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Over the past two decades, an enormous effort has been mounted by numerous federal and state agencies to prepare America to defend against the possibility of a catastrophic bioterrorist attack. This effort jumped ahead at warp speed following the horrendous World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September, 2001, followed by the postal anthrax scares a few weeks later that killed five people. By the end of 2008, the US will have spent nearly fifty billion dollars upgrading almost every conceivable aspect of our ability to respond defensively to a bioterrorism attack. How likely is it that America will experience a future bioterrorist attack that could bring this country to its knees? What would it take to mount such an attack? Who could do it, and what weapons would they use? How would bioterrorism compare with the damage America would suffer from other forms of terrorism, or from a natural biocatastrophe like avian influenza? No nation has infinite resources, and we must accept that we may never be able to make ourselves completely safe from every threat we face. We will have to make rational assessments of those threats we can identify, and apportion our resources as intelligently as we can to deal with them. This book looks at the scientific, political, legal and social facets of bioterrorism that can guide us as we attempt to bring this particular threat into a realistic perspective for the 21st century.

This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.

This book aims to provide new insights on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It presents the main findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents conducted at the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2005. The survey captured a broad range of differences among U.S. teens in religion, age, race, sex, socioeconomic status, rural-suburban-urban residence, region of the country, and language spoken. The book provides answers to questions about the character of teenage religion, the extent of spiritual seeking among youth, how religion affects adolescent moral reasoning and risk behaviors, and much more. It is hoped that by informing readers about the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, it will help foster discussions in families, religious congregations, community organizations, and beyond, not only about the general state of religion in the United States, but also about cultural and institutional practices that may better serve and care for American teens.

This book attempts to solve two problems in deliberative democratic theory and practice: How can agreements reached inside deliberative forums be legitimate for those who did not take part? And why should people with strongly-held views participate in the first place? The solution involves rethinking deliberative theory, but also draws on lessons from practical experience with deliberative forums in Britain’s National Health Service. The book discusses the competing representation claims that different participants make, the pros and cons of different approaches to democratic accountability, and different conceptions of rationality and public reasoning. It concludes by rejecting the idea that we can have authentic, legitimate deliberation in any one forum. Instead, authentic, legitimate deliberation can only result from linkages between different kinds of institutions, drawing on different kinds of participants, at different points of a decision-making cycle. That is, it promotes a macro, society-wide view of deliberative democracy quite different from the micro, deliberative-forum view which dominates thinking on the subject in the UK. The book sketches the outline of such a deliberative system, suggesting how various institutions in civil society and elected government might link together to create public decisions, which are both more rational and more democratic.

Yellowstone holds a special place in America's heart. As the world's first national park, it is globally recognized as the crown jewel of modern environmental preservation. But the park and its surrounding regions have recently become a lightning rod for environmental conflict, plagued by intense and intractable political struggles among the federal government, National Park Service, environmentalists, industry, local residents, and elected officials. This book asks why it is that, with the flood of expert scientific, economic, and legal efforts to resolve disagreements over Yellowstone, there is no improvement? Why do even seemingly minor issues erupt into impassioned disputes? What can Yellowstone teach us about the worsening environmental conflicts worldwide? The book argues that the battle for Yellowstone has deep moral, cultural, and spiritual roots that until now have been obscured by the supposedly rational and technical nature of the conflict. Tracing in detail the moral causes and consequences of large-scale social change in the American West, the book describes how a “new-west” social order has emerged that has devalued traditional American beliefs about manifest destiny and rugged individualism, and how morality and spirituality have influenced the most polarizing and techno-centric conflicts in Yellowstone's history. The book shows how the unprecedented conflict over Yellowstone is not all about science, law, or economic interests, but more surprisingly, is about cultural upheaval and the construction of new moral and spiritual boundaries in the American West.

Pauli Murray (1910–85) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come. In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington D.C. and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt. In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation. This book examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. The book traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from her theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s.

This is a major new study of the formative period in the development of modern general practice in the UK. Drawing upon an impressive range of hitherto unused archival material, the book analyses the important changes and developments in primary health care in the century before the creation of the National Health Service in 1948.

In this book, an international group of contributors provide a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle. This collection of essays is also the result of a workshop organized by the Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. The aim of the Cluster is to promote collaborative research in contemporary cultural practices which are influenced by intensifying transnational exchanges across historical, linguistic and cultural boundaries in Asia.