In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump ran and posed as a populist, inveighing against Wall Street, Washington swamp creatures, and the corruption of the elites. He championed and rode the wave of angst experienced by ordinary working Americans, while also feeding their darkest recesses of fear. As a majority of Americans continue to bemoan and mourn the Trump presidency on its third anniversary, it is a good time to take stock of how American workers have fared under its strain. Continue reading “The Workers’ President Unmasked”
Cornell Authors on the Web
College and Community: A Watershed Partnership
The need for improved water resource protection is urgent, yet land-use activities increasingly imperil our water supplies. With that in mind, we’re excited to present the second installment of a three-part blog series, “Watershed Paths to Water Protection,” on citizen stewardship of water resources by Karen Schneller-McDonald, author of Connecting the Drops: A Citizens’ Guide to Protecting Water Resources.
Watersheds connect people in multiple communities through a shared interest in water. Water doesn’t respect municipal boundaries, so watershed protection encourages water users to form partnerships—not only among towns and villages, but also with colleges and universities. Even if you don’t live in a college town, chances are good that the watershed that supplies your drinking water includes a college or university campus. Continue reading “College and Community: A Watershed Partnership”
Treasure Language
By Steve Zeitlin, author of The Poetry of Everyday Life
“There are nine different words for the color blue in the Spanish Maya dictionary,” writes Earl Shorris, “but just three Spanish translations, leaving six [blue] butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.”
Over 6,500 languages—with at least that many words for butterflies—are spoken in our fragile world. By the end of the century more than half will disappear. Our languages are melting like the icecaps. Continue reading “Treasure Language”
Saadia M. Pekkanen in Forbes
Saadia M. Pekkanen, editor of Asian Designs: Governance in the Contemporary World Order, published an article on Forbes.com on October 31: China and Japan Vie to Shape Asia’s Approach to Outer Space
David Bacon on Truthout
David Bacon, author of Communities without Borders, published a photoessay on Truthout about homeless would-be voters in Berkeley, California: “We’re Homeless and We Vote”: Homeless People Want a Voice in This Election”
Tamara Loos on the Death of the King of Thailand
Tamara Loos, author of Bones around My Neck: The Life and Exile of a Prince Provocateur, offers comment on the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand:
Thai King offered ‘pretext for unity,’ now country faces uncertain future
Robert J. Sternberg on How to Produce Students Who Can Change the World
A Q & A with Robert J. Sternberg was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled) on September 15. Dan Berrett of the Chronicle writes of Sternberg, “Over an extensive career, he has challenged orthodoxies on admissions, standardized testing, and academic culture. . . . In his new book, What Universities Can Be: A New Model for Preparing Students for Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership, Sternberg synthesizes his research and evolving thinking on intelligence, creativity, common sense, wisdom, and leadership. . . . He proposes a new model that prepares students for what he calls ‘active concerned citizenship and ethical leadership,’ or ‘Accel.’ That means emphasizing access over exclusivity, he says, and cultivating broad abilities, like creativity, wisdom, and practical thinking, instead of narrow ones like memory.”
A few short excerpts of the interview follow: Continue reading “Robert J. Sternberg on How to Produce Students Who Can Change the World”
Nancy Mandeville Caciola in the Washington Post
Nancy Mandeville Caciola, author of Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages and Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, was interviewed by Fred Barbash of the Washington Post:
Marina Rustow named 2015 MacArthur Fellow
Congratulations to Marina Rustow, author of Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, who has been named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow on the basis of her work with the Cairo Geniza texts. From the MacArthur Foundation’s description of Rustow’s work:
“In Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008), Rustow focuses on the period from 909 to 1171 C.E. and upends long-accepted ideas about the relationship between two rival Jewish communities under Fatimid rule. Prior historians, basing their interpretation on literary polemics, had depicted the Rabbanites and Karaites (or Qaraites) of Egypt and Syria as factions bitterly divided by theological difference, the latter branded as heretics and marginalized. Rustow examined nonliterary Geniza documents (such as letters, legal contracts, and state petitions and decrees) and revealed a wealth of social, economic, and political transactions between the two groups. The finding calls into question the depth of the religious schism, suggesting a higher level of tolerance and cooperation than had been assumed.”
Michael Khodarkovsky in the Wall Street Journal
The August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal features a commentary on Putin’s Russia by Michael Khodarkovsky, author most recently of Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus:
Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon on Ben Franklin’s World
The latest episode of Ben Franklin’s World, a podcast about early American history, features an interview with Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, author of For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789. Listen here!
Kathryn S. March on the Devastation in Nepal
In the Cornell Chronicle, Kathryn S. March, whose book “If Each Comes Halfway”: Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal features a CD of traditional songs recorded nowhere else, wrote this heartrending account of the fate of the village where she and David Holmberg, author of Order in Paradox: Myth and Ritual Among Nepal’s Tamang, have done fieldwork for decades: Cornell Perspectives: My village in Nepal is gone.
Other books Cornell University Press has published on Nepal include In the Circle of the Dance: Notes of an Outsider in Nepal by Katharine Bjork Guneratne and Many Tongues, One People: The Making of Tharu Identity in Nepal by Arjun Guneratne.
Jonathan Kirshner in the New York Daily News
Jonathan Kirshner, author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America and American Power after the Financial Crisis, wrote an article on the Oscars and the business of Hollywood for the New York Daily News: Bright Lights, Timid City
Maeve Brigid Callan on Moncrieff podcast
Maeve Brigid Callan, author of The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland was interviewed on the Moncrieff podcast: Heresy and witch craft in early Ireland
Jotham Parsons on History News Network
Jotham Parsons, author of Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State, published an article on HNN, the History News Network: Trying to Make Money Work, in the Place It Was Invented
Paul Staniland in the New York Times
Paul Staniland, author of Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, published an op-ed in the February 15, 2015 edition of the New York Times: Every Insurgency Is Different
Robert Snyder on NY1 and in a Cornwall Conversation
Robert Snyder, author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City, recently appeared on NY1: Author Talks History of Washington Heights.
Snyder will also be speaking at Rutgers University Newark on February 18—details appear below.
The Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies
Presents
“New York’s Bittersweet Recovery from the Urban Crisis”
A conversation with Robert W. Snyder and Roland V. Anglin
Wednesday, February 18, 2015• 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Dana Room, John Cotton Dana Library, Room 404
185 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102
How did New York City emerge from the crime and decay of the urban crisis?
Robert W. Snyder, Rutgers University-Newark associate professor and author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City, argues that community activists who learned to cross racial and ethnic lines played vital roles in restoring order and vitality to upper Manhattan, only to see their work threatened by growing economic inequality.
Join him and Roland Anglin, director, Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, Rutgers University-Newark, in a conversation about what cities can learn from the revival of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan— a neighborhood formerly known for its German Jews that is now the home of the largest Dominican community in the United States.
Topics to be explored will include:
Improving police-community relations in a neighborhood once wracked by drug-related murders and the slayings of police officers.
The strengths and limits of community activism in housing and economic development.
The role of the arts and media in the revival of Washington Heights.
Free Admission
Refreshments
Seating is limited and registration is required.
Register for this event by Monday, February 16th.
To register click on link: http://tinyurl.com/snyder2015
For more information, please contact Irene Welch at irenew@rutgers.edu
Cedric de Leon in the Lansing State Journal
Cedric de Leon, author of The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago, published an op-ed in the January 31, 2015 Lansing State Journal: What Michigan’s right-to-work ruling will mean.
Carol E. Harrison on New Books in Christian Studies
Carol E. Harrison, author of Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith, was interviewed by Carolina Armenteros, author of The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854, on a recent edition of New Books in Christian Studies. You can listen to the podcast here.
Fritz Umbach in the New York Daily News and the New York Times
Fritz Umbach, coeditor of Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, published an op-ed in the December 15, 2014 New York Daily News: Giving Projects “Their Cops” Back
Umbach was also quoted in the New York Times: Police Patrols in New York Public Housing Draw Scrutiny
Sage House News: The Cornell University Press Blog 
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