All News

The ability to look ahead and to treat abstractions as serious business is a skill we all need to cultivate. So states Douglas Raybeck professor of anthropology, and author of Looking Down the Road, a compelling short work by involving the grand, if frustrating, human preoccupation with prediction. Raybeck supplies readers with some of the tools and ideas they will need as they attempt to forecast developments that are apt to characterize future society.

Who will govern China at the dawn of the twenty-first century?  What are the social backgrounds and career paths of the new generation of leaders?  How do they differ from their predecessors in their responses to perplexing economic and sociopolitical challenges?  Drawing upon a wealth of both quantitative and qualitative data on the so-called fourth generation of leaders-those who where young during the Cultural Revolution-Cheng Li, professor of government, sheds valuable light on these key questions.

In rediscovering his native country, full of energy, irony, paradox, and contradiction, Cheng Li, professor of government, challenges some mainstream perceptions of China and presents a fresh perspective on U.S.-Sino relations during this period of uncertainty.

Most Americans first heard of Michael Harrington with the publication of The Other America, his seminal book on American poverty. Maurice Isserman, professor of history, expertly tracks Harrington's beginnings in the Catholic Worker movement, his abandonment of his once deeply-held Catholicism, his life in 1950s Greenwich Village, and his evolution as a thinker. Isserman explains why Harrington, who more than any other single individual seemed perfectly positioned to play the role of adult mentor to the New Left in the 1960s, instead fell into disfavor with young campus activists, and lost the opportunity of a lifetime to make his democratic Socialist perspective a relevant force in American politics.

Arguing that the period marked the end of the country's two-century-long ascent toward widespread affluence, domestic consensus, and international hegemony, the authors, Maurice Isserman professor of history and Michael Kazin, take students on a tour of the turbulent decade, exploring what did and did not change in the 1960s and why American culture and politics have never been the same since.

With a history stretching back to ancient India, Buddhism has influenced American culture since the American Transcendentalist movement in the 1830s and the 40's. Only in the past few decades, however, has this transplanted philosophy begun to blossom into a full-fledged American religion, made up of three broad groups: a burgeoning Asian immigrant population, numerous native-born converts, and old-line Asian American Buddhists. In Buddhism in America, religious historian and associate professor of religious studies , Richard Seager offers a perceptive and engaging portrait of the communities, institutions, practices, and individuals that are integral to the contemporary Buddhist landscape.

Although Americans would like to believe otherwise, our nation's commitment to racial equality has never been consistent, nor has it been irresistibly driven forward by America's founding principles.  Philip Klinkner, associate professor of government, disproves the idea that the United States has been on a "steady march" toward the end of racial discrimination. Rather, progress has been made only in brief periods, under special conditions, and it has always been followed by periods of stagnation and retrenchment.

Robert F. Fleissner '53 is the author of Sources, Meaning, and Influences of Coleridge's Kubla Khan: Xanadu Re-Routed, A Study in the Ways of Romantic Variety, a detailed investigative approach to what has been called "the world's most documented short poem," and certainly one of the most enigmatic. Fleissner, a longtime faculty member of Central State University in Ohio, "brings together the extensive scholarship written in the past seventy years to illuminate the literary, biographical and historial contexts that may have influenced Coleridge's composition."

Norman Moss '50 is the author of Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millennium. An enlightening history of international environmental politics, combined with a discussion of major issues confronting our planet, now and in the future, by a journalist, broadcaster, and writer long resident in his native Britain.

An introduction to the voyages, transformations, and interrogations of romance as its fictions travel within and between the linguistic, geo-political, and social boundaries of Europe from 1150 to 1600 is presented in 15 original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of western literature. Edited by Roberta Krueger, professor of French, chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy and Spain throughout the Middle Ages.