Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a lo...

Has the revolution that led from the economy of the gift, characteristic of most precapitalist societies, to the economy of modern societies been accomplished in all spheres of life, as tacitly assumed by those who claim to apply the model of the profit-optimizing agent to every practice – to art, to education and even to marriage, seen as an exchange of economic services of production and reproduction? And is it totally accomplished even at the heart of the sphere most directly concerned ...

While Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, the reproduction of inequality and the rise of the modern state is well known, his writings on the phenomena of internationalization and imperialism have received much less attention. Bourdieu’s analyses of the international circulation of ideas and the imperialisms of the universal – where two political powers, such as the United States and France, clash on matters of cultural legitimacy – generated multiple research programmes on topics rangi...

This slim volume contains four little-known texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the question of reflexivity, which was a key theme in his work.For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not an exercise in introspection but rather a way of applying the tools of sociology to itself. The aim is to make explicit and control the effects of the presuppositions, standpoints and dispositions that the researcher brings to the conduct of social science research. Bourdieu advocates an attitude of epistemological ...

A key feature of those who work for the state, in the legal system and in public services is that they claim to be putting their own personal interests aside and working in a disinterested fashion, for the public good. But is disinterested behaviour possible? Can law be treated as a set of universal rules that are independent of particular interests, or is this mere ideology? Is the state bureaucracy a universal class, as Hegel thought, or a structure that serves the interests of the domin...

This is the story of an American dynasty: the father, who built the fortune, the son who cleansed the name, the brothers who manipulated both the name and the fortune to their own ends, and the cousins who often wish they had inherited neither. Cast against the backdrop of America’s history is a spectacular array of characters: a bigamist, a robber baron, a philanthropist, a world-weary cynic, a drifting divorcee, polluters, environmentalists, art lovers and money manipulators.“[An...

The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys.An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyaltie...

In The Fords: An American Epic, Peter Collier and David Horowitz tell the riveting story of three generations of Fords, a dramatic story of conflict between fathers and sons played out against the backdrop of America’s greatest industrial empire.The story begins with the first Henry Ford, the mechanical wizard, tinkerer and “mad genius” who drove the automobile into the heart of American life and conquered the world with it. An American Original, by the end of his life he ...

“What’s the point of being Irish anyway if you don’t think the world will break your heart?” asks Jack Kennedy. He is spellbound by a song about Ireland’s neverland of dreams: “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?”No one better knew the real JFK’s dreams and passions than Lem Billings, a prep-school roommate who made himself “sidekick everlasting.” The late Peter Collier had the great fortune to obtain oral histories from Billings himself, and they became the basis for a vivid biographi...

On October 25, 2010, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta became the first living person since the Vietnam War to receive the United States’ highest military decoration, and both he and Sergeant Leroy Petry (the second inductee) rightly take their place in the pages of this third edition of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty. The book includes 144 contemporary portraits of recipients by award-winning photographer Nick Del Calzo and profiles by National Book Awar...

This is the first and only biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became an iconic figure in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan's UN ambassador and the most forceful presence in the administration, outside of the President himself, in shaping the Reagan Doctrine and fighting the Cold War to a victorious conclusion.Political Woman traces the complex interlock between Kirkpatrick's personal and professional lives using her as yet unarchived private papers and extensive interviews with ...

This volume collects 22 papers presented at the 4th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, on 28-29 June 2012. The overall conference theme is 'Exploration - Discovery - Cartography', but preference has been given to papers dealing with cartography in the 19th and 20th centuries. The papers are classified according to regional sub-themes, i.e. papers on the Americas, papers on Africa, etc.