This brief, practical guide offers a clear and comprehensive strategy for conceptualizing, approaching, and executing the task of writing a research paper in the humanities and social sciences. In addition, it provides: a critical and process-oriented approach to the tasks of topic selection, formulation of the research question, thesis development, and argumentation. judiciously selected examples drawn from a broad range of disciplines. concise treatment of the aims, methods, and conventions of scholarly research, including the opportunities and pitfalls of Internet use. a wealth of conceptual and organizational tools, and more.

Land Use and Society is a unique and compelling exploration of interactions among law, geography, history, and culture and their joint influence on the evolution of land use and urban form in the United States. Originally published in 1996, this completely revised, expanded, and updated edition retains the strengths of the earlier version while introducing a host of new topics and insights on the twenty-first century metropolis. This new edition of Land Use and Society devotes greater attention to urban land use and related social issues with two new chapters tracing American city and metropolitan change over the twentieth century. More emphasis is given to social justice and the environmental movement and their respective roles in shaping land use and policy in recent decades. This edition of Land Use and Society by Rutherford H. Platt is updated to reflect the 2000 Census, the most recent Supreme Court decisions, and various topics of current interest such as affordable housing, protecting urban water supplies, urban biodiversity, and "ecological cities." It also includes an updated conclusion that summarizes some positive and negative outcomes of urban land policies to date.

Food and Wine Pairing: A Sensory Experience provides a series of discussion and exercises ranging from identifying basic wine characteristics, including visual, aroma, taste (acid, sweetness, oak, tannin, body, etc.), palate mapping (acid, sweet, sour, bitter, and tannin), basic food characteristics and anchors of each (sweet, sour, bitter, saltiness, fattiness, body, etc). It presents how these characteristics contrast and complement each other. By helping culinary professionals develop the skills necessary to identifying the key elements in food or wine that will directly impact its matching based on contrast or similarities, they will then be able to predict excellent food and wine pairings.

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.