Neil Smith

Rendering grief, loneliness, hope, love and happiness with exquisite subtlety and intelligence, Neil Smith proves himself an able chronicler of the human condition.

A new history of the United States that turns American exceptionalism on its head. American Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States. Drawing on his expertise in economic history and the imperial histories of Britain and Europe, A. G. Hopkins takes readers from the colonial era to today to show how, far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar trajectories throughout this long period, and how America's dependency on Britain and Europe extended much later into the nineteenth century than previously understood. In a sweeping narrative spanning three centuries, Hopkins describes how the revolt of the mainland colonies was the product of a crisis that afflicted the imperial states of Europe generally, and how the history of the American republic between 1783 and 1865 was a response not to the termination of British influence but to its continued expansion. He traces how the creation of a U.S. industrial nation-state after the Civil War paralleled developments in Western Europe, fostered similar destabilizing influences, and found an outlet in imperialism through the acquisition of an insular empire in the Caribbean and Pacific. The period of colonial rule that followed reflected the history of the European empires in its ideological justifications, economic relations, and administrative principles. After 1945, a profound shift in the character of globalization brought the age of the great territorial empires to an end.

¿Qué está ocurriendo en los centros urbanos y en muchos otros barrios históricos de las ciudades de Europa, Norteamérica y otros continentes? ¿Por qué se ha producido esa oleada de operaciones de regeneración urbana con resultados tan extremadamente chic? ¿Se puede dar por terminado este proceso en el marco de la actual crisis financiero-inmobiliaria? ¿Qué supone la remodelación de los centros urbanos para la gente que vive en los mismos? Este libro, convertido ya en el estudio clásico sobre lagentrificación, revela con notable lucidez la fuertedependencia de los procesos de transformación urbana de las dinámicas de acumulación de capital sobre el territorio. Ajeno a toda complacencia con los gustos y estilos de vida de clase media, que normalmente justifican las políticas pro-gentrificación, Smith muestra con crudeza sus obvios efectos sociales: desplazamiento de la población con menores recursos, banalización y musealización de los centros urbanos, subordinación de las políticas urbanas al beneficio de promotores y entidades financieras, segregación espacial, criminalización de la pobreza y de las personas sin hogar, etc. En este terreno su análisis no sólo es convergente con movimientos como la okupación y la democratización del acceso a la vivienda, sino también extremadamente útil para cualquier aproximación que reivindique el derecho a la ciudad.

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"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists, and scholars know pieces of that history, but nowhere has it been put together in something close to its entirety. The effect is that each revolt or uprising seems almost sui generis, always surprising, disconnected from both its long- and near-term history and social geography. Revolting New York brings together the historical geography of revolt in New York in its fullness, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against Dutch occupation of Manhattan to Occupy. All in a style accessible to a broad as well as academic audience The book will show that there is a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is at least as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's evolution and the structuring of life within it" --

"Every once in a while nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illuminate the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example. Despite disabilities which mean that everyday tasks are burdensome chores, Christopher is a linguistic wonder who can read, write, speak, understand and translate more than twenty languages. On some tests he shows a severely low IQ, hinting at ineducability, yet his English language ability indicates an IQ in excess of 120 (a level more than sufficient to enter university). Christopher is a savant, someone with an island of startling talent in a sea of inability. This book documents his learning of British Sign Language, casting light on the modularity of cognition, the modality neutrality of the language faculty, the structure of memory, the grammar of signed language and the nature of the human mind"--