The appeal to a shared sense of origins and national purpose is part of the rhetoric of American life. Every new item on the social agenda--from the New Deal, to the Space Program, to affirmative action--has attempted to justify itself as an expression of American ideals. But the historical source of "the American experience" is a matter of dispute: was it the founding documents, New England puritanism, transcendentalism, the sentiment of individualism, the myth of America as a redeemer nation? Indeed, the whole idea of explaining our experience by a single impulse may itself be misconceived. If so, should we continue to justify public policy on these grounds? Drawing together stimulating and original articles by such noted writers as McGeorge Bundy, John Diggins, E.L. Doctorow, Denis Donoghue, Gerald Holton, and David Richards, America in Theory examines the extent to which our perceptions of the past have dictated, and should continue to dictate, the way we address the problems of the present. The essays consider general issues--can we base public policy on an "original intent" of the Framers? Is there an "American way"? How do you reconcile the tension between a fixed tradition and a pluralistic nation? How do our current concerns with theories of interpretation shape our reading of the constitution and a reconsideration of the past? Norman Dorsen points out that many recent policy debates have reached an impasse because opposing forces base their arguments on contradictory interpretations of the American past. And John Brademas, former U.S. Representative and current President of New York University, traces the history of federal support for education and offers a penetrating critique of Reagan's attempts to curtail this support. In addition, there are chapters on civil rights, foreign policy, the Equal Rights Amendment, nuclear arms, and affirmative action. As these thought-provoking essays reveal, the myths and theories that make up our idea of America are still evolving, are still open to debate two centuries after our nation's founding. Anyone interested in the meaning of the American experience, the recent direction of public policy both foreign and domestic, and the futre of America will find this volume provocative and insightful.

A compelling portrait of a unique moment in American history when the ideas of Charles Darwin reshaped American notions about nature, religion, science and race “A lively and informative history.” – The New York Times Book Review Throughout its history America has been torn in two by debates over ideals and beliefs. Randall Fuller takes us back to one of those turning points, in 1860, with the story of the influence of Charles Darwin’s just-published On the Origin of Species on five American intellectuals, including Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, the child welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace, and the abolitionist Franklin Sanborn. Each of these figures seized on the book’s assertion of a common ancestry for all creatures as a powerful argument against slavery, one that helped provide scientific credibility to the cause of abolition. Darwin’s depiction of constant struggle and endless competition described America on the brink of civil war. But some had difficulty aligning the new theory to their religious convictions and their faith in a higher power. Thoreau, perhaps the most profoundly affected all, absorbed Darwin’s views into his mysterious final work on species migration and the interconnectedness of all living things. Creating a rich tableau of nineteenth-century American intellectual culture, as well as providing a fascinating biography of perhaps the single most important idea of that time, The Book That Changed America is also an account of issues and concerns still with us today, including racism and the enduring conflict between science and religion.

As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

This book provides a complete overview of the Founders' natural rights theory and its policy implications.

Theory Groups in the Study of Language in North America provides a detailed social history of traditions and "revolutionary" challenges to traditions within North American linguistics, especially within 20th-century anthropological linguistics. After showing substantial differences between Bloomfield's and neo-Bloomfieldian theorizing, Murray shows that early transformational-generative work on syntax grew out of neo-Bloomfieldian structuralism, and was promoted by neo-Bloomfieldian gatekeepers, in particular longtime Language editor Bernard Bloch. The central case studies of the book contrast the (increasingly) "revolutionary rhetoric" of transformational-generative grammarians with rhetorics of continuity emitted by two linguistic anthropology groupings that began simultaneously with TGG in the late-1950s, the ethnography of communication and ethnoscience.

Asserts that the Founders' hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct—articulated in the Declaration of Independence—has been replaced by today's blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition.

How a new mathematical field grew and matured in America Graph Theory in America focuses on the development of graph theory in North America from 1876 to 1976. At the beginning of this period, James Joseph Sylvester, perhaps the finest mathematician in the English-speaking world, took up his appointment as the first professor of mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University, where his inaugural lecture outlined connections between graph theory, algebra, and chemistry—shortly after, he introduced the word graph in our modern sense. A hundred years later, in 1976, graph theory witnessed the solution of the long-standing four color problem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken of the University of Illinois. Tracing graph theory’s trajectory across its first century, this book looks at influential figures in the field, both familiar and less known. Whereas many of the featured mathematicians spent their entire careers working on problems in graph theory, a few such as Hassler Whitney started there and then moved to work in other areas. Others, such as C. S. Peirce, Oswald Veblen, and George Birkhoff, made excursions into graph theory while continuing their focus elsewhere. Between the main chapters, the book provides short contextual interludes, describing how the American university system developed and how graph theory was progressing in Europe. Brief summaries of specific publications that influenced the subject’s development are also included. Graph Theory in America tells how a remarkable area of mathematics landed on American soil, took root, and flourished.