This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century. The focus of this volume is on the destabilizing effects of modern challenges to notions of fixed order and absolute truths, and the contradictory consequences for philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic thought. The intellectual response to the unprecedented changes of this era produced visions of both liberation from the hierarchies of the past and new forms of control and constraint. One of the central contradictions in modern thought was between biological and cultural ideas of social, psychological, and moral order. This is the first work to provide an interpretive vision of the entire period under consideration. Topics covered include evolutionary thought, philosophical Pragmatism, ideas of race and gender, pluralism and cultural relativism, Cold War Liberalism, science and religion, feminist thought, evolutionary psychology, and the late twentieth-century Culture Wars. Thinkers from William James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Judith Butler and Cornel West are analyzed as historical figures. This volume is an ideal resource for a general audience as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the field of American intellectual history.

This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century. The focus of this volume is on the destabilizing effects of modern challenges to notions of fixed order and absolute truths, and the contradictory consequences for philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic thought. The intellectual response to the unprecedented changes of this era produced visions of both liberation from the hierarchies of the past and new forms of control and constraint. One of the central contradictions in modern thought was between biological and cultural ideas of social, psychological, and moral order. This is the first work to provide an interpretive vision of the entire period under consideration. Topics covered include evolutionary thought, philosophical Pragmatism, ideas of race and gender, pluralism and cultural relativism, Cold War Liberalism, science and religion, feminist thought, evolutionary psychology, and the late twentieth-century Culture Wars. Thinkers from William James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Judith Butler and Cornel West are analyzed as historical figures. This volume is an ideal resource for a general audience as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the field of American intellectual history.

An analysis of the ideological influence of Social Darwinists in Europe and America.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier. Dunaway demonstrates that Europeans established significant trade relations with Native Americans in the southern mountains and thereby incorporated the region into the world economy as early as the seventeenth century. In addition to the much-studied fur trade, she explores various other forces of change, including government policy, absentee speculation in the region's natural resources, the emergence of towns, and the influence of local elites. Contrary to the myth of a homogeneous society composed mainly of subsistence homesteaders, Dunaway finds that many Appalachian landowners generated market surpluses by exploiting a large landless labor force, including slaves. In delineating these complexities of economy and labor in the region, Dunaway provides a perceptive critique of Appalachian exceptionalism and development.

This visually dynamic historical atlas chronologically covers American environmental history through the use of four-color maps, photos, and diagrams, and in written entries from well known scholars.Organized into seven categories, each chapter covers: agriculture * wildlife and forestry * land use and management * technology and industry * polluti

This volume identifies and evaluates the relationship between outer-space geography and geographic position (astrogeography), and the evolution of current and future military space strategy. In doing so, it explores five primary propositions.

This innovative monograph is of major significance for not only all students and academics who undertake research on the history of Mexico during the half-century prior to the onset in 1910 of the Mexican Revolution but also the parallel community of scholars who specialise in the history of ideas, philosophy and science throughout Latin America in this period. Its principal purpose is to revisit the influential thesis of the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea that the political-ideological group dubbed 'the scientists' by their opponents were guided by positivist ideas, especially those of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Its structure embraces, first, an overview of previous research upon the formation and differentiation of 'the scientists' and the black legend surrounding their legitimisation of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico for 31 years until going into exile in 1911 after 27 uninterrupted years in the presidency, followed by an analysis, based upon primary sources that include Spencer's journal articles, of the origins of the theory of evolution long before Darwin and, in particular, the significant impact of Bacon and Newton upon the philosophy of Spencer. Having established what Spencer actually believed and wrote, the book then provides an analysis of the prolific writings, both published and archival, of two of the leading, although ideologically different, representatives of 'the scientists', Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra, demonstrating that their eclectic discourses used the ideas of the American Social Darwinists, and those from Spencer, Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte, and other European writers whose ideas reached them in a fragmented and second-hand fashion in an arbitrary fashion to support their conservative views of the need to promote political order and socio-economic progress, notwithstanding their belief that the ethnic make-up of Mexican society was a barrier to the country's modernisation. It concludes that far from forming a homogeneous elite guided by positivist ideas, 'the scientists' lacked a clear leader, and had an ambivalent relationship with Díaz. This revisionist book is of relevance for not only Mexicanists but also students of positivism in other Latin American countries - notably Brazil, because hitherto Zea's assessment of the Spencerianism of 'the scientists' has tended to be applied to the region as a whole by a process of inaccurate extrapolation.

Steve Fuller examines the history of the social sciences, covering most classic theorists and themes, to discover the key contributors to sociology and how relevant they remain today.

The Politics of Development: A Survey provides an overview of the intrinsically political relations of development. It brings together essays written by experts in the politics of development and covers a range of significant and topical concerns: gender, race, indigenous development, social movements, religion, security, environmental concerns, colonialism and its legacies, migration, the political economy of development, trajectories in urbanization, and the agrarian question. It introduces and examines key concepts and approaches which have underpinned development, as well as the struggles it has engendered historically, and in contemporary contexts. This volume provides critical insights into the global politics of development and offers alternative analytical frameworks for understanding the relationships around development and inequalities. The Politics of Development: A Survey is organized in an accessible manner, catering to a wide audience (ranging from undergraduates at University level to practitioners and Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] engaged in advocacy as well as practical political aspects), and provides introductions to key issues and themes around contemporary challenges and opportunities in development. The title also includes an A-Z Glossary, covering key terms, organizations, concepts and actors in the politics of development.