Drawing on the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP), this volume explores the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction. As the latter is often fraught with delays and even abandonment—one cause being ineffective interactions between construction and local people—PERRP used anthropological and participatory approaches. Along with strong construction management, such approaches led to the rebuilding being completed on time. As disasters are...

Georgia has played a formative role in the writing of America. Few states have produced a more impressive array of literary figures, among them Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, Joel Chandler Harris, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Toomer, and Alice Walker.This volume contains biographical and critical discussions of Georgia writers from the nineteenth century to the present as well as other information pertinent to Georgia literature. Organized in alphabetica...

This open access book provides an overview of the work developed within the SODALITE project, which aims at facilitating the deployment and operation of distributed software on top of heterogeneous infrastructures, including cloud, HPC and edge resources. The experts participating in the project describe how SODALITE works and how it can be exploited by end users. While multiple languages and tools are available in the literature to support DevOps teams in the automation of deployment and ...

This open acess book extends recent work on entrepreneurship in response to adverse events to explore entrepreneurial responses by people who face chronic adversity more deeply. Instead of focusing on the sort of responses intended to destroy the institutions that create and sustain chronic adversity, the authors are interested in how individuals use entrepreneurial action to find a way within these adverse constraints to improve their lives.They explore the positive outcomes arisi...

A renowned cultural critic untangles the twisted history and future of racism through its most volatile word.The N Word reveals how the term "nigger" has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America over the four hundred years since it was first spoken on our shores. Jabari Asim pinpoints Thomas Jefferson as the source of our enduring image of the "nigger." In a seminal but now obscure essay, Jefferson marshaled a welter of pseudoscience to ...

“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has ...

Celebrated scholar Carla Kaplan’s cultural biography, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, focuses on white women, collectively called “Miss Anne,” who became Harlem Renaissance insiders.The 1920s in New York City was a time of freedom, experimentation, and passion—with Harlem at the epicenter. White men could go uptown to see jazz and modern dance, but women who embraced black culture too enthusiastically could be ostracized.Miss Anne in Harlem fo...

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad. As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the ...

Oscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith: a bigger-than-life American folk hero whose important life story is nearly forgotten today. Now, in a feat of historical investigation and vivid storytelling, one of our greatest film biographers takes on one of the most talented and complex figures in the history of American entertainment.The son of freed slaves, Micheaux grew up in Metropolis, Illinois, then roamed America as a Pullman porter before making ...

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the leg...

A study of the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to interact with American culture in the 1920s.In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement.Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far...

The first-ever narrative history of African Americans told through their own letters, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century."While this unique collection of letters represents a frank depiction of the black experience, the great achievement is that these writings often go far beyond race and class to simply tell the story of the human experience in America." — Library Journal (starred review)