"Erosion, Self-Made offers a comprehensive treatment of self-criticism based in philosophy, developmental science, personality and clinical psychology, social theories, and cognitive-affective neuroscience"--

In this eye-opening work, the president of the ACLU takes a hard look at the human and social costs of the War on Terror. A decade after 9/11, it is far from clear that the government's hastily adopted antiterrorist tactics--such as the Patriot Act--are keeping us safe, but it is increasingly clear that these emergency measures in fact have the potential to ravage our lives--and have already done just that to countless Americans. From the Oregon lawyer falsely suspected of involvement with terrorism in Spain to the former University of Idaho football player arrested on the pretext that he was needed as a "material witness" (though he was never called to testify), this book is filled with unsettling stories of ordinary people caught in the government's dragnet. These are not just isolated mistakes in an otherwise sound program, but demonstrations of what can happen when our constitutional protections against government abuse are abandoned. Whether it's running a chat room, contributing to a charity, or even urging a terrorist group to forego its violent tactics, activities that should be protected by the First Amendment can now lead to prosecution. Blacklists and watchlists keep people grounded at airports and strand American citizens abroad, even though these lists are rife with errors--errors that cannot be challenged. National Security Letters allow the FBI to demand records about innocent people from libraries, financial institutions, and internet service providers without ever going to court. Government databanks now brim with information about every aspect of our private lives, while efforts to mount legal challenges to these measures have been stymied. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush, relies on secrecy and exaggerated claims of presidential prerogative to keep the courts and Congress from fully examining whether these laws and policies are constitutional, effective, or even counterproductive. Democracy itself is undermined. This book is a wake-up call for all Americans, who remain largely unaware of the post-9/11 surveillance regime's insidious and continuing growth.

During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. This text focuses on the question: what is lost when a language dies?

Scour and Erosion includes four keynote lectures from world leading researchers cutting across the themes of scour and erosion, together with 132 peer-reviewed papers from 34 countries, covering the principal themes of: - internal erosion - sediment transport - grain scale to continuum scale - advanced numerical modelling of scour and erosion - terrestrial scour and erosion- river and estuarine erosion including scour around structures, and - management of scour/erosion and sediment, including hazard management and sedimentation in dams and reservoirs. Scour and Erosion is ideal for researchers and industry working at the forefront of scour and erosion, and has applications in both the freshwater and marine environments.

In 2006, after a scandal that gripped the country, the British government began to transform its prison system. Under pressure to find and expel foreigners, Her Majesty's Prison Service began concentrating non-citizens in prisons with "embedded" border agents. Today, prison officers referanyone suspected of being foreign to immigration authorities and prisoners facing deportation are detained in special prisons devoted to confining non-citizens. Those who cannot be deported linger, sometimes for years, indefinitely detained behind prison walls. The British approach to foreignnationals reflects a broader trend in punishment. Over the past decade, penal institutions across England, the United States, and Western Europe have become key sites for border control.Offering the first comprehensive account of the imprisonment of non-citizens in the United Kingdom, Punish and Expel: Border Control, Nationalism, and the New Purpose of the Prison draws on extensive empirical data, based on fieldwork in five men's prisons, to explore the relationship betweenpunishment and citizenship. Using first-hand testimonies from hundreds of prisoners, prison officers, and high-level policy makers, it describes how prisons create a national identity and goes inside citizenship classes and 'all-foreign' prisons, documenting the treatment of non-citizens by otherprisoners and staff. Passionately argued and meticulously researched, Punish and Expel links prisons to the history of British colonialism and the contemporary politics of race, whilst challenging readers to rethink their approach to prisons, and to the people held inside them.