The goal is to record most books written or edited by Western Michigan University faculty, staff and students. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found. With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book or find it in a library near you.
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Virtual Civilization in the 21st Century
Andrew S. Targowski
This book analyzes a new phenomenon in civilization: the transformation of the current "Information Wave" into virtual civilization. In the 21st century, the "real-space" of the world civilization, due to the massive, network-intensive use of computers world-wide, gained the virtual space known as cyberspace. Cyberspace is a product of information technology exemplified by the Internet as the world system of information highway(s) [INFOSTRADA(S)] which forms a digital space containing all sorts of files and communication exchanges practiced in online and real-time modes. For the first time in 6,000 years of human civilization, society has become a quantum society, which can be real and virtual at the same time. The virtual society is invisible for those who do not use computer networks. Even for those who do use them, cyberspace access requires some sort of commercial transactions-oriented activities (ex. on Amazon or eBay and others), searching on Google or Yahoo or communicating as a member of one of social networks, e.g.. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
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Cyclorama (Poets Out Loud)
Daneen Wardrop
In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.
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Civil War Nurse Narratives 1863-1870
Daneen Leigh Wardrop
Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870, examines the first wave of autobiographical narratives written by northern female nurses and published during the war and shortly thereafter, ranging from the well-known Louisa May Alcott to lesser-known figures such as Elvira Powers and Julia Wheelock. From the hospitals of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, to the field at Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle, to the camps bordering front lines during active combat, these nurse narrators reported on what they saw and experienced for an American audience hungry for tales of individual experience in the war.
As a subgenre of war literature, the Civil War nurse narrative offered realistic reportage of medical experiences and declined to engage with military strategies or Congressional politics. Instead, nurse narrators chronicled the details of attending wounded soldiers in the hospital, where a kind of microcosm of US democracy-in-progress emerged. As the war reshaped the social and political ideologies of the republic, nurses labored in a workplace that reflected cultural changes in ideas about gender, race, and class. Through interactions with surgeons and other officials they tested women’s rights convictions, and through interactions with formerly enslaved workers they wrestled with the need to live up to their own often abolitionist convictions and support social equality.
By putting these accounts in conversation with each other, Civil War Nurse Narratives productively explores a developing genre of war literature that has rarely been given its due and that offers refreshing insights into women’s contributions to the war effort. Taken together, these stories offer an impressive and important addition to the literary history of the Civil War.
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Graphs & Digraphs
Ping Zhang
Graphs & Digraphs masterfully employs student-friendly exposition, clear proofs, abundant examples, and numerous exercises to provide an essential understanding of the concepts, theorems, history, and applications of graph theory. Fully updated and thoughtfully reorganized to make reading and locating material easier for instructors and students, the Sixth Edition of this bestselling, classroom-tested text: Adds more than 160 new exercises Presents many new concepts, theorems, and examples Includes recent major contributions to long-standing conjectures such as the Hamiltonian Factorization Conjecture, 1-Factorization Conjecture, and Alspachs Conjecture on graph decompositions Supplies a proof of the perfect graph theorem Features a revised chapter on the probabilistic method in graph theory with many results integrated throughout the text At the end of the book are indices and lists of mathematicians¿ names, terms, symbols, and useful references. There is also a section giving hints and solutions to all odd-numbered exercises. A complete solutions manual is available with qualifying course adoption. Graphs & Digraphs, Sixth Edition remains the consummate text for an advanced undergraduate level or introductory graduate level course or two-semester sequence on graph theory, exploring the subjects fascinating history while covering a host of interesting problems and diverse applications.