Bücher veröffentlicht von Johns Hopkins University Press

The definitive account of Synanon.On a fall day in 1978, Los Angeles attorney Paul Morantz reached into his mailbox to collect his mail and was nearly killed. He was bitten by the four-foot-long rattlesnake that had been put there by members of a cultlike group called Synanon.Chuck Dederich--a former Alcoholics Anonymous member who coined the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"--established Synanon as an innovative drug rehabilitation center near the Santa Monica beach in 1958. Synanon quickly evolved into an experimental commune and religion that attracted thousands of members and was strongly committed to social justice and progressive education. Twenty years later, when Dederich was arrested for the Morantz attack, Synanon had devolved into a paranoid community that followed its egomaniacal leader in whatever direction he chose to take.Based on extensive primary sources and interviews with former members, The Rise and Fall of Synanon explores how the group arose in the context of American social, political, and economic trends. Historian Rod Janzen argues that Synanon's downfall resulted from members giving too much power to Synanon's charismatic founder. The subject of a new documentary and podcast, this community serves as a mesmerizing case study of how alternative societies can change over time and how the general public's reactions to such societies can shift from tolerance to fear and opposition.

The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world.In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr.While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday on April 23, 1932.The library houses 82 First Folios, 277,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, DC, for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. With unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault, Grant draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

"A study of how companies gained the public trust despite their monopoly status"--

An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts. Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

How the 1970s energy crisis facilitated a neoliberal shift in US political culture.In Energizing Neoliberalism, Caleb Wellum offers a provocative account of how the 1970s energy crisis helped to recreate postwar America. Rather than think of the crisis as the obvious outcome of the decade's "oil shocks," Wellum unpacks the cultural construction of a crisis of energy across different sectors of society, from presidents, policy experts, and environmentalists to filmmakers, economists, and oil futures traders. He shows how the dominant meanings ascribed to the 1970s energy crisis helped to energize neoliberal visions of renewed abundance and power through free market values and approaches to energy. Deeply researched in federal archives, expert discourse, and popular culture, Energizing Neoliberalism demonstrates the central role that energy crisis narratives played in America's neoliberal turn. Wellum traces the roots of the crisis to the consumption practices and cultural narratives spawned by the petrocultural politics of Cold War capitalism. In a series of illuminating case studies--including 1970s energy conservation debates, popular car films, and the creation of oil futures trading--Wellum chronicles the consolidation of a neoliberal capitalist order in the United States through an energy politics marked by anxious futurity, petro-populist sentiment, and financialized energy markets. He shows how experiences of energy shortages and fears of future energy crises unsettled American national identity and power yet also informed Reagan-era confidence in free markets and US global leadership.In taking a cultural approach to the 1970s energy crisis, Wellum offers a challenging meditation on the status of "crisis" in modern history, contemporary life, and critical thought and how we rely on crises to make sense of the world.

"This book tracks the life history of insecticide-treated nets to explain how and why this technology became a cornerstone of global malaria control in the twenty first century"--

"This work considers the spectrum of face recognition from face blindness to super-recognizers and the influence of face evaluation on race, gender, class and ability judgments"--

An insider account of how an African public health leader responded to an unprecedented Ebola outbreak.Tolbert Nyenswah, LLB, MPH, DrPH, was the assistant minister of health and deputy chief medical officer in Liberia when the 2014 Ebola epidemic struck. Nyenswah, the incident manager who led the response, became known as the "Ebola Czar" for his pivotal role in combatting the epidemic despite his government's lack of resources. His story underscores the public health strategies that succeeded and those that failed, highlighting important lessons in managing current and future outbreaks. In Collapse and Resiliency, Nyenswah presents an insider's view of Liberia's response to the deadly Ebola epidemic. Nyenswah describes the fascinating journey from his childhood in a rural Liberian village to leading his country's response to the deadly outbreak, providing a deeply personal account of how the epidemic was finally controlled despite a depleted health care system. Prior to the Ebola epidemic, Liberia suffered from a protracted and ruthless civil war. Despite these challenges, Nyenswah and his team fostered a coordinated, community-based crisis response. Weaving together stories of effective and ineffective practices with the lived experiences that developed his skills to manage such a high-stress program, Nyenswah details how organizations worked together and what were the best public health methods to fight the spread of the disease. Unlike many books about Ebola in West Africa, Nyenswah provides both an expert account and a local voice. His story highlights the power imbalance during cooperative projects between western and nonwestern collaborators. In the only Ebola book written by a native African, the key strategist responsible for successfully ending the epidemic, Nyenswah reflects on the impacts of war and disease on the struggle to rebuild a more resilient health system and functioning society. As the world continues to reel from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, this look at a terrifying outbreak reminds us that a well-prepared public health system cannot be taken for granted.

Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia.In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world.Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology--such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage--to highlight the processes and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history. In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures. She rejects polarizing binaries such as traditional and modern or indigenous and foreign, instead underscoring Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world. Technology has contributed to the creation and disruption of social and political orders; shaped engagements across barriers of distance, culture, and language; and produced and reproduced diverse cultures in this region. This narrative of technological change offers students, scholars, and readers critical new perspectives on both technological history and Southeast Asian history.

How the Chicago International Livestock Exposition leveraged the eugenics movement to transform animals into machines and industrialize American agriculture.In 1900, the Chicago International Livestock Exposition became the epicenter of agricultural reform that focused on reinventing animals' bodies to fit a modern, industrial design. Chicago meatpackers partnered with land-grant university professors to create the International--a spectacle on the scale of a world's fair--with the intention of setting the standard for animal quality and, in doing so, transformed American agriculture.In Making Machines of Animals, Neal A. Knapp explains the motivations of both the meatpackers and the professors, describing how they deployed the International to redefine animality itself. Both professors and packers hoped to replace so-called scrub livestock with "improved" animals and created a new taxonomy of animal quality based on the burgeoning eugenics movement. The International created novel definitions of animal superiority and codified new norms, resulting in a dramatic shift in animal weight, body size, and market age. These changes transformed the animals from multipurpose to single-purpose products. These standardized animals and their dependence on off-the-farm inputs and exchanges limited farmers' choices regarding husbandry and marketing, ultimately undermining any goals for balanced farming or the maintenance and regeneration of soil fertility.Drawing on land-grant university research and publications, meatpacker records and propaganda, and newspaper and agricultural journal articles, Knapp critiques the supposed market-oriented, efficiency-driven industrial reforms proffered by the International, which were underpinned by irrational, racist ideologies. The livestock reform movement not only resulted in cruel and violent outcomes for animals but also led to twentieth-century crops and animal husbandry that were rife with inefficiencies and agricultural vulnerabilities.

Looking at farmers as serious independent agents in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American republic, Grassroots Leviathan offers an original take on the causes of the Civil War, the rise of federal power, and American economic ascent during the nineteenth century.

Examines how the June 12, 1982, rally for nuclear disarmament paved the way for a new generation of activists.On June 12, 1982, one million people filled the streets of New York City and rallied in Central Park to show support for the United Nations' Second Special Session on Disarmament. They demanded an end to the nuclear arms race and called for a shift from military funds to money allocated for human needs. In Saving the World from Nuclear War, Vincent J. Intondi draws on archival materials and interviews with rally organizers and activists in Central Park to explore this demonstration from its inception through the months of organizing, recruiting, and planning, to the historic day itself.

A leading voice in technology studies shares a collection of essential essays on the preservation of software and history of games.Since the early 2000s, Henry Lowood has led or had a key role in numerous initiatives devoted to the preservation and documentation of virtual worlds, digital games, and interactive simulations, establishing himself as a major scholar in the field of game studies. His voluminous writings have tackled subject matter spanning the history of game design and development, military simulation, table-top games, machinima, e-sports, wargaming, and historical software archives and collection development. Replayed consolidates Lowood's far-flung and significant publications on these subjects into a single volume.

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.

How a community in Cairo, Egypt, has adapted the many systems required for clean water.Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected, anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods.As a community that was originally not included in Cairo's municipal systems, the residents of Ezbet Khairallah built their own potable water and wastewater infrastructure. But when the city initiated a piped sewage removal system, local residents soon found themselves with little to no power over their own water supply or wastewater removal. Throughout this transition, residents worked together to collect water at the right times to drink, bathe, do laundry, cook, and clean homes. These everyday practices had deep implications for the health of community members, as they struggled to remain hydrated, rid their children of endemic intestinal worms, avoid consuming water contaminated with sewage, and mediate the impact of fluctuating water quality. Farmer examines how the people of Cairo interact with one another, with the government, and with social structures in order to navigate the water systems (and lack thereof) that affect their day-to-day lives. Farmer's extensive ethnographic fieldwork during the implementation of the Governorate of Cairo's septic system shines through in the compelling stories of community members. Well Connected taps into the inherent sociality of water through social contacts, moral ideology, interpersonal relationships, domestic rhythms, and the everyday labor of connecting.