Best Selling Books by Joshua Charles

Abstract: Immigrants at Home explores the history of Chinese citizens who immigrated to Mexico primarily during the last half of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th. Examining this subject from a social perspective, the paper first seeks to elaborate upon the process of negotiation that took place between these immigrants and dominant Mexican society. Chinese immigrants initially succeeded in modifying the roles prescribed for them by Mexican political thought, and the cultural agency that they displayed in both their sexual and economic practices made life in Mexico tolerable and even prosperous. However, following the onslaught of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and its concordant ideologies of nationalism, xenophobia, and racism, social discourse demanded that the Chinese immigrants abandon many of their survival strategies. Faced with violence and discrimination, many of these immigrants undertook a final renegotiation of their roles in Mexico by leaving the country with their Mexican wives and families. The paper attempts to synchronize these events into a broad examination of the factors and circumstances that allow particular adaptation and negotiation strategies to both succeed and change at divergent historical moments.

Between 1854 and 1954, MIT awarded 734 degrees to students studying abroad from China, which is the third largest number among all American universities during this time period. Within the MIT Mechanical Engineering department, the number of students is well within the hundreds. While these students studied engineering topics uniquely influenced by the developments and needs of twentieth-century China, their courses of study were furthermore influenced by the tutelage they received from a small set of MIT professors willing to cross cultural gaps. These students also had support through affinity groups and made notable impacts on MIT''s social landscape during their time at the Institute. Finally, they went on to play significant roles in the subsequent industrialization of China. What, then, were the academic and social environments in the twentieth-century MIT Mechanical Engineering department that led to the successful graduation of students studying abroad from China, and what lessons can be applied to present-day MIT? Based on information from the 1931 MIT Chinese Students'' Directory, which provides data on Chinese students from 1877 to 1930, Chinese students'' social and academic presence at MIT was quantified, and efforts were made to identify their research advisors and academic mentors, and also to delineate what interpersonal relationships and connections existed between the faculty and the students. In the first decades of the twentieth century, several Mechanical Engineering professors took on more Chinese students than others, most notably, George B. Haven. From the analysis of 20+ theses written by these students between 1877 and 1931, the Mechanical Engineering faculty certainly rallied to support these students as they faced linguistic, cultural, and other challenges during their courses of study. This cohort of Chinese mechanical engineering students was responsible for inventing the first Chinese typewriter, doing the earliest mechanical tests on China-native materials such as ramie and bamboo, and was fundamental to the development of the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT''s sister school, Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The dissertation consists of three essays in law and economics. The first chapter compares the efficiency of negligence and strict liability in unilateral accident cases when the injurer faces ambiguity about accident risk. It generalizes the standard accident model to allow for ambiguity by assuming the injurer is a Choquet expected utility maximizer and representing the injurer''s beliefs about accident s risk with a neo-additive capacity. The central result is that neither strict liability nor negligence is generally efficient in the presence of ambiguity. A key implication of the results is that negligence is more robust to ambiguity, which may help explain why negligence is the general basis for accident liability under modern Anglo-American tort law. The second chapter examines how different allocation rules influence the risk that putative class members will opt out of a mass tort class action. It analyzes a two-stage model of class action formation. The main result is that the class will be asymptotically stable if the net recovery will be allocated pro rata by expected claim values, but may not be asymptotically stable if the net recovery will be shared equally or allocated pro rata by damage claims. Other results explore how the shape of the distribution of the plaintiffs'' damage claims, the scale benefits of the class action, and the plaintiffs'' probability of prevailing and bargaining power in settlement negotiations influence the stability of the class. The third chapter offers a model of analogical legal reasoning. Under the model, the outcome in the case at hand is a weighted average of the outcomes of prior cases, where the weights are a function of fact similarity and precedential authority. The main theoretical result is an axiomatization of similarity-weighted averaging with an exponential similarity function based on a quasimetric. The chapter also investigates whether the analogical model provides a better fit than a rule-based model (represented by a fractional polynomial) to the reported decisions by federal judges in U.S. maritime salvage cases from 1880 to 2007. The principal conclusion of the empirical analysis is that the rule-based model fits the data better than the analogical model.

In southwestern New Mexico, rural residential development is expanding within the Greater Gila Ecosystem (GGE), an ecologically and culturally vulnerable wilderness landscape that includes the Gila National Forest and adjacent privately owned lands. Thoughtful land management in the GGE is critical in order to maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, and conserve working landscapes. However, the spatially explicit information needed to make informed management decisions is currently lacking. The objectives of this study were to 1) delineate a boundary for the GGE; 2) map development hotspots in the GGE with the aim of identifying study sites for land change research and 3) quantify land change rates and patterns for several sites within unprotected areas of the GGE. The GGE extent was delineated based on the ecological criteria of watersheds, historical fire, and contiguous habitat. Landsat imagery-based multi-date principal components analysis was used to identify land change hotspots (1984-2011) in the unprotected areas of the GGE. Multi-temporal (1945,1953,1976/1977, 1996/1997, 2011) high spatial resolution aerial photography was used to digitize detailed landscape data for three study sites. Land change intensity analysis was performed to detect the size and intensity of land changes, and landscape metrics were calculated to assess patterns over time. The extent of the GGE is 58% larger than the existing Gila National Forest. Three towns in the GGE were identified as hotspots: Pinos Altos, Mimbres-San Lorenzo, and Silver City. All three study sites exhibited a preponderance of natural (e.g. piñon-juniper woodland) to built-up (e.g. rural residential) land conversion, with the highest conversion rate between 1976 and 1996. Pinos Altos Largest patch index increased for Exurban lands 738% from 1945 to 2011, and decreased for piñon-juniper lands by 63% signaling a dramatic switch in land cover dominance. Mimbres-San Lorenzo number of patches nearly doubles from 1953 to 1996, and its Herbaceous Largest patch index dropped by 269% Silver city''s pinon-juniper woodland Edge Density Declined 47.7% from 1977 to 2011, with many of these changes occurring in the northern edges of the study site near the Gila National Forest. These changes in land patterns suggests that key species and ecological processes of the GGE are being compromised by habitat and landscape fragmentation. County planners, land managers, and conservation groups can use this critical information in order to help understand current, and prepare for future, landscape changes within the GGE.

This dissertation examines the thought of the five principal thinkers of the distinctive German neo-liberal tradition of ordo-liberalism, a consistent and often prominent current in the intellectual life of the Bundesrepublik since the end of the Second World War. By way of intellectual profiles of these main figures, the dissertation shows that ordo-liberalism developed as a political rather than purely economic theory. Shaped by the double crisis of capitalism of the inter-war period - of inflation and global economic depression - it attempted a response to the failure of the liberalism of the time. From the 1920s, these thinkers sought institutional and social arrangements that would preserve the separation of economic and political spheres, which they believed to be the basic requirement of a functioning price mechanism. They achieved this by appeal to the state in its capacity to enforce this separation and regulate social life. The dissertation proceeds by close reading of the main texts of Walter Eucken (1891-1950) and Franz Bi hm (1895-1977), representatives of the Freiburg School who developed a method of political economy and constitutional legal theory that sought to isolate the economic responsibilities of the state from democratic pressure. The dissertation then turns to the sociological thinkers Wilhelm Ri pke (1899-1966) and Alexander Ri stow (1885-1963), and profiles their development of a theory of mass culture and the measures the state might take to reintroduce and preserve a politics of vitality to combat it. The concluding chapter, on Alfred Mi ller-Armack (1901-1978), theorist of capitalist crisis in the 1930s, economist of European integration within the Christian Democratic Union, and sociologist of religion, reconstructs his development of the social market economy and concludes with his response to the onset of the downturn of the 1970s. The dissertation shows that by various means, ordo-liberals of the first generation sought resolution to economic crisis directly through politics, and therefore were compelled to undertake comprehensive revision of liberal economics and political theory.

This paper explores the emerging integration of international relations theory with postcolonial scholarship and uses Pakistan''s state formation and history as a case study. It is argued that international relations theory privileges European experiences and history, which results in inaccurate assumptions about the outcomes of colonialism and origins of postcolonial independence. Pakistan''s unique development as a state founded on ideology and build out of an imperial/colonial system offers an opportunity for destabilizing Eurocentrism in international studies. Rather than favoring a singular outcome or conclusion, this paper demonstrates the plurality necessary for an inclusive historical analysis of state-power.

A sampling of Fritz Scholder''s drawings, paintings, and sculptures of American Indians, animals, and other subjects is accompanied by an analysis of his artistry