‘Books are for white people.’ It’s an old idea, and historically, mostly a true one, at least in British publishing. Not only have most books, including children’s books, been written for and about white people in Britain, the scholarly and critical histories of literature, including children’s literature, have focused on these same books and their presumed-white audie…
Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways …
Thoroughly updated in light of new scholarship, including revised sections on President Nixon’s policies in Vietnam and President Reagan’s approach to U.S.-Soviet relations Features six all new "counterparts" sections that juxtapose important historical figures to illustrate the contrasting viewpoints that characterized the Cold War Argues that the success of Western capitalism during th…
Doctoral education has become a key element of the higher education landscape everywhere. With the spread of higher education massification and the rise of the global knowledge economy that began in the late twentieth century and continues today, doctoral education has expanded tremendously. There have been significant changes in doctoral education worldwide in the twent…
Agricultural development in Asia has undergone multiple phases and has experienced a remarkable evolution that also advanced general economic development. The region has become a major agricultural producer in the world due to the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century (Hazell 2009). In particular, its rice exports have become essentia…
A comprehensive and authoritative short guide, this Very Short Introduction to Medieval Britain covers the establishment of the Anglo-Norman monarchy in the early Middle Ages, through to England's failure to dominate the British Isles and France in the later Middle Ages. Out of the turbulence came stronger senses of identity in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Yet this was an age, too, of growing …
The dynamic processes of knowledge production in archaeology and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly viewed as the collaborative effort of groups, clusters and communities of researchers rather than the isolated work of so-called ‘instrumental’ actors. Shifting focus from the individual scholar to the wider social contexts of her work and the dynamic creative pr…
The capacity for sound to be powerfully evocative is unquestionable. An old photograph, or even a silent cine film from one’s childhood, brings back memories and can have strong emotional resonances. Listening to the ‘unseen sound’ of an old audio recording however, can almost without warning, engulf us in the feelings it triggers. The sound of a distant night-time …
Digital media have been responsible for some of the most wide-ranging changes in society over the past quarter-century. At the same time, there is little agreement in the social sciences about how these changes should be understood. One reason is increasing disciplinary specialization. For example, media and communication studies concentrates on specific areas such as the news or influe…
The web has been with us for more than a quarter of a century. It has become a daily and ubiquitous source of information in many peoples’ lives around the globe. But what does it tell us about historical and social change? For a researcher in the twenty-second century, it will seem unimaginable that someone studying the twenty-first c…