Modern Cronies

Modern Cronies traces how various industrialists, thrown together by the effects of the southern gold rush, shaped the development of the southeastern United States. Existing historical scholarship treats the gold rush as a self-contained blip that—aside from the horrors of Cherokee Removal (admittedly no small thing) and a supply of miners to California in 1849—had no other widespread effects. In fact, the southern gold rush was a significant force in regional and national history. The pressure brought by the gold rush for Cherokee Removal opened the path of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, the catalyst for the development of both Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Iron makers, attracted by the gold rush, built the most elaborate iron-making operations in the Deep South near this railroad, in Georgia’s Etowah Valley; some of these iron makers became the industrial talent in the fledgling postbellum city of Birmingham, Alabama. This book explicates the networks of associations and interconnections across these varied industries in a way that newly interprets the development of the southeastern United States. Modern Cronies also reconsiders the meaning of Joseph E. Brown, Georgia’s influential Civil War governor, political heavyweight, and wealthy industrialist. Brown was nurtured in the Etowah Valley by people who celebrated mining, industrialization, banking, land speculation, and railroading as a path to a prosperous future. Kenneth H. Wheeler explains Brown’s familial, religious, and social ties to these people; clarifies the origins of Brown’s interest in convict labor; and illustrates how he used knowledge and connections acquired in the gold rush to enrich himself. After the Civil War Brown, aided by his sons, dominated and modeled a vigorous crony capitalism with far-reaching implications.

With poetry and commentary, From the Bottom: Anti-Japanese Verses offers a much-needed challenge to the culture elite and policy wonks of a sun-marked country, where its red and white colors still fly as if they were an emblem of squeezing blood from bone. Unearthing what is buried beneath the seemly topography of the island nation, the book renders Japan's postwar history as an enormous inanity that has just come full circle, from nuclear to nuclear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Often with scathing mockery and derision, the work gives expression to the tension between tribal elite politics and underclass perspectives. This book of poetry opens with the introduction providing a necessary context in the form of historical accounts of Japanese poetry, from its ancient peninsular origin to its post-war transformation, and more recent singsong babbling after the 9/11 tragedy and the 3/11 disasters. Taneo Ishikawa, Ph.D. (2000) in humanities, Florida State University, fights with a ghostly development of Japanese humanities. He calls for the de-Japanification of much re-Japanized Japanese studies, in particular, in culture and history, including religion and archeology. The author insists that Japan's legacy of heliocentric self-identification is a culture of farmer-fighters, with a settler's history from peninsular to insular, unfolding on the unsustainable logic of self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. The major three malefactors were Buddha, Samurai, and Emperor, who together played on the legacy of stealing, cheating, and lying. This past history, the author believes, should be denounced by all means and with much rancor. He lives in Osaka, Japan. Publisher's website: http: //sbpra.com/TaneoIshikawa

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.

A matrix of Morality-wisdom Philosophy-insights, Diplomatic-cynicism, Common-sense impressions, Whimsy-freak notions, Personal love-relations, Societal love-relations, War, Guerilla War, & Assassinations. New political-terminology and conceptions, And much more for you, the story maker, to ponder, extract and catalyze into your very own allergy using your genius to flesh it out, in your name, a legend of our time. Story-smiths will delight in the wisdom given in the various sections on love that may be extracted here-from and fashion into a story line. A refreshing change of outlook on this subject both from society's point of view and from the individual's intuitive instincts. The parabilic sections on Front Line War, Guerilla War and Assassination will offer the story maker pause for thought on these subjects. The story maker's own abstraction and reworking of these new concepts will leave ample scope for metamorphosis into ones own powerful narrative. The cynical section on diplomacy takes the subject to new horizons that will lead one from fresh works in this subject thus adding modern scope to those works of Michiavelli. The story maker's extraction, modification and reapplication of the various other sections of this work may possibly lead to new higher ground in plot constructs. This book will both entertain and enlighten you. A revolutionary and extraordinary book that crosses the boundaries of religion, philosophy, and intellectual thought with purity, lucidity, and protraction laid out in an order that allows full scope of craft a blueprint for your own book in word erection. This book of 'parables' venerates the probity of extraordinary events in the life and times of contemporary society and doings. It validates and encourages responsibility for creating your own truly insightful work. The book requires some effort in understanding fresh ground breaking concepts and thus willingness to learn and grasp new terminology.

Examines the influence of Islam, as a religion, a practice, and a tradition, on Egypt's visual and literary modernity.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence, reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances as employers' associations driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers—former slaves, rustlers, homesteaders of modest means, populists, political radicals, and striking workers—as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. And perhaps most notably, spokespersons for these respective organizations justified their actions by insisting that they were committed to upholding "law and order." Ultimately, this book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

The making of modern Thailand is grounded in specific political institutions, Brahmanical tropes, and sacred Buddhist traditions stylized with Hindu rituals. Over and above these mysterious practices and ancient customs, modern Thailand is a product of the late Great Rama IX Bhumibol Adulyadej. Most Thai people have only known one King. Born in Europe and educated during World War II, Bhumibol was the son of a Harvard medical doctor who had a penchant for jazz music and fast cars. When he returned to Thailand in 1951 to assume his royal duties, he could hardly speak Thai but his French and German were remarkable. Bhumibol had inherited an impoverished country with nothing but a symbolic role as a figurehead monarch. He was surrounded by envious courtiers and royals from other families now sidelined by the rise of the Chakri. Scheming generals and authoritarian field marshals were emptying the Kingdom’s coffers. Using guile and wit, Bhumibol had turned the tide by 1973. He became the most powerful modern warlord in the history of the Kingdom. He survived attempted murder, crafty politicians, corrupt generals, sycophantic courtiers and impoverished masses. When he died on October 13 2016, Bhumibol was already the longest standing monarch in the world. King Bhumibol was deeply respected and well-liked by farang and locals alike. Despite his massive social and economic achievements many problems continue to plague the Kingdom. These are prostitution, human rights issues, pollution, corruption, cronyism in Chinese businesses, border conflicts with Cambodia, and the refugee problem. This book examines the role of Rama IX and the variegated set of problems that persist in life under the great white elephant and mango trees. Rappa draws from his primary research that includes interviews, surveys and first-hand observations of a remarkable kingdom and a uniquely remarkable king to reveal the internal security threats to democracy and civil society in the oldest Southeast Asian kingdom in late modernity.