Celebrating the Family or Tracking Americas Economy

Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals

Author: Elizabeth H Pleck

Nostalgia for the imagined warm family gatherings of yesteryear has colored our understanding of family celebrations. Elizabeth Pleck examines family traditions over two centuries and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans have celebrated holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, and Passover as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. By the early nineteenth century carnivalesque celebrations outside the home were becoming sentimental occasions that used consumer culture and displays of status and wealth to celebrate the idea of home and family. The 1960s saw the full emergence of a postsentimental approach to holiday celebration, which takes place outside as often as inside the home, and recognizes changes in the family and women's roles, as well as the growth of ethnic group consciousness.

This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.

Library Journal

This work is the fascinating history of the changes in holiday customs in our multi-cultural, socially, economically, and technologically evolving American environment over (roughly) the past two centuries. "In colonial America, derived from the Protestant Reformation," holidays and festivals spawned carnivalesque, often bawdy group celebrations. Over time, with the rise of a middle class, these gradually evolved into family-based and family-oriented, sentimentalized ceremonies with ritual in both religious and secular contexts. Later, as a multicultural America and its institutions wrestled with gender and ethnic identity and equity issues, the potent growth of a strongly consumer-oriented economy generated further changes. Conspicuous commercialism came to overshadow reverence and sentiment, as decor, gifts, flowers, and message cards became raisons d' tre at ceremonies in the current postsentimental culture. Pleck (history, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) sees an eclectic American society that is still in flux and continuing to shape and reshape the social content of our myriad and various celebrations. Strongly recommended for academic and public audiences.--Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology (Emerita), Alfred Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
1	Festivals, Rites, and Presents	1
2	Family, Feast, and Football	21
3	Holiday Blues and Pfeffernusse	43
4	Easter Breads and Bunnies	73
5	Festival of Freedom	95
6	Eating and Explosives	117
7	Cakes and Candles	141
8	Rites of Passage	162
9	Please Omit Flowers	184
10	The Bride Once Wore Black	207
11	Rituals, Families, and Identities	233
	Notes	251
	Index	325

Look this: Leadership Agility or Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder

Tracking America's Economy

Author: Norman Frumkin

The book provides a pragmatic approach for viewing the domestic and international dimensions of the ever-new economic landscape of the United States, for gauging its strengths and weaknesses, and for anticipating where it is headed. This edition broadens the focus of the earlier ones. The previous editions highlighted the use of several economic indicators in measuring and evaluating business cycles and economic growth, employment, inflation, and finance. In contrast, the current volume emphasizes broad economic topics, each of which includes several economic indicators used in quantifying and analyzing the overall topic. For example, the chapter on economic growth encompasses the gross domestic product as the basic measure of economic growth, the sources of economic growth, and a technique for anticipating when economic growth will turn negative into a cyclical recession. Thus, this edition shows more of the interrelationships that drive the American economy.

This new Third Edition includes:
-- New framework for macroeconomic analysis, policies, and forecasting;
-- Expanded analyses of economic growth;
-- Expanded analyses of inflation;
-- Expanded conceptual and statistical aspects of economic indicators.

Data and analyses are updated through the first quarter of 1997.

Library Journal

Every day, government and private sources make a bewildering array of data available on GNP, industrial production, capacity utilization, money supply, productivity, and CPI. Most people do not understand what these indicators signify nor how they relate to each other, and textbooks usually deal with these concepts only in passing. Frumkin explains in lay language the main characteristics of the indicators and their uses. His book is jargon-free and serves as a good introduction to a complex subject. Recommended for academic and public libraries. M. Balachandran, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana-Champaign

Booknews

A textbook describing a pragmatic approach for viewing the domestic and international dimensions of the ever-changing economic landscape of the US, for gauging its strengths and weaknesses, and for anticipating where it is headed. No dates are noted for earlier editions, but the third changes the basic organization from specific economic indicators to broad topics that encompass several indicators used to quantify and analyze the overall topic. It also includes statistics up to the first quarter of 1997. Methodology and interpretation are both emphasized, and the treatment is intended to be for readers with no special training in economics as well as for economists. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Written in everyday language, and suitable for classroom use, self- study or reference, Frumkin's popular classic helps students and the general public interpret trends in the major statistical indicators of the US economy. The second edition updates, refines, and augments the analyses and discussions of the first edition (1987). Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Joseph W. Duncan
This book is must reading for economist and non-economist.

Famine That Kills or Emerging Wireless Multimedia Services and Technologies

Famine That Kills: Darfur, 1984-1985

Author: Alex de Waal

In 2004, Darfur, Sudan was described as the "world's greatest humanitarian crisis." Twenty years previously, Darfur was also the site of a disastrous famine. Famine that Kills is a seminal account of that famine, and a social history of the region. In a new preface prepared for this revised edition, Alex de Waal analyzes the roots of the current conflict in land disputes, social disruption and impoverishment. Despite vast changes in the nature of famines and in the capacity of response, de Waal's original challenge to humanitarian theory and practice including a focus on the survival strategies of rural people has never been more relevant. Documenting the resilience of the people who suffered, it explains why many fewer died than had been predicted by outsiders. It is also a pathbreaking study of the causes of famine deaths, showing how outbreaks of infectious disease killed more people than starvation. Now a classic in the field, Famine that Kills provides critical background and lessons of past intervention for a region that finds itself in another moment of humanitarian tragedy.

Table of Contents:

1	'Famine' in English	9
2	Darfur	33
3	The history and concept of famine	59
4	Drought	78
5	Hunger	112
6	Destitution	141
7	Death	172
8	Relief	195
9	Other famines	227

Interesting textbook: Williams Sonoma Outdoor Entertaining or Splenda World of Sweetness

Emerging Wireless Multimedia Services and Technologies

Author: Apostolis K Salkintzis

The provision of IP-based multimedia services is one of the most exiting and challenging aspects of next generation wireless networks. A significant evolution has been underway for enabling such multimedia services and for ultimately migrating the Internet to the wireless world. This book examines this evolution, looking at an array of the most up-to-date wireless multimedia technologies and services. The first part focuses on enabling technologies for wireless multimedia, while the second is dedicated to the new wireless multimedia services that are expected to play a key role in the future wireless environment. In addition, the related recent standardization, research and industry activities are addressed.
* Covers a complete range of multimedia hot topics, ranging from audio/video coding techniques to multimedia protocols and applications
* Discusses QoS issues in WLANs, 3G and hybrid 3G/WLAN networks
* Provides in-depth discussion of the most modern multimedia services, such as Push-to-Talk, Instant Messaging, Presence, mobile payments, MMS, WAP, and location-based multimedia services
* Addresses the emerging Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) and the key aspects of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in 3G networks
* Numerous on-line references will assist readers in their quest for the most up-to-date information

This comprehensive resource will have instant appeal to students in electrical and computer engineering or IT disciplines. It is also essential reading for engineering managers, engineers in wireless systems and multimedia, and wireless multimedia researchers.

The Fabrication of Louis XIV or The Rise of Financial Capitalism

The Fabrication of Louis XIV

Author: Peter Burk

Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In this engrossing book, an internationally respected historian gives an account of contemporary representations of Louis XIV and shows how the making of the royal image illuminates the relationship between art and power. Images of Louis XIV included hundreds of oil paintings and engravings, three hundred-odd medals struck to commemorate the major events of the reign, sculptures and bronzes, as well as plays, ballets (in which the king himself sometimes appeared on stage), operas, odes, sermons, official newspapers and histories, fireworks, fountains and tapestries. Drawing on an analysis of these representations as well as on surviving documentary sources, Peter Burke shows the conscious attempt to 'invent' the image of the king and reveals how the supervision of the royal image was entrusted to a committee, the so-called 'small academy'. This book is not only a fascinating chronological study of the mechanics of the image-making of a king over the course of a seventy-year reign but is also an investigation into the genre of cultural construction. Burke discusses the element of propaganda implicit in image-making, the manipulation of seventeenth-century media of communication, the channels of communication (oral, visual and textual) and their codes (literary and artistic), and the intended audience and its response. He concludes by comparing and contrasting Louis's public image with that of other rulers ranging from Augustus to contemporary American presidents.

Read also The Greatest Story Ever Sold or Ataturk

The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason

Author: Larry Neal

This work establishes the existence of a sophisticated and smoothly functioning system of financial markets in the mercantile states of northwestern Europe throughout the 1700s. Based on computer analysis of thousands of price quotes from the financial press of the eighteenth century, the results should force both historians and economists to reevaluate their understanding of the evolution of financial markets and their importance for the economic developments of that era.

Table of Contents:

1. Historical background for the rise of financial capitalism: commercial revolution, rise of nation states, and capital markets;
2. The development of an information network and the international capital markets of London and Amsterdam;
3. The early capital markets of London and Amsterdam;
4. The Banque Royale and the South Sea Company: how the bubbles began;
4. Appendix: were the Mississippi and south sea bubbles rational?
5. The Bank of England and the South Sea Company: how the bubbles ended;
6. The English and Dutch East India Companies: how the west was won;
7. The integration of the English and Dutch capital markets in peace and war;
8. The English and Dutch capital markets in panics;
9. The capital markets during revolutions, war and peace;
10. A tale of two revolutions: international capital flows 1792-1819;
11. The London and Amsterdam stock markets, 1800-1825.