Higher Worlds

Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities. The predominant mode of study, education, must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution.

From the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles comes an exploration of a promising theory that when put to practice wreaked havoc on the world. An expert on communism, Richard Pipes follows the history of the Soviet Union from the 1917 revolution to the Cold War, and finally, to its deterioration and collapse.

Wie schaffen wir es, in einer immer stärker digitalisierten Welt alle Menschen mitzunehmen und für die Herausforderungen der Gegenwart und der Zukunft fit zu machen? Die Expertin für digitale Bildung—Yasmin Weiß—macht deutlich, warum wir dafür lebenslanges Lernen brauchen und wie sich dieses erreichen lässt. Wie es gelingt, diese Berührungsängste abzubauen und eine lernende Gesellschaft zu werden, um wirtschaftlich zukunftsfähig zu bleiben, zeigt dieses Buch.

Here Sitomer shares modern methods for keeping students engaged in the “boring” classroom. It’s understandable how school comes second to adolescents dealing with weighty issues in everyday life. That is why it’s necessary to teach teens how to get involved in their education and take responsibility for it.

The work of academics can matter and be influential on a public level, but the path to becoming a public intellectual, influential policy advisor, valued community resource, or go-to person on an issue is not one that most scholars are trained for. The Public Professor offers scholars ways to use their ideas, research, and knowledge to change the world.

Cambridge professor and renowned historian Anthony Pagden covers a vast subject in a compact package with Peoples and Empires. This wide-ranging and intellectually stimulating work examines the origins and history of the West with terse, efficient prose. With a captivating narration by Robert O'Keefe, listeners will find this work enjoyable and utterly absorbing.

The CliffsNotes study guide on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, and critical commentaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work.

World Order draws together Henry Kissinger's thinking on how we make sense of the world politically. Kissinger identifies four principal competing methods by which order has been and is still sought. Those four conceptions are European, Chinese, Islamic, and American. None of these has been accepted as dominant. Kissinger asks whether a new, universal world order can be developed today.

One of the most influential books on economics ever written, Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population remains one of the most controversial too. This 1798 work inspired naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to develop the theory of natural selection. But it has also sparked criticism - Karl Marx famously called Malthus a "lackey of the bourgeoisie." Yet this hasn't stopped leading present-day environmentalists from taking up Malthus's ideas.

J. A. (John) Hobson's 1902 book, Imperialism: A Study, presents an original and controversial interpretation of the forces that motivated Britain to conquer foreign lands in the 18th century. Hobson advances the idea that ultrawealthy financiers consciously worked to manipulate political leaders, all so they could invest money and sell goods in the outposts of a country's empire.

American sociologist Jack A. Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings in the period between 1500 and 1800. Investigating cases in both Europe and Asia, the conclusions he reaches are surprising. Many thinkers had previously believed that Europe's distinctive history - and particularly the rise of capitalism - had created the specific revolutions and political changes that launched the continent on a path to global supremacy. Goldstone says this is wrong, and that European and Asian states were, in fact, all experiencing similar developments.

Res Gestae Christiani: My Time as the President of the Cambridge University Korean Society 2002-2003by Christian Kim is a heart-warming real-life account of the struggle of Korean students at Cambridge University to empower themselves against all odds. At the helm of this endeavor is Christian Kim, who was the President of Cambridge University Korean Society from 2002 to 2003.

For the first time, the era's Muslim voices can be heard fully, and their accounts challenge narratives of the Crusades that have been subsequently accepted in the West and the East. Their different understandings of jihad, the often-friendly relations between Muslims and Crusaders, the widespread inter-Arab warfare and near indifference to the invaders' religious beliefs may well surprise listeners. Given today's worldwide political and religious conflicts, interest in the Crusades is greater than ever.

Former middle school teacher and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali struck a chord with his passionate response to a man at a dinner party who asked him what kind of salary teachers make - a poetic rant that has been seen and forwarded millions of times on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Based on the poem that inspired a movement, What Teachers Make is Mali's sharp, funny, reflective, critical call to arms about the joys of teaching and why teachers are so vital to America today.

The modern world has been marked by a series of immense social revolutions that have transformed the states where they happened. In 1979, American sociologist Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions and examined three of these uprisings: in France at the end of the 18th century, then in Russia and in China in the first half of the 20th century. She pinpointed a number of common factors that affected each of these countries at the time revolution happened.

Arguing first that what might be termed a morally good action is one that increases the general sum of happiness in the world, Mill then says that general principles of justice should be based on this idea. Therefore, in life, there is no conflict between what is just and what is morally right. Mill published Utilitarianism toward the end of a lifetime spent as a moral philosopher, political activist, and social reformer.

Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism. Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary rights to women.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 offers a thorough account of the emergence of the antislavery movement in Britain and the United States. But what makes the work unique is the way it explores and unpicks the complex relationships between changes in our understanding of what is moral, the impact of political action, and its effect on social change.

Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis. First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars.

Originally written as 13 individual books around 397 CE, Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is one of the most referenced works in the Western literary tradition. Augustine lived from 354-430 CE, and the work is in part an autobiography. But it also tells us much about the period in which he lived. The first nine books draw a compelling narrative of the first 43 years of Augustine's life, which were spent in North Africa and Italy. In the 10th book, Augustine uses these experiences as a meditation on the nature of memory.