This anthology presents a range of interdisciplinary explorations into the urban environment, through film, photography, digital imagery, maps and signage. Contributors examine our fascination with the city through the history of art and architecture, urban studies, environmental studies, cultural geography and screen studies.Bringing together a wide spectrum of urban contexts, Visualizing the City’s diverse essays explore visual representations of urbanism and modernity r...

Teaching History with Museums, Second Edition provides an introduction and overview of the rich pedagogical power of museums and historic sites. With a collection of practical strategies and case studies, the authors provide educators with the tools needed to create successful learning experiences for students. The cases are designed to be adapted to any classroom, encouraging students to consider museums as historical accounts to be examined, questioned, and discussed.Key...

Teaching Difficult History through Film explores the potential of film to engage young people in controversial or contested histories and how they are represented, ranging from gender and sexuality, to colonialism and slavery. Adding to the education literature of how to teach and learn difficult histories, contributors apply their theoretical and pedagogical expertise and experiences to a variety of historical topics to show the ways that film can create opportunities for challen...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

A lyrical memoir that identifies the pressure to conform as a hidden threat to our civil rights, drawing on the author’s life as a gay Asian American man and his career as an acclaimed legal scholar.“[Kenji] Yoshino offers his personal search for authenticity as an encouragement for everyone to think deeply about the ways in which all of us have covered our true selves. . . . We really do feel newly inspired.”—The New York Times Book Review

If you’re an actress or a coed just trying to do a man-size job, a yes-man who turns a deaf ear to some sob sister, an heiress aboard her yacht, or a bookworm enjoying a boy’s night out, Diane Ravitch’s internationally acclaimed The Language Police has bad news for you: Erase those words from your vocabula...

Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation.The authors’ central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals – and that it is a better predictor of achievement than income, background or socioeconomic status. One of the major issues raised by the book was its discussion of 'racial differences in intelligence,' and its con...

Howard S. Becker is a master of his discipline. His reputation as a teacher, as well as a sociologist, is supported by his best-selling quartet of sociological guidebooks: Writing for Social Scientists, Tricks of the Trade, Telling About Society, and What About Mozart? What About Murder? It turns out that the master sociologist has yet one more trick up his sleeve—a fifth guidebook, Evidence.Becker has for seventy years been mulling over ...

This study chronicles the rise of psychology as a tool for social analysis during the Cold War Era and the concept of the open mind in American culture.In the years following World War II, a scientific vision of the rational, creative, and autonomous self took hold as an essential way of understanding society. In The Open Mind, science historian Jamie Cohen-Cole demonstrates how this notion of the self became a defining feature of Cold War culture. From 19...

This primer for prospective and practicing teachers asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, reflect on their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to educate, and to become educated in the present moment in the places we inhabit.Not only the implementation of objectives to be assessed by standardized tests, curriculum is communication among older and younger generations, informed by academic knowledge, and charac...

In this book, eminent educational philosopher Nel Noddings and daughter Laurie Brooks explain how teachers can foster critical thinking through the exploration of controversial issues. The emphasis is on the use of critical thinking to understand and collaborate, not simply to win arguments. The authors describe how critical thinking that encourages dialogue across the school disciplines and across social/economic classes prepares students for participation in democracy. They offer specifi...

Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting social-psychological experiments with an almost artistic sense of creative imagination – casting new light on social phenomena in the process. His 1974 study Obedience to Authority exemplifies creative thinking at its most potent, and controversial. Interested in the degree to which an “authorit...