This book looks at the social and economic factors of schooling and will prove an intriguing read for sociologists, social economists and policy-makers alike.

Set in the American community of Rivercrest in a multi-racial junior school, this text provides a portrait of the beliefs and understandings held by students, teachers and administrators with respect to issues such as race, social class and gender.

Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842), the Scottish anatomist-surgeon, was a true polymath. His original ideas on the nervous system have been likened to those of William Harvey on the circulation of blood, and his privately published pamphlet detailing his ideas about the brain has been called the Magna Carta of neurology. He described the separate functions of different parts of the nervous system, new nerves and muscles, and several previously unrecognized neurological disorders, and he characterized the features of the facial palsy and its associated features now named after him. His sketches and paintings of the wounded from the Napoleonic Wars and his essays on the anatomical basis of expression changed the way art students are taught and influenced British and European artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. He was a renowned medical teacher who founded his own private medical school, took over the famous Hunterian school, and helped establish the University of London and the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. So how is it that a man of such influence is virtually unknown today by most neuroscientists, biologists, and clinicians? Sir Charles Bell: His Life, Art, Neurological Concepts, and Controversial Legacy discusses the work and teachings of this brilliant man. His reputation was tarnished by charges of intellectual dishonesty and fraud, but his work changed the way scientists and clinicians think about the nervous system and its operation in health and disease, led directly to the work of Charles Darwin on facial expressions, and influenced the way artists view the human body and depict illnesses and wounds. Masterfully written by Dr. Michael J. Aminoff in his signature approachable style, this is the perfect addition to any library of medical history.

"[A] page-turner…The Telephone Gambit is solid history, and Seth Shulman makes it as much fun to read as an Agatha Christie whodunit." —John Steele Gordon, Wall Street Journal Throughout his career, Alexander Graham Bell, one of the world’s most famous inventors, was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone. While researching at MIT, science journalist Seth Shulman scrutinized Bell’s journals and within them found the smoking gun, a hint of deeply buried historical deception. Bell furtively—and illegally—copied part of Elisha Gray’s patent caveat in the race to secure what would become the most valuable U.S. patent ever issued. Delving further into Bell’s story, Shulman unearths the surprising truth behind the telephone—and with it, a tale of romance, corruption, and unchecked ambition. The Telephone Gambit challenges the reputation of an icon of invention, rocks the foundation of a corporate behemoth, and offers a probing meditation on how little we know about our own history.

A prominent public personality, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone, teacher of the deaf, phonetician, showman and sage, was also a very private individual. With unrestricted access to Bell’s vast personal files, Robert V. Bruce takes the proper measure of Bell the man in this biography, which portrays Bell as intense, curious, struggling to overcome his very real limitations as a scientist and the negative effects of early fame (he invented the telephone while still in his 20s) and sheds light on 19th- and 20th-century technology and on Bell’s inventions, including tetrahedral construction, the bullet probe, the “vacuum jacket” (a precursor of the iron lung) and the telephone. Bruce also explores Bell’s research and experiments on the airplane, the phonograph and the hydrofoil, and offers detailed information about the long and dramatic battle waged by Bell and his backers to establish the legitimacy of their claims on the basic telephone patents. Bruce illuminates the field which Bell considered his foremost vocation, the teaching of the deaf, describing Bell’s friendship with Helen Keller, his marriage to a deaf girl to whom he had given lessons in speech, and his funding of The Volta Review, a journal concerned with the deaf and hard of hearing still in existence — like Bell’s other magazines, Science and National Geographic. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in biography. “Both a lucid picture of an extraordinary scientific career and an engaging account of a remarkable man... Professor Bruce doesn’t scant the astonishing variety of Bell’s interests and accomplishments, which ranged all the way from supporting important scientific periodicals... to teaching the deaf to speak and fighting for their right to do so... to inventing everything he could imagine... At the same time, he has given us an extremely candid personal picture of this titan of American technology.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times “The first full-scale life based on the voluminous Bell papers. It is an absorbing story... The technical trials and errors, Bell’s almost naive persistence, the actual components he worked with, are all attentively documented by Professor Bruce. We are, as well, given a vivid picture of the human environment out of which the telephone emerged, as one individual after another, each of immense importance to Bell, sought to advise, encourage, deter, rectify his failings or even defeat him... It is [in Bruce’s] account of Bell’s life after the telephone... that the man himself emerges... It becomes, as the author writes, a study not of long adversity culminating in a final crescendo of triumph, the usual pattern for heroic tales, but of a long personal struggle against the deadening handicap of early fame... As it turns out, Bell’s post-telephone days, from 1876 to August, 1922, when he died at age 75, were in many ways his best.” — David McCullough, New York Times Book Review “The brilliant Scottish immigrant’s story is more complicated, and more fascinating, than his myth. This authoritative, scientifically informed biography vividly portrays a man who, unlike his single-minded contemporary Thomas Edison, was a divided genius.” — Newsweek “Until now, Alexander Graham Bell has been eclipsed by that invention which so changed communication that it is among the few which can genuinely be called revolutionary. Here he emerges not as a myth but as a man.” — Los Angeles Times “Bruce has written the first fully documented biography of Alexander Graham Bell... a lengthy portrayal of a man gifted with intelligence, imagination, and energy pursuing a wide range of interests... It seems likely that Bruce’s narrative account of Bell’s invention of the telephone — with its shadings and emphasis — will be the definitive one.” — Thomas Parker Hughes, Science “The result of a decade of study with the blessing and help of Bell’s descendants, this is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and handsomely researched biography of Bell since C. D. MacKenzie’s 1928 work... Throughout the enormous detail of this biography, Bell’s restless intellectual energy and breakthrough fever emerge. A gargantuan work — sure to be a basic reference for both future admirers and detractors.” — Kirkus Reviews “Robert V. Bruce has written an admirable and much needed biography of Alexander Graham Bell... Based on the vast collection of Bell’s papers held at the National Geographic Society in Washington and exhaustively supplemented by other sources, it is the first full-scale biography of the man whose invention changed the world.” — Patrick O’Dowd, Isis “A definitive biography of [Alexander Graham Bell]... From [the] mass of source material available to him, Bruce has skillfully and faithfully extricated a genuine personality and has forced Bell off the pedestal to which his own contemporaries had assigned him.” — Joseph Frazier Wall, Business History Review “[A] carefully researched biography... from family correspondence especially Bruce has distilled skillfully the dreams, the disappointments, and the foibles of a determined inventor in his moments of triumph and distress... the author’s assertive style, brightened by flashes of wry humor, and frequent sketches reproduced from Bell’s lab notebooks help make this in depth analysis of a notable American inventor profitable reading.” — Hugo A. Meier, Journal of American History

The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary citizens—farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs—established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks and companies—a struggle with an emerging corporate giant that has been almost entirely forgotten. The People's Network reconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings, exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy, and social practice in the creation of modern North American telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications, and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a turning point in the history of information networks. The competing businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity and local versus centralized power. Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight with big business, they fundamentally changed the way telecommunications were conceived.