Drawing on a distinguished 40-year university career, Allen Thiher probes the subjects that serve as a basis for higher education in the twenty-first century. Addressing the general reader as well as the scholar, he argues that all the best about contemporary culture springs directly from the unfettered rationalism of the Enlightenment. Provocatively, Thiher argues that today’s education system is failing to produce students with the enlightened sensibilities they need to lead good and ethical lives and instead focuses on short-term utilitarian aims.

In volume, an emerging generation of African scholars examines specific states in Africa where instability is the order of the day. Considerations of African instability are highly relevant in today’s world, where one examines the types of regimes that were put in place after the Cold War and their effects on Africa.

Football as Literature adopts semiotics as a framework to compare football (soccer) to literature. The football field is akin to the plot or stage in narrative or dramatic modes, respectively, and the players are viewed as characters whose metamorphoses, in the text of football, are occasioned from the label of their positions to the completeness of the plot by the kinetic power of the ball. In employing this commentary, a standard football match is seen as a representation of the active text. Particularly, without commentary football unfolds as an unspoken semiotic narrative.

In this provocative new book, Shritha Vasudevan argues that feminist international relations (IR) theory has inadvertently resulted in a biased worldview, the very opposite of what feminist IR set out to try to rectify. This book contests theoretical presumptions of Western feminist IR and attempts to reformulate it in contexts of non-Western cultures. Vasudevan deftly utilizes the theoretical constructs of IR to explore the ramifications for India.

Globalization is posing enormous challenges to development efforts in many African countries. One of the most daunting challenges is to raise capital to meet financial needs. Despite regional tendencies, the effectiveness of stock markets to raise capital within the African region has been limited. This book asks whether African stock exchange might become more effective in enhancing development. It adopts a legal approach in analyzing various laws and texts.

At the onset of the American Revolution, Britain’s North American colonies sought political independence but remained culturally dependent upon Europe. Among the many vast contributions of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most celebrated Founding Fathers, was a continuing admiration and lifelong affinity for all things Italian. Jefferson believed that the genesis of liberty followed a path from Ancient Rome, through the Italian Renaissance and Enlightenment, and toward a progressive future for the new American nation.

In this book eminent philosopher Burton Porter examines the concept of “forbidden knowledge” in religion, science, government, and psychology. From the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (forbidden fruit), to world altering scientific research (nuclear power, stem-cells, cloning) to damning government secrets (Abu Ghraib, domestic spying), to traumatic experiences that individuals want to repress (sexual abuse), humanity has encountered knowledge that has been hidden and suppressed.

Foreword: Elena A. Okladnikova, Herzen University, St. Petersburg (Russia), Deputy Director for Museum Work at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)
Translators: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History; Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, Institute of Geology & Mineralogy, Russian Academy of Sciences; and Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems, Tomsk State University (Russia)

Translator: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History

In Diversity, Funding, and Standardized Testing in American Education, noted education expert Jose Martinez’s examines current aspects of inequality in American education, examining the complex nexus of funding, diversity, and the increasingly contentious role of standardized testing. A readable narrative format assesses the extensive documentation, which demonstrates that inequality is becoming entrenched throughout the education system, in no small measure due to biases in standardized testing systems.