"Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America by Mark A. Largent.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since 1990, the number of mandated vaccines has increased dramatically. Today, a fully vaccinated child will have received nearly three dozen vaccinations between birth and age six. Along with the increase in number has come a growing wave of concern among parents about the unintended side effects of vaccines. In Vaccine, Mark A. Largent explains the history of the debate and identifies issues that parents, pediatricians, politicians, and public health officials must address.

Nearly 40% of American parents report that they delay or refuse a recommended vaccine for their children. Despite assurances from every mainstream scientific and medical institution, parents continue to be haunted by the question of whether vaccines cause autism. In response, health officials herald vaccines as both safe and vital to the public's health and put programs and regulations in place to encourage parents to follow the recommended vaccine schedule.

For Largent, the vaccine-autism debate obscures a constellation of concerns held by many parents, including anxiety about the number of vaccines required (including some for diseases that children are unlikely ever to encounter), unhappiness about the rigorous schedule of vaccines during well-baby visits, and fear of potential side effects, some of them serious and even life-threatening. This book disentangles competing claims, opens the controversy for critical reflection, and provides recommendations for moving forward.

"When Is True Belief Knowledge?"

New from Princeton University Press: When Is True Belief Knowledge? by Richard Foley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief.

In this provocative book, Richard Foley finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs--something important that she doesn't quite "get." This may seem a modest point but, as Foley shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information.

Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.

"London"

New from Cambridge University Press: London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 by Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1550 and 1750 London became the greatest city in Europe and one of the most vibrant economic and cultural centers in the world. This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles as never before nor since. London: A Social and Cultural History incorporates the best recent work in urban history, accounts by contemporary Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to to trace London's rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity as well as how its citizens coped with those achievements. This book covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Along the way, readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor's Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city's pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, and taverns.

"Never Forget National Humiliation"

New from Columbia University Press: Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations by Zheng Wang.

About the book, from the publisher:

How could the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) not only survive but even thrive, regaining the support of many Chinese citizens after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Why has popular sentiment turned toward anti-Western nationalism despite the anti-dictatorship democratic movements of the 1980s? And why has China been more assertive toward the United States and Japan in foreign policy but relatively conciliatory toward smaller countries in conflict?

Offering an explanation for these unexpected trends, Zheng Wang follows the Communist government’s ideological reeducation of the public, which relentlessly portrays China as the victim of foreign imperialist bullying during “one hundred years of humiliation.” By concentrating on the telling and teaching of history in today’s China, Wang illuminates the thinking of the young patriots who will lead this rising power in the twenty-first century.

Wang visits China’s primary schools and memory sites and reads its history textbooks, arguing that China’s rise should not be viewed through a single lens, such as economics or military growth, but from a more comprehensive perspective that takes national identity and domestic discourse into account. Since it is the prime raw material for constructing China’s national identity, historical memory is the key to unlocking the inner mystery of the Chinese. From this vantage point, Wang tracks the CCP’s use of history education to glorify the party, reestablish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post–Cold War era. The institutionalization of this manipulated historical consciousness now directs political discourse and foreign policy, and Wang demonstrates its important role in China’s rise.

"Opera and the City"

New from Stanford University Press: Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900 by Andrea Goldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In late imperial China, opera was an integral part of life and culture, shared across the social hierarchy. Opera transmitted ideas about the self, family, society, and politics over time and space. The Qing capital of Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values via performance.

It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance refracted ethnic tensions and discontent among literati, blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage—literally and figuratively—on which to act out gender and class transgressions.

By examining opera in Qing Beijing, this work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies partook of opera and manipulated it to their own ends. Given Beijing's political influence, Goldman's analysis of opera and its tensions in the capital also sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.

"When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?"

New from Princeton University Press: When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality by Corey Brettschneider.

About the book, from the publisher:

How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints.

Distinguishing between two kinds of state action--expressive and coercive--Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

"The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 by S. C. M. Paine.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7–8, 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China, and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars – the Chinese Civil War (1911–1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945), and World War II (1939–1945) – together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China.

"The Little Republic"

New from Oxford University Press: The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Karen Harvey.

About the book, from the publisher:

The relationship between men and the domestic in eighteenth-century Britain has been obscured by two well-established historiographical narratives. The first charts changes in domestic patriarchy, founded on political patriarchalism in the early modern period and transformed during the eighteenth century by new types of family relationship rooted in contract theory. The second describes the emergence of a new kind of domestic interior during the long eighteenth century, a 'home' infused with a new culture of 'domesticity' primarily associated with women and femininity. Domesticating Patriarchy shifts the terms of these debates, rescuing the engagement of men with the house from obscurity, and better equipping historians to understand masculinity, the domestic environment, and domestic patriarchy.

Karen Harvey explores how men represented and legitimized their domestic activities. She considers the relationship between discourses of masculinity and domesticity, and whether there was a particularly manly attitude to the domestic. In doing so, Harvey suggests that 'home' is too narrow a concept for an understanding of eighteenth-century domestic experience. Instead, focusing on the 'house' foregrounds a different domestic culture, one in which men and masculinity were central. Reconstructing men's experiences of the domestic as shaped by their own and others' beliefs, assumptions and expectations, Harvey argues for the continuation of a model of domestic patriarchy and also that effective domestic patriarchs remained important to late-eighteenth-century political theory. It was a discourse of 'oeconomy' - the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order - that shaped men's attitudes towards and experiences in the house. Oeconomy combined day-to-day and global management of people and resources; it was a meaningful way of defining masculinity and established the house a key component of a manly identity that operated across the divide of 'inside' and 'outside' the house. Significantly for histories of the home which so often narrate a process of privatization and feminization, oeconomy brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's domestic management.

"Xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe"

New from Edinburgh University Press: Xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe by Raymond Taras.

About the book, from the publisher:

European anti-Muslim attitudes: the voice of public protest against out-of-touch elites? Are anti-Muslim attitudes becoming the spectre that is haunting Europe? Is Islamophobia as widespread and virulent as is made out? Or do some EU societies appear more prejudiced than others? And is there an anti-elitest dimension to Europeans' protest about rapid demographic change occurring in their countries? This cross-national analysis of Islamophobia looks at these questions in an innovative, even-handed way, steering clear of politically-correct clichés and stereotypes. It cautions that Islamophobia is a serious threat to European values and norms, and must be tackled by future immigration and integration policy.

Raymond Taras was Willy Brandt Professor at Sweden's Malmö University for 2010–11. He was director of Tulane University's world literature program before Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. Taras is the author of numerous scholarly books on nationalism and identities in Europe.

"God and War"

New from Rutgers University Press: God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945 by Raymond Haberski, Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:

Americans have long imagined that their nation is good and has a profound role to play in the world. Such expressions as "God Bless America," and "One Nation under God" reflect this popular view. In God and War, Raymond Haberski Jr. argues that unlike any previous period, the era since 1945 has seen the common moral assumptions guiding our nation—its civil religion—become increasingly defined by the nation's power and might.

Haberski traces the way three great postwar "trials"—the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror—created a popular understanding of American moral authority that grew dangerously beholden to calls for martial sacrifice. During the early Cold War, faith in God and faith in nation combined to rally Americans against communism. The Vietnam War, rather ironically, both tested this faith as many Americans questioned the great sacrifices made in a war that nearly broke the nation's moral compass and inspired many religious groups to push for a civil religious awakening to save the soul of the nation. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, America now assesses whether there still exists a viable civil religion to unify its people and attract admirers abroad in the absence of military conflict.

Americans cannot assume that the nation stands for a foolproof transcendental concept. Haberski argues that politicians and preachers and theorists and theologians must revisit the idea of civil religion as a way to critique rather than affirm the nation's will to power and frequent resort to war.