Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Second Coming of Napoleon -...

  Marcus Draysun

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  The Battle of Waterloo, fought on June 18, 1815, is widely regarded as one of history’s most decisive conflicts. It marked the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign and the beginning of a new European order. However, had the battle played out differently—had Napoleon emerged victorious—France and the world would have been set on an entirely new course. 
  A French victory at Waterloo was not an impossibility. Napoleon, despite being outnumbered, was still a military genius who had orchestrated countless triumphs before. His strategy depended on dividing and defeating the Anglo-Allied and Prussian forces separately before they could fully unite. For much of the battle, the French had the upper hand, with their artillery hammering British lines and their cavalry sowing chaos among enemy ranks. 
  One key turning point was the delayed arrival of Marshal Grouchy and his troops. Had Grouchy pursued and effectively neutralized the Prussian forces under Blücher, Napoleon would have been able to concentrate his full strength on Wellington’s forces, likely forcing them into retreat. With the British lines collapsing and no reinforcements arriving, the battlefield could have been transformed from a site of French defeat into one of Napoleon’s most remarkable victories.

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  The Amateur Hour - A History of...

  Jonathan Zimmerman

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  American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student.But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

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  True Crime in the Civil War -...

  Tobin T. Buhk

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  “Reconstruct[s] Civil War cold cases and crimes through the people who lived to tell about them . . . a unique history.”—MLive   “Crime did not take a holiday during the Civil War, far from it. As Tobin Buhk shows in this fast-paced narrative, the war created new opportunities to gain profits from illegal activities, to settle old scores against personal enemies under the cover of fighting the nation's enemies, to pillage, plunder, and murder amid the carnage and destruction that seemed to offer license to legitimize such crimes. Students of the Civil War will find new information in this readable account.” —James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom   This history of the rampant crime that took place in both the North and South amid the chaos of the American Civil War examines cases including currency counterfeiting; the tyrannical actions of Gen. Benjamin Butler; the murder of Gen. Earl van Dorn; the Detroit Draft Riot; the Rebel plot to burn New York City; raids by William Quantrill’s Bushwhackers; the Fort Pillow Massacre; the horrific prison conditions at Andersonville; the fate of the Lincoln assassination conspirators; and more.  Includes photographs

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  Unsettling Choice - Race Rights...

  Ujju Aggarwal

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  What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the "problem" of school choice actually not about better choices for all but about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement. 
   
   
   
  Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. 
   
   
   
  As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. This book tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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  Portraits as Animal - Poems

  Victoriano Cárdenas

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  Portraits as Animal is a gallery of self-becoming in a "sunbaked house as tiny as a heart." With a toothy lyricism at turns sly and forthright, Cárdenas's hunger to belong carries us from a stove "bleeding a hundred kinds of caldo" to his "determined mitochondrial ancestors''-a journey framed by generational struggles with addiction, a queerphobic church, and the always-transforming land. 
  In conversation with Taos's rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that "to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me." Here is pain and violence, but here, too, is the assurance that we are "built for this metamorphosis" and can follow our past incarnations "over scorched earth neon with new grass" to a future of our own making.

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  Babble On - A Drug Memoir

  Andrew Brobyn

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  A mid-level drug trafficker and self-proclaimed low-life with a big vocabulary comes to terms with his actions and his mental health. 
   
   
   
  Andrew Brobyn's relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents' home in Toronto, while he figured out what to do with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer. 
   
   
   
  Equal parts hilarious and terrifying, Babble On is a psycho-philosophical memoir that tracks Brobyn as he navigates the consequences of his eccentric choices and struggles with profound ambivalence toward his own health and well-being.

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