As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial "order." Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial "passing," a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race's authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires.
Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the "passing plot" to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described "voluntary Negro." Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and
Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of "post-passing" testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing "positive" images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin's 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of "color blindness."
Wald's analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

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Gayle Wald - Crossing the Line, Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (200 0).pdf

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Linda Romine - Frommer's Nashville and Memphis, 9t h Edition (2009).jpg

Our author hits all the highlights, from the Ryman Auditorium and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville to Beale Street and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She's checked out all the cities' best hotels and restaurants in person, and offers authoritative, candid reviews that will help you find the choices that suit your tastes and budget.
You'll also get up-to-the-minute coverage of shopping and nightlife in both cities; in-depth coverage of the respective music scenes; detailed walking tours; accurate neighborhood maps; advice on planning a successful family vacation; and side trips to distilleries and Civil War battlefields.

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Linda Romine - Frommer's Nashville and Memphis, 9t h Edition (2009).pdf

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Bob Sehlinger - Frommer's Las Vegas with Kids (200 9).jpg

Let Frommer's Show You Where Your Kids Can:
Play catch with dolphins
View spectacular (and free!) dancing fountains
Take a spin on the world's highest roller coaster
Dine amid NASCAR memorabilia
See pirates battle on a sinking ship
Watch dinosaurs (equipped with motion sensors) come alive
Experience a volcano "erupting"
Plus Invaluable Travel Tips:
Age ranges for each sight and activity
Hotels that offer cribs and rollaway beds
A complete rundown of restaurants with kids' menus
Shopping for everything from Native-American pottery to earrings made of poker chips
Getting your kids interested in Las Vegas

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6 mar 13 5:36

Bob Sehlinger - Frommer's Las Vegas with Kids (200 9).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

M. E. Ravage - An American in the Making, The Life Story of an Immigrant.jpg

M.E. Ravage, one of almost two million Jews, was lured by tales of success to America at the turn of the twentieth century. After learning a new language and finding success in college he penned a vivid account of his own assimilation. Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to an understanding of the notion of ""America"" and remains timely, especially when massive immigration from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.

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M. E. Ravage - An American in the Making, The Life Story of an Immigrant.pdf

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Patrick Sellers - Cycles of Spin, Strategic Commun ication in the U.S Congress (2009).jpg

How do politicians try to shape their news coverage? Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress. He argues that these campaigns create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process. These four stages are closely related; decisions at one stage influence those at another. Sellers uses diverse evidence, from participant observation and press secretary interviews, to computerized content analysis and vector auto regression. The result is a comprehensive and unprecedented examination of politicians' promotional campaigns and journalists' coverage of those campaigns. Countering numerous critics of spin, Sellers offers the provocative argument that the promotional messages have their origins in the actual policy preferences of members of Congress. The campaigns to promote these messages thus can help the public learn about policy debates in Congress.

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Mark Jickling - Barriers to Corporate Fraud (2009).jpg

The collapse of Enron Corp. in the fall of 2001 had a peculiar side effect: accounting became front page news. For the next year, accounting fraud at a long series of "Fortune" 500 companies made headlines. The worst cases led to spectacular bankruptcies, mass layoffs, and criminal prosecutions. Many other companies remained intact, but paid millions of dollars to settle charges that their books did not correspond to financial reality. The economic costs of the corporate scandals were substantial: trillions of dollars in shareholder wealth lost and a climate of uncertainty that may have suppressed business investment and hiring after the 2001 recession ended. The barriers to corporate fraud set in place after the Great Depression had clearly failed to protect public investors and were put under close scrutiny. Congress responded by passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, strengthening regulation of auditors, directors, and corporate executives and increasing criminal penalties for fraud. During the 2003-2004 school year, Professor William Black's class at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas examined corporate fraud from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Rather than viewing fraud as simply a securities law matter, the class considered the insights of criminology, sociology, management science, business ethics, behavioural economics, complex systems theory, and other fields. This book is the result of their investigations. The book focuses on the internal controls on American corporations (including corporate governance, business ethics, managerial structure and compensation, internal counsel, and whistleblowers), as well as external controls (government regulation, external auditors and accountants, and the judicial process). A recurring theme is the limited efficacy of many safeguards and watchdogs in cases of 'control fraud', where fraud is directed or abetted by top management, and where unethical or abusive practices may become the organisational norm. It may then be easier for employees, directors, auditors, and even government regulators to go along with the prevailing trends, rather than take a stand which might disrupt the smooth functioning of the business, and could bring on devastating personal and organisational consequences. Another broad question raised by the book is whether the post-Enron scandals were a one-time event, made possible by the stock market bubble of the 1990s and several other unique historical developments which together constituted a 'perfect storm', or whether fraud is a cyclical phenomenon associated with the end of long bull markets. The question has policy implications: if recent corporate scandals represent an unfortunate result of a unique set of conditions, one might conclude that the restraints now in place are sufficient to prevent outbreaks of fraud under normal circumstances. On the other hand, if fraud is cyclical and can be expected to reappear once stock prices begin to soar again, one might conclude that the post- Enron scandals have revealed fundamental weaknesses in law and regulation.

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6 mar 13 5:36

Mark Jickling - Barriers to Corporate Fraud (2009).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

Robert K. Dearment, William Rathmell - Life Of The Marlows, A True Story of Frontier Life of Early D ays (2004).jpg

USA Books - Robert K. Dearment, William Rathmell - Life Of The Mar...ows, A True Story of Frontier Life of Early Days 2004.jpg

The story of the five Marlow brothers and their tribulations in late-nineteenth-century Young County, Texas, was first related in 1892 by William Rathmell in Life of the Marlows. After killing a popular sheriff and escaping, Boone Marlow was murdered by bounty hunters. The other four brothers, arrested as accessories and jailed, made a daring break but were recaptured and later forced to fight off a lynch mob. Angry citizens ambushed the Marlows during a transfer to another town: two brothers were shot and killed, the other two severely wounded, and three mob members died. The surviving brothers eventually were exonerated, but members of the attack mob were prosecuted in cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rathmell's book, biased in favor of the Marlows, has long been out of print. Robert K. DeArment has sifted through the evidence and presents an objective, annotated edition. Now the complete story can be told and readers can judge for themselves: were the Marlows as law-abiding as Rathmell claims? Or was the mob reacting with justified anger?

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Robert K. Dearment, William Rathmell - Life Of The Marlows, A True Story of Frontier Life of Early D ays (2004).pdf

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Marta V. Vicente - Clothing the Spanish Empire, Fa milies and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern At lantic World (2006).jpg

USA Books - Marta V. Vicente - Clothing the Spanish Empire, Famili...e Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World 2006.jpg

By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic, from Veracruz to Montevideo. Catalan, Basque and Castilian families sent relatives throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, hoping to enrich themselves from the trade in calicoes.A Clothing the Spanish Empire narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century.

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Marta V. Vicente - Clothing the Spanish Empire, Fa milies and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern At lantic World (2006).pdf

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Gary M. Lavergne - Worse Than Death, The Dallas Ni ghtclub Murders and the Texas Multiple Murder Law (2003).jpg

In 1984, a Moroccan national gunned down seven people in a Dallas nightclub, killing six. Under 1984 statutes his crimes were not deemed capital murders and instead he was given life imprisonment. This work explores the case and subsequent change in "multiple murder" statute it brought about.

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Gary M. Lavergne - Worse Than Death, The Dallas Ni ghtclub Murders and the Texas Multiple Murder Law (2003).pdf

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Katherine McKittrick - Demonic Grounds, Black Wome n And The Cartographies Of Struggle (2006).jpg

In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition.
Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies.
Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change.
Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

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Katherine McKittrick - Demonic Grounds, Black Wome n And The Cartographies Of Struggle (2006).pdf

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Fred Moten - In the Break, The Aesthetics of the B lack Radical Tradition (2003).jpg

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on "The Burton Greene Affair," exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance-culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself-is improvisation.
For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten's concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.
Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten's wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines-semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis-to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten's ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.
Fred Moten is associate professor of African American studies and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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Fred Moten - In the Break, The Aesthetics of the B lack Radical Tradition (2003).pdf

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Willam Hartston - The Encyclopedia of Useless Info rmation (2007).jpg

Discover what all the other encyclopedias leave out
This is the superbly satisfying compendium of weird factoids too interesting to be contained in your average encyclopedia. Daring to cross-reference the un-cross-reference-able, to alphabetize what cannot be alphabetized, and to deliver the highest concentration of fun that can fit in one book's spine, this information is too useless to waste:
In Denmark, pigs go 'knor'; in Germany, horses go 'prrrh'; in ancient Greece, dogs went 'au au.' Italians sneeze 'ecci ecci.'

A teacher in Italy was disciplined in 1996 for passing students exam answers hidden in salami sandwiches.
In 1957 the U.S. air force completed a survey of the Atlantic Ocean but refused to divulge its width on the grounds that the information might be of military use to the Russians.

In Paris in 1740 a cow was hanged in public following its conviction for sorcery.

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Willam Hartston - The Encyclopedia of Useless Info rmation (2007) [PDF].rar

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Chuck Klosterman - Eating the Dinosaur (2009).jpg

A Book of All-New Pop Culture Pieces by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.
In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.
Q: What is this book about?
A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet - I've just clicked on it and casually glanced at this webpage. There clearly isn't a plot. I've heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book, and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores. Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I think there are several pages about Rear Window and football and Mad Men and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm misinformed.
Q: Is there a larger theme?
A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened.
Q: Should I read this book?
A: Probably. Do you see a clear relationship between the Branch Davidian disaster and the recording of Nirvana's In Utero? Does Barack Obama make you want to drink Pepsi? Does ABBA remind you of AC/DC? If so, you probably don't need to read this book. You probably wrote this book. But I suspect everybody else will totally love it, except for the ones who absolutely hate it.

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A. Cooper Drury - Economic Sanctions and President ial Decisions, Models of Political Rationality (20 05).jpg

This important contribution to the debate over the efficacy of economic sanctions develops a rational theory of why leaders choose sanctions, rather than another foreign policy tool, what type, whether to sustain them, and when to terminate them. This book breaks new ground with its innovative argument and thorough testing using a variety of data bases.

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A. Cooper Drury - Economic Sanctions and President ial Decisions, Models of Political Rationality (20 05).pdf

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Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule - Terror in the Ba lance, Security, Liberty, and the Courts (2007).jpg

In Terror in the Balance, Posner and Vermeule take on civil libertarians of both the left and the right, arguing that the government should be given wide latitude to adjust policy and liberties in the times of emergency. They emphasize the virtues of unilateral executive actions and argue for making extensive powers available to the executive as warranted. The judiciary should neither second-guess security policy nor interfere on constitutional grounds. In order to protect citizens, government can and should use any legal instrument that is warranted under ordinary cost-benefit analysis. The value gained from the increase in security will exceed the losses from the decrease in liberty. At a time when the 'struggle against violent extremism' dominates the United States' agenda, this important and controversial work will spark discussion in the classroom and intellectual press alike.

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Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule - Terror in the Ba lance, Security, Liberty, and the Courts (2007).pdf

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Sarah A. Soule - Contention and Corporate Social R esponsibility (2009).jpg

This book examines anti-corporate activism in the United States, including analysis of anti-corporate challenges associated with social movements as diverse as the Civil Rights Movement and the Dolphin-Safe Tuna Movement. Using a unique dataset of protest events in the United States, the book shows that anti-corporate activism is primarily about corporate policies, products, and negligence. Although activists have always been distrustful of corporations and sought to change them, until the 1970s and 1980s, this was primarily accomplished via seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor.

Sarah A. Soule traces the shift brought about by deregulation and the decline in organized labor, which prompted activists to target corporations directly, often in combination with targeting the state. Using the literatures on contentious and private politics, which are both essential for understanding anti-corporate activism, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the changing focal points of activism directed at corporations.

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Van Gosse - Rethinking the New Left, An Interpreta tive History (2005).jpg

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.

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