Haynes Explains The Americans

Written by bestselling author Boris Starling, The Americans is one of the new titles for 2017 in the Haynes Explains series. A lighthearted and entertaining take on the classic workshop manual, it contains everything you’d expect to see, including exploded views, flow charts, fault diagnosis and the odd wiring diagram. It takes the reader through all areas of American life, giving the reader all the hints and tips needed to make cross-Atlantic relationships run smoothly.

Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

Perhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible. African Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines--including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. The focus is on the interaction between the people known as African Americans and that complex of visions, rhetorics, and ideologies known as the Bible. As such, the book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact--in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people constructs a text. It is about a particular sociocultural formation but also about the dynamics that obtain in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. Thus African Americans and the Bible provides an exemplum of sociocultural formation and a critical lens through which the process of sociocultural formation can be viewed.

This volume presents substantially revised and new essays on methodology and approaches in foreign and international relations history.

In his analysis of the relations between the United States and Central America through the 1980s, Brown seeks to broaden our view of events and historical processes by examining these relations in historical and global terms in lieu of the usual local or regional comparative focus. By drawing on the central concepts of Immanuel Wallerstein's World System Theory, the ideologically and strategically contorted policies of the Reagan years can be understood in the context of an evolving American society within the Modern World System. This critical historical narrative follows the growth of an American state and nation and its relations with Central America from its origins as a collection of colonies on the periphery of the world system, through eras of expansionism, imperialism, world wars, and triumph as global hegemon, and into ultimate crisis, decline, and conservative reaction through the 1980s. Primary emphasis is placed on the internal ideological and global strategic polarizations of the Cold War and their influence on American society, foreign relations with Central America, and the conservative extremes of the Reagan years.

Approximately one in five adults in the United States experience mental illness on an annual basis, and emotional, behavioral, or mental disorders are just as prevalent among young people. Issues like homelessness and mass violence have brought mental illness into the spotlight, but have significant strides been made in addressing mental health issues in recent years or are these disorders still widely stigmatized? This volume explores the questions of whether mental health issues stem from uniquely American factors, how accessible treatment is to those who need it, and whether modern technology plays a role in America's mental health.

This is a collection of readings that approach hate crimes from a variety of perspectives. Part 1 provides an introduction and a comparison of both historic and modern-era hate crimes. Part 2 discuss legal developments, and some of the complexities associated with legislation and judicial interpretation. Part 3 focuses on the complex public policy issues raised in creating laws to define hate crimes, and shows how public policy development reflects both political and practical considerations. Readings in the next section examine the perpetrators, showing that these crimes relate to diverse theoretical perspectives and a wide range of methods. Part 5 examines and discusses organized hate groups and the central role they play in extremism. This is followed by a section of historical and contemporary examples of the ways in which members of targeted groups have been victimized, as well as the social processes by which people come to be characterized as "others" outside the mainstream of society. Part 7 examines different strategies for fighting hate through changing attitudes which serve as precursors to hate crimes, and for responding to the emotional needs of victims when dealing with the aftermath of hate crimes. The last section presents international perspectives.