How did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as antithetical to self and national creation, but Jason Richards argues that imitation was in fact central to such creation. Imitation Nation shows how whites simultaneously imitated and therefore absorbed the cultures they so readily disavowed, as well as how Indians and blacks emulated the power and privilege of whiteness while they mocked and resisted white authority. By examining the republic’s foundational literature--including works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Martin Delany--Richards argues that the national desire for cultural uniqueness and racial purity was in constant conflict with the national need to imitate the racial and cultural other for self-definition. The book offers a new model for understanding the ways in which the nation’s identity and literature took shape during the early phases of the American republic.

An interdisciplinary overview of current research on imitation in animals and artifacts.

A reprint of the 1933 classic novel, the basis for two film versions, with a new introduciton.

As interest in computer, cognitive, and social sciences grow, the need for alternative approaches to models in related-disciplines thrives. An Imitation-Based Approach to Modeling Homogeneous Agents Societies offers a framework for modeling societies of autonomous agents that is heavily based on fuzzy algebraic tools. This publication overviews platforms developed with the purpose of simulating hypotheses or harvesting data from human subjects in efforts for calibration of the model of early learning in humans. An Imitation-Based Approach to Modeling Homogeneous Agents Societies reaches out to the cognitive sciences, psychology, and anthropology providing a different perspective on a few "classical" problems within these fields.

An acclaimed biologist draws on a wide range of his own and others' research into the behavior of fish, birds, whales, and humans to reveal the failure of genetic determination to explain mating behavior and the fundamental process of learning.

Useful for undergraduate study, this book provides an account of the Turing Test, its history, context and implications, illustrated with practical tests.