Threshold Of A Nation

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

This imprint is established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press's most outstanding original monographs. These are titles which would normally appear in specialist hardback editions only, but whose quality and general academic importance justify their special promotion in this prestige imprint. The series will include both new and recent titles drawn from the whole range of the Press's very substantial publishing programmes in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and therefore represents some of the best current scholarship in the English language.

If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world’s billions of individuals are really managing? In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

As the first comprehensive treatment of the American entry into World War II to appear in over thirty-five years, Waldo Heinrichs' volume places American policy in a global context, covering both the European and Asian diplomatic and military scenes, with Roosevelt at the center. Telling a tale of ever-broadening conflict, this vivid narrative weaves back and forth from the battlefields in the Soviet Union, to the intense policy debates within Roosevelt's administration, to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, to the precarious and delicate negotiations with Japan. Refuting the popular portrayal of Roosevelt as a vacillating, impulsive man who displayed no organizational skills in his decision-making during this period, Heinrichs presents him as a leader who acted with extreme caution and deliberation, who always kept his options open, and who, once Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in July, 1941, acted rapidly and with great determination. This masterful account of a key moment in American history captures the tension faced by Roosevelt, Churchill, Stimson, Hull, and numerous others as they struggled to shape American policy in the climactic nine months before Pearl Harbor.

'Liquid life’ is the kind of life commonly lived in our contemporary, liquid-modern society. Liquid life cannot stay on course, as liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long. Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt this liquid life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast moving events, of overlooking the ‘use by’ dates and being saddled with worthless possessions, of missing the moment calling for a change of tack and being left behind. Liquid life is also shot through by a contradiction: it ought to be a (possibly unending) series of new beginnings, yet precisely for that reason it is full of worries about swift and painless endings, without which new beginnings would be unthinkable. Among the arts of liquid-modern living and the skills needed to practice them, getting rid of things takes precedence over their acquisition. This and other challenges of life in a liquid-modern society are traced and unravelled in the successive chapters of this new book by one of the most brilliant and original social thinkers of our time.

In Intent for a Nation, Michael Byers argues that it is time for a clear-eyed appreciation of our strengths and weaknesses, of all we have and all we could be. A whole series of world events-the waning of US credibility; the increasing value of natural resources; the brain-gain; the ever-increasing interdependence of peoples, countries and continents-have combined to put Canada center stage in a new world order. Instead of emulating our increasingly isolated neighbor, we should be advancing the Canadian model, an idealistic, fiscally prudent, socially progressive vision that has never looked so good. Intent for a Nation is a fundamentally optimistic, informed and opinionated overview of where Canada stands in the world and what aggressive public policies are needed to carry the country forward in an ever more competitive and volatile world. Here is a book urging Canadians to rediscover their national self-confidence, to find the courage to dream great dreams-and make them happen.

The new and updated seventh edition of Political Geography once again shows itself fit to tackle a frequently and rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. It retains the intellectual clarity, rigour and vision of previous editions based upon its world-systems approach, and is complemented by the perspective of feminist geography. The book successfully integrates the complexity of individuals with the complexity of the world-economy by merging the compatible, but different, research agendas of the co-authors. This edition explores the importance of states in corporate globalization, challenges to this globalization, and the increasingly influential role of China. It also discusses the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy and the constant tension between the global scale of economic processes and the territorialization of politics in the current context of geopolitical change. The chapters have been updated with new examples – new sections on art and war, intimate geopolitics and geopolitical constructs reflect the vibrancy and diversity of the academic study of the subject. Sections have been updated and added to the material of the previous edition to reflect the role of the so-called Islamic State in global geopolitics. The book offers a framework to help students make their own judgements of how we got where we are today, and what may or should be done about it. Political Geography remains a core text for students of political geography, geopolitics, international relations and political science, as well as more broadly across human geography and the social sciences.