Author: David A. Hollinger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691001898
Category: History
Page: 194
View: 675
This remarkable group of essays describes the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enterprises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life. Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural. Yet Hollinger shows that the liberal cosmopolitans of the mid-century generation defined themselves against the realities of their own time: McCarthyism, Nazi and Communist doctrines, a legacy of anti-Semitic quotas, and both Protestant and Catholic versions of the notion of a "Christian America." The victory of liberal cosmopolitans was so sweeping by the 1960s that it has become easy to forget the strength of the enemies they fought. Most books addressing the emergence of Jewish intellectuals celebrate an illustrious cohort of literary figures based in New York City. But the pieces collected here explore the long-postponed acceptance of Jewish immigrants in a variety of settings, especially the social science and humanities faculties of major universities scattered across the country. Hollinger acknowledges the limited, rather parochial sense of "mankind" that informed some mid-century thinking, but he also inspires in the reader an appreciation for the integrationist aspirations of a society truly striving toward equality. His cast of characters includes Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Richard Hofstadter, Robert K. Merton, Lionel Trilling, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Author: James Tobin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472038572
Category: Education
Page: 289
View: 580
In Sing to the Colors, award-winning author James Tobin considers ideas of place, tradition, legacy, and pride while investigating two centuries of history at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. The book’s 23 essays capture a series of moments—some well-known and celebrated, others inconspicuous or even troubling—that have contributed to the ongoing evolution of the University. Readers travel back to bitter battles fought over the vision for the University in its early years and learn how the Diag and other campus landmarks came to be. Other chapters consider milestones on the University’s continuing journey toward greater inclusivity such as the 1970 Black Action Movement strike and the enrollment of Michigan’s first female students in the 1870s. Still others illuminate the complex relationship between the University and the city of Ann Arbor, revisiting former mainstays like the Pretzel Bell and Drake’s Sandwich Shop. Alongside these stories, Tobin grapples with his own understanding of and connection to Michigan’s history, which—whatever its imperfections and errors—has shaped the lives of thousands of alumni around the world. This is a book for readers who not only cherish the University of Michigan but who also want to better understand the long work of the many generations who envisioned and built and sustained the place.
Author: Francis Xavier Blouin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472032704
Category: History
Page: 516
View: 292
As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, artifacts of culture, and places of uncovering, archives provide tangible evidence of memory for individuals, communities, and states, as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. By assigning the prerogatives of record keeper to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. Far from being mere repositories of data, archives actually embody the fragments of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. The essays in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory conceive of archives not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies.
Author: Floris Heukelom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139867856
Category: Business & Economics
Page:
View: 685
This book presents a history of behavioral economics. The recurring theme is that behavioral economics reflects and contributes to a fundamental reorientation of the epistemological foundations upon which economics had been based since the days of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. With behavioral economics, the discipline has shifted from grounding its theories in generalized characterizations to building theories from behavioral assumptions directly amenable to empirical validation and refutation. The book proceeds chronologically and takes the reader from von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms of rational behavior, through the incorporation of rational decision theory in psychology in the 1950s–70s, to the creation and rise of behavioral economics in the 1980s and 1990s at the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.
Author: Thomas Adam
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603445627
Category: German Americans
Page: 190
View: 988
"This volume is an intriguing document for the new state of intercultural studies with regard to German-American history. Full of new discoveries in the realms of art collecting, poetry, women's standing, universities, social politics, and everyday life, the book illuminates the Atlantic not as the barrier but rather the bridge between the people of two nations. It sets clear parameters for the step from merely tracing cultural relations (and stereotypes) to an understanding of the transatlantic world as an ever-changing web of human interconnections. The essays complement each other in their reflection of both the ethnic traditions of the German-Americans and the intercultural encounters of the elites in the nineteenth century, raising new interest in the specifics of travels across the Atlantic and providing a new context to the much-debated facts of German emigration and American isolationism."--Frank Trommler, University of Pennsylvania "With their focus on the variety and processes of transatlantic cultural and intellectual exchange, most of the essays in the two volumes under review here do reflect a significant shift in perspective in German-American Studies, away from the filiopietistic, quaint, or contributionist vein to serious engagement with theoretical discourses that shape the broader field of German Studies today. The editors are to be congratulated for producing volumes that may in fact help to bring German-American Studies back into the mainstream of that field." ---H-Net Book Reviews, May 2008 Nineteenth-century Germans and Americans were linked by emigration and ongoing interaction and cultural exchanges. In "Traveling between Worlds," six authors explore the German-American relationship, focusing on the topics of travel, cultural interpretation, ideological and intellectual transfer, the immigrant experience, and German-American poetry. Contributors are: Christoph Mauch, Eberhard Bruning, John T. Walker, Thomas Adam, Gabriele Lingelbach, Andrew P. Yox, and Christiane Harzig.
Author: James J. Duderstadt
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880629
Category: Education
Page: 251
View: 768
In the United States, public colleges and universities educate more than 80 percent of the nation's 11 million college students. Public universities conduct the majority of the country's campus-based research and produce most of the nation's doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and other professionals and public leaders. They provide critical services such as agricultural and industrial technology, health care, and economic development, and they help students of all ages develop more rewarding careers and more meaningful lives. Written for everyone who is interested in and concerned about the nation's public universities, The Future of the Public University in America offers a view from the perspective of two experienced professionals. James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, and Farris W. Womack, former executive vice president and chief financial officer of the University of Michigan, explore the unique challenges facing public higher education today. They look at the forces driving change -- economic imperatives, technology, and market forces -- as well as the characteristics of the public university that make change difficult: the nature of its various campus communities, its governance system, its management and decision-making processes, and its leadership. The authors conclude by suggesting strategies at the state and federal level to preserve and strengthen public higher education as a resource for future generations.