MITPressLog

No Tech-fix for Justice

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, on the Arab Spring and whether social media promotes radical political change. 

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in  Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

 

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.

References:

Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?

Women of the Arab Spring

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, Oxford UP: 1991.  

 

 

Marshall McLuhan, What Are You (Still) Doin'?

A guest post from Peter Lunenfeld, whose latest book from the MIT Press is The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, on Marshall McLuhan's influence. Happy 100th Birthday, Professor McLuhan!

I’m a media theorist, and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be without the redoubtable Marshall McLuhan, who would have been 100 today.  Not only wouldn’t I be, but perhaps no else would be either. That’s not to say that people wouldn’t be thinking about radio dramas and television sitcoms, classic books and pulp magazine, the postal service and the Internet, movies in theaters and movies on video and movies on YouTube, just that they might not think of them in that peculiarly synthetic, dare we say Catholic (in the comprehensive rather than doctrinal) sense that McLuhan bequeathed to us with his seminal work of the 1960s.  Trained as a Medievalist at Cambridge, this son of the Canadian West forever after looked the part of the tweedy don, which paradoxically lent his pronouncements on the newest communications technologies a gravitas that his black clad, architect-glasses sporting descendents (myself included) may lack.

It was in the 1950s that McLuhan started change his focus from literary criticism to the idea of “media,” publishing his thoughts on advertising in a quirky little book called The Mechanical Bride. This was followed in 1962 by The Gutenberg Galaxy, which examined the impact of print on the entirety of culture, and then, in 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. With pithy insights like "we change our tools and then our tools change us," invertable probes like “the medium is the message,” and frankly gnomic statements like “the electric light is pure information,” Understanding Media was a watershed book that ignited a firestorm of support, derision, controversy and publicity the likes of which we really haven’t seen since. I like to tell myself that in 1968, at six years old, I saw a very young Goldie Hawn in a bikini on the TV show Laugh-In gyrating and giggling “Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?” but I’m probably projecting backwards.

McLuhan’s fortunes rose and fell with the 1960s and by the time I started grad school in the 1980s, he was out of favor with all but a tiny coterie that looked past his outrageousness to unearth the truly radical thoughts he had about the intersections of communications, technologies and cultures. By the 1990s, and the digitization of everything, the World Wide Web seemed more a “global village” than television ever did, Wired proclaimed him the magazine’s patron saint, and Understanding Media was more relevant than ever. So, on this specific day, in this centennial year of tribute conferences around the world, twitter feeds, and biographies, I suggest we raise a glass of white Bordeaux--one of his favorite drinks--to Herbert Marshall McLuhan, who’s still (as per Goldie) “doin’” in the most influential way.

 

Digital Apollo

Happy Moon Day! Today marks the 42^nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Here’s an excerpt from David Mindell’s Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight to commemorate Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’ flight to the moon.

 

A July Day on the Moon

On a July day in 1969, after a silent trip around the far side of the moon, the two Apollo spacecraft reappeared out of the shadows and reestablished contact with earth. The command and service module (CSM) (sometimes simply “command module”) was now the mother ship, the capsule and its supplies that would carry the astronauts home. The CSM continued to orbit the moon, with astronaut Michael Collins alone in the capsule. “Listen, babe,” Collins reported to ground controllers at NASA in Houston, “everything’s going just swimmingly. Beautiful.” His two colleagues Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had just separated the other spacecraft, the fragile, spidery lunar module (LM, pronounced “lem”) nicknamed Eagle, from the command module. This odd, aluminum balloon, packed with instruments and a few engines, would carry the two men down to the lunar surface.

A rocket engine fired to slow the LM, causing it to fall out of orbit. Once on its way down, the spacecraft would either execute a dangerous abort or soon hit the moon. Whether the impact was a landing or a crash depended on the next ten minutes—the longest continuous series of critical events in the entire mission.

In the LM, weight was such a premium that seats had been eliminated altogether. The astronauts stood up, stabilized by tensioned cables connected to the floor. The spacecraft was an enclosing home, complementing the astronauts’ bodies. It supplied their food, exchanged their gases, and collected their wastes. The human occupants, in turn, controlled flows of the spacecraft’s numerous fluids, drinking some for hydration and carefully igniting others for propulsion. An inertial navigation system—accelerometers wedded to precisely spinning gyroscopes—measured the vehicle’s motions. A radar reached an invisible beam down to sense the first approach of the moon’s surface, like a blind man’s stick tapping for a curb.

Tying the whole thing together was an embedded digital computer, made out of exotic devices called “integrated circuits”—silicon chips, running a set of esoteric grams. In the middle of the instrument panel, amid familiar dials and switches, stood the computer interface, a numeric keypad glowing with segmented digits. Throughout the mission the astronauts punched in numbers, ran programs, and read the displays. Much of the landing was under direct control of these programs. Neil Armstrong, when he did fly, did not command the spacecraft directly, but rather used two control sticks to command the computer, whose programs fired the thrusters to move the LM. Every move was checked and mediated by software, written by a group of young programmers half a world away.

Nor was the LM alone with its computer, for the command module had an identical computer of its own; both were linked to Houston’s control center. Down in Houston, numerous experts monitored systems, offered advice, and controlled some parts of the flight (they even had a remote computer keypad for entering commands directly into the computer in either of the two spacecraft). Communication between the three nodes was calm, matter-of-fact conversation, the precise technical banter of professionals, with an audience of millions.

As the LM began to descend the ground controllers focused their attention. Mission Control locked its doors.

Suddenly, the LM lost contact with Houston…

 

Making an Impact

Thomson Reuters released its most recent Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and impact factor rankings in late June. Many of the journals from the MIT Press did well this year, with several of them seeing a notable increase in impact factor. The title to steal the show was the quarterly Global Environmental Politics (GEP). The journal’s impact factor jumped nearly a full point from 1.382 to 2.231 in 2010. The JCR ranks GEP ninth in environmental studies and fifth out of 139 journals in political science.

GEP was founded in 2000 and explores the relationship between global political forces and environmental change. The MIT Press has watched this nascent journal grow its subscriber base continuously over the years and come to be a cornerstone for the burgeoning field of environmental science. It has quickly distinguished itself as an important home for seminal work and its influence both within and outside of academia has grown. Its authors hail from a variety of disciplines: political science, international relations, sociology, history, human geography, public policy, science and technology studies, environmental ethics, law economics, and environmental science. GEP editors, Jennifer Clapp and Matthew Paterson, attribute much of the success of the journal to this interdisciplinary authorship, stating that the “strong community of top-rate scholars both follow and contribute to the growing global conversation” on international environmental issues. Rather than simply gleaning select pieces from the field, Clapp and Paterson, along with GEP’s associate editors, consistently provide thorough and thoughtful feedback to authors, a process they believe creates high-quality articles that are both conceptually profound and topically relevant.

As scholars delve further into the complexities of environmental issues, it becomes clear that these stresses touch aspects of our lives previously unacknowledged. Say Clapp and Paterson, "the journal's success reflects the increasing recognition that environmental problems cannot be understood just as economic or technical questions, but raise profound questions about politics - of authority, power, justice". The MIT Press looks forward to watching GEP gather more questions, research and reflections within its pages, and we hope readers (both casual and professional) continue to find the substantive discourse they’ve come to expect from the journal.  

 

Bastille Day Reading

Happy Bastille Day! Here’s an excerpt from The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michel Feher, to celebrate.

 

Libertinism, as developed in this reader, refers first and foremost to the licentious ways of the declining French aristocracy. However, before the eighteenth century, the word “libertine” did not refer exclusively to sexual mores. The term appeared as early as the middle of the sixteenth century within a theological context: Calvin used it to denounce a sect of dissident Anabaptists whom he accused of abusing their freedom by “transforming Scripture into allegory.” Others used it more generally as a synonym for “atheist.” By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the words “libertine” and “libertinism” became associated with an actual school of thought. The “scholarly libertines” (les libertines érudits), an assortment of scholars, poets, and dilettantes, formed a small group of freethinkers who shared an aversion to dogma; seeking to demystify superstition and to dismantle baseless beliefs and preconceived ideas, they contested both political and religious authority. Every watchword imposed by the powers that be, or accepted without question by the public, inevitably raised the libertines’ hackles. Conversely, any thinker persecuted for his opinions was counted, by definition, as a member of their circle…

After 1715, libertinism pertained almost exclusively to erotic matters…Neither moralistic nor strictly amoral, libertine fiction is nevertheless primarily about morals. Its main purpose is to examine critically the ethos of the petits-maîtres and of the dangerous men, as well as of the women who are the targets of the libertines’ maneuvers. In this respect, the writers in question paid special attention to their characters’ views on love, desire, and pleasure; first, because the libertines they describe spend most of their time devising and executing campaigns of seduction, and second, because they use their philosophical positions on love, nature, and society as a justification for their reckless ways.

Although libertine fiction is largely devoted to describing the schemes and the prowess of the petits-maîtres and the dangerous men, it also endeavors to underline the problems, the impasses, and even the tragedies to which the libertine life can lead.

 

The Twitterverse Shares Its Favorite Video Game Books

We received several great responses on Twitter (@mitpress) that named favorite video game books in reaction to last week's Video Game Book Roundup. Here are a few of the picks:

"SFU CMNS Prof. Jin's book on Korea's Online Gaming Empire."

"Game Over

by Dave Sheff! It's not as relevant as it once was but it's still a great story."

"re video game books, Play Between Worlds was pretty spectacular." 

"My favorite videogame book is by that Jim Rossignol guy. He's great."

 

"I'd have to go with Lucky Wander Boy. A Steven Millhauser novel cleverly disguised as one by Nick Hornby."

"Persuasive Games!"

"Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, hands down!"

 

Thanks to all who shared their favorites with us. Which books about video games would you add to this list?

Seattle Highlights

Sales rep Patricia Nelson shares a few highlights from her visit to Seattle to sell fall titles.

 

Elliott Bay

I spent a long evening browsing the store and getting my bearings here. The metaphor of a great ship is extended in the Elliott Bay logo and in the store blog The Ship’s (B)Log, and the great wood-decked store fairly creaks. It is an old original wooden floor heavy enough to hold trucks—this retrofitted warehouse with great beamed rafters and an arching wood warehouse ceiling was an old truck garage. Even the handtrucks for carting books about are crafted wood—well-scuffed and dinged from hard work.A richly literary sensibility pervades. Staff picks find the new but also rediscover Barthes, Bellow, R Graves, Malcolm X, and Cormac McCarthy.

 

University Bookstore/University of Washington

Another legendary store and only blocks from my hotel. I spent a long evening and several other visits looking through the store. With on-the-street access, private parking, two huge floors, the store is a stand-alone destination; a major Seattle landmark attracting a big off-campus audience. Staff picks are energetic and a lot of space allotted. UB bestsellers and events also add a lot of display keeping the ground floor energetic. Ground floor includes an Espresso Book Machine humming away—and a nice display of recently printed books. I asked if it had a name—‘Homer’—wonderfully, this alludes to Homer Price and the donut machine.

 

Kinokuniya Seattle

Each of the Kinokuniya stores has a quite different layout and character. The Seattle store is adjacent to the huge destination market Umijimaya, This is a Seattle phenomenon, an Asian food market with cookware, take-out, aisles of imported package food and fabulous vegetables. The bookstore actually opens directly into the market on the ground floor.  Kinokuniya has a second floor, which is mostly Japanese language. Umijimaya is a major shopping landmark here—while downtown malls are ignored, Umijimaya gets called out on tourist maps and in guidebooks. The market and bookstore are symbiotic. The manga customer is picking up octopus sushi. Both shopping experiences are exotic for the tourist. Both are browsing experiences for the constant customer, and the whole attracts crowds for both English and Asian language experiences.

 

Atlantis' Last Flight

Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, on today’s final flight for NASA’s Space Shuttle Program:

We should remember that the image of the shuttle lifting off for the last time is, at its core, a larger sunset—the last, fading glimpse of the intense pressures of Cold-War politics that led to the marvelous images, and intense sacrifice of the midcentury manned space program. Like tectonic forces, these pressures led to the creation of shining diamonds in the fabric of the century, but remained dark and terrible in their origin. The next generation of US Manned space exploration—already bubbling to the surface—is likely to be much less epic, but the deeply rewarding prospect of human space exploration will continue to fuel our ambitions, and imagination.

To hear more from Nicholas and to learn about the development of the spacesuit as we know it, be sure to check out his book and his Science Friday interview.

 

Video Game Roundup

Happy Video Game Day! Here are a few books we think you should check out between rounds of Mortal Kombat. Game on:

 

Newsgames: Journalism at Play
by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer

Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are written and edited as they are for print; video and audio features are produced as they would be for television and radio. The authors of Newsgames propose a new way of doing good journalism: videogames. 

 

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

 

Critical Play: Radical Game Design
by Mary Flanagan

For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play,artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture.

 

Korea's Online Gaming Empire
by Dal Yong Jin

In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms.

 

Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming
edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner and Jennifer Y. Sun

Women may be warriors in World of Warcraft, but they are also scantily clad "booth babes" whose sex appeal is used to promote games at trade shows. Player-generated content has revolutionized gaming, but few games marketed to girls allow "modding" (game modifications made by players). Gender equity, the contributors to Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat argue, requires more than increasing the overall numbers of female players.

 

A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players
by Jesper Juul

The enormous popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, and smaller games like Bejeweled orZuma has turned the stereotype of the obsessed young male gamer on its head. Players of these casual games are not required to possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or to devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction.

 

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
by Jesper Juul

A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in video games. Discussing games from Pong to The Legend of Zelda, from chess to Grand Theft Auto, he shows how video games are both a departure from and a development of traditional non-electronic games.

 

Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
by T. L. Taylor

In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps—as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. 

Uncle Sam's Reading List

To get into the Independence Day 2011 spirit, we picked 11 books with “America” or “American” in the title to kick off the holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!

  Inventing American History by William Hogeland

American public history—in magazines and books, television documentaries, and museums—tends to celebrate its subject at all costs, even to the point of denial and distortion. This does us a great disservice, argues William Hogeland.  Looking at details glossed over in three examples of public history—the Alexander Hamilton revival, tributes to Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley, and the Constitution Center in Philadelphia—Hogeland considers what we lose when history is written to conform to political aims.

Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil

America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail. He finds profound differences.

 

After America’s Midlife Crisis by Michael Gecan

Gecan reveals an urban landscape in which careerism, nepotism, and greed are the principal movers in policy, while the institutions that preserve and advance communities—schools, churches, affordable housing, recreational opportunities—have fallen prey to the indifference of pols and developers and the shortsightedness of technocrats and shows how local experiments can create vibrant institutions that truly serve their constituents.

 

America's Food : What You Don't Know About What You Eat by Harvey Blatt

We don't think much about how food gets to our tables, or what had to happen to fill our supermarket's produce section with perfectly round red tomatoes and its meat counter with slabs of beautifully marbled steak. We don't realize that the meat in one fast-food hamburger may come from many different cattle raised in several different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In America's Food, Harvey Blatt gives us the specifics.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea

The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth.

 

America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina.  Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated.

 

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

The surge of inequality in income and wealth in the United States over the past twenty-five years has reversed the steady progress toward greater equality that had been underway throughout most of the twentieth century. This economic development has defied historical patterns and surprised many economists, producing vigorous debate. Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? examines the ways in which human capital policies can address this important problem.

 

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings by David E. Nye

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.

 

Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology by Kenneth A. Breisch

One natural outcome of the educational reform movement of the 1840s was the growth of the American public library. Some 450 public libraries were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The most important and influential architect of the era who built libraries was Henry Hobson Richardson, perhaps best known for his design of Boston's Trinity Church.

 

What Does the World Want from America?: International Perspectives on US Foreign Policy edited by Alexander T. J. Lennon

In What Does the World Want from America?, writers from twelve countries or regions (Brazil, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa) answer the question, "In an ideal world, what role would you want the United States to perform with your country and region?" Four analysts from the United States then respond.

 

The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 by Margret Kentgens-Craig

Although the Bauhaus existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula. After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing.