Books by "J. Peter Scoblic"
5 books found
"On a cold and clear afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. The flames at the Smithsonian, however, were merely an omen of things to come for museums in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process. Hampered by troubling problems, museum leaders made different choices while remaining committed to versions of the museum idea. This book explores the concepts of "crisis" as it relates to museums in the United States, exploring how museums have dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. Fires, floods, and hurricanes have all upended museum plans and forced people to ask difficult questions about U.S. cultural life. With chapters exploring the First World War and 1918 influenza pandemic, Great Depression, Second World War, 1970 Art Strike in New York City, as well as more recent controversies in U.S. museums, this book takes a new approach to understanding museum history. By diving deeply into the nature of museum changes emerging from these key challenges, historian Samuel J. Redman argues that museums and other cultural institutions can use their history to prepare for challenges lying ahead"--
A Promethean technology is one that allows someone of average resources, skills, and intelligence to carry out actions that were once only doable by governments, militaries, or institutions with considerable resources. Essentially, Promethean technologies allow users to create their own weapons of mass destruction. These emerging technologies are increasingly affordable and accessible--and are no more complicated to operate than a satellite TV control box or a smart phone. Although these technologies are a terrifying prospect, the more we know about these dangers, the better we can prepare to head them off. In The Devil's Toy Box, Andrew Fox lays out seven decades of preemptive analysis and shows that while homeland security has explored, in depth, the possible Promethean threats the world faces, it has failed to forecast the most likely attacks. Using fictional scenarios Fox teaches how to predict future threats and how to forecast which ones are likely to be used by bad actors within the next five to ten years. Combining the skills of homeland security experts and the imaginations of speculative fiction writers, he then offers an analytical method to deter, counter, or abate these threats, rather than adopting an attitude of resigned fatalism.
Discusses how deeply held beliefs guide American foreign policy and identifies the foundations of those beliefs, explaining how they have inspired poor strategic decisions in Washington.
“Harvard Square isn’t what it used to be.” Spend any time there, and you’re bound to hear that lament. Yet people have been saying the very same thing for well over a century. So what does it really mean that Harvard Square—or any other beloved Main Street or downtown—“isn’t what it used to be”? Catherine J. Turco, an economic sociologist and longtime denizen of Harvard Square, set out to answer this question after she started to wonder about her own complicated feelings concerning the changing Square. Diving into Harvard Square’s past and present, Turco explores why we love our local marketplaces and why we so often struggle with changes in them. Along the way, she introduces readers to a compelling set of characters, including the early twentieth-century businessmen who bonded over scotch and cigars to found the Harvard Square Business Association; a feisty, frugal landlady who became one of the Square’s most powerful property owners in the mid-1900s; a neighborhood group calling itself the Harvard Square Defense Fund that fought real estate developers throughout the 1980s and ’90s; and a local businesswoman who, in recent years, strove to keep her shop afloat amid personal tragedy, the rise of Amazon, and a globalizing property market that sent her rent soaring. Harvard Square tells the crazy, complicated love story of one quirky little marketplace and in the process, reveals the hidden love story Americans everywhere have long had with their own Main Streets and downtowns. Offering a new and powerful lens that exposes the stability and instability, the security and insecurity, markets provide, Turco transforms how we think about our cherished local marketplaces and markets in general. We come to see that our relationship with the markets in our lives is, and has always been, about our relationship with ourselves and one another, how we come together and how we come apart.
In Russia and Armed Persuasion, Stephen J. Cimbala argues that Russia's war planners and political leaders must make painful adjustments in their thinking about the relationship between military art and policy in the twenty-first century. Russia must master the use of force for persuasion, not just destruction. As the author shows, military persuasion requires that Russian leaders master the politico-military complexity of crisis management, deterrence and arms control, and the limitation of ends and means in war. Russia now has scarce resources to devote to defense and can no longer afford the stick-only diplomacy and strategy that have characterized some of its recent past. Russian and Soviet military thinking historically emphasized the blunderbuss and total war: overwhelming mass, firepower, and conflicts of annihilation or prolonged attrition. However, historical experience also forced Russia and the Soviet Union to come to grips with crisis management and with limited aims and means in the conduct of war. On the one hand, Russia failed the test of military persuasion in its management of the July 1914 crisis that plunged Europe into World War I. On the other hand, the Soviet Union did adjust to the requirements of the nuclear age for crisis management, deterrence, and limited war. Using this mixed record of Russian and Soviet success and failure in twentieth century experience, Cimbala argues that Russia can, and must, improve in the twenty-first century. According to the author, the first decades of this century will pose at least three immediate challenges to Russia's military persuasion. Russia must continue to pursue strategic nuclear arms control and arms reductions, with the United States and avoid re-starting the Cold War by means of an ill-considered race in missile defenses. Second, Russia must maintain a surer grip on the military information revolution, especially as it pertains to the management of Russia's nuclear deterrent. Third, Russia must develop forces that are more flexible in small wars and peace operations: its recent experiences in Chechnya show that it has a long way to go in using economy of force as a military persuader. Cimbala's original analysis demonstrates the similar features in apparently dissimilar, or even opposite, events and processes. For example, he shows how the problem of military persuasion applies equally to the challenge of managing a nuclear crisis and the problem of low-intensity war. In each case, the dilemma is calibrating the military means to the political ends. Controversially, the author argues against both military and academic traditionalists, contending that the complexity of the force-policy relationship in the next century will reward the subtle users of military power and that others will be subject to a 'Gulliver effect' of diminishing returns.