Since 1945, North Americans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on urban development, literally transforming the landscape of the continent. This development has been disastrous, Edmund Fowler maintains, because it is inordinately expensive, destructive of the environment, and disruptive of healthy social life and authentic politics. Revealing the connections between our basic cultural beliefs and why we build the way we do, he stresses that to build cities that work we must become aware of how our personal choices contribute to the form of the built environment.
Behind the internet's viral "Universe 25" experiment and Robert C. O'Brien's iconic novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Secret of NIMH, was one scientist who set out to change the way we view our fellow man — using rats . . . After the Civil War and throughout the twentieth century, cities in northern American states absorbed a huge increase in populations, particularly of immigrants and African Americans from southern states. City governments responded by creating new regulations that were often segregationist — corralling black Americans, for example, into small, increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods, or into high-rise “projects.” The situation intensified after World War II, as rising crime and racial unrest swept the nation, and blame fell on the crowded conditions of city life. The hardest-hit populations were left marginalized and voiceless. Enter John B. Calhoun, an ecologist employed by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of overcrowding on rats. From 1947 to 1977, Calhoun built a series of sprawling habitats in which a rat’s every need was met—except space. The results were cataclysmic. Did a similar fate await our own teeming cities? Rat City is the first book to tell the story of Calhoun’s experiments, and their extraordinary influence — an enthralling record of urban design and dystopian science. Meticulously researched, it follows Calhoun’s struggle to solve the problem of crowding before America’s cities drain into the behavioral sink. And as the “war on rats” continues around the world, and our post-pandemic society reevaluates the necessity of urban living, the riveting story of Rat City is more relevant than ever.
Survival and Regeneration captures the heritage of Detroit's colorful Indian community through printed sources and the personal life stories of many Native Americans. Survival and Regeneration captures the heritage of Detroit's colorful Indian community through printed sources and the personal life stories of many Native Americans. During a ten-year period, Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr. interviewed hundreds of Indians about their past and their needs and aspirations for the future. This history is essentially their success story. In search of new opportunities, a growing number of rural Indians journeyed to Detroit after World War II. Destitute reservations had sapped their physical and cultural strength; paternalistic bureaucrats undermined their self-respect and confidence; and despairing tribal members too often sound solace in mind-numbing alcohol. Cut off from the Bureau of Indian Affairs services, many newcomers had difficulty establishing themselves successfully in the city and experienced feelings of insecurity and powerlessness. By 1970, they were one of the Motor City's most "invisible" minority groups, so mobile and dispersed throughout the metropolitan area that not even the Indian organizations knew where they all lived. To grasp the nature of their remarkable regeneration, this inspiring volume examines the historic challenges that Native American migrants to Detroit faced - adjusting to urban life, finding a good job and a decent place to live, securing quality medical care, educating their children, and maintaining their unique cultural heritage. Danziger scrutinizes the leadership that emerged within the Indian community and the formal native organizations through which the Indian community's wide-ranging needs have been met. He also highlights the significant progress enjoyed by Detroit Indians - improved housing, higher educational achievement, less unemployment, and greater average family incomes - that has resulted from their persistence and self-determination. Historically, the Motor City has provided an environment where lives could be refashioned amid abundant opportunities. Indians have not been totally assimilated, nor have they forsaken Detroit en masse for their former homelands. Instead, they have forged vibrant lives for themselves as Indian-Detroiters. They are not as numerous or politically powerful as their black neighbors, but the story of these native peoples leaves no doubt about their importance to Detroit and of the city's effect on them.
Edmund Wilson's personal and informative study on the plight of the Native American Indians, Apologies to the Iroquois As Wilson writes, “[In August 1975] I discovered in the New YorkTimes what seemed to me a very queer story. A band of Mohawk Indians, under the leadership of a chief called Standing Arrow, had moved in on some land on Schoharie Creek, a little river that flows into the Mohawk not far from Amsterdam, New York, and established a settlement there. Their claim was that the land they were occupying had been assigned them by the United States in a treaty of 1784. The Times ran a map of the tract which had at that time been recognized by our government as the territory of the Iroquois people, who included the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, the Cayugas and the Tuscaroras, and were known as the Six Nations. The tract was sixty miles wide, and it extended almost from Buffalo to Albany. "I had already known about this agreement as the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (now Rome, New York), which had first made it possible for white people to settle in upper New York State without danger of molestation by its original inhabitants; but I had not known what the terms of this treaty were, and I was surprised to discover that my property, acquired at the end of the eighteenth century by the family from which it had come to me, seemed to lie either inside or just outside the northern boundary. Having thus been brought to realize my ignorance of our local relations with the Indians and continuing to read in the papers of the insistence of Standing Arrow that the Mohawks had some legal right to the land on which they were camping, I paid a visit, in the middle of October, to their village on Schoharie Creek . . . .”
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Brain Computations and Connectivity is about how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed. The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current biologically plausible computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes. Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions. This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed, and updates by much new evidence including the connectivity of the human brain the earlier book: Rolls (2021) Brain Computations: What and How, Oxford University Press. Brain Computations and Connectivity will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whether they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics.
In North America, we are generally desensitised to our surroundings, whether they are buildings or forests. This lack of awareness makes it easier to accept the fact that cities, towns, and suburbs are all built for us, not by us. It also makes sensible urban planning or policy difficult. The results have not been pretty. Cities are dysfunctional in part because we have built them in ways that pollute our ecosphere, something that harms our health in a direct way. Ecological stupidity is also economic stupidity, and North American urban development is incomprehensibly expensive. But cities also don't work socially: their design discourages casual public contact, which is the source of strong local communities and of self-confident collective action. Fowler points to numerous examples of humans who have transcended this culture of separation.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of all time • One of Esquire’s 50 best biographies of all time “A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle.”—Time This classic biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook 8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.” The rest of this book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had always craved. His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”
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