Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.
Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge.
Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

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William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trud ier Harris - The Concise Oxford Companion to Afric an American Literature (2001).jpg

USA Books - William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier ...e Oxford Companion to African American Literature 2001.jpg

This important sourcebook for information about black writers and their craft is a welcome companion to the recently issued Norton Anthology of African American Literature. More to the point, it shows how much black literature, once relegated to the margins, has become mainstream. Here are brief biographies of more than 400 black writers, entries on some 150 works, and a host of entries on characters from novels, stories, and plays. In addition, there are entries on topics such as Afrocentricity (as well as on topics of more general interest, such as the novel), that make this essential for anyone who cares about black literature.

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William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trud ier Harris - The Concise Oxford Companion to Afric an American Literature (2001).pdf

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Carla Mulford - The Cambridge Companion to Benjami n Franklin (2009).jpg

Comprehensive and accessible, this Companion addresses several well-known themes in the study of Franklin and his writings, while also showing Franklin in conversation with his British and European counterparts in science, philosophy, and social theory. Specially commissioned chapters, written by scholars well-known in their respective fields, examine Franklin's writings and his life with a new sophistication, placing Franklin in his cultural milieu while revealing the complexities of his intellectual, literary, social, and political views. Individual chapters take up several traditional topics, such as Franklin and the American dream, Franklin and capitalism, and Franklin's views of American national character. Other chapters delve into Franklin's library and his philosophical views on morality, religion, science, and the Enlightenment and explore his continuing influence in American culture. This Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of American literature, history and culture.

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Brian Kogan, Tony Kelso - Encyclopedia of Politics , the Media, and Popular Culture (2009).jpg

Covering topics that highlight the intersection between politics, media, and popular culture, this encyclopedia follows the connections between all three areas for the past 200 years, with the main focus on developments since the advent of movies and broadcast radio. It is divided into two sections. The first section consists of eight chapters, each taking a look at how politics has meshed with feature films and documentaries, radio, television, broadcast news (both serious and satirical), music, advertising, and the Internet. Each chapter ends with a further-reading list. The second section contains 247 A–Z entries covering people (Ken Burns, Ann Coulter, Hillary Clinton), music (“Born in the USA,” Country music), events (Kennedy-Nixon debates, Live Aid), radio and television programs (The Simpsons, War of the Worlds radio program), new media (Blog, YouTube), and more. Within the text, bold type is used to alert the reader to terms that are also entry headings. For some topics, such as Pirate radio and Twitter, see references refer the reader to pages in part 1 for information. A bibliography follows the A–Z portion of the book. This volume provides a thoughtful look at how pop culture and the media, both historical and contemporary, affect or reflect political events. It is recommended for academic and large public libraries. Also available as an e-book. --Christy Donaldson

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2,7 MB
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Brian Kogan, Tony Kelso - Encyclopedia of Politics , the Media, and Popular Culture (2009).pdf

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Daniel Salinas - Latin American Evangelical Theolo gy in the 1970's, The Golden Decade (2009).jpg

The story of Latin American evangelicals doing theology is mostly unknown. In the 1970s there was an important development with the formation of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL). This group spearheaded the theological production in Latin America, marking the beginning of a critical stage in the history of evangelicals in the region. This book deals with the reception history in North America of the FTL and its program. Interamerican theological dialogue is documented and analysed.

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3,6 MB
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Daniel Salinas - Latin American Evangelical Theolo gy in the 1970's, The Golden Decade (2009).pdf

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Susan B. A. Somers-Willett - The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry, Race, Identity, and the Performan ce of Popular Verse in America (2009).jpg

USA Books - Susan B. A. Somers-Willett - The Cultural Politics of ..., and the Performance of Popular Verse in America 2009.jpg

The cultural phenomenon known as slam poetry was born some twenty years ago in white working-class Chicago barrooms. Since then, the raucous competitions have spread internationally, launching a number of annual tournaments, inspiring a generation of young poets, and spawning a commercial empire in which poetry and hip-hop merge.

The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry is the first critical book to take an in-depth look at slam, shedding light on the relationships that slam poets build with their audiences through race and identity performance and revealing how poets come to celebrate (and at times exploit) the politics of difference in American culture.

With a special focus on African American poets, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett explores the pros and cons of identity representation in the commercial arena of spoken word poetry and, in doing so, situates slam within a history of verse performance, from blackface minstrelsy to Def Poetry. What's revealed is a race-based dynamic of authenticity lying at the heart of American culture. Rather than being mere reflections of culture, Somers-Willett argues, slams are culture—sites where identities and political values get publicly refigured and exchanged between poets and audiences.

"For a lucid and thorough 'real-world' analysis of the movement from the ground-up--including its history, aesthetics, and culture, there is surely no better place to start than Somers-Willett's trailblazing book."
— Jerome Sala, Pleiades

"Finally, a clear, accurate, and thoroughly researched examination of slam poetry, a movement begun in 1984 by a mixed bag of nobody poets in Chicago. At conception, slam poetry espoused universal humanistic ideals and a broad spectrum of participants, and especially welcome is the book's analysis of how commercial marketing forces succeeded in narrowing public perception of slam to the factionalized politics of race and identity. The author's knowledge of American slam at the national level is solid and more authentic than many of the slammers who claim to be."
—Marc Kelly Smith, founder/creator of the International Poetry Slam movement

Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is a decade-long veteran of slam and teaches creative writing and poetics as an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University. She is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver and Roam.

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0,6 MB
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Susan B. A. Somers-Willett - The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry, Race, Identity, and the Performan ce of Popular Verse in America (2009).pdf

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Andrew Rathmell - Developing Iraq's Security Secto r, The Coalition Provisional Authority's Experienc e (2006).jpg

Looks at the Caolition Provisional Authority's efforts to rebuild Iraq's security sector and pres lessons learned.

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Andrew Rathmell - Developing Iraq's Security Secto r, The Coalition Provisional Authority's Experienc e (2006).pdf

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Ann Norton Greene - Horses at Work, Harnessing Pow er in Industrial America (2008).jpg

Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America, yet a bird’s-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on farms, providing power for transportation, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture. On Civil War battlefields, thousands of horses labored and died for the Union and the Confederacy hauling wagons and mechanized weaponry.
The innovations that brought machinery to the forefront of American society made horses the prime movers of these machines for most of the nineteenth century. Mechanization actually increased the need for horsepower by expanding the range of tasks requiring it. Indeed, the single most significant energy transition of the antebellum era may have been the dramatic expansion in the use of living, breathing horses as a power technology in the development of industrial America.
Ann Greene argues for recognition of horses’ critical contribution to the history of American energy and the rise of American industrial power, and a new understanding of the reasons for their replacement as prime movers. Rather than a result of “inevitable” technological change, it was Americans’ social and political choices about power consumption that sealed this animal’s fate. The rise and fall of the workhorse was defined by the kinds of choices that Americans made and would continue to make—choices that emphasized individual mobility and autonomy, and assumed, above all, abundant energy resources.

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Ann Norton Greene - Horses at Work, Harnessing Pow er in Industrial America (2008).pdf

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Austin Long - Deterrence, From Cold War to Long Wa r, Lessons from Six Decades of RAND Research (2008 ).jpg

Since its inception six decades ago, the RAND Corporation has been one of the key institutional homes for the study of deterrence. This book examines much of this research for lessons relevant to the current and future strategic environment. It is therefore part intellectual history and part policy recommendation, intended to encourage debate and discussion on how deterrence can best be incorporated into U.S. strategy.This book examines six decades of RAND Corporation research on deterrence for lessons relevant to the current and future strategic environments.

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Austin Long - Deterrence, From Cold War to Long Wa r, Lessons from Six Decades of RAND Research (2008 ).pdf

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Benjamin Ross, Steven Amter - The Polluters, The M aking of Our Chemically Altered Environment (2010).jpg

Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter tell the story of how the chemical industry, abetted by a compliant government, set loose a plague of pollution that began in the years before and directly following World War II, a plague that still lingers today. The advent of new synthetic chemical products such as Nylon and DDT created new hazards just as the expansion and mechanization of industry exacerbated old ones. Environmental dangers well known today--smog, pesticides, lead, chlorinated solvents, asbestos, and even global warming--were already recognized in that era by chemists, engineers, doctors, and business managers. A few of them spoke out about these dangers, others overlooked scientific truth in pursuit of wealth and prestige, and many struggled to find a balance between the interests of industry and the needs of the wider world.
By the mid-twentieth century, the chemical industry understood that it needed to curb its pollution. But federal government regulation, the only mechanism by which effective control could have been accomplished, faced implacable hostility from the industry. Driven by the twin forces of pecuniary interest and ideological hostility to governmental control, it exercised its considerable political and economic power to block oversight. Discovery of new environmental problems was discouraged, and research that might find them was starved of funds. When dangers did emerge, well-paid advocates concocted grounds for doubt. If a crisis exploded into public view, money and influence were deployed to steer investigations toward reassuring conclusions.

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Courtney Bender - The New Metaphysicals, Spiritual ity and the American Religious Imagination (2010).jpg

American spirituality—with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration—is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But, as The New Metaphysicals makes clear, contemporary American spirituality has historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements. To explore this world, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritual beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners and those who study it alike—and shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.
See all Editorial Reviews

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Elijah Wald - The Blues, A Very Short Introduction (2010).jpg

It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap.
As with all of Oxford's Very Short Introductions, The Blues tells you--with insight, clarity, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre.

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Ernest Freeberg - Democracy's Prisoner, Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (200 8).jpg

In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country.
In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.
The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals.

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Ernest Freeberg - Democracy's Prisoner, Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (200 8).pdf

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Gary Alan Fine, Bill Ellis - The Global Grapevine, Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade M atter (2010).jpg

USA Books - Gary Alan Fine, Bill Ellis - The Global Grapevine, Why...mors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter 2010.jpg

Fine (Whispers on the Color Line), John Evans professor of sociology at Northwestern, and Ellis, professor emeritus at Penn State, examine the rumors and legends that circulate about the risks of our interconnected world in their treatment of the most ancient source of news. The authors explore its influence in the intimidating global community of the 21st century, particularly in the arenas of terrorism, immigration, international trade, and tourism; they make a generally persuasive case that since rumor shapes how people think and then respond to the world, its propagation is a fundamentally political act. Relying on shards of evidence, bits and pieces of hearsay, the self-styled rumor scholars analyze an array of contemporary rumors and draw some unremarkable conclusions: e.g., Americans are of several minds about immigration, have mixed feelings about the exotic, and are anxious about the economic impact of international trade. Even if Fine and Ellis promise more than they deliver, there is much that adds to our understanding of rumor in an era when access to information (and misinformation) has never been faster or more constant.

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Gary Alan Fine, Bill Ellis - The Global Grapevine, Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade M atter (2010).pdf

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George M. Fredrickson - Big Enough to Be Inconsist ent, Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (2 008).jpg

“Cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves.” Abraham Lincoln was, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “big enough to be inconsistent.” Big enough, indeed, for every generation to have its own Lincoln—unifier or emancipator, egalitarian or racist. In an effort to reconcile these views, and to offer a more complex and nuanced account of a figure so central to American history, this book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
George Fredrickson shows how Lincoln’s antislavery convictions, however genuine and strong, were held in check by an equally strong commitment to the rights of the states and the limitations of federal power. He explores how Lincoln’s beliefs about racial equality in civil rights, stirred and strengthened by the African American contribution to the northern war effort, were countered by his conservative constitutional philosophy, which left this matter to the states. The Lincoln who emerges from these pages is far more comprehensible and credible in his inconsistencies, and in the abiding beliefs and evolving principles from which they arose. Deeply principled but nonetheless flawed, all-too-human yet undeniably heroic, he is a Lincoln for all generations.

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George M. Fredrickson - Big Enough to Be Inconsist ent, Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (2 008).pdf

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Headquarters Department of the Army - M16A1 Rifle. Operator's Manual (1977).jpg

TM 9-1005-249-10. Poor quality scan. Contents: Introduction; To your weapon; Ammunition; Disassembly; Lubrication; Assembly; Magazine; PMCS; Operation; Troubleshooting.

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Headquarters Department of the Army - M16A1 Rifle. Operator's Manual (1977).pdf

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Herfried Munkler - Empires, The Logic of World Dom ination from Ancient Rome to the United States (2 007).jpg

This book is a commanding walk through the history of empires and at the same time a brilliant analysis of the most modern of topics. It will appeal to students and scholars of international politics and history as well as general readers interested in political history and contemporary world politics.

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