A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Cervone describes how the Inca Atahualpa contested racial subordination by intervening in matters of resource distribution, justice, and cultural politics. Considering local indigenous politics and indigenous mobilization at the national and international levels, she explains how, beginning in the 1960s, state-led modernization created political openings by generating new economic formations and social categories. Long Live Atahualpa sheds new light on indigenous peoples operating at the crossroads of global capitalism and neoliberal reforms as they redefine historically rooted relationships of subordination.
Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.
Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.
Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.
Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast.
As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.
This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology.
These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living.
An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.
Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer
With the help of generous excerpts from Haafner's own writings, including material newly translated into English, Paul van der Velde tells an affecting story of a young man who made a world for himself along the Coromandel Coast, in Ceylon and Calcutta, but who returned to Europe to live the last years of his life in Amsterdam, suffering an acute nostalgia for Asia. This will be compelling reading for anyone interested in European response to the cultures of Asia.
From the intense and brooding Magellan and the glamorous and dashing Sir Francis Drake; to Thomas Cavendish, who set off to plunder Spain’s American gold and the Dutch circumnavigators, whose numbers included pirates as well as explorers and merchants, Robert Silverberg captures the adventures and seafaring exploits of a bygone era.
Over the course of a century, European circumnavigators in small ships charted the coast of the New World and explored the Pacific Ocean. Characterized by fierce nationalism, competitiveness, and bloodshed, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery captures the drama, danger, and personalities in the colorful story of the first voyages around the world. These accounts begin with Magellan’s unprecedented 1519–22 circumnavigation, providing an immediate, exciting, and intimate glimpse into that historic venture. The story includes frequent threats of mutiny; the nearly unendurable extremes of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; the fear, tedium, and moments of despair; the discoveries of exotic new peoples and strange new lands; and, finally, Magellan’s own dramatic death during a fanatical attempt to convert native Philippine islanders to Christianity.
Capturing the total context of political climate and historical change that made the Age of Discovery one of excitement and drama, Silverberg brings a motley crew of early ocean explorers vividly to life.
The Arctic of towering icebergs and midnight sun, of flaming auroras and endless winter nights, has long provoked flights of the imagination. Now, in The Last Imaginary Place, renowned archeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic world. Based on thirty years of work with native peoples of the Arctic and travel in the region, McGhee’s account dispels notions of the frozen land as an exotic, remote world that exists apart from civilization.
Between the frigid reality and lurid fantasy lies McGhee’s true interest, the people who throughout human history have called the Arctic home. He paints a vivid portrait of Viking farmers, entrepreneurial Inuit, and Western explorers who have been seduced by the natural wealth and haunting beauty of this land. From lively accounts of fur trading, ivory hunting, and whaling to white-knuckle tales of the first, doomed expeditions, McGhee takes the reader on a whirlwind journey across this disorienting, dreamlike terrain that has fascinated mankind for centuries.
“In prose infused by his position as curator of Arctic archaeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization—which has taken him to sites in several countries—McGhee demolishes some persistent illusions about the white North . . . evocative.”—Times Literary Supplement
“[A] compelling account . . . [McGhee] believes that the Arctic is not so much a region as a dream—what he sees as a dream of a unique, attractive world . . . An archaeologist who has spent thirty years there, the author lets his love for the region shine through on every page.—Booklist
“McGhee displays the powerful attractions of the top of the world . . . [his] prose . . . sparkles like frost in the midnight sun.”—Financial Times
“McGhee has written a sensitive, fascinating and extremely important book.”—Canadian Geographic
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.
From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.
In this book, paleobotanist Alan Graham traces the formation and disruption of key New World land bridges and describes the biotic, climatic, and biogeographic ramifications of these land masses’ changing formations over time. Looking at five land bridges, he explores their present geographic setting and climate, modern vegetation, indigenous peoples (with special attention to their impact on past and present vegetation), and geologic history. From the great Panamanian isthmus to the boreal connections across the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans that allowed exchange of organisms between North America, Europe, and Asia, Graham’s sweeping, one-hundred-million-year history offers new insight into the forces that shaped the life and land of the New World.
After explaining beaches as dynamic ecosystems, Pilkey and Cooper assess the harm done by dense oceanfront development accompanied by the construction of massive seawalls to protect new buildings from a shoreline that encroaches as sea levels rise. They discuss the toll taken by sand mining, trash that washes up on beaches, and pollution, which has contaminated not only the water but also, surprisingly, the sand. Acknowledging the challenge of reconciling our actions with our love of beaches, the geologists offer suggestions for reversing course, insisting that given the space, beaches can take care of themselves and provide us with multiple benefits.
In 1925 the geological connection between Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave was proved when dye placed in a Flint Ridge spring showed up in Echo River at Mammoth Cave.
That tantalizing swirl of dye confirmed speculations that wereto tempt more than 650cavers over half a century with the thrill of being the first to make human passage of the cave connection. Roger Brucker and Richard Watson tell not only of their own twenty-year effort to complete the link but the stories of many others who worked their way through mud-choked crawlways less than a foot high only to find impenetrable blockages.
Floyd Collins died a grisly death in nearby Sand Cave in1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. The wide press coverage of the rescue efforts stirred the imagination of the public and his body was on macabre display in a glass-topped coffin in Crystal Cave into the 1940s. Agents of a rival cave owner once even stole his corpse, which was recovered and still is in a coffin in the cave. Modern cavers still have a word with Floyd as they start their downward treks.
Brucker and Watson joined the parade of cavers who propelled themselves by wiggling kneecaps, elbows, and toes through quarter-mile long crawlways, clinging by fingertips and boot toes across mud-slick walls, over bottomless pits, into gurgling streams beneath stone ceilings that descend to water level, down crumbling crevices and up mountainous rockfalls, into wondrous domed halls, and straight ahead into a blackness intensified rather than dispelled by the carbide lamps on their helmets.
Over two decades they explored the passages with others who sought the final connection as vigorously as themselves. Pat Crowther, a young mother of two, joined them and because of her thinness became the member of the crew to go first into places no human had ever gone before. In that role, in July 1972, she wiggled her way through the Tight Spot and found the route that would link the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave systems into one cave extending 144.4 miles through the Kentucky limestone.
In a new afterword to this edition the authors summarize the subsequent explorations that have more than doubled the established length of the cave system. Based upon geological evidence, the authors predict that new discoveries will add another 200 miles to the length of the world’s longest cave, making it over 500 miles long.
Facing two oceans and three seas, Alaska's coastline stretches through bays, fjords, and around islands for 45,000 miles. Living with the Coast of Alaska, a new volume in the Living with the Shore series, is a user's guide for both present and future inhabitants of Alaska. Providing individual property owners in all regions of the state with the fundamentals of hazard recognition and mitigation strategy, the authors discuss the geological history of Alaska and its relation to the area's cultural history and present customized hazard risk assessments for coastal communities.
Describing the dynamic nature of natural seismic events and coastal processes in Alaska, the authors emphasize the multiplicity of potential effects that result from a unique combination of geology, climate, and the sea. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami waves, avalanches, glacial advances, storm surges, flash flooding, wind channeling, and shoreline erosion combined with human-induced hazards such as oil spills, fire, and beach and offshore mining accidents make living with danger a way of life in Alaska. The authors provide information on federal and state laws and programs regarding natural disasters and coastal zone management as well as practical suggestions for the design and construction of buildings. For private, commercial, and public developments, this book offers a manual to help Alaskans make informed decisions to minimize, if not avoid, damage and danger.
A Land Between Waters explores the relationship between the people and the environment in Mexico. It heralds the arrival of environmental history as a major area of study within the field of Mexican history. This volume brings together a dozen original works of environmental history by some of the foremost experts in Mexican environmental history from both the United States and Mexico.
The contributions collected in this seminal volume explore a wide array of topics, from the era of independence to the present day. Together they examine how humans have used, abused, and attended to nature in Mexico over more than two hundred years. Written in clear, accessible prose, A Land Between Waters showcases the breadth of Mexican environmental history in a way that defines the key topics in the field and suggests avenues for subsequent work. Most importantly, it assesses the impacts of environmental changes that Mexico has faced in the past with an eye to informing national debates about the challenges that the nation will face in the future.
The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.
Learning to Listen to the Land represents the sounding of an alarm. It's authors call on us to recognize the consequences of our actions, and inactions, and to develop a sense of connection with the earth.
Contributors from North America, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Europe explore a wide variety of case studies that includes seascapes in Jamaica; the Solomon Islands; the forests of Madagascar; Aboriginal and European notions of landscape in Australia; place and identity in 19th century maps and the bogs of Ireland; contemporary concerns over changing landscapes in Papua New Guinea; and representations of landscape and history in the poetry of the Scottish Borders.
Radding’s comparative approach illuminates what happened when similar institutions of imperial governance, commerce, and religion were planted in different physical and cultural environments. She draws on archival documents, published reports by missionaries and travelers, and previous histories as well as ecological studies and ethnographies. She also considers cultural artifacts, including archaeological remains, architecture, liturgical music, and religious dances. Radding demonstrates how colonial encounters were conditioned by both the local landscape and cultural expectations; how the colonizers and colonized understood notions of territory and property; how religion formed the cultural practices and historical memories of the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples; and how the conflict between the indigenous communities and the surrounding creole societies developed in new directions well into the nineteenth century.
How we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintained by politics, and often go unquestioned. In Loving Orphaned Space, Mrill Ingram provides a call to action to claim and to cherish these neglected spaces and make them a source of inspiration through art and/or remuneration.
Ingram advocates not only for “urban greening” and “green planning,” but also for “radical caring.” These efforts create awareness and understanding of ecological connectivity and environmental justice issues—from the expropriation of land from tribal nations, to how race and class issues contribute to creating orphaned space. Case studies feature artists, scientists, and community collaborations in Chicago, New York, and Fargo, ND, where grounded and practical work of a fundamentally feminist nature challenges us to build networks of connection and care.
The work of environmental artists who venture into and transform these disconnected sites of infrastructure allow us to rethink how to manage the enormous amount of existing overlooked and abused space. Loving Orphaned Space provides new ways humans can negotiate being better citizens of Earth.
Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage is an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between the study and management of physical sites and the reproduction of intangible cultural legacies. The volume provides nine case studies that explore different ways in which place is mediated by social, political, and ecological processes that have deep historical roots and that continue to affect the politics of heritage management.
Spaces of human habitation are both historical records of the past and key elements in reproducing the knowledge and values that define lives in the present. Practices, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as part of their culture—and that a range of legal statutes define as protected intangible heritages—are threatened by increased migration, the displacement of indigenous peoples, and limits on access to culturally or historically significant sites. This volume addresses how different physical environments contribute to the reproduction of cultural forms even in the wake of these processes of displacement and change. Case studies from North and South America reveal a pattern of abandonment and reestablishment of settlements and show how collective memory drives people back to culturally meaningful sites.
This tendency for communities to return to the sites that shaped their collective histories, along with the growing importance granted to intangible heritage, challenges archaeologists and other heritage workers to find new ways of incorporating the cultural legacies that link societies to place into the work of research and stewardship. By examining the politics of cultural continuity through the lenses of archaeology and ethnohistory, Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage demonstrates this complex relationship between a people’s heritage and the landscape that affects the making of "place."
Contributors: Rani Alexander, Hannah Becker, Minette Church, Bonnie Clark, Chip Colwell, Winifred Creamer, Emiliana Cruz, T. J. Ferguson, Julio Hoil Gutierrez, Jonathan Haas, Saul Hedquist, Maren Hopkins, Stuart B. Koyiyumptewa, Christine Kray, Henry Marcelo Castillo, Anna Roosevelt, Jason Yaeger, Keiko Yoneda
Geographer Conrad Bahre now challenges the view that these vegetation changes are due to climatic change. Correlating his own field research with archival records and photographs, Bahre demonstrates that most of the changes follow some type of human disturbance, such as cattle grazing, fuelwood cutting, wildfire suppression, agriculture, and road construction. Indeed, all available evidence suggests that Anglo settlement brought unprecedented changes to the land.
Vegetation change in the American West has long been an issue of concern. This careful scrutiny of one corner of that region—one of the most ecologically diverse areas of the United States—shows how poorly understood is the relationship between human activities and vegetation. More important, it introduces new techniques for differentiating between natural and anthropogenic factors effecting vegetation change that can be used to help ecologists understand vegetation dynamics worldwide.
Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism--is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer.
Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature.
In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living."
We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters.
So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformative over and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.
In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
Alison Jolly believes that biologists have an important story to tell about being human—not the all-too-familiar tale of selfishness, competition, and biology as destiny but rather one of cooperation and interdependence, from the first merging of molecules to the rise of a species inextricably linked by language, culture, and group living. This is the story that unfolds in Lucy’s Legacy, the saga of human evolution as told by a world-renowned primatologist who works among the female-dominant ringtailed lemurs of Madagascar.
We cannot be certain that Lucy was female—the bones themselves do not tell us. However, we do know, as Jolly points out in this erudite, funny, and informative book, that the females who came after Lucy—more adept than their males in verbal facility, sharing food, forging links between generations, migrating among places and groups, and devising creative mating strategies—played as crucial a role in the human evolutionary process as “man” ever did. In a book that takes us from the first cell to global society, Jolly shows us that to learn where we came from and where we go next, we need to understand how sex and intelligence, cooperation and love, emerged from the harsh Darwinian struggle in the past, and how these natural powers may continue to evolve in the future.
Case studies from the New and Old Worlds—including historic California, medieval Iceland, ancient Mesoamerica, ancient Nubia, colonial El Salvador, the prehistoric Levant, pre-Columbian Amazon, Africa’s historic central Sahel, and ancient Peru—offer novel perspectives on how borderland societies adapted to the unique human and natural environments of these liminal spaces. Contributors draw on archaeological evidence as well as historical documents and linguistic data to facilitate the documentation of local histories and the strategies employed by communities living in or near ancient states and empires.
This close study of groups on the margins shows that peripheral polities are not simply the by-products of complexity emanating from a political core and demonstrates that traditional assumptions and models need to be reconsidered.
Contributors:
Tara D. Carter, Mikael Fauvelle, Elena A.A. Garcea, Esteban Gomez, Scott MacEachern, Claire Novotny, Bradley J Parker, Erin Smith, John H. Walker
For roughly 99% of their existence on earth, Homo sapiens lived in small bands of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, finding everything they needed to survive and thrive in the biological richness that surrounded them. Most if not all of the problems that threaten our own technologically advanced society -- from depletion of natural capital to the ever-present possibility of global annihilation -- would be inconceivable to these traditional, immediate-return societies. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies appear to have solved problems of production, distribution, and social and environmental sustainability that our own culture seems incapable of addressing.
Limited Wants, Unlimited Means examines the hunter-gatherer society and lifestyle from a variety of perspectives. It provides a brief introduction to the rich anthropological and sociological literature on non-agricultural societies, bringing together in one volume seminal writings on the few remaining hunter-gatherer cultures including, the !Kung, the Hadza, and the Aborigines. It examines the economics of traditional societies, and concludes with a multifaceted investigation of how such societies function and what they can teach us in our own quest for environmental sustainability and social equality.
Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is an important work for students of cultural anthropology, economic anthropology, environmental studies, and sustainable development, as well as for professionals, researchers, and anyone interested in prehistoric societies, environmental sustainability, or social justice.
Focusing on economic actors—whether ordinary consumers or financial experts—Guyer traces how people and institutions hold together past experiences (legacies), imagined scenarios and models (logics), and situational challenges (logistics) in a way that makes the performance of economic life (on platforms made of these legacies, logics, and logistics) work in practice. Individual essays explore a number of topics—including time frames and the future, the use of percentages in observations and judgments, the explanation of prices, the coexistence of different world currencies, the reapplication of longtime economic theories in new settings, and, crucially, how we talk about the economy, how we use stable terms to describe a turbulent system. Valuable as standalone pieces, the essays build into a cogent method of economic anthropology.
Relationships with land are fundamental components of Indigenous worldviews, politics, and identity. The disruption of land relations is a defining feature of colonialism; colonial governments and capitalist industries have violently dispossessed Indigenous lands, and have undermined Indigenous political authority through the production of racialized and gendered hierarchies of difference. Consequently, Indigenous resistance and visions for justice and liberation are bound up with land and land-body relationships that challenge colonial power. “Land back” has become a slogan for Indigenous land protectors across the Americas, reflecting how relations to land are foundational to calls for decolonization and liberation.
Land Back highlights the ways Indigenous peoples and anti-colonial co-resistors understand land relations for political resurgence and freedom across the Americas. Contributors place Indigenous practices of freedom within the particularities of Indigenous place-based laws, cosmologies, and diplomacies, while also demonstrating how Indigeneity is shaped across colonial borders. Collectively, they examine the relationships among language, Indigenous ontologies, and land reclamation; Indigenous ecology and restoration; the interconnectivity of environmental exploitation and racial, class, and gender exploitation; Indigenous diasporic movement; community urban planning; transnational organizing and relational anti-racist place-making; and the role of storytelling and children in movements for liberation.
Rural Appalachians in Kentucky call it "The Kentucky Way"—making a living by doing many kinds of paid and unpaid work and sharing their resources within extended family networks. In fact, these strategies are practiced by rural people in many parts of the world, but they have not been studied extensively in the United States. In The Livelihood of Kin, Rhoda Halperin undertakes a detailed exploration of this complex, family-oriented economy, showing how it promotes economic well-being and a sense of identity for the people who follow it.
Using actual life and work histories, Halperin shows how people make a living "in between" the cash economy of the city and the agricultural subsistence economy of the country. In regionally based, three-generation kin networks, family members work individually and jointly at many tasks: small-scale agricultural production, food processing and storage, odd jobs, selling used and new goods in marketplaces, and wage labor, much of which is temporary. People can make ends meet even in the face of job layoffs and declining crop subsidies. With these strategies people win a considerable degree of autonomy and control over their lives.
Halperin also examines how such multiple livelihood strategies define individual identity by emphasizing a person’s role in the family network over an occupation. She reveals, through psychiatric case histories, what damage can result when individuals leave the family network for wage employment in the cities, as increasing urbanization has forced many people to do.
While certainly of interest to scholars of Appalachian studies, this lively and readable study will also be important for economic anthropologists and urban and rural sociologists.
Cairo is a city obsessed with honor and respectability—and love affairs. Sara, a working-class woman, has an affair with a married man and becomes pregnant, only to be abandoned by him; Ayah and Zeid, a respectably engaged couple, argue over whether Ayah’s friend is a prostitute or a virgin; Malak, a European belly dancer who sometimes gets paid for sex, wants to be loved by a man who won’t treat her like a whore just because she’s a dancer; and Alia, a Christian banker who left her abusive husband, is the mistress of a wealthy Muslim man, Haroun, who encourages business by hosting risqué parties for other men and their mistresses.
Set in transnational Cairo over two decades, Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt is an ethnography that explores female respectability, male honor, and Western theories and fantasies about Arab society. L. L. Wynn uses stories of love affairs to interrogate three areas of classic anthropological theory: mimesis, kinship, and gift. She develops a broad picture of how individuals love and desire within a cultural and political system that structures the possibilities of, and penalties for, going against sexual and gender norms. Wynn demonstrates that love is at once a moral horizon, an attribute that “naturally” inheres in particular social relations, a social phenomenon strengthened through cultural concepts of gift and kinship, and an emotion deeply felt and desired by individuals.
In Labor's Lot, Povinelli shows how everyday activities shape Aboriginal identity and provide cultural meaning. She focuses on the Belyuen women's interactions with the countryside and on Belyuen conflicts with the Australian government over control of local land. Her analysis raises serious questions about the validity of Western theories about labor and culture and their impact on Aboriginal society.
Povinelli's focus on women's activities provides an important counterpoint to recent works centering on male roles in hunter-gatherer societies. Her unique "cultural economy" approach overcomes the dichotomy between the two standard approaches to these studies. Labor's Lot will engage anyone interested in indigenous peoples or in the relationship between culture and economy in contemporary social practice.
is arguably the single most important Middle Pleistocene
archaeological site in Europe. Here the deposits contain not
only prehistoric artifacts but also extraordinary records of
fossil flora and fauna, making Hoxne one of the few
paleolithic sites where early hominid materials can be found
with other types of information in their primary contexts.
Much controversy has surrounded the interpretation of
these prehistoric materials and their stratigraphic position
since John Frere published the first account of the site in
1797. Seeking to resolve some of the disputes, a team from
the University of Chicago began in 1971 the most extensive
series of excavations yet undertaken. This profusely
illustrated volume presents the results of the team's five
summers of excavations, which ended in 1978, and includes
contributions by twelve specialists who represent many
branches of Quaternary science. Although some uncertainty
remains on various minor questions, this will stand for many
years to come as the definitive study of Hoxne's
archaeological and geochronological significance.
Ronald Singer is the Robert R. Bensley Professor in the
Departments of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of
Chicago. Bruce G. Gladfelter is associate professor in the
Department of Geography at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. John Wymer, a self-employed archaeologist, has been
a field officer with the Norfolk Archaeological Unit and the
Essex Archaeological Unit.
Debitage, the by-product flakes and chips from stone tool production, is the most abundant artifact type in prehistoric archaeological sites. For much of the period in which archaeology has employed scientific methodology, debitage has been discarded or ignored as debris. Now archaeologists have begun to recognize its potential to provide information about the kinds of tools produced and the characteristics of the technology being employed. Debitage can even provide clues regarding human organizational systems such as settlement mobility and site functions.
This volume brings together some of the most recent research on debitage analysis and interpretation. It presents stone tool production experiments and offers detailed archaeological investigations for interpreting variability at the individual and collective levels. Although there are a number of volumes that focus on general analysis of lithic artifacts, this is the first volume to address debitage and should be of use to a wide range of archaeological researchers.
Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field’s history and major terms to theories, interpretive approaches, and fieldwork.
Many teachers of undergraduates find the available folklore textbooks too complex or unwieldy for an introductory level course. It is precisely this criticism that Living Folklore addresses; while comprehensive and rigorous, the book is specifically intended to meet the needs of those students who are just beginning their study of the discipline. Its real strength lies in how it combines carefully articulated foundational concepts with relevant examples and a student-oriented teaching philosophy.
Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field's history and major terms to theories and interpretive approaches.
Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications, and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication.
This revised edition incorporates new examples, research, and theory along with added discussion of digital and online folklore.
Drawing on Bahktinian and feminist theory, Sawin pushes forward our understanding of the interactive roles of ethnographer and subject and in the process gives us a deeper understanding of folk singer and storyteller Bessie Eldreth and her greatest art, herself.
Joe Wilson (1938-2015), a native of rural East Tennessee, was a civil rights activist, self-educated scholar, founder/administrator of nationally important roots music enterprises, and was legendary for his colorful writing and opinions. Lucky Joe’s Namesake, a companion to Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson (also published by the University of Tennessee Press), brings us Wilson’s life and observations, mostly in his own words.
From humble mountain beginnings, Wilson’s career progressed through Nashville, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; and New York City, before settling him for twenty-eight years near the seats of power in Washington, D.C. as the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. In that role, he developed a national model for folk festival presentations, stalked the halls of federal representatives seeking support for traditional artists, and filled concert venues throughout the world with audiences eager to experience the work of master folk musicians. A powerful advocate on behalf of agrarian values, social justice, artistic authenticity, and cultural democracy, Joe wrote in an engaging, humorous, and memorable style.
This eclectic anthology is filled with Joe Wilson’s brilliant published writing for magazines, books, and newspapers as well as privately circulated unpublished works, including an extended autobiographical essay. Readers are sure to benefit from Wilson’s lessons and artful ruminations culled from a lifetime of devotion to music and cultural and social activism.
Joseph Sobol is one of a select few contemporary scholar-practitioners to chart the evolution of storytelling from traditional foundations to its current multifarious presence in American life. The years since his classic The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival (1999), have brought seismic shifts in storytelling circles. Essays gathered here move between cultural history, critical analysis, and personal narratives to showcase the efforts of traditional and contemporary storytellers to make their presence felt in the world.
The book begins with an account of recent changes in the storytelling landscape, including the growth of a new generation of urban personal storytelling venues sparked by The Moth. Next is a suite of essays on Appalachian Jack tales, the best-known cycle of traditional American wonder tales, and an account of its most celebrated practitioners, including close encounters with the traditional master, Ray Hicks. The next set examines frames through which storytellers capture truth—historical, legendary, literary, oral traditional, and personal. Stylistic differences between northern and southern tellers are affectionately portrayed, with a special look at the late, much-loved Alabaman Kathryn Tucker Windham.
The final section makes the case for informed critical writing on storytelling performance, through a survey of notable contemporary storytellers’ work, a look at the ethics of storytelling genres, and a nuanced probe of truth and fiction in storytelling settings. A tapestry of personal stories, social criticism, and artistic illuminations, Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers is valuable not only to scholars and students in performance, folklore, cultural studies, and theater, but also to general readers with a love for the storytelling art.
This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon—a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative—as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities.
Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to “unfinished narratives,” those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective—part humanities, part social science—their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.
Following versions of the tale by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the essays by an international group of scholars provide an impressive cross-section of theoretical approaches.
The volume presents both insightful research and useful pedagogy, making this an invaluable resource in the classroom. Selected major articles on legend tripping, with introductory sections written by the editors, are followed by discussion questions and projects designed to inspire readers to engage critically with legend traditions and customs of legend tripping and to explore possible meanings and symbolics at work. Suggested projects incorporate digital technology as it appears both in legends and in modes of legend tripping.
Legend Tripping is appropriate for students, general readers, and folklorists alike. It is the first volume in the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research series, a set of casebooks providing thorough and up-to-date studies that showcase a variety of scholarly approaches to contemporary legends, along with variants of legend texts, discussion questions, and projects for students.
Contributors: S. Elizabeth Bird, Bill Ellis, Carl Lindahl, Patricia M. Meley, Tim Prizer
Most of Richard Dorson’s thirty years as folklorist have been spent collecting tales and legends in the remote backcountry, far from the centers of population. For this book he extended his search for folk traditions to one of the most heavily industrialized sections of the United States. Can folklore be found, he wondered, in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana? Does it exist among the steelworkers, ethnic groups, and blacks in Gary, Whiting, East Chicago, and Hammond?
In his usual entertaining style, Dorson shows that a rich and varied folklore exists in the region. Although it differs from that of rural people, it is equally vital. Much of this urban lore finds expression in conversational anecdotes and stories that deal with pressing issues: the flight from the inner city, crime in the streets, working conditions in the steel mills, the maintenance of ethnic identity, the place of blacks in a predominantly white society. The folklore reveals strongly held attitudes such as the loathing of industrial work, resistance to assimilation, and black adoption of middle-class-white values.
Millworkers and mill executives, housewives, ethnic performers, storekeepers, and preachers tell their stories about the region. The concerns that occupy them affect city dwellers throughout the United States. Land of the Millrats, though it depicts a special place, speaks for much of America.
Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces.
Ladies and Gents consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations," discusses public toilets as spaces of representation and representational spaces, with reference to architectural design, humor, film, theater, art, and popular culture. Compelling visual materials and original artwork are included throughout, depicting subjects as varied as female urinals, art installations sited in public restrooms, and the toilet in contemporary art.
Taken together, these seventeen essays demonstrate that public toilets are often sites where gendered bodies compete for resources and recognition—and the stakes are high.
Contributors include: Nathan Abrams, Jami L. Anderson, Johan Andersson, Kathryn H. Anthony, Kathy Battista, Andrew Brown-May, Ben Campkin, Meghan Dufresne, Peg Fraser, Deborah Gans, Clara Greed, Robin Lydenberg, Claudia Mitchell, Alison Moore, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Bushra Rehman, Alex Schweder, Naomi Stead, and the editors.
It is a fact that architecture "began with the tomb", yet, as Ken Worpole shows us in Last Landscapes, many historic cemeteries have been demolished or abandoned in recent times (notably the case with Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe), and there has been an increasing loss of inscription and memorialization in the modern urban cemetery. Too often cemeteries today are both poorly designed and physically and culturally marginalized. Worse, cremation denies a full architectural response to the mystery and solemnity of death.
The author explores how modes of disposal – burial, cremation, inhumation in mausoleums and wall tombs – vary across Europe and North America, according to religious and other cultural influences. And Last Landscapes raises profound questions as to how, in an age of mass cremation, architects and landscape designers might create meaningful structures and settings in the absence of a body, since for most of history the human body itself has provided the fundamental structural scale. This evocative book also contemplates other forms of memorialization within modern societies, from sculptures to parks, most notably the extraordinary Duisberg Park, set in a former giant steelworks in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.
In addition to the editors, the contributors include Andrea Brady, Catherine Kellogg, Shai Lavi, Ray Madoff, Ann Pelligrini, and Mark Sanders.
“Even with the all the hard work, we had more time (perhaps we took more time) to enjoy what was all around us: nights filled with starlight, days with clear blue skies and puffy clouds. Wonderful smells everywhere—fresh mown hay, wildflowers, and apple blossoms. Interesting sounds—the rumble of distant thunder, an owl calling in the woods, a flock of Canada geese winging over in the fall.”
In this paperback edition of a beloved Jerry Apps classic, the rural historian tells stories from his childhood days on a small central Wisconsin dairy farm in the 1930s and 1950s. From a January morning memory of pancakes piled high after chores, to a June day spent learning to ride a pony named Ginger, Jerry moves through the turn of the seasons and teaches gentle lessons about life on the farm. With recipes associated with each month and a new introduction exclusive to this 2nd edition, Living a Country Year celebrates the rhythms of rural life with warmth and humor.
Noted photographer E. A. Kennedy spent four years documenting the Mummers and their parade. He has personally selected the striking images included here -- more than 150 in all -- and he has written an engaging history of the parade itself. As Kennedy explains, and as his photos make clear, "mummery" is a way of life for Mummers, who have deep attachments to their clubs, associations, and brigades.
For all its glitz, the Mummers Parade remains a folk parade. This is the captivating story of the folks behind the parade.
The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in U.S. culture. Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, Laboring to Play interrogates the ways that leisure performances (such as parlor games, charades, home dramas, and tableaux vivants) encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles.
From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of performing displays of individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction.
Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.
Sport is deeply embedded in human nature and culture, and it is central to human well-being. Outdoor sport and physical exercise have had considerable impact on how we design, live in, and understand landscapes. Landscapes and environments have, in turn, contributed to the formation and development of new sport activities as well as cultures of movement and the body. How have perceptions and politics of the body played a role in the evolution of different landscapes for sport? What do they tell us about their inherent culture and use, and how do landscapes for sport embody constructions of race, gender, and place? What are the interrelationships between more and less agonistic sport and body cultures, their politics, and the sites and spaces that accommodate them?
Landscapes for Sport explores these intersections from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world. They focus on outdoor spaces that have been designed, built, and used for physical exercise and various competitive and non-competitive sports since the early modern period. Frequently overlooked and taken for granted, these landscapes for sport often constitute significant areas of open space in and outside our cities. This volume uncovers their relevance and meanings.
The Polo Grounds was the home of the New York Giants from John McGraw and Christy Mathewson to Carl Hubbell and Mel Ott to Willie Mays and Leo Durocher. It was also home to the Yankees when Babe Ruth's home run production was soaring (which led to "the House that Ruth built") and home to the Mets in their painful early years.
From "Merkle's Boner," which cost the New York Giants a pennant, to Bobby Thomson's homer, which won them one, Stew Thornley retells the legendary events of the park and its legendary personalities. He reveals little-known facts too:
When the championship Giants and Yankees played in the 1921 and 1922 World Series, it
wasn't a "subway series," because the two teams shared the same ballpark.
The team Bays was playing for when he hit his firstd home run in the Polo Grounds was
not the Giants, but the Birmingham Black Barons. The Polo Grounds was also the site for
the Negro World Series games in 1946 and 1947.
Fans cherish not only the historic moments and team traditions of these stadiums, but treasure their physical peculiarities. Like the "Green Monster" at Fenway Park, the unusual horseshoe shape of the Polo Grounds made the park a special place to play. Stew Thornley analyzes the effect of the very short porches along the foul lines and of a cavernous center field on home run production and hitting in general.
Baseball wasn't the only sport played in the Polo Grounds. The footbal Giants played here from 1925 to 1955, but the stadium was better known for some of the great college games, including the 1924 Army-Notre Dame game in which the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame were christened. Numerous boxing title bouts were held at the Polo Grounds, and it also hosted tennis, rodeo, midget auto racing, outdoor opera, ice skating, and religious rallies.
Children love to play in risky—often misunderstood to mean unsafe—ways. It is often how they learn. Research shows that activities like climbing on trees and boulders, hiking in nature, and playing in a creek are excellent ways for kids to develop their creativity and their senses, because playing outdoors evokes different sights, sounds, smells, and textures.
Letting Play Bloom analyzes five outstanding case studies of children’s nature-based risky play spaces—the Slide Hill at Governors Island in New York, the Berkeley (CA) Adventure Playground, and Wildwoods at Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, as well as sites in the Netherlands and Australia. Author Lolly Tai provides detailed explanations of their background and design, and what visitors can experience at each site.
She also outlines the six categories of risky—not hazardous—play, which involve great heights, rapid speeds, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and wandering or getting lost. These activities allow children to explore and challenge themselves (testing their limits) to foster greater self-worth while also learning valuable risk-management skills such as dealing with fear-inducing situations.
Filled with more than 200 photographs, Letting Play Bloom advocates for a thoughtful landscape design process that incorporates the specific considerations children need to fully experience the thrill that comes from playing in nature.
As Americans, we believe there ought to be a level playing field for everyone. Even if we don’t expect to finish first, we do expect a fair start. Only in sports have African Americans actually found that elusive level ground. But at the same time, black players offer an ironic perspective on the athlete-hero, for they represent a group historically held to be without social honor.
In his first new collection of sports essays since Tuxedo Junction (1989), the noted cultural critic Gerald Early investigates these contradictions as they play out in the sports world and in our deeper attitudes toward the athletes we glorify. Early addresses a half-century of heated cultural issues ranging from integration to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Writing about Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, he reconstructs pivotal moments in their lives and explains how the culture, politics, and economics of sport turned with them. Taking on the subtexts, racial and otherwise, of the controversy over remarks Rush Limbaugh made about quarterback Donovan McNabb, Early restores the political consequence to an event most commentators at the time approached with predictable bluster.
The essays in this book circle around two perennial questions: What other, invisible contests unfold when we watch a sporting event? What desires and anxieties are encoded in our worship of (or disdain for) high-performance athletes?
These essays are based on the Alain Locke lectures at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute.
Triumphant wins, gut-wrenching losses, last-second shots, underdogs, competition, and loyalty—it’s fun to be a fan. But when a football player takes a hit to the head after yet another study has warned of the dangers of CTE, or when a team whose mascot was born in an era of racism and bigotry takes the field, or when a relief pitcher accused of domestic violence saves the game, how is one to cheer? Welcome to the club for sports fans who care too much.
In Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, acclaimed sports writers Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson tackle the most pressing issues in sports, why they matter, and how we can do better. For the authors, “sticking to sports” is not an option—not when our taxes are paying for the stadiums, and college athletes aren’t getting paid at all. But simply quitting a favorite team won’t change corrupt and deplorable practices, and the root causes of many of these problems are endemic in our wider society. An essential read for modern fans, Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back challenges the status quo and explores how we might begin to reconcile our conscience with our fandom.
While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, 26-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge’s order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.
Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports. Kuhn claimed that allowing women into locker rooms would violate his players’ “sexual privacy.” Late-night television comedy sketches mocked her as newspaper cartoonists portrayed her as a sexy, buxom looker who wanted to ogle the naked athletes’ bodies. She weaves these public perspectives throughout her vivid depiction of the court drama overseen by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal bench. She recounts how her lawyer, F.A.O. “Fritz” Schwarz employed an ingenious legal strategy that persuaded Judge Motley to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in giving Ludtke access identical to her male counterparts. Locker Room Talk is both an inspiring story of one woman’s determination to do a job dominated by men and an illuminating portrait of a defining moment for women’s rights.
Part crusader, part comedian, Jim Murray was a once-in-a-generation literary talent who just happened to ply his trade on newsprint, right near the box scores and race results. During his lifetime, Murray rose through the ranks of journalism, from hard-bitten 1940s crime reporter, to national Hollywood correspondent, to the top sports columnist in the United States. In Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray, Ted Geltner chronicles Jim Murray’s experiences with twentieth-century American sports, culture, and journalism.
With sure-footed and swift-moving prose, Sam Jefferies tells Geoffrion’s story against the backdrop of modern North American hockey. Thorough research and scores of interviews fuel this tale of soaring success and terrible tragedy, offering insight not only into one man’s athletic journey but also into the rise of American hockey on the national and international stage. Geoffrion’s brief career, marked by tribulation and triumph, illustrates the subtle but omnipresent currents of American media, sports labor, and the interplay between college and professional athletics. It tells the story of what was, what is, and what may yet be for the fastest game on earth.
The origins of baseball are controversial. James A. Vlasich discusses the debates between two men intimately involved in nineteenth-century baseball, Henry Chadwick and Albert G. Spalding. Abner Graves of the Mills Commission claimed that Abner Doubleday had invented the game and he had done it in Cooperstown, New York. This claim was scrutinized at the time but the myth became etched into baseball history.
Through the years, however, some critics have questioned the Mills Commission report. The problem is that the Baseball Hall of Fame is built on this shaky foundation. The lack of diligence on the part of Spalding’s self-appointed committee has led to a credibility gap for the baseball shrine that continues a half century after its dedication. Indeed, the story of the building of the Baseball Hall of Fame is filled with intrigue worthy of a political thriller.
Farred shows that issues like race, politics, and war are critical to understanding a sport, especially soccer. And he writes beautifully, with candor and lyricism. Long Distance Love does for soccer what C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary did for cricket: it provides poetry and politics in equal measure, along with insights on every page.
No one is better equipped to tell this story than novelist and historian Elizabeth Wilson. With a penchant for tennis’s inherent drama, she finds its core: a psychological face off between flamboyant personalities navigating the ebbs and flows of fortune in the confines of a 78 x 36–foot box—whether of clay, grass, or DecoTurf. Walking the finely kempt lawns of Victorian England, she shows how tennis’s early role as a social pastime that included both men and women—and thus, lots of sexual tension—set it apart from most other sports and their dominant masculine appeal. Even today, when power and endurance are more important than ever, tennis still demands that the body behave gracefully and with finesse. In this way, Wilson shows, tennis has retained the vibrant spectacle of human drama and beauty that have always made it special, not just to sports fans but to popular culture.
Telling the stories of all the greats, from the Renshaw brothers to Novak Djokovic, and of all the advances, from wooden racquets to network television schedules, Wilson offers a tennis book like no other, keeping the court square in our sights as history is illuminated around it.
Under legendary and beloved coach John Walsh, the most successful coach in the history of American collegiate boxing, University of Wisconsin boxers won eight NCAA team championships and thirty-eight individual titles from 1933 to 1960. Badger boxers included heroes like Woody Swancutt, who later helped initiate the Strategic Air Command, and rogues like Sidney Korshak, later the most feared mob attorney in the United States. A young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay also boxed in the Wisconsin Field House during this dazzling era.
But in April 1960, collegiate boxing was forever changed when Charlie Mohr— Wisconsin’s finest and most popular boxer, an Olympic team prospect—slipped into a coma after an NCAA tournament bout in Madison. Suddenly, not just Mohr’s life but the entire sport of college boxing was in peril. It was to be the last NCAA boxing tournament ever held. Lords of the Ring tells the whole extraordinary story of boxing at the University of Wisconsin, based on dozens of interviews and extensive examination of newspaper microfilm, boxing records and memorabilia.
Chips, cards, and a table.
The riddles insightful,
the future, unstable! What is it?
It's Lotería, the Mexican game of chance! For the uninitiated, it might seem like bingo played with a riddling tarot deck. But this enthralling board game is more than entertainment. The images found on its cards—La Virgen, El Pan Dulce, La Telenovela—are miniature reflections of an entire culture, capturing the joys and sorrows of the Mexican people.
Wildly popular on both sides of the border, Lotería cards originated in the Iberian peninsula in the eighteenth century but have been redesigned so many times as to defy expectation, with boards devoted to ecclesiastical figures, soccer idols, and even vaudeville starlets. With the dawn of a new millennium, American artist Teresa Villegas created a new Lotería set that is already gaining popularity in Mexico, and her striking images are also widely exhibited in galleries across the United States.
This gift book, which will bring pleasure and bewilderment to children and adults alike, reproduces more than two dozen of Villegas's 54 colorful cards, pairing them with insightful, humorous riddles written by award-winning author Ilan Stavans. Stavans also revisits his childhood in an essay that examines the role of luck in Mexican life and recreates the sort of poetry jam that often accompanies Lotería contests wherever they might take place. Delve into the emblematic pages of this marvelous volume to find your own Calavera. Let yourself unravel the paths of El Deseo and the mysteries of El Corazón. Before too long, you'll realize that luck is never truly accidental—for a turn at ¡Lotería! is always an opportunity to come face to face with El Destino.
The first history begins in colonial Singapore in the 1880s, when British administrators revised gambling laws in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates. Following the tracks of these punitive laws and practices, the book moves into the 1960s when the newly independent city-state created a national lottery while criminalizing both organized and petty gambling in the name of nation-building. The second history shifts the focus to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s when digital technology and corporate management practices found each other on the casino floor. Tracing the emergence of the specialist casino designer, the book reveals how casino development evolved into a highly rationalized spatial template designed to maximize profits. Today an iconic landmark of Singapore, Marina Bay Sands is also an artifact of these two histories, an attempt by Singapore to normalize what was once criminalized in its nationalist history.
Lee Kah-Wee argues that the historical project of the control of vice is also about the control of space and capital. The result is an uneven landscape where the legal and moral status of gambling is contingent on where it is located. As the current wave of casino expansion spreads across Asia, he warns that these developments should not be seen as liberalization but instead as a continuation of the project of concentrating power by modern states and corporations.
Her movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before—and this is the story of how it all works. A founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar is Hay’s account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained dancers became the human laboratory for Hay’s creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar. In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be. She includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance’s four-month emergence.
In an original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the movements—precise and mysterious, mental and physical—that go into the making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional, psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.
Barnum deliberately cultivated his ambiguous public image through a lifelong advertising campaign, shrewdly exploiting the cultural and technological capabilities of the new publishing industry. While running his numerous shows and exhibitions, Barnum managed to publish newspaper articles, exposés of fraud (not his own), self-help tracts, and a series of best-selling autobiographies, each promising to give "the true history of my many adventures."
Updated editions of The Life of P. T. Barnum appeared regularly, allowing Barnum to keep up with demand and prune the narrative of details that might offend posterity. The present volume is the first modern edition of Barnum's original and outrageous autobiography, published in 1855 and unavailable for more than a century. Brazen, confessional, and immensely entertaining, it immortalizes the showman who hoodwinked customers into paying to hear the reminiscences of a woman presented as George Washington's 161-year-old nurse, the impresario who brought Jenny Lind to America and toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, and the grand entrepreneur of the American Museum of New York. Above all, it ensures that Barnum would be properly remembered . . . exactly as he created himself.
The story of the park's creation and wild, but brief, success is full of larger-than-life characters who hoped to thrill attendees and rake in profits. Stephen R. Wilk describes the planning and history of the park, which featured early roller coasters, a scenic railway, a central lagoon in which a Shoot-the-Chutes boat plunged, an aerial swing, a funhouse, and more. Performances ran throughout the day, including a daring Fires and Flames show; a Wild West show; a children's theater; and numerous circus acts. While nothing remains of what was once called "Boston's Regal Home of Pleasure" and the park would close in 1910, this book resurrects Wonderland by transporting readers through its magical gates.
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