Gaylord Jackson Perry was born in 1938 as the younger son of a tobacco sharecropper in Martin County, North Carolina. He and his older brother Jim grew up against a background of backbreaking work ...six days a week in a community that boasted not a single paved road until the 1950s. Their only relaxation was playing baseball, first with their father and later at school. While both brothers would go on to succeed as pitchers in major league baseball, for Gaylord, success would require a lot of perseverance and an almost equal amount of subterfuge. After a couple of lackluster seasons with the San Francisco Giants, he learned from bullpen-mate Bob Shaw how to throw the illegal spitball. More importantly, he learned to control the tricky pitch and to conceal it from suspicious umpires, opposing managers, and baffled batters. When he finally broke out the spitter in a victory by attrition in a marathon, 32-inning, nine-hour doubleheader against the Mets in May 1964, his destiny was set. The Hall of Famer would go on to a 314–265 win-loss record, with a 3.11 earned-run average and 3,534 career strikeouts, becoming the first pitcher in major league history to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues. Sports historian David Vaught has mined archival and public records, game statistics, media accounts, and previously published works—including Perry’s 1974 autobiography—to compile the first critical biography of a player as famous for his wry humor and downhome banter as for his trademark illegal pitch. Written for baseball fans and American sports historians, Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry  provides new insights and genuine enjoyment of the game for a wide range of readers.
An intellectual history of American conservativism since the New Deal.The New Deal fundamentally changed the institutions of American constitutional government and, in turn, the relationship of ...Americans to their government. Johnathan O'Neill's Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal examines how various types of conservative thinkers responded to this significant turning point in the second half of the twentieth century.O'Neill identifies four fundamental transformations engendered by the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how various schools of conservative thought (traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, Straussians) responded to these major changes in American politics and culture. Conservatives frequently argued among themselves, and their responses to the New Deal ranged from adaptation to condemnation to political mobilization. Ultimately, the New Deal pulled American governance and society permanently leftward. Although some of the New Deal's liberal gains have been eroded, a true conservative counterrevolution was never, O'Neill argues, a realistic possibility. He concludes with a plea for conservative thinkers to seriously reconsider the role of Congress—a body that is relatively ignored by conservative intellectuals in favor of the courts and the presidency—in America's constitutional order. Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal explores the scope and significance of conservative constitutional analysis amid the broader field of American political thought.
What does a culture of evidence really look like in higher education?The use of big data and the rapid acceleration of storage and analytics tools have led to a revolution of data use in higher ...education. Institutions have moved from relying largely on historical trends and descriptive data to the more widespread adoption of predictive and prescriptive analytics. Despite this rapid evolution of data technology and analytics tools, universities and colleges still face a number of obstacles in their data use. In How Colleges Use Data, Jonathan S. Gagliardi presents college and university leaders with an important resource to help cultivate, implement, and sustain a culture of evidence through the ethical and responsible use and adoption of data and analytics. Gagliardi provides a broad context for data use among colleges, including key concepts and use cases related to data and analytics. He also addresses the different dimensions of data use and highlights the promise and perils of the widespread adoption of data and analytics, in addition to important elements of implementing and scaling a culture of evidence.Demystifying data and analytics, the book helps faculty and administrators understand important topics, including:• How to define institutional aspirations using data• Equity and student success• Strategic finance and resource optimization• Academic quality and integrity• Data governance and utility• Implicit and explicit bias in data• Implementation and planning• How data will be used in the futureHow Colleges Use Data helps college and university leaders understand what a culture of evidence in higher education truly looks like.
Winner of the 2020 Mid-South Sociological Association Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award. Contributing to an emerging literature on mixed-race people in the United States and United Kingdom, ...this book draws on racial formation theory and the performativity (i.e. "doing") of race to explore the social construction of mixedness on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to macro- and micro-level theoretical frameworks, the authors use comparative and relational analytical approaches to reveal similarities and differences between the two nations, explaining them in terms of both common historical roots as well as ongoing contemporary interrelationships. Focusing on the census, racial identity, civil society, and everyday experiences at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Mixed- Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future offers academics and students an intriguing look into how mixed-race is constructed and experienced within these two nations. A final in-depth discussion on the authors' research methodologies makes the book a useful resource on the processes, challenges, and benefits of conducting qualitative research in two nations.
How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical—and harmful—power.In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary ...culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being well means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present.Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling—and harmful—concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
A historical look at how activists influenced the adoption of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical views of disability.Disability activism has fundamentally changed American society for the ...better—and along with it, the views and practices of many clinical professionals. After 1945, disability self-advocates and family advocates pushed for the inclusion of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical perspectives on disability in clinical research, training, and practice. In Disability Dialogues, Andrew J. Hogan highlights the contributions of disabled people—along with their family members and other allies—in changing clinical understandings and approaches to disability.Hogan examines the evolving medical, social, and political engagement of three postwar professions—clinical psychology, pediatrics, and genetic counseling—with disability and disability-related advocacy. Professionals in these fields historically resisted adopting a more inclusive and accepting perspective on people with disabilities primarily due to concerns about professional role, identity, and prestige. In response to the work of disability activists, however, these attitudes gradually began to change. Disability Dialogues provides an important contribution to historical, sociological, and bioethical accounts of disability and clinical professionalization. Moving beyond advocacy alone, Hogan makes the case for why present-day clinical professional fields need to better recruit and support disabled practitioners. Disabled clinicians are uniquely positioned to combine biomedical expertise with their lived experiences of disability and encourage greater tolerance for disabilities among their colleagues, students, and institutions.
The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898
eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until
their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and
medical ...practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture,
Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat
cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into
a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical
Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania-the first successful commercial
producer of radium in the United States-aggressively promoted the
benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties as part of a
lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter products, from
fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and suppositories,
inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a revolutionary
pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United States marketed
commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of Youth at a time when
using this new chemical element in the laboratory, in the hospital,
in private clinics, and in commercial settings remained largely
free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how marketing campaigns
targeted individually to men and women affected not only how they
consumed these products of science but also how that science was
understood and how it contributed to the formation of ideas about
gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how
innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art
packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping
scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who
consumed it.
The Picky Eagle explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of ...further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country.These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of U.S. territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international relations.
Presents a unique view of social problems and conflicts
over urban space from the cab of an
ambulance. While we imagine ambulances as a site for
critical care, the reality is far more complicated. ...Social
problems, like homelessness, substance abuse, and the health
consequences of poverty, are encountered every day by Emergency
Medical Services (EMS) workers. Written from the lens of a
sociologist who speaks with the fluency of a former Emergency
Medical Technician (EMT), Medicine at the Margins delves
deeply into the world of EMTs and paramedics in American cities, an
understudied element of our health care system. Like the public
hospital, the EMS system is a key but misunderstood part of our
system of last resort. Medicine at the Margins presents a
unique prism through which urban social problems, the health care
system, and the struggling social safety net refract and intersect
in largely unseen ways. Author Christopher Prener examines the
forms of marginality that capture the reality of urban EMS work and
showcases the unique view EMS providers have of American urban
life. The rise of neighborhood stigma and the consequences it holds
for patients who are assumed by providers to be malingering is
critical for understanding not just the phenomenon of non- or
sub-acute patient calls but also why they matter for all patients.
This sense of marginality is a defining feature of the experience
of EMS work and is a statement about the patient population whom
urban EMS providers care for daily. Prener argues that the
pre-hospital health care system needs to embrace its role in the
social safety net and how EMSs' future is in community practice of
paramedicine, a port of a broader mandate of pre-hospital health
care. By leaning into this work, EMS providers are uniquely
positioned to deliver on the promise of community medicine. At a
time when we are considering how to rely less on policing, the EMS
system is already tasked with treating many of the social problems
we think would benefit from less involvement with law involvement.
Medicine at the Margins underscores why the EMS system is
so necessary and the ways in which it can be expanded.
The frequency and intensity of natural disasters-such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and storms-is on the rise, threatening our way of life and our livelihoods. Managing this growing risk will be ...central to economic and social progress in the coming decades. Insurance, an often confusing and unpopular tool, will be critical to successfully emerging from the effects of these crises. Its traditional role is to protect us from unforeseen and unanticipated risk, but as currently structured, insurance cannot adequately respond to these types of threats. How can we improve insurance to provide consistent and sufficient help following all disasters? How do we use insurance not just to help us recover, but also to help us prevent disasters in the first place? And how can insurance help us achieve broader social and environmental goals?Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities-and exciting possibilities-of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. With examples ranging from individual entrepreneurs to multi-country collaborations, she shows how innovative thinking and creative applications of insurance-based mechanisms can improve recovery outcomes for people and their communities. She also explores the role of insurance in supporting policy goals beyond disaster recovery, such as nature-positive approaches for larger environmental impact. The book holds up the possibility that new risk transfer markets, brought to scale, could help create more equitable and sustainable economies. Insurance and risk transfer markets can be a powerful tool for adapting to climate change, yet they are frequently misunderstood. Many find insurance confusing or even problematic and ineffective. Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future-and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood.
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