Walt Disney's vision for a city of tomorrow, EPCOT, would be a way for American corporations to show how technology, creative thinking, and hard work could change the world. He saw this project as a way to influence the public's expectations about city life, in the same way his earlier work had redefined what it meant to watch an animated film or visit an amusement park. Walt and the Promise of Progress City is a personal journey that explores the process through which meaningful and functional spaces have been created by Walt Disney and his artists as well as how guests understand and experience those spaces.

"A detailed presentation of Lewis Henry Morgan's life from his early work with the Iroquois to his defense of American capitalism to his strange posthumous career among international leftists up to Morgan's influence among today's environmentalists, anarchists, feminists, and other social visionaries"--Provided by publisher.

A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.

'What is India's future? I deeply believe in India's promise, in our potential for great achievement. I am also old enough to appreciate our ability to snatch failure from the jaws of success.' THE PROMISE: Our diverse culture has something for everyone. Our young population is thirsty for education and achievement. And a strong private sector is our engine of growth. We can lead the world in the future. THE STRUGGLE: We struggle to create a business-friendly environment. We lag in innovation. Education, public health and quality of jobs demand attention. Our governments control some things too much and neglect others. How can the government, citizens and firms turn our struggle into promise and enable India to lead? How can we fix things by learning from best practices elsewhere? How can we ensure openness, inclusivity and innovation? How can independent institutions make up for low state capacity? How can our culture deliver leadership? In The Struggle and the Promise, Naushad Forbes answers these and other critical questions concerning India's progress. He provides a logical, actionable blueprint for getting the balance right between industry, institutions and policy. Backed by rigorous research and copious data, here's a book that shows how to fulfil India's potential.

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

Why the news about the global decline of infectious diseases is not all good. Plagues and parasites have played a central role in world affairs, shaping the evolution of the modern state, the growth of cities, and the disparate fortunes of national economies. This book tells that story, but it is not about the resurgence of pestilence. It is the story of its decline. For the first time in recorded history, virus, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death or disability in any region of the world. People are living longer, and fewer mothers are giving birth to many children in the hopes that some might survive. And yet, the news is not all good. Recent reductions in infectious disease have not been accompanied by the same improvements in income, job opportunities, and governance that occurred with these changes in wealthier countries decades ago. There have also been unintended consequences. In this book, Thomas Bollyky explores the paradox in our fight against infectious disease: the world is getting healthier in ways that should make us worry. Bollyky interweaves a grand historical narrative about the rise and fall of plagues in human societies with contemporary case studies of the consequences. Bollyky visits Dhaka—one of the most densely populated places on the planet—to show how low-cost health tools helped enable the phenomenon of poor world megacities. He visits China and Kenya to illustrate how dramatic declines in plagues have affected national economies. Bollyky traces the role of infectious disease in the migrations from Ireland before the potato famine and to Europe from Africa and elsewhere today. Historic health achievements are remaking a world that is both worrisome and full of opportunities. Whether the peril or promise of that progress prevails, Bollyky explains, depends on what we do next. A Council on Foreign Relations Book