In the parlance of social psychology, social work, and urban social scientists, African American fathers have often been described as "absent," "missing," "non-residential," "non-custodial," "unavailable," "non-married," "irresponsible," and "immature." It is wondered why it is/was so difficult to find literature, research, and comments regarding positive attributes of African American families in general and African American fathers in particular. This book fills a void in attempting to offer a broader picture regarding the status of African American males in a father role. The purpose is to get beyond the African American father "invisibility" syndrome and gloom and doom pathology oriented labels and tell another side of the story about the power of fathering in the African American experience. The book brings these "invisible" social and biological fathers to life by telling their stories and letting the reader hear and feel the vibrancy of their voices as they struggle to meet the challenges of being fathers and Black men in America. Black Fathers: An Invisible Presence in America is divided into four sections: *Part I offers some research and theory regarding the impact of fathers on the lives of their children. *In Part II, reactions and experiences from those men who had active, involved, and committed Black men in their lives as they were growing up are shared. *In Part III, stories are shared from African American men who had problematic relationships with their fathers, but who put forth the time, energy, and effort to work through the issues. *The primary focus of Part IV is on how to strengthen the role of Black fathers, father figures, and social fathers in family life and child rearing by discovering and internalizing psychological strengths anchored in African American psychological themes, African values, and spirituality. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in the fields of race/ethnic relations, family studies, and Black studies.

Julie Yingling considers communication and relationships through the lens of human development. Beginning with infancy and moving through adolescence to adulthood, the chapters examine communication and cognition in the various stages of human development.

This book takes an innovative approach to one of the great figures of Chinese culture, the writer and painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559). Renowned as one of the great “scholar painters” of the Ming dynasty, Wen was enmeshed in a complex web of social obligations, his “elegant debts” as he called them, which led to many of his most celebrated works. Using an unprecedented quantity of primary sources for his life and work, Elegant Debts looks at the ways in which social obligation and gift exchange were central to personal and individual identity in the Ming period. The book also examines Wen’s family relationships, his friends, mentors, and pupils, his sense of a distinct local identity, and the interplay of national and regional politics with the achievements of his long life. It uses the insights of a range of scholarship—art history, social and literary history, and anthropology—to show how “self” was constructed in Ming China. In doing so, it makes a major contribution toward a more diverse art history that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work. Craig Clunas has published extensively in the field, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars of Ming culture. Featuring many images of the work of one of China’s major painters, this book is accessible to all who are interested in China’s culture and history, as well as to students and scholars of art history and the history of culture.

The book includes essay which are all written by philosophers of or about forty -five years of age. They fall into two main groups: those in which the writer devotes himself chiefly to the exposition of the great Vedic tradition as he has apprehended it and made it the basis of his own life’s work; and those in which the writer, while on the whole remining true to the spirit of that tradition, has sought to give new interpretations of it, either by instituting comparisons of it with the Western doctrines most closely allied to it or by treating of modern problems in a way which, though suggested by what he has learned from the West, is yet stamped with the mark of his own racial sympathy. Western readers will naturally find the latter group more attractive; but this volume will have failed of its purpose if it does not give them some sense of the truth that underlies even the essays with which, owing to the presuppositions ion which these are founded, they find themselves least in sympathy.