In this fascinating interdisciplinary book, Shawn W. Rosenberg challenges two basic assumptions that orient much contemporary social scientific thinking. Offering theory and empirical research, he rejects the classic liberal view that people share a basic "common sense" or rationality. At the same time, he questions the view of contemporary social theory that meaning is simply an intersubjective or cultural product. Through in-depth interviews, Rosenberg explores the underlying logic of cognition. Rather than discovering a common sense or rationality, he finds that people reason in fundamentally different ways, and these differences affect the kind of understandings they craft and the evaluations they make. As a result, people actively reconstruct culturally prevalent meanings and norms in their own subjective terms. Rosenberg provides a comprehensive description of three types of socio-political reasoning and the full text of three exemplary interviews. Rosenberg's findings help explain such puzzling social phenomena as why people do not learn even when it is to their advantage to do so, or why they fail to adapt to changed social conditions even when they have clear information and motivation. The author argues that this kind of failure is commonplace and discusses examples ranging from the crisis of modernity to the classroom performance of university students. Building on the ideas of Jean Piaget, George Herbert Mead, and Jurgen Habermas, Rosenberg offers a new orienting vision, structural pragmatics, to account for these social phenomena and his own research in cognition. In the concluding chapter, he discusses the implications of his work for the study of social cognition, political behavior, and democratic theory.

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Shawn W. Rosenberg - The Not So Common Sense. Diff erences in How People Judge Social and Political L ife (2002).pdf

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William Lasser - Benjamin V. Cohen, Architect of t he New Deal (2002).jpg

A key figure in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Benjamin V. Cohen (1894-1983) was a major architect of public policy from the first days of FDR's presidency through the early days of the Cold War. Although he kept a low public profile, Cohen's influence extended across a wide range of domestic and foreign policy initiatives. In this biography, William Lasser offers the first account of Ben Cohen's life and career, and an assessment of his contribution to the origin and development of modern American liberalism. Cohen's life provides an extraordinary lens through which to view the development of the evolving political philosophy of the Roosevelt and Truman presidencies. A brilliant lawyer noted for his good judgment and experience, Cohen was a leading member of FDR's "Brain Trust," developing ideas, drafting legislation, lobbying within the administration and in Congress, and defending the New Deal in court. The book traces his contributions to domestic financial policy, his activities during the war years in London and Washington, his service as counselor to the State Department and member of the American delegation to the United Nations after the war, and his role in the American Zionist movement. From Cohen's life and work, Lasser draws important insights into the development of the New Deal and the evolution of postwar liberalism.

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William Lasser - Benjamin V. Cohen, Architect of t he New Deal (2002).pdf

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David B. Berman - Do.Good.Design.How.Designers.Can .Change.the.World.(2008).jpg

How did design help choose a president?
Why are people buying houses they cannot afford?
Why do U.S. car makers now struggle to compete? Why do we really have an environmental crisis?
Design matters. Like never before.
Disarming the weapons of mass deception.
Designers create so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience. In this time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers can choose what their young profession will be about: inventing deceptions that encourage more consumption—or helping repair the world.
Do Good Design is a call to action:
It alerts designers to the role they play in persuading global audiences to fulfill invented needs. The book outlines a more sustainable approach to both the practice and the consumption of design. All professionals will be inspired by the message of how one industry can feel better about itself by holding onto its principles. In this provocative and dramatically-illustrated book, David Berman offers a powerful and hopeful message for all designers.
Today, everyone is a designer.
And the future of civilization is our common design project.
Do Good Design is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA. The author will make a donation of 10% of his proceeds to a not for-profit organization whose mission is in alignment with the goals of this book.

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DK Publishing - Alaska (2006).jpg

Whether spotting a moose stopping traffic in Anchorage or exploring Alaska's stunning glacier-lined coast by cruise ship, the Last Frontier is sure to exceed all expectations. Complete with 3D mapping, extensive hotel and restaurant selections, guided walks and evocative photography, this is the most colorful and comprehensive guide to Alaska on the market. Let DK Eyewitness Travel Guides: Alaska be your planning aid, companion and souvenir as you experience the richness of our northernmost state.

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John C. Chapin - Breaching the Marianas, The Battl e for Saipan (1994).jpg

It was to be a brutal day. At first light on 15 June 1944, the Navy fire support ships of the task force lying off Saipan Island increased their previous days' preparatory fires involving all calibers of weapons. At 0542, Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner ordered, "Land the landing force." Around 0700, the landing ships, tank (LSTs) moved to within approximately 1,250 yards behind the line of departure. Troops in the LSTs began debarking from them in landing vehicles, tracked (LVTs). Control vessels containing Navy and Marine personnel with their radio gear took their positions displaying flags indicating which beach approaches they controlled.
Admiral Turner delayed H-hour from 0830 to 0840 to give the "boat waves" additional time to get into position. Then the first wave headed full speed toward the beaches. The Japanese waited patiently, ready to make the assault units pay a heavy price.
The first assault wave contained armored amphibian tractors (LVT[A]s) with their 75mm guns firing rapidly. They were accompanied by light gunboats firing 4.5-inch rockets, 20mm guns, and 40mm guns. The LVTs could negotiate the reef, but the rest could not and were forced to turn back until a passageway through the reef could be discovered.

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John C. Chapin - Breaching the Marianas, The Battl e for Saipan (1994).pdf

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Lawrence J. Vale - From the Puritans to the Projec ts, Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2007).jpg

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.

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Lawrence J. Vale - From the Puritans to the Projec ts, Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2007).pdf

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Nomi Claire Lazar - States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (2009).jpg

In an emergency, statesmen concentrate power and suspend citizens' rights. These emergency powers are ubiquitous in the crisis government of liberal democracies, but their nature and justification is poorly understood. Based on a pluralist conception of political ethics and political power, this book shows how we can avoid the dangers and confusions inherent in the norm/exception approach that dominates both historical and contemporary debate. The book shows how liberal values need never - indeed must never - be suspended, even in times of urgency. Only then can accountability remain a live possibility. But at the same time, emergency powers can sometimes be justified with reference to extra-liberal norms that also operate in times of normalcy. By emphasizing the continuity between times of normalcy and emergency, the book illuminates the norms of crisis government, broadening our understanding of liberal democratic government and of political ethics in the process.

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Nomi Claire Lazar - States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (2009).pdf

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Eugenie Samuel Reich - Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific Worl d (2009).jpg

USA Books - Eugenie Samuel Reich - Plastic Fantastic, How the Bigg...gest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World 2009.jpg

This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology - computer chips that we could stick on a dress or eyewear, or even use to make electronic screens as thin and easy-to-fold as sheets of paper.
But as other researchers tried to recreate Schön's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schön? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?

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Eugenie Samuel Reich - Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific Worl d (2009).pdf

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Stephen H. Axilrod - Inside the Fed, Monetary Poli cy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke (2009).jpg

USA Books - Stephen H. Axilrod - Inside the Fed, Monetary Policy a...Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke 2009.jpg

Axilrod, a longtime Federal Reserve System veteran, provides an insider's perspective on how the Fed has evolved over the past 50 years. Revealing the impact of personalities and their responses to political, social and bureaucratic situations, he explores such key topics such as money supply vs. interest rates, monetary base and reserve aggregates vs. money-market conditions, and increased emphasis on real-world variables rather than on monetary variables as indicators and guides for policy. The book is based mostly on anecdotal recollections of personal interactions with central bank leaders and others as they managed policy discussions and implementation. Despite the involvement of other influential parties, Axilrod's view is that chairmen took the lead in policy formation but had limited influence on the day-to-day operating targets. He also offers his thoughts on the future of the organization, noting that leaders will need to take a more direct account of international markets in making judgments about policy and its management. Informative and insightful, this view of the inner workings of the Fed will appeal to anyone with an interest in economics or curious about the organization's recent progression.

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Stephen H. Axilrod - Inside the Fed, Monetary Poli cy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke (2009).pdf

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Edward Weismiller - Walking Toward the Sun (2002).jpg

In 1936, twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction. Yale University Press here reintroduces Edward Weismiller-now the oldest living Younger Poet-with the publication of his latest book of poetry. Weismiller's is "a talent that has kept faith with itself and its sources," says W. S. Merwin, current judge of the Younger Poets Series. In Walking Toward the Sun, youthful lyricism has given way to plainness of speech-even spareness. These poems are honest and unflinching, always striking in their prosody. They will remind some readers of Yeats, for they convey nobility in the face of old age, infirmity, and disappointment. Weismiller sings powerfully about a world of loss, but he is never grim or despairing. The poet in old age remains hopeful, open to possibility, and always aware of beauty in the smallest places. There, in the sun, spring's youngest flower, without memory and without dreams, smiles on the calm of unrelated stone.

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Edward Weismiller - Walking Toward the Sun (2002).pdf

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David R. Mayhew - Electoral Realignments, A Critiq ue of an American Genre (2002).jpg

The study of electoral realignments is one of the most influential and intellectually stimulating enterprises undertaken by American political scientists. Realignment theory has been seen as a science able to predict changes, and generations of students, journalists, pundits, and political scientists have been trained to be on the lookout for "signs" of new electoral realignments. Now a major political scientist argues that the essential claims of realignment theory are wrong-that American elections, parties, and policymaking are not (and never were) reconfigured according to the realignment calendar.
David Mayhew examines fifteen key empirical claims of realignment theory in detail and shows us why each in turn does not hold up under scrutiny. It is time, he insists, to open the field to new ideas. We might, for example, adopt a more nominalistic, skeptical way of thinking about American elections that highlights contingency, short-term election strategies, and valence issues. Or we might examine such broad topics as bellicosity in early American history, or racial questions in much of our electoral history. But we must move on from an old orthodoxy and failed model of illumination.

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David R. Mayhew - Electoral Realignments, A Critiq ue of an American Genre (2002).pdf

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Robert A. Askins - Restoring North America's Birds , Lessons from Landscape Ecology (2002).jpg

This volume draws on research on bird species and their habitats to explain how basic principles of bird ecology and landscape ecology can help us create scientifically sound plans for protecting and restoring the rich diversity of North American birds. This edition includes an afterword that reviews literature that has appeared since the first edition was completed in 1999. This new material - on such key issues as the importance of preserving large expanses of natural habitat, the importance of maintaining early successional habitats, and the habitat requirements of neotropical migrants - shows how the research on landscape ecology of birds has shaped conservation policy more rapidly than most would have predicted.

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Robert A. Askins - Restoring North America's Birds , Lessons from Landscape Ecology (2002).pdf

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Yahya Sadowski - The Myth of Global Chaos (1998).jpg

When the Cold War ended in 1989, American hopes for a new world order were quickly disappointed. A new wave of violence soon erupted, engulfing places from Rwanda and Somalia to Chechnya and Bosnia. These new "clashes of civilizations," fundamentalist jihads, and ethnic massacres appeared to be more savage and less rational than the long twilight struggle with the USSR, during which Washington's adversary was clearly identified and relatively predictable.

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Yahya Sadowski - The Myth of Global Chaos (1998).CHM

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Derrick Wright - Tarawa 1943 (2001).jpg

The island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll was defended by the elite troops of the Special Naval Landing Force, whose commander, Admiral Shibasaki, boasted that 'the Americans could not take Tarawa with a million men in a hundred years'. This book tells the story of the pioneering amphibious invasion in which the Marines of the 2nd Division set out to prove him wrong, overcoming serious planning errors to fight a 76-hour battle of unprecedented savagery. The cost would be more than 3000 Marine casualties at the hands of a garrison of some 3700. The lessons learned would dispel forever any illusions that Americans had about the fighting quality of the Japanese.

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Osprey - Order of Battle 11 - James R. Arnold - G ettysburg July 3 1863, Union, The Army of Potomac (2000).jpg

Supported by portraits of the commanders, contemporary illustrations and photographs of the key features of the battlefield, this volume examines the defence of the Union flanks on the 2nd July 1863.

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Michael B. Ballard - Vicksburg, The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (2004).jpg

When Confederate troops surrendered Vicksburg on July 4, 1863--the day after the Union victory at Gettysburg--a crucial port and rail depot for the South was lost. The Union gained control of the Mississippi River, and the Confederate territory was split in two. In a thorough yet concise study of the longest single military campaign of the Civil War, Michael B. Ballard brings new depth to our understanding of the Vicksburg campaign by considering its human as well as its military aspects.
Ballard examines soldier attitudes, guerrilla warfare, and the effects of the campaign and siege on civilians in and around Vicksburg. He also analyzes the leadership and interaction of such key figures as U.S. Grant, William T. Sherman, John Pemberton, and Joseph E. Johnston, among others. Blending strategy and tactics with the human element, Ballard reminds us that while Gettysburg has become the focal point of the history and memory of the Civil War, the outcome at Vicksburg was met with as much celebration and relief in the North as was the Gettysburg victory, and he argues that it should be viewed as equally important today.

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Michael B. Ballard - Vicksburg, The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (2004).pdf

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Robert M. Hazen - The Diamond Makers (1999).jpg

Since time immemorial, we have treasured diamonds for their exquisite beauty and unrivaled hardness. Yet, most of the earth's diamonds lie deep underground and totally unaccessible to us - if only we knew how to fabricate them! In The Diamond Makers Robert Hazen vividly recounts the very human desire to exceed nature and create a synthetic diamond. Spanning centuries of ground-breaking science, instances of bitter rivalry, cases of outright fraud and self-delusion, Hazen blends drama and science to reveal the extraordinary technological advances and devastating failures of the diamond industry. Along the way, readers will be introduced to the brilliant, often eccentric and controversial, pioneers of high-pressure research who have harnessed crushing pressures and scorching temperatures to transform almost any carbon-rich material, from road tar to peanut butter, into the most prized of all gems. Robert M. Hazen is the author of fifteen books, including the bestseller, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy, which he wrote with James Trefil. Dr. Hazen has won numerous awards for his research and scientific writing.

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