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Dungan Folktales and Legends is a unique anthology that acquaints English-speaking readers with the rich and captivating folk stories of the Dungans, Chinese-speaking Muslims who fled Northwest China for Russian Central Asia after failure of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) against the Qing dynasty. The most comprehensive collection of Dungan folk narratives, available now in English for the first time, this volume features translations of oral narratives collected in the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the twentieth century, and first published in Dunganskie narodnye skazki i predaniia (1977), which was edited by the internationally renowned Russian sinologist Boris L. Riftin and compiled by his prominent Dungan colleagues Makhmud A. Khasanov and Ilʹias I. Iusupov. The Dungan folk narrative tradition is a vibrant and fascinating tapestry of Chinese, Islamic, and various Central Asian cultural elements.

The present volume is comprised of a chapter introducing the Dungan tale and three chapters containing 78 folk stories organized in the following categories: wonder tales and animal tales; novelistic tales, folk anecdotes, and adventure stories; and legends, historical tales, and narratives. Also included are appendixes, a glossary, an index, the original notes to the texts, and translator’s notes aimed at an English-reading audience. This volume will be of interest to general readers, as well as students and scholars of folklore, ethnography, anthropology, comparative literature, Chinese studies, and Central Asian studies.

The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes’ great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine’. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences’—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language’ and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model’.

Invisible Effects directly engages systems and complexity theory to reveal how the effects of writing and writing instruction work in deferred, disguised, and unexpected ways. The book explains how writing and language that exist in "writing systems" can indirectly (though powerfully) affect people and environments in sometimes distant contexts. In so doing, the book takes on a question central to rhetoric and writing throughout its long history but perhaps even more pressing today: how do we recognize and measure the effects of writing when those effects are so tangled up with our complex material and discursive environments? The surprisingly powerful effects explored here suggest new ways of thinking about and teaching writing and the applications, lessons, and examples in the text precisely model what this thinking and teaching might look like.

This book is primed to serve as an important addition to reading lists of scholars and graduate students in Writing Studies and Rhetoric and should appear on many syllabi in courses on writing and writing instruction and on rhetoric, both introductory and advanced. As well, the book’s advocacy for the unrecognized potential impact of writing instruction makes it appealing for writing program directors and any potential university faculty, administrators, and non-academics interested in the importance and the efficacy of writing instruction. This book is also a useful resource for scholars and graduate students specializing in Writing Across the Curriculum, as the text provides a useful way to shift the conversation and communicate about writing across disciplines.

Black women are long overdue for proper recognition as primary love interests and researchers who are so inclined must do a better job of uncovering examples of black men who proclaim black women as more than a default companion. A primary objective of this book is to examine love letters, civil rights pursuits, and interpersonal relations amongst prominent liberation icons. Additionally, exploring colorism, black power, nihilism, race manners, race matters, black feminism, secular verification of spirituality and racial casting will hopefully provide insight concerning whether black-on-black love is a survival type of love. This is attractive for any undergraduate and graduate level courses seeking to understand the nature of the black experience in America. Moreover, this book is intended to reach audiences interested in the real thin line between love and hate amongst black men and black women.

Professor James Cracraft is an established specialist on early modern Russian history, particularly the era of Peter the Great (1682-1725), tsar and first Russian emperor. This volume gathers some of the many key articles and reviews published by him over the last forty years and more in a wide variety of scholarly venues, some of which are not readily accessible. They constitute in sum important contributions not only to Russian history broadly understood, but also to the study of history itself. The collection will include a preface by the editor and an introduction by the author, where he will sum up his decades of historical work and point to new avenues of needed research, all the while emphasizing that "history" properly understood does not exist somewhere on its own but is the creation, however imperfect, of professional historians (as "chemistry", say, is properly understood as the work, however imperfect, of professional chemists).

A look inside the day-to-day life of a retail manager as he witnessed from the front lines a company take the country by storm. Through a model of selling low priced clothing partnered with celebrity endorsements, the company’s rise was as big as their fall. After over a decade of teaching, the author, now a marketing and strategy professor, recalls his former life in retail. In a light-hearted and funny first-person narrative, the author takes you on a ride through his time with the now defunct clothing retailer Steve and Barry’s. He shares the lessons he learned from inside the store while watching mistakes made along the way. Stories of being robbed at gunpoint, finding a dead body in the dumpster, and working to the point of exhaustion, the reader is given a firsthand account of the best and worst practices in store management. Designed to introduce students to business, management, entrepreneurship, and retail, it allows students to answer the question “Do I really want to be a manager?”

El presente volumen quiere acercar las diferentes corrientes de investigación sobre el teatro áureo hispánico que se llevan a cabo en ambos lados del Atlántico y que parecen ser cada vez más divergentes.  Mientras que los críticos europeos suelen achacar a los colegas americanos su lectura anacrónica de los textos áureos desde corrientes interpretativas contemporáneas, estos acusan a aquellos de un excesivo apego al texto donde la ecdótica y un malinterpretado rigor textual aleja el teatro áureo del público moderno.  Nuestro trabajo por lo tanto tiene una finalidad integradora y pretende demostrar que la buena filología no conoce de fronteras. Un volumen complejo, completo y caleidoscópicoque se aproximaal teatro del Siglo de Oro con una multiplicidad de miradas que una vez compaginadas nos permiteempezar a abarcar la complejidad del fenómeno. Los trabajos aquí recogidos se centran en la triada poeta (dramaturgo), autores-actores, público-festejos, elementos esenciales para poder realizar una aproximación amplia y polifónica a una realidad extraordinariamente rica.

No previous research has ever explored thoroughly the types and trends of smoking and the different models of tobacco smoking among Palestinian children. This study was designed to identify the factors that increase or mitigate risk associated with smoking among school children and adolescents living within the Palestinian territories. An ecological framework serves as the theoretical framework for the study, incorporating multiple levels of children’s and adolescents’ lives, including individual, family, school, peers, and community dimensions. The study is based on theory that considers the school as a central component of socialization and also on problem behavior theory, suggesting that humans develop clusters of dangerous behaviors that become part of their daily lives. This research study is based on the data set of the Health Behaviors in School-aged Children (HBSC) international survey. It revealed the high prevalence of tobacco smoking, the risk and protective factors affecting smoking, and showed that Nargilah ranked first among tobacco smoking habits, and employed a dual focus on individuals and schools. In an era of narrow agendas of “effectiveness” and “control,” this book suggests a way to incorporate schools as venues and spaces for behavioral transformation, growth, and positive change, and shows how awareness can be created within the families and the relevant agencies. Health promotion and risk prevention initiatives can help control tobacco smoking, the most preventable cause of death and disease in the nation. Those who smoke must quit, and we must work together to prevent children from starting this endangering health behavior.

Although the American Civil War has received extensive scholarly attention in the 150+ years since its conclusion, far less scholarly work has been devoted to western newspapers and their experiences of that bloody conflict. This first volume of a two-volume set reveals that the West was not immune from the war’s battles, military recruitment, national anxieties, or partisan infighting. The Western Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War explores how editors throughout the region (from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast) responded to secession, the war, and its immediate aftermath. This edited volume examines editors’ outspoken partisanship (including political feuds), their newsgathering techniques, their financial concerns, and their responses to wartime press censorship. The book also reveals how the war was reported in the western press, while also casting a light on reporting of home front issues. This first volume reveals the financial and editorial lengths that editors went to in order to meet readers’ demands for war and home front news across a vast region where infrastructure was poor and news, therefore, was often slow to arrive.