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This book places the 2000 presidential and congressional elections into the larger and future context of American politics. The essays in Part I focus on the role of'wedge'issues in 2000, including the economy, foreign policy, and race. Part II examines the electorate in terms of gender, religion, and age. Part III analyzes Republican and Democratic strategies in 2000. Part IV focuses in on specific factors affecting the 2000 races including the Clinton factor.

The American cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the 1990s. As church attendance has declined, seculars have increased in number and in political involvement. The economy was supposed to be the most important issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but social issues such as gay rights and the status of women actually had a greater impact on vote choice. Moral issues and perceptions of candidate morality had less effect on voters in 2004 than in 2008. These arguments directly challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the 2004 and 2008 elections, which were supposedly decided on the basis of moral values and the economy respectively. Yet in The Politics of Sex, Susan B. Hansen justifies these claims theoretically based on evidence about how voters actually evaluate candidates. Hansen explores trends in public opinion on abortion, gay rights, and the status of women and finds that'values voters'are still crucial in presidential elections, even those supposedly fought over economic or foreign-policy issues. She then analyzes campaign strategies and vote choice to show how Barack Obama made effective use of the liberal trends in public opinion on social issues in 2008 and 2012. Hansen also examines trends in demographics, religious involvement, the institutional setting, and public opinion to predict who in future years benefit from the politics of sex.By providing an historical perspective on the changing impact of morality politics on presidential elections, this book will show how and why the politics of sex now favors the Democratic Party.

At the heart of this study on cross-cultural trade lies a concrete case-study of a network of diamond merchants operating in the early eighteenth century. All the traders examined in this study are outsiders: an English Catholic in Antwerp, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in London and Amsterdam and French Huguenots in Lisbon.

Technoculture is culture--such is the proposition posited in Technoscience and Cyberculture, arguing that technology's permeation of the cultural landscape has so irrevocably reconstituted this terrain that technology emerges as the dominant discourse in politics, medicine and everyday life. The problems addressed in Technoscience and Cyberculture concern the ways in which technology and science relate to one another and organize, orient and effect the landscape and inhabitants of contemporary culture.