You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The collected reflections and wisdoms of 30 contemporary farmer-writer-teachers Heralding the seventy-fifth anniversary of the quintessential agrarian anthology I'll Take My Stand, Zachary Michael Jack, himself a fourth generation farmer's son, has assembled North America's foremost contemporary writers on the present rural experience to provide their own twenty-first-century insights. In the grand tradition of farmer-writers Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, and Andrew Lytle, Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom gathers the disparate wisdoms of modern day stewarts of the land including Victor David Hanson, Michael Martone, Linda Hasselstrom, John Hildebr...
An Unholy Alliance offers a dissenting view to the claim by a growing number of scholars that Sports are a new religion. The last few years have seen a spate of books that might be classified by a genre called "Sports Apologetics," that is, arguments defending or celebrating in one way or another the familiar and ongoing alliance in America between sports and religion. Recently, claims have been made by scholars that sports are an authentic religion in and of themselves. They make this startling assertion not by showing connections with the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, or Moses, but by parallels between the rites of modern games and those of preliterate man that were "religious" in nature because they were designed to propitiate powers and to ward off evil for the tribes employing them. In this evocative book, Higgs and Braswell suggest that while sports may often be good things, they are not inherently divine. They do not focus on wide-spread abuse in sports as evidence for their counterargument. Rather, they question the use of mythological parallels from prehistory as justification for viewing sports as a religion.
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy, 1865-1914 is a reinterpretation of black economic history in the half-century after Emancipation. Its central theme is that economic competition and racial coercion jointly determined the material condition of the blacks. The book identifies a number of competitive processes that played important roles in protecting blacks from the racial coercion to which they were peculiarly vulnerable. It also documents the substantial economic gains realized by the black population between 1865 and 1914. Professor Higgs's account is iconoclastic. It seeks to reorganize the present conceptualization of the period and to redirect future study of black economic history in the post-Emancipation period. It raises new questions and suggests new answers to old questions, asserting that some of the old questions are misleadingly framed or not worth pursuing at all.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the most powerful of federal regulatory agencies, if not the most powerful, regulating about 25 per cent of all consumer goods in the United States. It routinely makes decisions that determine the well-being of millions of people in the United States and around the world concerning foods, drugs, medical devices, and dietary supplements. Although the FDA was created to protect the public, could its actual operations have the opposite effect, causing enormous harm to public health? Assembling the work of three outstanding scholars, Hazardous to Our Health? provides a lucid and comprehensive examination of the FDA: How has the FDA acquired its vast powers? What have been the effects of the FDA? Why has the FDA failed to achieve its goals? Who actually benefits and loses from the FDA? How has the FDA defended itself against criticism? What real alternatives exist to the FDA? and much more. Hazardous to Our Health? goes beyond mere assumptions, conjectures, and political predilections to examine the facts and findings of independent authorities. Providing far more than just an account of the past and a warning for the future, this powe
Suddenly everyone in the world loses consciousness for two minutes. Planes fall from the sky, there are millions of car crashes, millions die. And when everyone comes round they have had a glimpse of their life in the future. When it awakes the world must live with the knowledge of what is to come. Some saw themselves in new relationships, some saw exciting new technologies, some saw the stuff of nightmares. Some, young and old alike, saw nothing at all ... A desperate search to find out what has happened begins. Does the mosaic of visions offer a clue? What did you see? Now the basis for the Channel 5 hit series FLASHFORWARD
A DELIGHTFUL COLLECTION OF YARNS TOLD SIMPLY AND ELOQUENTLY BY MOUNTAIN FOLKS FOR WHOM HUMOR IS A WAY OF LIFE.
"This book collects almost a hundred short pieces that Robert Higgs has written in recent years. The topics range widely, reflecting his varied interests and experience: Most of them may be described as analytical commentaries or observations. Most are substantive, dealing with definite actors and events, but a substantial number are more methodological, dealing with how various analysts have dealt with particular subjects or how analysts can, in my judgment, deal most effectively with certain subjects. A substantial number of them pertain to the nature and functioning of the state; many with the economy, both as a whole and in regard to sectors or specific aspects of its operation. One section pertains to commentaries on libertarianism, an ideology I have long embraced, though the precise nature of my (Higgs) embrace has changed over the years"--
In Delusions of Power, economic historian Robert Higgs calls into question our ingrained notions concerning the nature of the state and democracy. Higgs uproots the foundation stone upon which the state's powers have rested and grown unchecked by the public. Beginning with the Founding Fathers and moving forward, Higgs reassesses the world wars, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and the financial debacle that began in 2008 with the view of demonstrating Americans' loss of liberties. He brings together the crisis in policymaking; key political actors and events; and the impact of war on the economy and civil liberties. For Higgs, war, and the cost of it, has had a major impact of war on the economy and civil liberties. For Higgs, war, and the cost of it, has had a major impact on American life and freedom. Through reading Higg's work, one will gain a new understanding of the state's power, democracy, and the issues threatening the pursuit of liberty. Book jacket.
To examine the social and cultural significance of the athlete hero in American literature, Robert J. Higgs turns to the works of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Higgs views the athlete in literature not as an artistic creation but as one who reflects the tastes, attainments, beliefs, and ideals of his society. The athletes he describes as Apollonian are the know-it-alls, of whom Lardner's Busher Keefe is an example; the Dyonisian, as exemplified by Irwin Shaw's Christian Darling, worships his body as an end in itself. The Adonic seeks knowledge for the sake of self-realization and lives in a world of tension, pain, struggle, and hope. Such a figure is Wolfe's Nebraska Crane. Higgs finds in contemporary American literature a clear rejection of the Apollonian and Dyonisian models and an acceptance of the Adonic.