Silicon Valley Imperialism


Book Description

In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.










Born Under a Black Cloud and Then I Married Hitler’s Daughter


Book Description

The primary reason for writing this book was to describe the difficult circumstances I have encountered in every endeavor that eventually ended my quest for success. Although I never failed in any challenge, the end was always predictable. I was always doomed to be the loser. My attempts to achieve success were always to follow clearly marked paths that numerous people before me had followed and found success. They achieved their goals. It never worked for me. In every endeavor I began with the full knowledge of how I was to proceed and operate until some unforeseen problem interfered. I thought that I was a success in the Race to the moon until that race was cancelled by a war. I was overcome by flood from a broken water main that destroyed my business. A sudden change in the law that at first protected my business and then later denied it. A sudden fire in an adjacent building destroyed the roof of my business. A change in how computers made life amazingly good was replaced by cell phones. It appeared that somehow I was not meant to be a success. My Reason Even before I was born my goal was to be born but that was quickly changed to mere survival. My mother attempted an early abortion by bathing in a tub that was filled with a laundry lye soap that was definitely a method used to kill the unborn child within her, but it ultimately failed, and I was born. Of course, I never knew about this even till much later in my life. I then began my life not knowing that every future opportunity was predestined to not come to fruition. I never understood that my path to success was under the path of my personal Dark Cloud. My first marriage was wonderful until several years later my wife learned of how she was born and the infamous circumstance that permitted her birth was enough to destroy everything two years later. Marvin Coren




Meet the Great Jazz Legends


Book Description

Introduce a new generation of music enthusiasts to 17 legendary jazz artists who have enriched the world with their incredible talents. Dr. McCurdy's illuminating stories about the lives, times and music of these great jazz musicians span the entire twentieth century, from early New Orleans Jazz through the Golden Age of Swing plus the avant-garde and jazz fusion eras. Includes units on Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock. Also available: Classroom Kit and Activity Sheets! The Activity Sheets are perfect for the classroom! 100% reproducible!




Back Over There


Book Description

Based on Richard Rubin's wildly popular New York Times series, Back Over There is a timely journey, in turns reverent and iconoclastic but always fascinating, through a place where the past and present are never really separated. In The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin introduced readers to a forgotten generation of Americans: the men and women who fought and won the First World War. Interviewing the war’s last survivors face-to-face, he knew well the importance of being present if you want to get the real story. But he soon came to realize that to get the whole story, he had to go Over There, too. So he did, and discovered that while most Americans regard that war as dead and gone, to the French, who still live among its ruins and memories, it remains very much alive. Years later, with the centennial of the war only magnifying this paradox, Rubin decided to go back Over There to see if he could, at last, resolve it. For months he followed the trail of the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, finding trenches, tunnels, bunkers, century-old graffiti and ubiquitous artifacts. But he also found an abiding fondness for America and Americans, and a colorful corps of local after-hours historians and archeologists who tirelessly explore these sites and preserve the memories they embody while patiently waiting for Americans to return and reclaim their own history and heritage. None of whom seemed to mind that his French needed work.







Remembering Communism


Book Description

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.




School of Music Programs


Book Description




School of Music, Theatre & Dance (University of Michigan) Publications


Book Description

Includes miscellaneous newsletters (Music at Michigan, Michigan Muse), bulletins, catalogs, programs, brochures, articles, calendars, histories, and posters.