Benjamin Rush or Crude Chronicles

Benjamin Rush: Signer of the Declaration of Independence

Author: David Barton

Dr. Benjamin Rush was a great American hero and role model. At the time of his death in 1813, he was heralded as one of America's three most notable men, along with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And no wonder! He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, served under three Presidents, helped found five universities and colleges, is titled "The Father of American Medicine," led both the abolition and prison reform movements, and founded American Sunday Schools and the nation's first Bible Society. Amazingly, two hundred years ago, Dr. Benjamin Rush offered insights still applicable today. Learn about the inspiring life of Dr. Benjamin Rush, and read from his insightful writings -- many of which are here reprinted for the first time in two centuries! Dr. Benjamin Rush -- a true American hero!

Interesting book: Green Tea or The Dessert Bible

Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador

Author: Suzana Sawyer

Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America's strongest indigenous movements.

Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, redeployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality -- that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging -- as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

Table of Contents:

I	National narratives
1	Amazonian imaginaries	27
2	Crude excesses	57
II	Petroleum politics
3	Neoliberal ironies	91
4	Corporate antipolitics	118
III	Raced realities
5	Contested terrain	149
6	Liberal legal-scapes	182
	Closing : a plurinational space	211