The Bookshelf

The Southern Albatross: Race and Ethnicity in the American South
Mercer University Press, 2000
Co-edited by Philip D. Dillard, ISBN: 0-86554-666-5

The Southern Albatross: Race and Ethnicity in the American South is a collection of essays by eight emerging historians, who push the historical investigation of race and ethnicity in new directions. Essays address subjects from the 1830s to the 1990s, including the struggle to redefine ethnic boundaries and etiquettes to match changing circumstances. Essay topics range from domestic violence, the Atlanta child murders, the transformation of white supremacist Asa Carter to the Reconstruction era. "Throughout their essays, these scholars contribute significantly to legal, military, cultural and women's history, while demonstrating that race and ethnicity are woven into all aspects of the South's past," says Donald Mathews, author of Religion in the Old South.

Dillard, co-editor of the book, is an assistant professor of history and a former instructor for the United States Military Academy. He served in the U.S. Army from 1984 to 1985.

From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities (2nd edition)
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000
By J. Barkley Rosser Jr., ISBN: 0-7923-7770-2

From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities presents an unusual perspective on economics and economic analysis. Current economic theory largely depends upon assuming that the world is fundamentally continuous. However, an increasing amount of economic research has been done using approaches that allow for discontinuities such as catastrophe theory, chaos theory, synergetics and fractal geometry. The spread of such approaches across a variety of disciplines has constituted a virtual intellectual revolution.

Rosser's book reviews the applications of these approaches in various subdisciplines of economics and draws upon past economic thinkers to develop an integrated view of economics as a whole from the perspective of inherent discontinuity.

Rosser, a professor of economics, holds the Kirby F. Kramer Chair of Business Administration. He earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.