The Contagion of Liberty

The Contagion of Liberty

Author: Andrew M. Wehrman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1421444666

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"The author argues that a demand for public solutions during smallpox epidemics of the eighteenth century, especially broad access to inoculation, influenced revolutionary politics and changed the way that Americans understood their health and governmental responsibilities to protect it"--


Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics

Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics

Author: Chad E. Nelson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-08-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0197601928

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A unique theory of what happens when leaders fear a revolution abroad will spread to their own country and how that affects international relations. When do leaders fear that a revolution elsewhere will spread to their own polities, and what are the international effects of this fear? In Revolutionary Contagion, Chad E. Nelson develops and tests a theory that explains how states react to ideological-driven revolutions that have occurred in other nations. To do this, he analyzes four key revolutionary movements over two centuries-liberalism, communism, fascism, and Islamism. He further explains that the key to understanding the response to revolutions lies in focusing on the extent to which leaders fear upheaval in their own countries. According to the theory, Nelson argues, fear of contagion is driven more by the characteristics of the host rather than the activities of the infecting agents. In other words, leaders will fear revolutionary contagion when they have significant revolutionary opposition movements that have an ideological affinity with the revolutionary state. A powerful theory of the profound effects revolutions have on international relations, this book shows why one simply cannot make sense of international politics--including patterns of alliances and wars--in certain situations without considering the fear of contagion.


Thought Contagion

Thought Contagion

Author: Aaron Lynch

Publisher:

Published: 2008-08-06

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0786725648

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Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.


Moral Contagion

Moral Contagion

Author: Michael A. Schoeppner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 110846999X

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During the Antebellum era, thousands of free black sailors were arrested for violating the Negro Seamen Acts. In retelling the harrowing experiences of free black sailors, Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.


The Common Wind

The Common Wind

Author: Julius S. Scott

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1788732472

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Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved. Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.


The Rules of Contagion

The Rules of Contagion

Author: Adam Kucharski

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2020-02-13

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1782834303

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An Observer Book of the Year A Times Science Book of the Year A New Statesman Book of the Year A Financial Times Science Book of the Year 'Astonishingly bold' Daily Mail 'It is hard to imagine a more timely book ... much of the modern world will make more sense having read it.' The Times We live in a world that's more interconnected than ever before. Our lives are shaped by outbreaks - of disease, of misinformation, even of violence - that appear, spread and fade away with bewildering speed. To understand them, we need to learn the hidden laws that govern them. From 'superspreaders' who might spark a pandemic or bring down a financial system to the social dynamics that make loneliness catch on, The Rules of Contagion offers compelling insights into human behaviour and explains how we can get better at predicting what happens next. Along the way, Adam Kucharski explores how innovations spread through friendship networks, what links computer viruses with folk stories - and why the most useful predictions aren't necessarily the ones that come true. Now revised and updated with content on Covid-19.


Transforming Contagion

Transforming Contagion

Author: Breanne Fahs

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813589589

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2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Moving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, Transforming Contagion energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion. The contributors provocatively suggest contagion to be as full of possibilities for revolution and resistance as it is for the descent into madness, malice, and extensive state control. The infectious practices rooted in politics, film, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of a literary text or meme on social media compellingly reveal patterns that emerge in those attempts to re-route, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate various contagions.


The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations

Author: Jonathan Leader Maynard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 654

ISBN-13: 1000632385

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The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations reviews, consolidates, and advances the study of ideology in international politics. The volume unifies fragmented scholarship on ideology’s impact on international relations into a wide-ranging and go-to volume. Declarations of the ‘end of ideology’ have once again been proven premature: nationalisms of various stripes are thriving; ideological polarization and conflicts both within and among states are growing; and environmentalist, feminist and anti-globalization activists are intensifying their demands on international institutions and states. This timely volume presents ideology as a way of explaining these major developments of world politics, rejecting the simplistic association of ideology with passionate convictions in favor of more complex theories of ideology’s influence. The chapters summarize cutting edge knowledge on major topics, suggest key implications for broader theoretical debates and frameworks, and point the way forwards to future avenues of inquiry. Contributors adopt puzzle-orientated causal, constitutive and/or critical approaches with a central focus on the determinants and effects of ideological phenomena and their interaction with other aspects of politics. This handbook is of key interest to students and scholars of ideologies, international relations, foreign policy analysis, political science, political theory and more broadly to sociology, psychology, and history. The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations is part of the mini-series Routledge Handbooks on Political Ideologies, Practices and Interpretations, edited by Michael Freeden.


The Contagion Next Time

The Contagion Next Time

Author: Sandro Galea

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0197576427

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A better and healthier time to be alive than ever -- An unhealthy country -- An unhealthy world -- Who we are, the foundational forces -- Where we live, work, and play -- Politics, power, and money -- Compassion -- Social, racial, and economic justice -- Health as a public good -- Understanding what matters most -- Working in complexity and doubt -- Humility and informing the public conversation.


Revolutionary Medicine

Revolutionary Medicine

Author: Jeanne E Abrams

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 081475936X

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An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.