Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture
【著者】Ben Pitcher
【出版社】McGill-Queen's University Press (December 15, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】C95 /P682 /E
【简 介】Prehistoric human life is a common reference point in contemporary culture, inspiring attempts to become happier, healthier, or better people. Exploited by capitalism, overwhelmed by technology, and living in the shadow of environmental catastrophe, we call on the prehistoric to escape the present, and to model alternative ways of living our lives. In Back to the Stone Age Ben Pitcher explores how ideas about race are tightly woven into the powerful origin stories we use to explain who we are, where we came from, and what we are like. Using a broad range of examples from popular culture – from everyday practices like lighting fires and walking in the woods to engagements with genetic technologies and Neanderthal DNA, from megaliths and museum mannequins to television shows and best-selling nonfiction – Pitcher demonstrates how prehistory is alive in the twenty-first century, and argues that popular flights back in time provide revealing insights into present-day anxieties, obsessions, and concerns. Back to the Stone Age shows that the human past is not set in stone. By opening up the prehistoric to critical contestation, Pitcher places racial justice at the centre of questions about the existence and persistence of Homo sapiens in the contemporary world.
Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution
【著者】Mary Sarah Bilder
【出版社】University of Virginia Press (March 22, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】K837.125.46 /O18b /E
【简介】In this provocative new biography, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s―the Age of the Constitution―to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution.
Female Genius reconstructs Eliza Harriot’s transatlantic life, from Lisbon to Charleston, paying particular attention to her lectures and to the academies she founded, inspiring countless young American women to consider a college education and a role in the political forum. Promoting the ideas made famous by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Harriot brought the concept of female genius to the United States. Its advocates argued that women had equal capacity and deserved an equal education and political representation. Its detractors, who feared it undermined male political power, felt deeply threatened. By 1792 Eliza Harriot experienced struggles that reflected the larger backlash faced by women and people of color as new written constitutions provided the political and legal tools for exclusion based on sex, gender, and race.
In recovering this pioneering life, the richly illustrated Female Genius makes clear that America’s framing moment did not belong solely to white men and offers an inspirational transatlantic history of women who believed in education as a political right.
The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together
【著 者】Luiz Pessoa
【出版社】The MIT Press (November 15, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】B842.2 /P475 /E
【简介】 Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger question: What kind of object is the brain? Neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa describes the brain as a highly networked, interconnected system that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. One can’t point to the brain and say, “This is where emotion happens” (or any other mental faculty). Pessoa argues that only by understanding how large-scale neural circuits combine multiple and diverse signals can we truly appreciate how the brain supports the mind.
Presenting the brain as an integrated organ and drawing on neuroscience, computation, mathematics, systems theory, and evolution, The Entangled Brain explains how brain functions result from cross-cutting brain processing, not the function of segregated areas. Parts of the brain work in a coordinated fashion across large-scale distributed networks in which disparate parts of the cortex and the subcortex work simultaneously to bring about behaviors. Pessoa intuitively explains the concepts needed to formalize this idea of the brain as a complex system and how to unleash powerful understandings built with “collective computations.”
Is AI Good for the Planet?
【著者】Benedetta Brevini
【出版社】Polity; 1st edition (January 6, 2022)
【馆藏地】江湾馆三楼理科借阅区
【索书号】X22 /B846 /E
【简介】Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use.
Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI. Embracing a green agenda for AI that puts the climate crisis at centre stage is our urgent priority.
Engaging and passionately written, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of AI, environmental studies, politics, and media studies and for anyone interested in the connections between technology and the environment.
Football in the Land of the Soviets
【著者】Carles Viñas
【出版社】Pluto Press (October 20, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】G843.951.2 /V766 /E
【简 介】Mistrusted and derided, instrumentalized and adored - the story of football in Tsarist and early Soviet Russia is as wild and intriguing as that of the country itself. In many ways, it is the same story…
Football in the Land of the Soviets offers a fresh perspective on a momentous chapter in modern political history. Carles Viñas shows how the Russian game was transformed in just a few decades: from a minor emigré pastime to a modernizing driver of society, to a vanguard for Soviet diplomacy and internationalism, and finally, with the first championship of the Soviet League in 1936, into a truly mass phenomenon.
So exactly how did a bourgeois game end up as the collective passion of the Soviet working class? And why does it matter? Football in the Land of the Soviets brings these questions to the fore in this thrilling, unorthodox account of the fall of an imperial dynasty and the rise of the world's first socialist state.
The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America
【作者】John Wood Sweet
【出版社】Henry Holt and Co. (July 19, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】D771.288-09 /S974 /E
【简介】On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape.
Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives. The trial exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and sexual double standards. The ongoing conflict attracted the nation’s top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the development of American law. The crime and its consequences became a kind of parable about the power of seduction and the limits of justice. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable—but at a terrible cost to herself.
Based on rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a chance encounter in the street into the sanctuaries of the city’s elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors’ prison. The Sewing Girl's Tale shows that if our laws and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again.
Women & Art: A Post-Feminist View
【著者】Alexander Adams
【出版社】Academica Press (August 1, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】J110.95 /A211 /E
【简介】 Women & Art surveys the history of women in art and addresses the effects of feminist art history and art production. This book is among the first to offer a critical assessment of the role of feminism in art history and how it has presented and misrepresented women’s roles in art. Seeking to counterbalance overwhelmingly pro-feminist narratives, it relies on evidence from artists, statisticians, and historians to support individual women artists while remaining critical of feminism. Cogent and persuasive, Women & Art stands as a key for students and researchers interested in art history, gender studies, feminism, and cultural studies.
Slouching towards Utopia
【著者】J. Bradford DeLong
【出版社】Basic Books; 1st edition (September 6, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】F119.5 /D361 /E
【简介】Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.
The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender
【作 者】Matthew Sharpe
【出版社】Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (February 16, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】B504 /S532 /E
【简介】Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others.
The enlightenment’s key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the ‘proto-postmodernist’ practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naïves, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.
A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present
【著者】Teresa A. Meade
【出版社】Wiley-Blackwell; 3rd edition (August 9, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】K773 /M481(3) /E
【简 介】A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present, Third Edition offers a lively account of the rich political, cultural, and social history of the independent nation-states of Latin America and the Caribbean. Viewing Latin American history through the lens of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity, this accessible textbook explores the complex set of personalities, issues, and events that intersect to form the Latin American historical landscape.
Written in a clear and engaging narrative style, the fully updated third edition examines specific events in different nations and periods to illustrate broader historical trends and interpretations. Concise chapters feature first-hand accounts of the life history of both prominent and ordinary people to contextualize topics such as African slavery in the Americas, the struggle for Haitian independence, the patriarchal rules governing marriage in Brazil, the construction of the Panama Canal, indigenous uprisings in the Mexican Revolution, the impact of immigration on Latin American life, the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, and more.
Presents documents and excerpts from fiction to serve as concrete examples of historical ideas
Examines gender and its influence on political and economic change
Highlights the role of music, art, sports, movies, and other popular culture in the formation of Latin American cultural identity
Includes a summary of European colonialism and an overview of Latin America in the 21st century
Provides end-of-chapter review questions, discussion topics, and suggested readings
Part of the popular Wiley Blackwell Concise History of the Modern World series, the third edition of A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present is an excellent textbook for introductory and intermediate undergraduate students as well as high school students taking advanced/honors Latin American history courses.