The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records are available for sale to strangers; our children are fingerprinted and their every test score saved for posterity; and small robots patrol our schoolyards and drones may soon fill our skies. The contributors to this anthology don't simply describe these problems or warn about the loss of privacy—they propose solutions. They look closely at business practices, public policy, and technology design, and ask, “Should this continue? Is there a better approach?” They take seriously the dictum of Thomas Edison: “What one creates with his hand, he should control with his head.” It's a new approach to the privacy debate, one that assumes privacy is worth protecting, that there are solutions to be found, and that the future is not yet known. This volume will be an essential reference for policy makers and researchers, journalists and scholars, and others looking for answers to one of the biggest challenges of our modern day. The premise is clear: there's a problem—let's find a solution.

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.

At its beginning, every age has been "modern." We speak of "pre-" and "post-" modern ages. We are likewise tempted to identify what is most up-to-date with what is true. But to he up-to-date is to be out-of-date. If we Find what is really true in any age, it will he true in all ages. This proposition is central to this hook. Moreover, what is true will appear in different guises, as will what is false. The "modern age" had often considered itself relativist, or secular, or skeptical. It strove to divest itself of its theological and metaphysical back-grounds, only to find that the central themes from this tradition recur again and again, most often under political or even scientific forms. This book proposes to "see" these classical and revelational roots within their modern forms. But we also find the proposition that what exists is only what we make. We find no "truth" but that of our own confection. When we find only our own "truth" however, we do not really find or know ourselves. We do not cause what it is to be ourselves in the first place. The central truth that the "Modern age" does not acknowledge is that its own existence along with that of the world itself is first a gift. When we see the "modern age" in this light we can again rediscover what we really are. Hopefully, we can choose and rejoice what we are intended to be in any age as the gift of being is something that transcends all ages even while dwelling within them.

An account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model-T, the machine that defined twentieth-century America.

A groundbreaking study of how emotions motivate attempts to counter species loss. This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. Jørgensen argues that the recovery of nature—identifying that something is lost and then going out to find it and bring it back—is a nostalgic practice that looks to a historical past and relies on the concept of belonging to justify future-oriented action. The recovery impulse depends on emotional responses to what is lost, particularly a longing for recovery that manifests itself in such emotions as guilt, hope, fear, and grief. Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply—both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.

In the preface to this 2000 edition, the authors point out that with the advent of the millennium, it is important to take stock of the 20th century, which has been labelled as the Age of Genocide.

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.