In 1979, a group of women athletes at Michigan State University, their civil rights attorney, the institution’s Title IX coordinator, and a close circle of college students used the law to confront a powerful institution—their own university. By the mid-1970s, opposition from the NCAA had made intercollegiate athletics the most controversial part of Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting discrimi nation in all federally funded education programs and activities. At the same time, some of the most motivated, highly skilled women athletes in colleges and universities could no longer tolerate the long-standing differences between men’s and women‘s separate but obviously unequal sports programs. In Invisible Seasons, Belanger recalls the remarkable story of how the MSU women athletes helped change the landscape of higher education athletics. They learned the hard way that even groundbreaking civil rights laws are not self-executing. This behind-the-scenes look at a university sports program challenges us all to think about what it really means to put equality into practice, especially in the money-driven world of college sports.

"Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.

Every day, Antonio Vivaldi composes a new orchestral piece, and every day, the orphan Candida transcribes Vivaldi's masterpiece into sheet music for the Invisible Orchestra. Nobody notices Candida or appreciates her hard work. But one day Candida accidentally slips a poem she wrote into the sheet music and the girl so often behind the shadows gets recognized for her own talents. Vivaldi really did have an Invisible Orchestra made up of orphan girls he taught to play. This beautiful book pays tribute to their inspiration.

China’s most sophisticated system of computational astronomy was created for a Mongol emperor who could neither read nor write Chinese, to celebrate victory over China after forty years of devastating war. This book explains how and why, and reconstructs the observatory and the science that made it possible. For two thousand years, a fundamental ritual of government was the emperor’s “granting the seasons” to his people at the New Year by issuing an almanac containing an accurate lunisolar calendar. The high point of this tradition was the “Season-granting system” (Shou-shih li, 1280). Its treatise records detailed instructions for computing eclipses of the sun and moon and motions of the planets, based on a rich archive of observations, some ancient and some new. Sivin, the West’s leading scholar of the Chinese sciences, not only recreates the project’s cultural, political, bureaucratic, and personal dimensions, but translates the extensive treatise and explains every procedure in minimally technical language. The book contains many tables, illustrations, and aids to reference. It is clearly written for anyone who wants to understand the fundamental role of science in Chinese history. There is no comparable study of state science in any other early civilization.