The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. Its four sections explore topics ranging from family life to market trading, from informal socializing to forms of religious devotion. Uniting these topics are an emphasis on the role folklore and personal narrative play in helping individuals situate themselves in and create communities and social groups, and a focus on how men’s concerns to advance themselves in an agonistic world of status competition shape social life in Uyghur communities.
The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice. In virtually every aspect of their daily lives, individuals and families are drawn into dense and overlapping networks of social relationships, united by a shared engagement with the place of men’s status competition within daily life in the community.
An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.
In Down on Mahans Creek, Benjamin Rader provides a fascinating look at a neighborhood in the Missouri Ozarks from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He explores the many ways in which Mahans Creek, though remote, was never completely isolated or self-sufficient. The residents were deeply affected by the Civil War, and the arrival of the railroad and the timber boom in the 1890s propelled the community into modern times, creating a more fast-paced and consumer-oriented way of life and a new moral sensibility. During the Great Depression the creek’s residents returned to some of the older values for survival. After World War II, modern technology changed their lives again, causing a movement away from the countryside and to the nearby small towns.
Down on Mahans Creek tells the dynamic story of this distinctive neighborhood navigating the push and pull of the old and new ways of life.
Summer visitors and year-round residents alike are sure to discover Jersey Shore lore that captures their fancy in this entertaining account of the people, places, and events that have shaped New Jersey’s famous shoreline.
From ghost stories and the comic misadventures of the early Miss America Pageant to the dynamics of the changing coastline and poignant portraits of traditional crafts workers, Russell Roberts and Rich Youmans have chronicled the fascinating history and heritage of the New Jersey Shore. In this book you’ll meet the luminaries who’ve frequented the Shore—from President Ulysses Grant strolling through Long Branch to Grace Kelly learning to surf at Ocean City. You’ll find out why the boardwalk was invented, and also why early ones were removable. Join the authors as they pay tribute to the Shore’s forgotten inventors, including Simon Lake, who some consider the true father of the modern submarine. Relive the Jersey Shore’s role in wartime and learn the story of the mysterious Nazi submarine sunken off of Point Pleasant Beach. Read about Lucy the Margate Elephant, as a well as her two long-gone “cousins.”
Discover all this and more as Roberts and Youmans explore the vast uncharted heritage of the New Jersey Shore.
Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, technological innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of the satellite industry. Satellite projects that have not received extensive coverage—microsatellites in China, WorldSpace in South Africa, SiriusXM, the failures of USA 193 and Cosmos 954, and Iridium—are explored. This collection takes readers on a voyage through a truly global industry, from the sites where satellites are launched to the corporate clean rooms where they are designed, and along the orbits and paths that satellites traverse. Combining a practical introduction to the mechanics of the satellite industry, a history of how its practices and technologies have evolved, and a sophisticated theoretical analysis of satellite cultures, Down to Earth opens up a new space for global media studies.
Originally published in 1961, this shrewd, smartly written novel follows two American men traveling in Europe. Though both have struck out for the same continent, each man’s methods of and motives for travel lead him to have a very different experience than the other. Underlying it all is the premise that Europe--the contrast, the otherness of it--can be a refiner’s fire, deeply affecting a person’s character. Europe represents a crucial step in Stern’s development as a writer and stands as a witty, sharp point of entry into his writings and the writings of novelists who rose to prominence in the 1960s.
Perry McDonough Collins was the first American to journey through Siberia and down the 2,690-mile Amur River to the Pacific Ocean. In 1860 he wrote A Voyage Down the Amoor, an account of his adventures, and his book proved so popular that it was reissued in 1864. Siberian Journey consists of Collins’s original text framed by an interpretive introduction and explanatory notes by Charles Vevier, providing an extensive, first-hand account of Russia’s land and its people in the mid–nineteenth century.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press