance of books in a religion without scripture.