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What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowl...
A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues...
Globalization promises to bring people around the world together, to unite them as members of the human community. To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are transforming our understanding of humanity and its prerogatives. Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human that underwrite our understanding of globalization. Cheah asks whether the contemporary international division of labor so irreparably compromises and mars global solidarities and our sense of human belonging that we must radi...
A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.
At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through pol...
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0°, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian’s location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain’s imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times. Withers guides readers through th...
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation ...