For many years, author Divinia D. Sampson wore her smile like armor— covering rejection, depression, pain, and silent battles no one else could see. On the outside, she appeared strong, but inside, she was breaking. In Beyond the Smile: The Story of My Life, she presents an honest and faith-filled memoir of transformation that depicts a journey through pain to healing and, ultimately, freedom. Through powerful storytelling and spiritual reflection, Sampson opens her heart to reveal how she...

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates.Sampson argues that a biological knowled...

The future, an unknown territory. It is the year 2058 and our Mother Earth is in a pre-apocalyptic tailspin. Humans have disrespected and not taken care of our Mother Earth entrusted to humankind. The heavens are angry. Technology has gotten out of control. Technological mutations have given rise to half-human droid mutants who are on a mission to conquer and destroy all mankind at any costs.

APPEARANCES is a collection of twelve short stories revealing how fragile and elusive reality is. It is full of playful and powerful images that exist all around us. Funhouse mirrors of life. Or maybe the other way round. Raw images of a reality normally photoshopped and made to look gorgeous in the beauty parlors of everyday society, now shown for what they are, revealing their true nature. The mirror theme helps reflect on this reality. Stories are mirrors of life, of people and circumst...

By the beloved and wildly popular host of the PBS Kids show Dinosaur Train, here is the book every parent needs: a rousing call to connect our kids to the natural world, a practical parenting guide filled with tips and advice for nature mentoring.The average North American child now spends about seven hours a day staring at screens, with mere minutes engaged in the kind of unstructured play outdoors essential for growth. Yet recent research on child development indicates t...

Winner of the Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical SocietyBaseball’s spread across Illinois paralleled the sport’s explosive growth in other parts of the country.Robert D. Sampson taps a wealth of archival research to transport readers to an era when an epidemic of “base ball on the brain” raged from Alton to Woodstock. Focusing on the years 1865 to 1869, Sampson offers a vivid portrait of a game where local teams and civic a...

This captivating book, laced with evocative anecdotes from the field, gives the first holistic, up-to-date overview of dinosaurs and their world for a wide audience of readers. Situating these fascinating animals in a broad ecological and evolutionary context, leading dinosaur expert Scott D. Sampson fills us in on the exhilarating discoveries of the past twenty-five years, the most active period in the history of dinosaur paleontology, during which more "new" species were named than in al...

Positing online users as 'sleepwalkers', Tony Sampson offers an original and compelling approach for understanding how social media platforms produce subjectivities.Drawing on a wide range of theorists, including A.N. Whitehead and Gabriel Tarde, he provides tools to track his sleepwalker through the 'dark refrain of social media': a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big li...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah is the location of one of the best-known terrestrial records for the late Cretaceous. A major effort in the new century has documented over 2,000 new vertebrate fossil sites, provided new radiometric dates, and identified five new genera of ceratopsids, two new species of hadrosaur, a probable new genus of hypsilophodontid, new pachycephalosaurs and ankylosaurs, several kinds of theropods (including a new genus of oviraptor and a new ...

A renaissance in Illinois history scholarship has sparked renewed interest in the Prairie State's storied past. Students, meanwhile, continue to pursue coursework in Illinois history to fulfill degree requirements and for their own edification.This Common Threads collection offers important articles from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Organized as an approachable survey of state history, the book offers chapters that cover the colonial era, early sta...

Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence.The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new ...

Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. The book is packed with well over a hundred captivating images, ranging from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium up to the decolonization of many regions after World War II.Reinforcing a broad range of Western assumptions and prejudices, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson argue that s...