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Along the Russian-Qing frontier in the nineteenth century, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and revolution. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the Uyghur nation.

Shaper Nations provides perspectives on the national strategies of eight countries that are shaping global politics in the twenty-first century. The volume's authors offer a unique viewpoint: they live and work primarily in the country about which they write, bringing an insider's feel for national debates and politics.

Alejandra Dubcovsky maps channels of information exchange in the American South, exploring how colonists came into possession of knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. She describes ingenious oral networks, and she uncovers important lessons about the nexus of information and power.

The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel an American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. This interdisciplinary work explains how a complex matrix of cultures influences black youth.

Kecia Ali delves into the many ways the Prophet's life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, she shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent.

Should laws apply to everyone, or should some people be exempt because of conflicting religious or moral convictions? Through a close study of several cases, from abortion to taxes, Kent Greenawalt demonstrates how to weigh competing values without losing sight of practical considerations like the difficulty of implementing a specific law.

Revealing an Italian Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday people who were inspired to pursue humanistic learning. Physicians were often the most avid professionals seeking to earn the respect of their betters, advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the Two Chinas dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Hsiao-ting Lin challenges this conventional narrative, showing the many ways the ad hoc creation of this not fully sovereign state was accidental and serendipitous.

Does America have a free press? Many who say yes appeal to First Amendment protections against censorship. Sam Lebovic shows that free speech, on its own, is not sufficient to produce a free press and helps us understand the crises that beset the press amid media consolidation, a secretive national security state, and the daily newspaper's decline.

Julia Cage explains the economics and history of the media crisis and offers a solution: a nonprofit media organization, midway between a foundation and a joint stock company, supported by readers, employees, and innovative financing such as crowdfunding. Her business model is inspired by a central idea: that news, like education, is a public good.

Hilary Putnam's writings have shaped epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of physics and mathematics, and philosophy of mind. This volume illustrates his willingness to revisit past arguments, above all how to articulate a theory of naturalism which acknowledges that normative phenomena form an ineluctable part of human experience.

Science has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets-caught between a reductive scientific view and naive literary metaphors-struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

In the 1960s Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was labeled America's largest ghetto. But its brownstones housed a coterie of black professionals intent on bringing order and hope to the community. In telling their story Michael Woodsworth reinterprets the War on Poverty by revealing its roots in local activism and policy experiments.

Giovanni Marrasio was esteemed in the Renaissance as the first to revive the ancient Latin elegy, and his Angelinetum, or "Angelina's Garden," and other poems explores that genre in all its variety, from love poetry, to a description of a court masque, to political panegyric, to poetic exchanges with famous humanists of the day.

In a bold and boundary defining work, Angus Fletcher clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining literature and topology-a branch of mathematics-he maps the ways the imagination's contours are formed by the spherical earth's patterns and cycles, and shows how the world we inhabit also inhabits us.

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, yet most of its stories are lost. Randy Sparks examines the few remaining reconstructed experiences of West Africans who lived in the South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores.

Writing in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg's shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?

What if you were to discover that you were only one half of a whole-that you had a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, Charles Stang shows, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, offering a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms down to the present.

Lysenko became one of the most notorious figures in twentieth-century science after his genetic theories were discredited decades ago. Yet some scientists now claim that discoveries in epigenetics prove that he was right after all. Loren Graham reopens the case, to determine whether new developments in molecular biology validate Lysenko's claims.

What gives statistics its unity as a science? Stephen Stigler sets forth the seven foundational ideas of statistics-a scientific discipline related to but distinct from mathematics and computer science and one which often seems counterintuitive. His original account will fascinate the interested layperson and engage the professional statistician.

From 1716 to 1845 Scottish banks were among the most dynamic and resilient in Europe, effectively absorbing economic shocks that rocked markets in London and on the continent. Tyler Beck Goodspeed explains the paradox that Scotland's banking system achieved this success without the regulations Adam Smith considered necessary for economic stability.

Consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How do these actors assess uncertainty? Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by showing how fictional expectations drive modern economies-or throw them into crisis when imagined futures fail to materialize.

Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. Holy Men of Mount Athos presents the Lives of five holy men who lived there at different times, from the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century.

Changes in longevity, marriage, and the workplace have undermined Social Security, making the experience of old age increasingly unequal. Anne Alstott's pragmatic, progressive revision would permit all Americans to retire between 62 and 76 but would provide generous early retirement benefits for workers with low wages or physically demanding jobs.

A new therapeutic strategy could break the stalemate in the war on cancer by targeting not all cancerous cells but the small fraction that lie at the root of cancers. Lucie Laplane offers a comprehensive analysis of cancer stem cell theory, based on an original interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, biomedical history, and philosophy.

Scholars have long separated a few privileged "religions of the Book" from faiths lacking sacred texts, including ancient Roman religion. Looking beyond this distinction, Duncan MacRae delves into Roman treatises on the nature of gods and rituals to grapple with a central question: what was the significance of books in a religion without scripture?

Presented in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture, composed of 60 short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces.

William Halsey, the most famous naval officer of World War II, was known for fearlessness, steely resolve, and impulsive errors. In this definitive biography, Thomas Hughes punctures the popular caricature of the fighting admiral to present a revealing human portrait of his personal and professional life as it was lived in times of war and peace.

American slaves drew on memories of African musical traditions to construct instruments from carved-out gourds covered with animal skin. Providing a sense of rootedness, solidarity, and consolation, banjo picking became an essential part of black plantation life, and its unmistakable sound remains versatile and enduring today, Laurent Dubois shows.

Challenging the conventional trope that French environmentalism arose after WWII, Caroline Ford argues that a broad environmental consciousness emerged in France much earlier. In response to war, natural disasters, and imperialism, the bourgeoisie, along with politicians, engineers, naturalists, writers, and painters, took up environmental causes.