Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive ...examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an ...idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children's museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children's capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children's museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.
There is substantial racial and gender disparity in the American economy. As we will demonstrate, discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality. Yet, there ...appear to have been particular periods in which racial minorities, and then women, experienced substantial reductions in economic disparity and discrimination. Some questions remain: Why did the movement toward racial equality stagnate after the mid-1970s? What factors are most responsible for the remaining gender inequality? What is the role of the competitive process in elimination or reproduction of discrimination in employment? How successful has the passage of federal antidiscrimination legislation in the 1960s been in producing an equal opportunity environment where job applicants are now evaluated on their qualifications? To give away the answer at the outset, discrimination by race has diminished somewhat, and discrimination by gender has diminished substantially; neither employment discrimination by race or by gender is close to ending. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent related legislation has purged American society of the most overt forms of discrimination, while discriminatory practices have continued in more covert and subtle forms. Furthermore, racial discrimination is masked and rationalized by widely-held presumptions of black inferiority.
By emphasising the role of nuclear issues, After Hiroshima, published in 2010, provides an original history of American policy in Asia between the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the ...escalation of the Vietnam War. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, Matthew Jones charts the development of American nuclear strategy and the foreign policy problems it raised, as the United States both confronted China and attempted to win the friendship of an Asia emerging from colonial domination. In underlining American perceptions that Asian peoples saw the possible repeat use of nuclear weapons as a manifestation of Western attitudes of 'white superiority', he offers new insights into the links between racial sensitivities and the conduct of US policy, and a fresh interpretation of the transition in American strategy from massive retaliation to flexible response in the era spanned by the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
After World War II, the escalating tensions of the Cold War shaped the international system.Fearing the Worst explains how the Korean War fundamentally changed postwar competition between the United ...States and the Soviet Union into a militarized confrontation that would last decades. Samuel F. Wells Jr. examines how military and political events interacted to escalate the conflict. Decisions made by the Truman administration in the first six months of the Korean War drove both superpowers to intensify their defense buildup. American leaders feared the worst-case scenario-that Stalin was prepared to start World War III-and raced to build up strategic arms, resulting in a struggle they did not seek out or intend. Their decisions stemmed from incomplete interpretations of Soviet and Chinese goals, especially the belief that China was a Kremlin puppet. Yet Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-sung all had their own agendas, about which the United States lacked reliable intelligence. Drawing on newly available documents and memoirs-including previously restricted archives in Russia, China, and North Korea-Wells analyzes the key decision points that changed the course of the war. He also provides vivid profiles of the central actors as well as important but lesser known figures. Bringing together studies of military policy and diplomacy with the roles of technology, intelligence, and domestic politics in each of the principal nations,Fearing the Worst offers a new account of the Korean War and its lasting legacy.
En el acto de entrega de la primera edición (2012) del Premio Javier Carvajal el profesor Frampton pronunció una conferencia cuyo contenido fue editado para la ocasión y que se reproduce a ...continuación.
En el acto de entrega de la primera edición (2012) del Premio Javier Carvajal el profesor Frampton pronunció una conferencia cuyo contenido fue editado para la ocasión y que se reproduce a ...continuación.
The development of observational, theoretical, and experimental studies on seismology in Japan from 1945 to 1965 is described. Damage caused by the Fukui earthquake in 1948 and its nature was ...surveyed from different perspectives. This survey later became the model for comprehensive surveys of major earthquakes. After the Fukui earthquake, observations on micro-earthquakes were carried out with sensitive electromagnetic seismographs. These studies confirmed the Gutenberg-Richter's formula and the Ishimoto-Iida's formula for small earthquakes. Explosion seismic observations have also been conducted by the Research Group for Explosion Seismology since 1950, and crustal structures in Japan have been precisely inferred from those observations. The Earth's interior was investigated by analyzing the attenuation of body waves in the 1950s, and surface waves and free oscillations of the Earth also began to be used to investigate the Earth's interior in the 1960s. Studies on earthquake mechanisms attracted great attention from seismologists worldwide in the 1950s. The elasticity theory of dislocations was applied to the earthquake mechanism and Takuo Maruyama's sophisticated mathematical theory was suggested by Hirokichi Honda's hypothesis of a pair of couples, i.e., that force system type II at the foci of earthquakes corresponds to earthquake faults. Furthermore, Keiiti Aki's studies in the 1960s on the earthquake mechanism using Love and Rayleigh waves strongly supported the double-couple source mechanism. During this period, not only studies analyzing waveforms of earthquakes but also statistical studies on the characteristics of earthquake occurrence were conducted actively. Some seismologists, such as Chuji Tsuboi, examined time, space, and magnitude distributions of earthquakes and discussed the energy of earthquakes. Experimental studies on the mechanical properties of rocks under high pressures and temperatures began in the second half of the 1950s. Magnitude-frequency relations of elastic shocks accompanying fractures were discussed comparing the statistical nature of earthquakes. Besides, the Earthquake Prediction Research Project was launched at the initiative of seismologists in the 1960s.
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