What Tom Vanderbilt did for traffic and Brian Wansink did for mindless eating, Jonathan Bloom does for food waste. The topic couldn’t be timelier: As... more people are going hungry while simultaneously more people are morbidly obese, American Wasteland sheds light on the history, culture, and mindset of waste while exploring the parallel eco-friendly and sustainable-food movements. As the era of unprecedented prosperity comes to an end, it’s time to reexamine our culture of excess.Working at both a local grocery store and a major fast food chain and volunteering with a food recovery group, Bloom also interviews experts—from Brian Wansink to Alice Waters to Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen—and digs up not only why and how we waste, but, more importantly, what we can do to change our ways.

Whether you're a foreign student visiting for a semester or a business person visiting for a week, American Ways,Third Edition covers all your basic... needs from the trends and customs of day-to-day activities to the more esoteric customs regarding cultural values, politics, education, religion and relationships. In this revised edition, Gary Althen and Janet Bennett have added material that provides the clearest insights yet into the American psyche and culture, reflecting many of the monumental changes that have occurred since the previous edition's publication. Examples include a rewritten chapter on politics that d iscusses Bush-administration policies and controversies and the election of th e nation's first black president, as well as an updated chapter on social rela tionships and the effect that networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook ha ve had on meeting people and creating friendships.

American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture, Third Edition, by Maryanne Kearny Datesman, JoAnn Crandall, and Edward N. Kearny, focuses on the... traditional values that have attracted people to the United States for well over 200 years and traces the effects of these values on American life. Chapter themes include diversity, the family, education, government and politics, religion, business, and recreation. Cross-cultural activities --- from discussion topics to writing projects --- encourage high-intermediate to advanced students to compare their own values with those discussed in the readings. New to the Third Edition: *Expanded pre-reading exercises preview the chapter content and Academic Word List vocabulary. *Improve Your Reading Skills helps students become independent readers. *Build Your Vocabulary features collocations and exercises that expand on the Academic Word List. *New Internet activities offer opportunities for further research and study.

This collected volume of original essays proposes to address the state of scholarship on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Americans... responses to wilderness from first contact to the present. While not bringing a synthetic narrative to wilderness, the volume will gather competing interpretations of wilderness in historical context.

On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy... figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell. A thought-provoking meditation on themes of race, identity, and class, American Woman explores the psychology of the young radicals, the intensity of their isolated existence, and the paranoia and fear that undermine their ideals.

" Women run wind tunnel experiments, direct air traffic, and fabricate airplanes. American women have been involved with flight from the beginning, but... until 1940, most people believed women could not fly, that Amelia Earhart was an exception to the rule. World War II changed everything. "It is on the record thatwomen can fly as well as men," stated General Henry H. Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces. The question became "Should women fly?" Deborah G. Douglas tells the story of this ongoing debate and its impact on American history. From Jackie Cochran, whose perseverance led to the formation of the Women's Army Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II to the recent achievements of Jeannie Flynn, the Air Force's first woman fighter pilot and Eileen Collins, NASA's first woman shuttle commander, Douglas introduces a host of determined women who overcame prejudice and became military fliers, airline pilots, and air and space engineers. Not forgotten are stories of flight attendants, air traffic controllers, and mechanics. American Women and Flight since 1940 is a revised and expanded edition of a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum reference work. Long considered the single best reference work in the field, this new edition contains extensive new illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography.

Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land was the first practical guidebook to give restorationists and would-be restorationists with little or no... scientific background the "how to" information and knowledge they need to plan and implement ecological restoration activities. The book sets forth a step-by-step process for developing, implementing, monitoring, and refining on-the-ground restoration projects that is applicable to a wide range of landscapes and ecosystems.This companion workbook describes more fully the planning tools and techniques outlined in the book and offers a wealth of specific resources, including worksheets and spreadsheets to help you determine what equipment and plant materials you need, create project schedules, monitor results, and estimate costs. Online versions of the forms are available, making it even easier for you to incorporate them into your own projects. In addition, the authors and their network of professional advisers are offering free consulting sessions of up to one hour to purchasers of the book, giving you expert knowledge and experience that can help make your project a success.  Both books make the process of restoration accessible to everyone, from professional land managers to volunteer stewards. The tools offered will help you collect and process the information you need to make good decisions about your projects and are an invaluable resource for anyone thinking about or working on a hands-on restoration project.

Interweaving personal stories with historical photos and background, this lively account documents the history of the more than 40,000 women who served... in relief and military duty during World War I. Through personal interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, and memoirs, Lettie Gavin relates poignant stories of women’s wartime experiences and provides a unique perspective on their progress in military service. American Women in World War I captures the spirit of these determined patriots and their times for every reader and will be of special interest to military, women’s, and social historians.

Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does... it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice.Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces -- personal, aesthetic, political -- informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process.CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the... general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

Highly acclaimed and widely read, American Workers, American Unions (first published in 1986, revised ed. 1994) provides a concise and compelling... history of American workers and their unions in twentieth-century America. This new edition features new chapters on the pre–1920 period, as well as an entirely new final chapter that covers developments of the 1980s and 1990s in detail. There the authors explore how economic change, union stagnation, and antilabor policies have combined to erode workers' standards and labor's influence in the political arena over the last two decades. They review current "alternatives to unionism" as means of achieving fair workplace representations but insist that strong unions remain essential in a democratic society. They argue that labor's new responsiveness to the concerns of women, minority groups, and low-wage workers, as well as its resurgent political activism, offer new hope for trade unionism. Also included in this third edition is new bibliographical material and a regularly updated on-line link to an extended bibliographical essay.

Historically, Filipina/o Americans have been one of the oldest and largest Asian American groups in the United States. In this pathbreaking work of... historical scholarship, Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony traces the evolution of Seattle as a major site for Philippine immigration between World Wars I and II and examines the dynamics of the community through the frameworks of race, place, gender, and class. By positing Seattle as a colonial metropolis for Filipina/os in the United States, Fujita-Rony reveals how networks of transpacific trade and militarism encouraged migration to the city, leading to the early establishment of a Filipina/o American community in the area. By the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant Filipina/o American society had developed in Seattle, creating a culture whose members, including some who were not of Filipina/o descent, chose to pursue options in the U.S. or in the Philippines.Fujita-Rony also shows how racism against Filipina/o Americans led to constant mobility into and out of Seattle, making it a center of a thriving ethnic community in which only some remained permanently, given its limited possibilities for employment. The book addresses class distinctions as well as gender relations, and also situates the growth of Filipina/o Seattle within the regional history of the American West, in addition to the larger arena of U.S.-Philippines relations.

This is a social history of almost four centuries of competition, co-operation and exclusion. In a New World built on a foundation of tobacco, rice,... timber and peas, human labour was the key to wealth and colonists knew that most labour was "naturally" not free. Red, white and black men, women and children could all expect "hard usage" by masters, husbands and fathers. As the wilderness was cultivated and economies stabilized, however, life got better - for some. This book is the story of how blacks were excluded from significant social transformation in American history - from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy. Meanwhile, whites have characterized blacks simultaneously as lazy and ruthless competitors for their jobs.

America's workers have been singing, reciting, performing, telling stories, writing, and publishing for more than three centuries. Ranging from early... colonial times to the present, American Working-Class Literature presents more than 300 literary texts that exemplify this tradition. It demonstrates how American working people live, labor, struggle, express themselves, and give meaning to their experiences both inside and outside of the workplace. The only book of its kind, this groundbreaking anthology includes work not only by the industrial proletariat but also by slaves and unskilled workers, by those who work unpaid at home, and by workers in contemporary service industries. As diverse in race, gender, culture, and region as America's working class itself, the selections represent a wide range of genres including fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, oratory, journalism, letters, oral history, and songs. Works by little-known or anonymous authors are included alongside texts from such acclaimed writers as Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Philip Levine, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko. A rich selection of contemporary writing includes Martin Espada's poem "Alabanza" about the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. American Working-Class Literature is organized chronologically into seven sections that highlight key historical and cultural developments in working-class life. The book is enhanced by an editors' introduction, section introductions, and individual head notes for each selection that provide biographical and historical context. A timeline of working-class history, rich illustrations, sidebars, reading lists, and a bibliography of critical commentary are also included. This unique volume is ideal for courses in American literature, cultural and working-class studies, and labor history.

What is a gang? What are the risk factors associated with joining a gang? What is the nature of gang violence? How involved are girls in gangs and gang... violence? What are the responses to gang violence? Answers to these questions are often elusive or fluctuate based on how facts are interpreted, varying perspectives, or changing circumstances. During the last fifteen years of the twentieth century, there was a virtual explosion of attention to youth gangs and youth violence that prompted the proliferation of numerous myths and misperceptions about American youth gangs. The chapters in this book, some previously published and others solicited specifically for this volume, were written by highly regarded scholars and researchers who address the status of youth gangs in America at the turn of the twenty-first century. This cutting-edge collection does more than add to the already abundant amount of information available; it focuses on specific, salient issues to offer a clear picture and better understanding of the complex nature of youth gangs in America.