An anthology of Civil War stories from nineteenth-century magazines.

This is a very short book with some poems that I wrote for Sariah Kuosmanen or words that appeared in my mind in the case of 2 of them. And other Poems that I wrote for Olga Bondareva, Anya Belova and Julia Danilova from Russia. The girls inspired me to write them though I haven’t been lucky enough to get married.

The apocalyptic clashes of culture between the land-hungry whites and the American Indians, which reached their climax in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were among the most tragic of all wars ever fought. These conflicts pitted one civilization against another, neither able to comprehend or accommodate the other. To the victor went domination of the continent, to the vanquished the destruction of their way of life. This volume describes those who took part in these wars, focusing on the Plains Indians such as the Sioux and the Cheyenne, the Apache peoples of the south-west, and their implacable foe, the US Cavalry.

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view (from psychology to anthropology) was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change (from the distribution of bird songs to the staying power of children's rhymes) and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution.

An anthropologist deconstructs the notion of masculinity using twenty years of field research in the Cairo neighborhood of al-Zawiya. Watching the revolution of January 2011, the world saw Egyptians, men and women, come together to fight for freedom and social justice. These events gave renewed urgency to the fraught topic of gender in the Middle East. The role of women in public life, the meaning of manhood, and the future of gender inequalities are hotly debated by religious figures, government officials, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens throughout Egypt. Live and Die Like a Man presents a unique twist on traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, shifting the attention to men and exploring how they are collectively “produced” as gendered subjects. It traces how masculinity is continuously maintained and reaffirmed by both men and women under changing socio-economic and political conditions. Over a period of nearly twenty years, Farha Ghannam lived and conducted research in al-Zawiya, a low-income neighborhood not far from Tahrir Square in northern Cairo. Detailing her daily encounters and ongoing interviews, she develops life stories that reveal the everyday practices and struggles of the neighborhood over the years. We meet Hiba and her husband as they celebrate the birth of their first son and begin to teach him how to become a man; Samer, a forty-year-old man trying to find a suitable wife; Abu Hosni, who struggled with different illnesses; and other local men and women who share their reactions to the uprising and the changing situation in Egypt. Against this backdrop of individual experiences, Ghannam develops the concept of masculine trajectories to account for the various paths men can take to embody social norms. In showing how men work to realize a “male ideal,” she counters the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes of Middle Eastern men all too frequently reproduced in media reports, and opens new spaces for rethinking patriarchal structures and their constraining effects on both men and women. Praise for Live and Die Like a Man “In a book that lives up to its name, anthropologist Ghannam explores what it means to be a man . . . . Her thick descriptions, amassed over 20 years of research, will make readers laugh, cry, and gasp at the lives of these individuals . . . . By examining the construct of manhood, Ghannam is charting new territory in Middle Eastern studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —CHOICE “With its focus on masculinity, Farha Ghannam’s thoughtful ethnography, Live and Die Like a Man, makes important interventions into the anthropological scholarship on gender, childhood, and family in the Middle East . . . . Her ethnographic sensibility perfectly grasps the dynamic and complex intertwining of male and female ways of being and self-presentation and how that interrelationship forms men’s lives.” —International Journal of Middle East Studies

In the 1960's marked changes occurred throughout the world in philosophies and policies related to man's role in life. These changes, prompted predominantly by extensive increases in knowledge and popula tion density, have produced increased pleasures as well as problems. The rising number of people and improved methods of communication and transportation have caused more relationships among people, with their pleasures, competitions, jealousies, conflicts of interest, oppressions, and crimes. Large assortments of drugs have been developed and are easily obtained. There are drugs to speed us up, slow us down, make us sleep, change our perspectives on life, promote propagation of life or prevent it, prolong life or terminate it, and modify the course of life in many ways. Also, numerous mechanical devices have been developed that influence the propagation of life, the termination of life, and the manner in which we live. Many people have changed their overall goals in life, and in par ticular have experienced major changes in attitudes and policies applying to sexual activity, marriage, birth control, abortion, welfare, children, old people, criminals, economics, social status, careers, education, euthanasia, and suicide. There also has been marked enlightenment concerning the effect of the chemical and physical status of the brain upon normal and abnormal thinking and behavior.

How gangsta rap shocked America, made millions, and pulled back the curtain on an urban crisis. How is it that gangsta rap—so dystopian that it struck aspiring Brooklyn rapper and future superstar Jay-Z as “over the top”—was born in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, surf, and sun? In the Reagan era, hip-hop was understood to be the music of the inner city and, with rare exception, of New York. Rap was considered the poetry of the street, and it was thought to breed in close quarters, the product of dilapidated tenements, crime-infested housing projects, and graffiti-covered subway cars. To many in the industry, LA was certainly not hard-edged and urban enough to generate authentic hip-hop; a new brand of black rebel music could never come from La-La Land. But it did. In To Live and Defy in LA, Felicia Viator tells the story of the young black men who built gangsta rap and changed LA and the world. She takes readers into South Central, Compton, Long Beach, and Watts two decades after the long hot summer of 1965. This was the world of crack cocaine, street gangs, and Daryl Gates, and it was the environment in which rappers such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E came of age. By the end of the 1980s, these self-styled “ghetto reporters” had fought their way onto the nation’s radio and TV stations and thus into America’s consciousness, mocking law-and-order crusaders, exposing police brutality, outraging both feminists and traditionalists with their often retrograde treatment of sex and gender, and demanding that America confront an urban crisis too often ignored.

Startdotlongagodotstart Start.longago.start How the brain calculates day of death with astonishing accuracy.