Faculty Monographs and Chapters

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  Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology

  Eric Dienstfrey

  Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to the longstanding battles between stereo and mono technologies. Throughout the book, Eric Dienstfrey analyzes newly discovered archival materials and myriad stereo releases, from Hell’s Angels (1930) to Get Out (2017), to show how Hollywood’s financial dependence on mono prevented filmmakers from seeing surround sound’s full aesthetic potential. Though studios initially explored stereo’s unique capabilities, Dienstfrey details how filmmakers eventually codified a conservative set of surround-sound techniques that prevail today, despite the arrival of more immersive formats.

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  C. S. Lewis on Higher Education: The Pedagogy of Pleasure

  Stewart Goetz

  Why pursue a university education? Some people answer in terms of the purpose of getting a good job. Others respond in terms of the aim of earning more money. Still others answer in terms of the goal of promoting social justice. Drawing on C. S. Lewis's belief that the purpose of life is the experience of perfect happiness, Stewart Goetz explains Lewis's simple but overlooked view that a person should pursue a university education for the pleasure that comes from higher-level intellectual activity. Goetz not only sharpens our understanding of Lewis's life and work in higher education, but also leads us to question why we attend, study, teach, or research at a university.

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  Teaching and Learning With Primary Source Projects: Real Analysis, Topology, and Complex Variables

  Janet Heine Barnett, Dave Ruch, and Nicholas A. Scoville

  Recent pedagogical research has supported Abel's claim of the effectiveness of reading the masters. Students exposed to historically based pedagogy see mathematics not as a monolithic assemblage of facts but as a collection of mental processes and an evolving cultural construct built to solve actual problems. Exposure to the immediacy of the original investigations can inspire an inquiry mindset in students and lead to an appreciation of mathematics as a living intellectual activity.
  
  TRIUMPHS (TRansforming Instruction in Undergraduate Mathematics via Primary Historical Sources) is an NSF-funded initiative to design materials that effectively harness the power of reading primary historical documents in undergraduate mathematics instruction. Teaching and Learning with Primary Source Projects is a collection of 24 classroom modules (PSPs) produced by TRIUMPHS that incorporate the reading of primary source excerpts to teach core mathematical topics. The selected excerpts are intertwined with thoughtfully designed student tasks that prompt students to actively engage with and explore the source material. Rigorously classroom tested and scrupulously edited to comply with the standards developed by the TRIUMPHS project, each of the PSPs in this volume can be inserted directly into a course in real analysis, complex variables, or topology and used to replace a standard textbook treatment of core course content. The volume also contains a comprehensive historical overview of the sociocultural and mathematical contexts within which the three subjects developed, along with extensive implementation guidance. Students and faculty alike are afforded a deeper classroom experience as they heed Abel's advice by studying today's mathematics through the words of the masters who brought that mathematics to life.

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  Brave in Season

  Jon Volkmer

  Set in 1950 in the rural Midwest, and inspired by real events, this gripping novel explores what happens when an African American railroad repair crew is dropped into a tiny, tight-knit farm community. Will frictions build to an all-too familiar American tragedy, or can tensions be overcome in that uniquely American way, with balls and bats and a field of green?

  Seventeen-year-old Carlin Littman has big dreams, much bigger than will fit into sleepy Julian, Nebraska, population 172. She has set her sights on college, Chicago, and beyond. The arrival of the rail workers, known as gandy dancers, is an interesting distraction in the bored summer days where her only job is looking after her little brother, Timmy. When she befriends Sam Washington, the awkward, bookish gandy a year younger than she, neither of them have any idea what they have set in motion.

  Many decades later, Tim returns to Nebraska, attempting to recover the lost history through interviews with the few surviving seniors who might remember. These encounters provide the basis for a story that lies somewhere between myth and memory. A story where the mutual respect between the oldest gandy, Jerome, and the store owner, Dave, offers townsfolk an alternative to stereotype and prejudice. A story where the new rail line is being built over the route of the underground railroad, challenging a new generation of farm families to live up to that heritage. A story where an unlikely pick-up game propels players on both sides to epic performances.

  Race, railroads, and baseball are iconic themes that come together in this moving story of the American heartland.

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  Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization

  Oscar Ivan Useche

  In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.

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  Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century

  Karen Clemente, Lindsay Guarino, Carlos R. A. Jones, and Wendy Oliver

  An African American art form, jazz dance has an inaccurate historical narrative that often sets Euro-American aesthetics and values at the inception of the jazz dance genealogy. The roots were systemically erased and remain widely marginalized and untaught, and the devaluation of its Africanist origins and lineage has largely gone unchallenged. Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture.

  Rooted Jazz Dance brings together jazz dance scholars, practitioners, choreographers, and educators from across the United States and Canada with the goal of changing the course of practice in future generations. Contributors delve into the Africanist elements within jazz dance and discuss the role of Whiteness, including Eurocentric technique and ideology, in marginalizing African American vernacular dance, which has resulted in the prominence of Eurocentric jazz styles and the systemic erosion of the roots. These chapters offer strategies for teaching rooted jazz dance, examples for changing dance curricula, and artist perspectives on choreographing and performing jazz. Above all, they emphasize the importance of centering Africanist and African American principles, aesthetics, and values.

  Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, these essays challenge a century of misappropriation and lean into difficult conversations of reparations for jazz dance. This volume overcomes a major roadblock to racial justice in the dance field by amplifying the people and culture responsible for the jazz language.

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  Devil's Pool

  Sarah Kaufman

  The Devil’s Pool photographs explore a swimming hole in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park and emphasize the value of access to green spaces within an urban setting. The project investigates how people relate to their environment and affirms a human need or impulse to commune with the natural world. The work pictures diversity, celebrating the human body interacting with nature, and looks at relationships among people, their bodies, and the environments that they inhabit. It recognizes a long tradition of bathing throughout art history (both indoors and out in nature) and the potential for a pictorial space where the body can be openly represented and honored. This work considers the reflexivity in viewing imagery of people fully taken by their physical and psychological surroundings.

  Devil’s Pool stems from my love for the Wissahickon and the respite that it provides. People from all over are drawn to this urban swimming hole as a place to play and revel in physicality and nature. The images depict moments of coherence among our bodies and the world around us. At Devil’s Pool, I am able to expand my admiring picture of everyday bodies, their owners absorbed in unselfconscious presence.

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  Le taureau triste: La solitude du celibataire de Maupassant

  Celine Brossillon

  Les œuvres de Guy de Maupassant prennent vie dans une société française fin-de-siècle brisée par la guerre franco-prussienne, et marquée par l'évolution vers un individu sans foi, mélancolique et désœuvré. Emblème de cet esprit décadent et individualiste, le célibataire, figure littéraire importante, affirme sa liberté, se dresse à contre-courant des valeurs traditionnelles et menace l'ordre établi.
  Maupassant mène alors son lecteur à la conclusion tragique d'une réalité sans amour et sans espoir. Si, dans ses œuvres, le célibataire vit en véritable libertin, il est aussi vieillissant et empli de regrets. Dans l'impasse, seul face à lui-même, il s'interroge sur ses choix : une vie à deux aurait-elle été plus douce ? Maupassant innove, décrivant ses célibataires-solitaires dans ce qu'ils ont de tragique, pris au piège d'un mode de vie qui les détruit.

  
  Cette étude porte un regard anthropologique sur la crise de l'identité masculine à la fin du xixe siècle. L'époque est troublée, les identités et les rôles sexués changent. Les hommes, dont la virilité est remise en cause par l'émancipation progressive des femmes, semblent ainsi peu à peu ne plus savoir quel rôle jouer. Dans ce contexte, le célibataire de Maupassant incarne le mal/mâle du siècle, un homme en crise qui finit par se désintégrer dans la folie.

  The works of Guy de Maupassant come to life in a fin-de-siècle French society shattered by the Franco-Prussian war, and marked by the evolution towards a faithless, melancholy and idle individual. Emblem of this decadent and individualistic spirit, the bachelor, an important literary figure, asserts his freedom, stands against traditional values and threatens the established order. Maupassant then leads his reader to the tragic conclusion of a reality without love and without hope. If, in his works, the bachelor lives as a true libertine, he is also aging and full of regrets. In the dead end, alone in front of himself, he wonders about his choices: would a life for two have been sweeter? Maupassant innovates, describing his singles-loners in their tragedy, trapped in a lifestyle that destroys them. This study takes an anthropological look at the crisis of male identity at the end of the 19th century. The times are troubled, identities and gender roles are changing. Men, whose virility is called into question by the progressive emancipation of women, thus gradually seem to no longer know what role to play. In this context, Maupassant's bachelor embodies the evil / male of the century, a man in crisis who ends up disintegrating into madness.

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  What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell About Meritocracy

  Doron Taussig

  Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else?

  The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream, Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions.

  Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life—as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business—What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not.

  Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by—and how we can deliver on—the American Dream of today.

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  Let's be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education

  Jonathan Marks

  Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let’s Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable—and revealing why the health of our democracy is at stake.
  
  Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education. He recognizes that professors and administrators frequently adopt the language and priorities of the left, but he explains why conservative nightmare visions of liberal persecution and indoctrination bear little resemblance to what actually goes on in college classrooms. Marks examines why advocates for liberal education struggle to offer a coherent defense of themselves against their conservative critics, and demonstrates why such a defense must rest on the cultivation of reason and of pride in being reasonable.
  
  More than just a campus battlefield guide, Let’s Be Reasonable recovers what is truly liberal about liberal education—the ability to reason for oneself and with others—and shows why the liberally educated person considers reason to be more than just a tool for scoring political points.

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  SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research's Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game

  Heather M. O'Neill and Bill Nowlin

  SABR 50 at 50 celebrates and highlights the Society for American Baseball Research’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball history. Established in 1971 in Cooperstown, New York, SABR has sought to foster and disseminate the research of baseball—with groundbreaking work from statisticians, historians, and independent researchers—and has published dozens of articles with far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the game. Among its current membership are many Major and Minor League Baseball officials, broadcasters, and writers as well as numerous former players.
  
  The diversity of SABR members’ interests is reflected in this fiftieth-anniversary volume—from baseball and the arts to statistical analysis to the Deadball Era to women in baseball. SABR 50 at 50 includes the most important and influential research published by members across a multitude of topics, including the sabermetric work of Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and Bill James, along with Jerry Malloy on the Negro Leagues, Keith Olbermann on why the shortstop position is number 6, John Thorn and Jules Tygiel on the untold story behind Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers, and Gai Berlage on the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team in the 1990s. To provide history and context, each notable research article is accompanied by a short introduction.
  
  As SABR celebrates fifty years this collection gathers the organization’s most notable research and baseball history for the serious baseball reader.

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  Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State

  Edward Onaci

  On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South--including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana--as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day.
  
  This book is the first to tell the full history of the RNA and the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Edward Onaci shows how New Afrikans remade their lifestyles and daily activities to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture, and argues that the RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles. Onaci expands the story of Black Power politics, shedding new light on the long-term legacies of mid-century Black Nationalism.

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  Interpersonal Relationships and the Self-Concept

  Brent A. Mattingly, Kevin P. McIntyre, and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr.

  This volume provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical work on relationship-induced self-concept change that has occurred over the last 10-15 years. The chapters in this volume discuss the foundations of relationship self-change, how and when it occurs, how it influences relationship decisions and behavior, and how it informs and modifies subsequent knowledge structures, all examined over the course of the relationship cycle (i.e., initiation, maintenance, and dissolution). Additionally, this volume identifies novel applications and extensions of the relationship self-change literature, including applications to health and behavior, intergroup relations, and the workplace.

  Interpersonal Relationships and the Self-Concept serves both as a comprehensive overview of the existing empirical research as well as a roadmap for future research on self-change, including a discussion of emerging theoretical frameworks. It will interest researchers focusing on romantic relationships, self and identity, and the intersection of self and relationships, spanning the disciplines of psychology, sociology, communication, and family studies.

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  Predictable Pleasures: Food and the Pursuit of Balance in Rural Yucatán

  Lauren Wynne

  The pursuit of balance pervades everyday life in rural Yucatán, Mexico, from the delicate negotiations between a farmer and the neighbor who wants to buy his beans to the careful addition of sour orange juice to a rich plate of eggs fried in lard. Based on intensive fieldwork in one indigenous Yucatecan community, Predictable Pleasures explores the desire for balance in this region and the many ways it manifests in human interactions with food. As shifting social conditions, especially a decline in agriculture and a deepening reliance on regional tourism, transform the manners in which people work and eat, residents of this community grapple with new ways of surviving and finding pleasure.
  
  Lauren A. Wynne examines the convergence of food and balance through deep analysis of what locals describe as acts of care. Drawing together rich ethnographic data on how people produce, exchange, consume, and talk about food, this book posits food as an accessible, pleasurable, and deeply important means by which people in rural Yucatán make clear what matters to them, finding balance in a world that seems increasingly imbalanced.
  
  Unlike many studies of globalization that point to the dissolution of local social bonds and practices, Predictable Pleasures presents an array of enduring values and practices, tracing their longevity to the material constraints of life in rural Yucatán, the deep historical and cosmological significance of food in this region, and the stubborn nature of bodily habits and tastes.

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  The Grieving Child in the Classroom: A Guide for School-Based Professionals

  Susan Lawrence

  The Grieving Child in the Classroom integrates the latest research on children’s bereavement and adapts it for use in the classroom.

  Chapters tackle the neurological, cognitive, emotional, and social effects of childhood grief and demonstrate the ways in which those reactions can manifest in the classroom. By recognizing individual differences in coping styles and considering variables such as developmental stage, nature of the loss, and availability of support, teachers and staff can become better equipped to respond to the bereaved child’s needs. The book incorporates theoretical explanations of grief responses as well as practical suggestions for supporting bereaved children in real-world settings.

  Whether the loss affects one child or the entire student body, educators can turn to this comprehensive guidebook for ways to support grieving students in their classrooms.

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  News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures

  Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer

  From the National Review to Breitbart, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, conservative news is an inescapable feature of modern politics. Since the early days of mass communication, right-wing media producers have blended reporting with commentary, narrating the news of the day from a perspective informed by conservative worldviews and partisanship. News on the Right seeks to initiate a new interdisciplinary field of scholarly research focused on the study of right-wing media and conservative news. Editors Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer gather a range of voices, presenting an interdisciplinary investigation into the practices and patterns of meaning-making in the production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. Traversing journalism, media and communication studies, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology, this volume utilizes a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods to elucidate case studies of conservative news cultures in the US and UK. Together, these perspectives show that a fuller understanding of right-wing media and its effects can be reached by treating these phenomena as deeply interwoven into many conservatives' lives and political sensibilities.

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  Discrete Morse Theory

  Nicholas A. Scoville

  Discrete Morse theory is a powerful tool combining ideas in both topology and combinatorics. Invented by Robin Forman in the mid 1990s, discrete Morse theory is a combinatorial analogue of Marston Morse's classical Morse theory. Its applications are vast, including applications to topological data analysis, combinatorics, and computer science. This book, the first one devoted solely to discrete Morse theory, serves as an introduction to the subject. Since the book restricts the study of discrete Morse theory to abstract simplicial complexes, a course in mathematical proof writing is the only prerequisite needed. Topics covered include simplicial complexes, simple homotopy, collapsibility, gradient vector fields, Hasse diagrams, simplicial homology, persistent homology, discrete Morse inequalities, the Morse complex, discrete Morse homology, and strong discrete Morse functions. Students of computer science will also find the book beneficial as it includes topics such as Boolean functions, evasiveness, and has a chapter devoted to some computational aspects of discrete Morse theory. The book is appropriate for a course in discrete Morse theory, a supplemental text to a course in algebraic topology or topological combinatorics, or an independent study.

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  TV Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms

  Alice Leppert

  During the 1980s, U.S. television experienced a reinvigoration of the family sitcom genre. In TV Family Values, Alice Leppert focuses on the impact the decade's television shows had on middle class family structure. These sitcoms sought to appeal to upwardly mobile “career women” and were often structured around non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework. Drawing on Foucauldian and feminist theories, Leppert examines the nature of sitcoms such as Full House, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, and Who's the Boss? against the backdrop of a time period generally remembered as socially conservative and obsessed with traditional family values.

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  The Crusades: An Epitome

  Susanna A. Throop

  This sweeping yet succinct new survey introduces readers to the history of the crusades from the eleventh to the twenty-first century. By synthesizing a variety of historical perspectives, the book deliberately locates crusading in the broader history of the Mediterranean, moving away from approaches focused primarily on narrating the deeds of a small section of the Latin Christian elite to explore the rich and contested complexity of crusade history.

  Contents:

  0) Introduction: What Were the Crusades? 1) Connections and Conflicts in the Eleventh-Century Mediterranean 2) Constructing the First Crusade: Contexts, Events, and Reactions 3) Shifting Ground: Crusading and the Twelfth-Century Mediterranean 4) Allies and Adversaries: Crusading Culture and Intra-Christian Crusades 5) Changing Circumstances: Crusading in the Thirteenth Century 6) Towards Christian Nationalism: Crusading into the Early Modern Period 7) Conclusion: Have the Crusades Ended?

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  American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity

  Meredith Goldsmith and Melanie V. Dawson

  The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers departed from values and traditions of the Victorian era in wholly new works of modernist literature, with the turn of the century typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, contributors argue that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field.
  
  The essays in this volume show that these were years of experimentation, negotiation of boundaries, and hybridity—resulting in a true literature of transition. Contributors offer new readings of authors including Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser in light of their ties to both the nineteenth-century past and the emerging modernity of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the diversity of the literature of this time, contributors also examine poetry written by and for Native American students in a Westernized boarding school, the changing attitudes of authors toward marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, anthologies edited by late-nineteenth-century female literary historians, and fiction of the Harlem Renaissance.
  
  Calling for readers to look both forward and backward at the cultural contexts of these works and to be mindful of the elastic categories of this era, these essays demonstrate the plurality and the tensions characteristic of American literature during the century’s long turn.

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  Dante's Philosophical Life: Politics and Human Wisdom in "Purgatorio"

  Paul Stern

  When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank.

  In Dante's Philosophical Life, Stern argues that Purgatorio's depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as "love of wisdom." As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern's interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante's intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul's understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul's enduring hopes.

  According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern's claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life.

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  Kant and the Faculty of Feeling

  Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson

  Kant stated that there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. The faculty of feeling has received the least scholarly attention, despite its importance in Kant's broader thought, and this volume of new essays is the first to present multiple perspectives on a number of important questions about it. Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings, such as respect and sublimity, tell us about the nature of feeling for Kant? And what about other important feelings that have been overlooked or mischaracterized by commentators, such as enthusiasm and hope? This collaborative and authoritative volume will appeal to Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and those working on topics in ethics, aesthetics, and emotions.

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  Incentivizing Peace: How International Organizations can Help Prevent Civil Wars in Member Countries

  Johannes Karreth and Jaroslav Tir

  Civil wars are among the most difficult problems in world politics. While mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some positive results in helping to end civil wars, they fall short in preventing them in the first place. In Incentivizing Peace, Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth show that considering civil wars from a developmental perspective presents opportunities to prevent the escalation of nascent armed conflicts into full-scale civil wars. The authors demonstrate that highly-structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, or regional development banks) are particularly well-positioned to engage in civil war prevention. When such IGOs have been actively engaged in nations on the edge, their potent economic tools have helped to steer rebel-government interactions away from escalation and toward peaceful settlement. Incentivizing Peace provides enlightening case evidence that IGO participation is a key to better predicting, and thus preventing, the outbreak of civil war.

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  The 25 Issues That Shape American Politics: Debates, Differences, and Divisions

  Ann Karreth and Michael Kryzanek

  This book is organized to examine the major subjects taught in American politics through the lens of twenty-five hot button issues affecting American politics and policy today. These key issues reflect the ideas, principles, concerns, fears, morals, and hopes of the American people. The authors argue that these issues are the heart and soul of the American political system, serving as the basis for the disagreements that drive citizens, public servants, and elected officials into action.