Books published by The University of Chicago Press

The disparity between rich and poor countries is the most serious, intractable problem facing the world. The author in this book draws on extensive microeconomic studies of thirteen nations - conducted over twelve years by the Institute itself - to counter virtually all prevailing wisdom about how best to ameliorate economic disparity.

Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic? This book tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade's absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, and its troubled presentation in the country's classrooms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of political philosophy. This edition brings together translations of three of Rousseau's works: the "Discourse on the Sciences and Arts", the "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men", and "On the Social Contract".

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain. These lectures provide the missing link between Foucault's early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. This book presents these lectures.

This volume gathers together letters of condolence, memorial essays, eulogies and funeral orations, written by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, written as colleagues and friends passed away before him. It captures his thoughts on some important themes - mourning, memory and friendship.

A study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, it locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines.

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. This book discusses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, despite it being one of science's best-established findings. This book sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science.

Offers a critique of the standard approach to social research - namely, assessing the relative importance of causal variables drawn from competing theories. This book proposes the use of set-theoretic methods to find a middle path between quantitative and qualitative research.

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. This book challenges this long-held view. It reveals that animals exhibit a range of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity.

"This is a book about waste transformed, and reuse, repurposing, and recycling -- and how we consume the products of our industry. Through the story of shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes up these provocative topics and offers a new way for us to think critically about them. Shoddy is a global potpourri of textile waste manufactured into a saleable commodity: for example, wool that has been sorted, scoured, stuffed into rag-grinding machines, and remade into new clothes and textile and upholstery products. Both of-the-moment and truly historical, the book sends us back to West Yorkshire, 1812 and the birth of the commodification of waste through processing, before pushing us forward again with interviews and images from shoddy towns, waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories in the US and UK. Along the way we see exposed the political, ethical, environmental, and other ways shoddy has transformed lives and landscapes"--

"Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey is a top selling coursebook designed for entry-level college classes in the history of science and as a single-volume introduction for the general reader. Exploring both the history of science and its influence on modern thought, this general survey chronicles all major developments in scientific thinking, from the revolutionary ideas of the seventeenth century to contemporary issues in genetics, physics, and more. First published fifteen years ago, this revised edition is not only updated to reflect the latest scholarship, it also contains two entirely new chapters: on computing, and empire"--

Papers of the international conference "A Voice as Something More," held at the University of Chicago in November 2015.

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled "Discourse and Truth," given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault's reading of the Greek concept of parrēsia, often translated as "truth-telling" or "frank speech." The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept's history, Foucault's concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. These lectures--carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault's insights--are a major addition to Foucault's English language corpus.

"Wow. No one ever told me this!" Wendy Laura Belcher has heard this countless times throughout her years of teaching and advising academics on how to write journal articles. Scholars know they must publish, but few have been told how to do so. So Belcher made it her mission to demystify the writing process. The result was Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, which takes this overwhelming task and breaks it into small, manageable steps. For the past decade, this guide has been the go-to source for those creating articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. With this new edition, Belcher expands her advice to reach beginning scholars in even more disciplines. She builds on feedback from professors and graduate students who have successfully used the workbook to complete their articles. A new chapter addresses scholars who are writing from scratch. This edition also includes more targeted exercises and checklists, as well as the latest research on productivity and scholarly writing. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is the only reference to combine expert guidance with a step-by-step workbook. Each week, readers learn a feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. Every day is mapped out, taking the guesswork and worry out of writing. There are tasks, templates, and reminders. At the end of twelve weeks, graduate students, recent PhDs, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct instructors, junior faculty, and international faculty will feel confident they know that the rules of academic publishing and have the tools they need to succeed.

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music--long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening--has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.             Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject--at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow--and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries--like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality--against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion--for living and for dying.

A moving collection of intimate portraits of farm animals who somehow escaped the typical fate of their kind and got to experience old age. These photos have so much personality, and Leshko supplements them with accounts of each animal's life and her experience photographing them.

Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the fusion of architecture, history and national identity in present-day Berlin. He surveys the urban landscape and deconstructs the public debates and political controversies emerging from Berlin's past.

Fully updated for the digital age, this new edition of How to Lie with Maps examines the myriad ways that technology offers new opportunities for cartographic mischief, deception, and propaganda.

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists anxieties about survival and salvation led them to stockpile and freeze materials from communities that seemed to embody potentially valuable biological resources. This has grown into a monumental, tissue-based infrastructure that enables a huge range of contemporary research in the private and public sectors. Preserved tissues have been mined again and again, each time for new constituents, and arguments have been made about the urgency of acquiring ever more high quality specimens. At the same time, concerns about privacy and property have dominated the ethical, legal, and social discussions surrounding what has been referred to as the stored tissue issue. In this book Joanna Radin explains the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice. This is a fascinating inquiry into how and why the question who do I think I am? came to be asked in the language of science and how the practice of accumulating blood samples shaped the emergence of biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age."

Originally published: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, Ã1955.

While the natural world is often described as organic, it is in fact structured to the very molecule, replete with patterned order that can be decoded with basic mathematical algorithms and principles. In a nautilus shell one can see logarithmic spirals, and the Golden Ratio can be seen in the seed head of the sunflower plant. These patterns and shapes have inspired artists, writers, designers, and musicians for thousands of years. "Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does" illuminates the amazing diversity of pattern in the natural world and takes readers on a visual tour of some of the world s most incredible natural wonders. Featuring awe-inspiring galleries of nature s most ingenious designs, "Patterns in Nature" is a synergy of art and science that will fascinate artists, nature lovers, and mathematicians alike."

It is time for the story of the evolution of language to be rewritten. Michael Corballis breaks tradition with the likes of Chomsky, Pinker, and Gould and shows how language was neither a great leap nor a merge of mental wires. Language, he argues, is a device for sharing our thoughts, and is not thought itself; thought evolved independently of language, and was not necessary for its later emergence. His story centers on the ability of mental time travel, that is to entertain thoughts that are not tied to the present, and the theory of mind, or the ability to read other people s minds. Language in this framework becomes a way of sharing our thoughts, of communicating about aspects of the world, exquisitely shaped to communicate about the non-present; ideas, and stories, that are housed in our minds. This involved grammar, a set of conventions by which our thinking can be put into words, so that others can share them. The main attributes of grammatical language were shaped gradually from some 2.5 million years ago, during the Pleistocene. It did not, Corballis contends, emerge in a fortuitous big bang a mere 60,000 years ago. Corballis sees the evolution of language as one of the strongest test cases for Darwin s theory of evolution by natural selection. Language evolution has been referred to as the hardest problems in science, and Corballis here offers some meaningful paths to its solution. "

From sprawling houses to compact bungalows and from world-famous museums to a still-working gas station, Frank Lloyd Wright's designs can be found in nearly every corner of the country. While the renowned architect passed away more than fifty years ago, researchers and enthusiasts are still uncovering structures that should be attributed to him. William Allin Storrer is one of the experts leading this charge, and his definitive guide, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, has long been the resource of choice for anyone interested in Wright. Thanks to the work of Storrer and his colleagues at the Rediscovering Wright Project, thirty-seven new sites have recently been identified as the work of Wright. Together with more photos, updated and expanded entries, and a new essay on the evolution of Wright's unparalleled architectural style, this new edition is the most comprehensive and authoritative catalog available. Organized chronologically, the catalog includes full-color photos, location information, and historical and architectural background for all of Wright's extant structures in the United States and abroad, as well as entries for works that have been demolished over the years. A geographic listing makes it easy for traveling Wright fans to find nearby structures and a new key indicates whether a site is open to the public. Publishing for Wright's sesquicentennial, this new edition will be a trusted companion for anyone embarking on their own journeys through the wonder and genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Although plants comprise more than 90% of all visible life, and land plants and algae collectively make up the most morphologically, physiologically, and ecologically diverse group of organisms on earth, books on evolution instead tend to focus on animals. This organismal bias has led to an incomplete and often erroneous understanding of evolutionary theory. Because plants grow and reproduce differently than animals, they have evolved differently, and generally accepted evolutionary views--as, for example, the standard models of speciation--often fail to hold when applied to them. Tapping such wide-ranging topics as genetics, gene regulatory networks, phenotype mapping, and multicellularity, as well as paleobotany, Karl J. Niklas's Plant Evolution offers fresh insight into these differences. Following up on his landmark book The Evolutionary Biology of Plants--in which he drew on cutting-edge computer simulations that used plants as models to illuminate key evolutionary theories--Niklas incorporates data from more than a decade of new research in the flourishing field of molecular biology, conveying not only why the study of evolution is so important, but also why the study of plants is essential to our understanding of evolutionary processes. Niklas shows us that investigating the intricacies of plant development, the diversification of early vascular land plants, and larger patterns in plant evolution is not just a botanical pursuit: it is vital to our comprehension of the history of all life on this green planet.