College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Books

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Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate

Deidre Johnson

Deidre Johnson's biography of Edward Stratemeyer leaves little, if anything, to be desired. His entire history is covered here with, of course, special emphasis on his incredible "Syndicate" - a Syndicate which produced the most influential juvenile fiction of the 20th century (Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew to mention but a few) and whose influence is still felt to this day.
The Practice of Mathematics: An Introduction to Proof Techniques and Number Systems

Clifford Johnston

The Practice of Mathematics: An Introduction to Proof Techniques and Number Systems is designed to help students prepare for higher-level mathematics courses through an introduction to the methods and practices of logic and proof. The book uses the development of set theory and the number systems as a framework for the introduction of the various proof techniques.
As students study proof techniques, they learn about basic set theory, natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, and real numbers. Within each chapter, ideas critical to the number systems are expanded to motivate the study of more advanced topics. In this way, students are exposed to basic ideas and concepts in modern algebra, graph theory, combinatorics, real analysis, and topology.
Additionally, the text serves as an introduction to mathematics as a profession, covering mathematical disciplines, professional activities, and mathematical software. It includes a large variety of exercises that range from easy to difficult and serve to instill key concepts and provide students with opportunities for practical application.
Emphasizing the simultaneous development of proof techniques within the content of set theory and the number systems, The Practice of Mathematics is an exemplary resource for students pursuing an undergraduate degree in mathematics.
Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement

Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee

This volume examines the role of rhetoric in today’s culture of democratic activism. The volume takes on two of the most significant challenges currently facing contemporary rhetorical studies: (1) the contested meanings and practices of democracy and civic engagement in global context, and (2) the central role of rhetoric in democratic activist practices. In presenting a variety of political and rhetorical struggles in their specific contexts, editors Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee allow contributors to reflect on and elaborate possibilities for both activist approaches to rhetorical studies, and rhetorical approaches to activist projects, facilitating better understanding the socio-political consequences of this work.
Rigidity in Higher Rank Abelian Group Actions: Volume 1, Introduction and Cocycle Problem

Anatole Katok and Viorel Nitica

This self-contained monograph presents rigidity theory for a large class of dynamical systems, differentiable higher rank hyperbolic and partially hyperbolic actions. This first volume describes the subject in detail and develops the principal methods presently used in various aspects of the rigidity theory. Part I serves as an exposition and preparation, including a large collection of examples that are difficult to find in the existing literature. Part II focuses on cocycle rigidity, which serves as a model for rigidity phenomena as well as a useful tool for studying them.
International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces – from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain – the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish civil war, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism – the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions – and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.
Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Small Comrades is a fascinating examination of Soviet conceptions of childhood and the resulting policies directed toward children. Working on the assumption that cultural representations and self-representations are not entirely separable, this book probes how the Soviet regime's representations structured teachers' observations of their pupils and often adults' recollections of their childhood. The book draws on work that has been done on Soviet schooling, and focuses specifically on the development of curricula and institutions, but it also examines the wider context of the relationship between the family and the state, and to the Bolshevik vision of the "children of October."
The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of “heroic Leningrad” omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state’s myths, and they often found their own uses for the state’s monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union’s chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.
Essentials of Public Relations Management

Edward J. Lordan

Filling a gap in current PR literature, Essentials of Public Relations Management takes students to the next level. Designed to help students and professionals who have mastered the fundamentals of public relations, this book develops management skills needed for further career advancement. Appropriate for those in the fields of business, communications, journalism or political science, this down-to-earth study of the practical application of public relations covers: Relating to clients, Managing staff, Conducting and applying research, Coping with crises, Handling finances, Understanding the power and the problems of technology, Recognizing actual and potential legal issues, Defining professional ethics.
Politics, Ink: How American Editorial Cartoonists Skewer Politicians, From King George III to George Dubya

Edward J. Lordan

This fun and extensively illustrated book tells the story of the American political cartoon, from its origins over 250 years ago to today. Edward Lordan gives us a tour of artists, politics, media, American society, and the technology of cartooning, including the work of Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, Currier & Ives, Thomas Nast, Dr. Seuss, Pat Oliphant, Draper Hill, Tom Toles, Ted Rall, Mike Keefe, and countless others. Interviews with today's political cartoonists—including Pulitzer winners Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson—go behind the art form, to show how and why we respond to editorial cartoons as well as what syndication and the Internet mean to the future of political cartooning.
Sports and Scandals: How Leagues Protect the Integrity of Their Games

Edward J. Lordan

Sports are inspiring and uplifting. They can also bring out some of the worst characteristics in human nature: narcissism, prejudice, greed. This book looks at the major sports scandals in modern American history, from the Black Sox fix of 1919 to the current concussion crisis in the NFL.
The Case for Combat: How Presidents Persuade Americans To Go To War

Edward J. Lordan

From Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, many American presidents have used their words to garner support to go to war. What are the techniques they employed to convince citizens to get behind their president in committing to combat? Are these methods effective—or ethical?
Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Graham MacPhee

This radical reassessment shows how, after the Second World War, British national identity and culture was shaped in ways that still operate today. As empires declined, globalisation spread, and literature responded to these influences. As Graham MacPhee explains, postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions. In this way, they reveal both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism, as they seek to cope with the shock of post-imperial downsizing.
The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

Graham MacPhee

Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual-now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy-have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals-from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida-have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades. The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York-two key world cities for over two centuries-Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.
Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective

Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar

The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.
An Exalted House

Paul Maltby

PR man George Burghess, employed to whitewash the name of a firm linked to a fatal factory fire, suffers torments of conscience. Then a friendship with a woman, who squats in the flat above his own, points the way to the redemption he seeks. But Burghess cannot give up a hard-won career in corporate PR and, instead, descends into spiritual ruin. Through its story of a soul in crisis, "An Exalted House" brings into view the warring sides of London: the corporate zone of hostile takeovers and monuments to financial power versus an alternative zone of popular-festive breakouts and squats, presided over by the spirit of William Blake.
Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

Paul Maltby

Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.
Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon

Paul Maltby

Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, Paul Maltby contends, have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on problems of language. In "Dissident Postmodernists", Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communications. Among Maltby's models of dissident postmodernist writings are "Gravity's Rainbow", "The Public Burning", "Snow White" and more recent publications like "Vineland" and "Spanking the Maid". In a series of readings, he examines the ways in which these works respond to the erosion of the public sphere, the elevation of functionalist discourse, the enlargement of the state propaganda network, the corporate management of mass communications, and the diffusion of concept-poor language forms which limit social understanding. Alert to such developments, Maltby argues, dissident postmodernists such as Barthelme, Coover and Pynchon write with politicized perceptions of language and a heightened awareness of language as a medium of social integration.
The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique

Paul Maltby

In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or 'epiphany', in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains show the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.
Stress Management and Longevity: The Importance of Physical and Social Activity In Later Life

Jasmin Tahmaseb McConatha

The world is aging. Age is accompanied by opportunities as well as challenges. This book addresses the relationship between longevity, aging, and stress. It describes the varied stressors of later life and presents effective coping mechanisms. The book emphasizes the importance of physical and social activity and the healing power of nature.
The Social Geography of Healthy Aging

Jasmin Tahmaseb McConatha and Karin Volkwein-Caplan

The healthy and successful transition to later life can be a difficult experience. This book discusses the historical, cultural, and social psychological factors that shape the quality of life of older women and men. A central premise of the proposed book is that where we live is vital to how we age, Thus, this book has a look at stories of older women and men who are from different cultural backgrounds.
Discovering Evolution Equations with Applications: Volume 1-Deterministic Equations

Mark A. McKibben

Discovering Evolution Equations with Applications: Volume 1-Deterministic Equations provides an engaging, accessible account of core theoretical results of evolution equations in a way that gradually builds intuition and culminates in exploring active research. It gives nonspecialists, even those with minimal prior exposure to analysis, the foundation to understand what evolution equations are and how to work with them in various areas of practice.
Discovering Evolution Equations with Applications: Volume 2-Stochastic Equations

Mark A. McKibben

Most existing books on evolution equations tend either to cover a particular class of equations in too much depth for beginners or focus on a very specific research direction. Thus, the field can be daunting for newcomers to the field who need access to preliminary material and behind-the-scenes detail. Taking an applications-oriented, conversational approach, Discovering Evolution Equations with Applications: Volume 2-Stochastic Equations provides an introductory understanding of stochastic evolution equations.
Differential Equations with MATLAB: Exploration, Applications, and Theory

Mark A. McKibben and Micah Webster

A unique textbook for an undergraduate course on mathematical modeling, Differential Equations with MATLAB: Exploration, Applications, and Theory provides students with an understanding of the practical and theoretical aspects of mathematical models involving ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs and PDEs). The text presents a unifying picture inherent to the study and analysis of more than 20 distinct models spanning disciplines such as physics, engineering, and finance.
The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

Christopher Merkner

Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely—offering stability and identity and comfort—are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them.
Mirror on America: Essays and Images from Popular Culture

Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen

Mirror on America meets students where they are right now. Whether they have lived in America all their lives or have only just arrived, they can consider themselves experts in pop culture. After all, they participate in it every day. Brief, current essays and images on topics like hip-hop, our online lives, and, of course, vampires and zombies spark discussion and critical thinking. And because critical thinking should lead to solid writing, the book’s editorial apparatus gives students clear instruction and support for every step of the reading and writing process. Always engaging and always accessible,Mirror on America reflects the interests of students and the instructors who want them to become confident writers.