The export of American architecture began in the nineteenth century as a disjointed set of personal adventures and commercial initiatives. It continues today alongside the transfer of other aspects of American life and culture to most regions of the world. Jeffrey Cody explains how, why and where American architects, planners, building contractors and other actors have marketed American architecture overseas. In so doing he provides a historical perspective on the diffusion of American building technologies, architectural standards, construction methods and planning paradigms. Using previously undocumented examples and illustrations, he shows how steel-frame manufacturers shipped their products abroad enabling the erection of American-style skyscrapers worldwide by 1900 and how this phase was followed by similar initiatives by companies manufacturing concrete components.

In this richly interdisciplinary work twenty-eight of the nation's leading critics and scholars offer a comprehensive exploration of American society and culture. Each outstanding in his or her own field, the contributors address "America" from a diversit

Out in the Periphery explores how Latin America, a region known for its Catholic heritage and machismo culture, came to embrace gay rights. At the heart of this analysis is the activism of Latin America's gay rights organizations, a long-neglected social movement even by students of Latin American social movements.

In March 2005, the NASA History Division and the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum brought together a distinguished group of scholars to consider the state of the discipline of space history. This volume is a collection of essays based on those deliberations. The meeting took place at a time of extraordinary transformation for NASA, stemming from the new Vision of Space Exploration announced by President George W. Bush in January 204: to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. This Vision, in turn, stemmed from a deep reevaluation of NASA?s goals in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident and the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The new goals were seen as initiating a "New Age of Exploration" and were placed in the context of the importance of exploration and discovery to the American experiences. (Amazon).

Global Suburbs: Urban Sprawl from the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro offers a critical new perspective on the emerging phenomenon of the global suburb in the western hemisphere. American suburban sprawl has created a giant human habitat stretching from Las Vegas to San Diego, and from Mexico to Brazil, presented here in a clear and comprehensive style with in depth descriptions and images. Challenging the ecological problems that stem from these flawed suburban developments, Herzog targets an often overlooked and potentially disastrous global shift in urban development. This book will give depth to courses on suburbs, development, urban studies, and the environment.

An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Focusing on the processes of accumulation, concentration and centralisation of capital, this book explains the transnationalisation of capital and its impact on Latin America and Brazil. The first chapter addresses the logic of these processes from a Marxian perspective. The second chapter shows how this movement of capital expands into some Latin American countries, and how it subsequently retracts in the 1990s process of global centralisation. The third chapter evaluates Latin American strategies to attract capital by taking a subordinate position to capital’s global movement. The last two chapters focus on Brazil's development strategy in the face of the alternating expansion and contraction of capital, and point out the vulnerability of Latin American countries when their development is subordinate to transnational capital. First published in Portuguese as Subordinação consentida: capital multinacional no processo de acumulação da América Latina e Brasil by Annablume Editora/Fapesp in 2006.

A provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended result of nineteenth-century colonial design. From the Afghan frontier with British India to the pampas of Argentina to the deserts of Arizona, nineteenth-century empires drew borders with an eye toward placing indigenous people just on the edge of the interior. They were too nomadic and communal to incorporate in the state, yet their labor was too valuable to displace entirely. Benjamin Hopkins argues that empires sought to keep the “savage” just close enough to take advantage of, with lasting ramifications for the global nation-state order. Hopkins theorizes and explores frontier governmentality, a distinctive kind of administrative rule that spread from empire to empire. Colonial powers did not just create ad hoc methods or alight independently on similar techniques of domination: they learned from each other. Although the indigenous peoples inhabiting newly conquered and demarcated spaces were subjugated in a variety of ways, Ruling the Savage Periphery isolates continuities across regimes and locates the patterns of transmission that made frontier governmentality a world-spanning phenomenon. Today, the supposedly failed states along the margins of the international system—states riven by terrorism and violence—are not dysfunctional anomalies. Rather, they work as imperial statecraft intended, harboring the outsiders whom stable states simultaneously encapsulate and exploit. “Civilization” continues to deny responsibility for border dwellers while keeping them close enough to work, buy goods across state lines, and justify national-security agendas. The present global order is thus the tragic legacy of a colonial design, sustaining frontier governmentality and its objectives for a new age.

This book discusses the conditions that underpin configuration of specific places as resource peripheries and the consequences that such a socio-spatial formation involves for those places. The book thereby provides an interdisciplinary approach underpinned by economic geography, political ecology, resource geography, development studies and political geography. It also discusses the different technological, political and economic changes that make the ongoing production of resource peripheries a distinctive socio-spatial formation under the global economy. Through a global and interdisciplinary perspective that uncovers ongoing political processes, socio-economic changes and socio-ecological dynamics at resource peripheries, this book argues that it is critical to take a more profound appraisal about the socio-spatial processes behind the contemporary way in which capitalism is appropriating and transforming nature.