From the pulpits to the op-ed pages, several messages about religion in the U.S. are heard again and again: It's said that Americans are flocking to churches and other religious institutions in greater numbers than ever before, that non-Christian faiths are growing rapidly, and that a new religious fervor among the young is filling up the pews. All of these frequently heard messages are incorrect, according to this book. The book, by professors Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., is based on a major national survey which they conducted. The U.S. Census is prohibited from asking questions about religion, so this survey, the American Religious Identification Survey, contains the most complete and reliable source of data on religion in America today. This book argues that religion in America can best be understood as a product on offer in the marketplace of ideas. It says that "religious ferment in America is as strong as it has ever been, so whatever you learned about religion in the U.S. a generation ago is out of date."

America’s fascination with the stock market dates back to the Gilded Age. Winner of the BAAS Book Prize of the British Association of American Studies Americans pay famously close attention to “the market,” obsessively watching trends, patterns, and swings and looking for clues in every fluctuation. In Reading the Market, Peter Knight explores the Gilded Age origins and development of this peculiar interest. He tracks the historic shift in market operations from local to national while examining how present-day ideas about the nature of markets are tied to past genres of financial representation. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century explosion of art, literature, and media, which sought to dramatize the workings of the stock market for a wide audience, Knight shows how ordinary Americans became both emotionally and financially invested in the market. He analyzes popular investment manuals, brokers’ newsletters, newspaper columns, magazine articles, illustrations, and cartoons. He also introduces readers to fiction featuring financial tricksters, which was characterized by themes of personal trust and insider information. The book reveals how the popular culture of the period shaped the very idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism by making the impersonal abstractions of high finance personal and concrete. From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance—and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.

Global Backlash is the first book to move beyond the monolithic portrayal of the globalization protests that have escalated since Seattle and are not likely to abate soon. With trenchant analysis and dozens of primary documents from a variety of popular and uncommon sources, Robin Broad explores proposals and initiatives coming from the backlash to answer the question, 'But what do they want?' A range of sophisticated propositions and a vibrant debate among segments of the backlash emerge. Highly readable and analytically powerful, this book is vital to understanding the most potent protest movement of our times.

The global is an instituted perspective, not just an empirical process. Adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire, the global perspective served to make heterogeneous spaces and nonwhite subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonizers and modern anticolonial nationalists. In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire. These works offer some of the most explicit and sophisticated discussions of the world as a single, interconnected entity, inducting their readers into comprehensive and objective descriptions of the world. The perspective organizing these authors' conception of the global-the frame or code through which the world came into view-is indebted to the material and discursive possibilities set in motion by European conquest. The global, therefore, is not just a peculiar mode of thematization; it is aligned to a conception of historical development unique to European colonial capitalism. Krishnan troubles this dominant perspective. Drawing on the poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and challenging the recent historiography of empire and economic histories of globalization, he elaborates a bold new approach to the humanities in the age of globalization.

How did the concept of Western liberalism, rooted in the notions of religious toleration and universal human rights, evolve into the "anything goes" moral relativism of our own late twentieth century society? This is the question at the heart of David Peterson's fascinating examination of the Positivist tradition, one of the most far-reaching philosophical movements of the past two centuries. The book begins prior to the official birth of Positivism with the rise of British Empiricism under David Hume and John Locke. From there, Peterson shifts focus to the writings of the French free thinker Auguste Comte, before moving on to the work of the late nineteenth century "Vienna Circle," and finally to the corpus of three seminal thinkers of the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Friedrich von Hayek, and Karl Popper. By weaving together contemporary social and political debates (such as the rise and fall of "supply-side" economics and the abortion controversy) with their antecedents in modern intellectual history, Revoking the Moral Order not only brings to life seemingly arcane philosophical texts but also provides important context for contemporary issues that sometimes seem to be without precedent. This book will especially appeal to philosophers and historians and to the educated general reader seeking historical insight into the social and intellectual dilemmas of our time.