Posts by Yale University Press

COP26: INDIGENOUS VOICES IN GLOBAL SOIL (AND CLIMATE) POLICY

Jo Handelsman, Kayla Cohen, Garth Harmsworth, and Shaun Awatere tell us about the importance of soil and why the voices of indigenous people must be heard at the COP26 table. The 2021 United Nations climate change conference, COP26, marks the world’s next big step toward limiting global warming to 1.5

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Finding a Genetic Hybrid

Tom Higham— Monday 22 June 2015 at 9:10 am. One of the great moments of my life. I was in one of the laboratories at the Research Lab for Archaeology at Oxford University, where I have worked for the last twenty years. With one of my students, Samantha Brown, I

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Muscat, December 1992

Sonallah Ibrahim— As Fathy pulled the seat belt across his chest he said, “Please fasten your seat belt or we’re doomed. Traffic cops here are tough, nothing like in your country.” I almost said that it wasn’t our country anymore, but I didn’t want to start off with an argument.

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Mussolini’s Last Lover

R.J.B. Bosworth— The story began on 24 April 1932, a sunny day in Rome. That afternoon, the Petaccis, by now residing even more centrally and respectably at flat 6, 326 Corso Vittorio Emanuele, decided they deserved an outing. Mother Giuseppina, little sister Myriam (not yet nine), Claretta (who had just

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Sadie Alexander on Black Achievement

Nina Banks— Sadie Alexander was an outstanding economic historian whose speeches relied heavily on her knowledge of European and American history. Prior to taking courses in European history at the University of Pennsylvania, Alexander studied the history of African Americans while a student at the M Street High School, which

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Jews in the Greek and Roman Periods

Lawrence M. Wills— The books of the Hebrew Bible were likely composed in the ninth through second centuries BCE, under a range of very different political conditions. Israel was established as a kingdom by David in about the year 1000 BCE, and his son, Solomon, ruled successfully for about forty

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Theories of Managerialism

Beth Simone Noveck— In recent decades, especially since Reagan and Thatcher, some scholars and practitioners have argued that the way to fix government is to copy the techniques of the private sector, especially the use of more data to deliver better performance. In line with rising interest in private-sector solutions

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Paradoxes of Constitutional Processes

Donald L. Horowitz— Suppose you were advising a constitutional assembly chosen to produce a new constitution for a troubled country. Most constitutions are created because some trouble has occurred: the fall of an authoritarian regime, a civil war, mass discontent with the performance of a government. There is a good

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Presentations of the Self

Desiree C. Bailey— I was once invited to write a poem based on photographs of self-presentation housed at the International Center for Photography. One photograph stood out to me perhaps because of the verdant background, or because the subject, whom I perceived as a young Black woman, reminded me of

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The Strange Speech of Sultan Valad

Michael Pifer— Sometime in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a Sufi poet named Sultan Valad was trying his hardest to get out of delivering a public sermon. He had just spoken before a private gathering of religious scholars while on a visit to the city of Kayseri, located

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