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With 150 accessible articles written by more than 130 leading experts, this essential reference provides authoritative introductions to some of the most important and talked-about topics in American history and politics, from the founding to today. Abridged from the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, this is the only single-volume encyclopedia that provides comprehensive coverage of both the traditional topics of U.S. political history and the broader forces that shape American politics--including economics, religion, social movements, race, class, and ge

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Klappentext: "The Autonomous City" is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. He looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housingfrom Copenhagen's Freetown Christiana to the squats of the Lower East Sideas well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification.Pictured as a way to reimagine and reclaim the city, squatting offers an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration. We must, more than ever, reanimate and remake the urban environment as a site of radical social transformation.

I would argue that history students should understand that the whole body of historical writing consists of interpretations of the past. They should be able to analyse a wide variety of texts and form their own opinions on a historical topic, and should be able to construct a coherent argument, using evidence to support their opinion. In doing so, they should be actively aware that their argument is no more "true" than that offered by any other historian. It is as much a product of their personal biography and the social formation in which they live as of the evidence used in its construction. Even this evidence is the product of other personal biographies and other social forces.

I would argue that history students should understand that the whole body of historical writing consists of interpretations of the past. They should be able to analyse a wide variety of texts and form their own opinions on a historical topic, and should be able to construct a coherent argument, using evidence to support their opinion. In doing so, they should be actively aware that their argument is no more "true" than that offered by any other historian. It is as much a product of their personal biography and the social formation in which they live as of the evidence used in its construction. Even this evidence is the product of other personal biographies and other social forces.

The article explores the major features of the Swedish Government's new
initiative - a school based Upper Secondary Apprenticeship model. The analyses are
guided by activity theory. The analysed texts are part of the parliamentary reformmaking
process of the 2011 Upper Secondary School reform. The analyses unfold
how the Government, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO), and the Confederation
of Swedish Enterprise (SN) construct Upper Secondary Apprenticeship
as an activity in the 21st century. The conclusion highlights how three traditional
aspects of Swedish initial vocational education and training (IVET) collide in the
formation of Upper Secondary Apprenticeship – a curriculum of labour market based
apprenticeships, a curriculum of school based IVET, and ill-defined curriculums of
school based apprenticeships. The emerging Upper Secondary Apprenticeship curriculum
foreshadows multifaceted educational trajectories where the learning targets,
and not the responsibility for the student's learning are displaced from the school to
the workplace setting.

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as "the devil's milk." All the advancements made possible by rubber industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But, as John Tully reminds us, the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and the oppressed who toil closest to "the devil's milk" in all its forms have never accepted their immiscration without a fight. This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and on several continents, is destined to become a classic. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, Tully presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber. --Book Jacket

Perhaps the most accurate description of the present state of knowledge on the economic history of the Near East is the schoolboy's definition of a net as "a bunch of holes tied together with string." The trouble is that, here, the holes are so wide that rather large fish can easily slip through, while the string is so weak that one cannot be sure of keeping what one thinks one holds. Add to this the fact that the present fisherman is a newcomer to the field, and has not yet had the time to make much of the necessary studies, and it will be seen that this paper must be regarded as only a preliminary and very tentative introduction, which makes no claim to thoroughness or completeness.

Public policy questions such as public funding for Catholic schools, the extent of government involvement in private education, and church-state relations in general are not unique to the United States. This article discusses Catholic education in Scotland, which a view to explaining the ongoing need for cooperation and goodwill in church-state relations concerning schools.