In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women...

From 1976 to 1998, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program moved over 7,000 low-income black families from Chicago's inner city to middle-class white suburbs the largest and longest-running residential, racial, and economic integration effort in American history. "Crossing the Class and Color Lines" is the story of that project, from the initial struggles and discomfort of the relocated families to their eventual successes in employment and education cementing the sociological concept of the "neighborhood effect" and shattering the myth that inner-city blacks cannot escape a "culture of...

In the former Eastern Bloc countries, one of the most difficult and important aspects of the transition to democracy has been the establishment of constitutional justice and the rule of law. Herman Schwartz's wide-ranging book, backed with rich historical detail and a massive array of research, is the first to chronicle and analyze the rise and troubles of constitutional courts in this changing region.

The past few decades have seen the legal system entering American popular culture like never before, from the media blitzes surrounding high-profile trials to the countless television programs in which judges rule on everyday disputes. What, if anything, does this mean for the legal system itself? According to Richard K. Sherwin, it is a dangerous development--one that threatens to turn law into spectacle, undermining public confidence as legal style and logic begin to resemble advertising and public relations.

The People Shall Judge provides a complete set of readings for courses in American history and political science and for general social science courses. The editors have assembled more than 250 readings which illustrate the great controversies in America's past, the issues involved in forming American public policy yesterday and today.
These selections have been drawn from systematic philosophies; from opinions expressed in law and judicial decisions; from speeches or pamphlets struck off in the heat of controversy; from political and diplomatic correspondence. They are grouped to...

Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist art, beauty became suspect. This work explores how this happened, tracing the century's troubled relationship with beauty.

"What Is What Was," Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky...

From the counter-reformation through the twentieth century, the notion of sacrifice has played a key role in French culture and nationalist politics. Ivan Strenski traces the history of sacrificial thought in France, starting from its origins in Roman Catholic theology. Throughout, he highlights not just the dominant discourse on sacrifice but also the many competing conceptions that contested it.
Strenski suggests that the annihilating spirituality rooted in the Catholic model of Eucharistic sacrifice persuaded the judges in the Dreyfus Case to overlook or play down his possible...

Tiger Moon is the powerful, poetic story of the Sunquists' two years studying tigers in Nepal traveling by elephant, avoiding a rhino attack, and learning to recognize individual tigers by roar. A new afterword tells the story of promising efforts to reconnect fractured Nepalese tiger habitats.
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What if there were more women in Congress? Providing the first comprehensive study of the policy activity of male and female legislators at the federal level, Michele L. Swers persuasively demonstrates that, even though representatives often vote a party line, their gender is politically significant and does indeed influence policy making.
Swers combines quantitative analyses of bills with interviews with legislators and their staff to compare legislative activity on women's issues by male and female members of the House of Representatives during the 103rd (1993-94) and 104th (1995-96)...