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Author: Jessica Wang Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807867101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America's future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies. This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.
Author: Jessica Wang Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807867101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America's future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies. This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.
Author: Andrea Tone Publisher: Basic Books (AZ) ISBN: 0465086586 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
A critical study of America's tranquilizer culture ranges from the 1950s to the present day as it looks at Americans' increasing dependence on pills and prescriptions to ensure peace of mind, traces the growth of the billion-dollar anti-anxiety business, and assesses the economic, cultural, and social influence of pharmaceuticals.
Author: Scott Stossel Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0385351321 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.
Author: Anthony Scioli Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199701598 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
Economic collapse, poverty, disease, natural disasters, the constant threat of community unrest and international terrorism--a quick look at any newspaper is enough to cause almost anyone to feel trapped and desperate. Yet the recent election also revealed a growing search for hope spreading through society. In the timely Hope in the Age of Anxiety, Anthony Scioli and Henry Biller illuminate the nature of hope and offer a multitude of techniques designed to improve the lives of individuals, and bring more light into the world. In this fascinating and humane book, Scioli and Biller reveal the ways in which human beings acquire and make use of hope. Hope in the Age of Anxiety is meant to be a definitive guide. The evolutionary, biological, and cultural roots of hope are covered along with the seven kinds of hope found in the world's religions. Just as vital, the book provides many personal tools for addressing the major challenges of the human condition: fear, loss, illness, and death. Some of the key areas illuminated in Hope in the Age of Anxiety: How do you build and sustain hope in trying times? How can hope help you to achieve your life goals? How can hope improve your relationships with others? How can hope aid your recovery from trauma or illness? How does hope relate to spirituality? Hope in the Age of Anxiety identifies the skills needed to cultivate hope, and offers suggestions for using these capacities to realize your life goals, support health and healing, strengthen relationships, enhance spirituality, and inoculate yourself against the despair that engulfs many individuals.
Author: Rebecca Onion Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469629488 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their children to live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthful curiosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian Rebecca Onion examines the rise of informal children's science education in the twentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after World War I to the century-long boom in child-centered science museums. Onion looks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over the last century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. She shows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciences is synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated in an era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have a conflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examining the histories of popular science and the development of ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealized concept of "science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive to make child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.
Author: Laura Micheletti Puaca Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469610825 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
This compelling history of what Laura Micheletti Puaca terms "technocratic feminism" traces contemporary feminist interest in science to the World War II and early Cold War years. During a period when anxiety about America's supply of scientific personnel ran high and when open support for women's rights generated suspicion, feminist reformers routinely invoked national security rhetoric and scientific "manpower" concerns in their efforts to advance women's education and employment. Despite the limitations of this strategy, it laid the groundwork for later feminist reforms in both science and society. The past and present manifestations of technocratic feminism also offer new evidence of what has become increasingly recognized as a "long women's movement." Drawing on an impressive array of archival collections and primary sources, Puaca brings to light the untold story of an important but largely overlooked strand of feminist activism. This book reveals much about the history of American feminism, the politics of national security, and the complicated relationship between the two.
Author: David Anderegg Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451603975 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
A much-needed book for parents about themselves. In the tradition of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who in 1946 revolutionized parenting with the famous opening words of his classic child-rearing guide, "You know more than you think you know," child and family therapist David Anderegg reminds contemporary parents that "parenting is not rocket science. It's not even Chem 101." So why do those of us with children worry so much? Whether they're thinking about school violence or getting a child into the right college, American moms and dads are a pretty worried crowd. Even though most American families are safer and healthier today than at any other time in our history, studies show that parental worrying has, in recent years, reached an all-time high. In Worried All the Time, Dr. Anderegg draws on social science research and his more than twenty years' experience as a therapist treating both parents and their children to clarify facts and fantasies about kids' lives today and the key issues that preoccupy parents. In the process, he offers a comforting and useful message: Parents are suffering needlessly -- and there are things they can do to take the edge off and focus on what their children really need. In Worried All the Time, Dr. Anderegg identifies some of the causes of worry in contemporary American families, including fewer children, exaggerated fear of competition, and overblown media reports of children at risk. Anderegg calls this the "tabloidization of children" and critiques the fashion for media portrayals of "children in crisis." One at a time, he takes on the hot-button issues of our times: • the use of day care and nannies • overexposure to media • school violence • overscheduling • experimentation with drugs and looks a little closer to see the facts and the fantasies beneath the hysteria. Calling himself a "crisis agnostic," Anderegg persuasively argues that needless worry has negative consequences for families and for our culture as a whole. The cardinal rules of good parenting -- moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one's child -- are simple, he says, and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings. Anderegg helps parents to understand the difference between wise vigilance and potentially crippling anxiety and to gain the confidence to trust their own common sense.
Author: Joseph Bottum Publisher: Image ISBN: 0385521464 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.
Author: Omar Kholeif Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 1907071806 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age. Every day we are bombarded by information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in our online and offline lives. How does the never-ending flow of data affect our powers of perception and decision making? This richly illustrated and boldly designed collection of essays and artworks investigates visual culture in the post-digital age. The essays, by such leading cultural thinkers as Douglas Coupland and W. J. T. Mitchell, consider topics that range from the future of money to the role of art in a post-COVID-19 world; from mental health in the digital age to online grieving; and from the mediation of visual culture to the thickening of the digital sphere. Accompanying an ambitious exhibition conceived by the Sharjah Art Foundation and volume editor and curator Omar Kholeif, the book is a work of art and a labor of love, emulating the labyrinthine corridors of the exhibition itself. Created by a group of writers, artists, designers, photographers, and publishers, Art in the Age of Anxiety calls upon us to consider what our collective future will be and how humanity will adapt to it.
Author: Jason Schnittker Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231553560 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Anxiety is not new. Yet now more than ever, anxiety seems to define our times. Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders in the United States, exceeding mood, impulse-control, and substance-use disorders, and they are especially common among younger cohorts. More and more Americans are taking antianxiety medications. According to polling data, anxiety is experienced more frequently than other negative emotions. Why have we become so anxious? In Unnerved, Jason Schnittker investigates the social, cultural, medical, and scientific underpinnings of the modern state of mind. He explores how anxiety has been understood from the late nineteenth century to the present day and why it has assumed a more central position in how we think about mental health. Contrary to the claims that anxiety reflects large-scale traumas, abrupt social transitions, or technological revolutions, Schnittker argues that the ascent of anxiety has been driven by slow transformations in people, institutions, and social environments. Changes in family formation, religion, inequality, and social relationships have all primed people to be more anxious. At the same time, the scientific and medical understanding of anxiety has evolved, pushing it further to the fore. The rise in anxiety cannot be explained separately from changes in how patients, physicians, and scientists understand the disorder. Ultimately, Schnittker demonstrates that anxiety has carried the imprint of social change more acutely than have other emotions or disorders, including depression. When societies change, anxiety follows.