One of the most important theologians of the modern era, Karl Rahner is best known for his efforts to make Christianity credible in light of the intellectual questions of modern culture. Stephen M. Fields, SJ, now explains how Rahner developed his metaphysics as a creative synthesis of Thomism and the modern philosophical tradition. Focusing on Rahner's core concept of the Realsymbol, which posits all beings as symbolic, Fields establishes the place of the Realsymbol in philosophical theories of the symbol. He particularly concentrates on those key aspects of Rahner's metaphysics-his theories of finite realities and language—that have received insufficient attention.

By examining a wide range of Rahner's works in the context of twelve medieval, modern, and contemporary thinkers, Fields locates the origins of this seminal thinker's metaphysics to an extent never before attempted. He notes the correlations that exist between the Realsymbol and such work as Aquinas's theory of the sacraments, Goethe's and Hegel's dialectics, Moehler's view of religious language, and Heidegger's aesthetics.

Through this analysis, Fields reveals the structural core of Rahner's metaphysics and shows how art, language, knowledge, religious truth, and reality in general are all symbolic. Being as Symbol opens new perspectives on this important thinker and positions him in the broader spectrum of philosophical thought.

The 1911 revolution in China sparked debates that politicized and divided Chinese communities in the United States. People in these communities affirmed traditional Chinese values and expressed their visions of a modern China, while nationalist feelings emboldened them to stand up for their rights as an integral part of American society. When Japan threatened the China's young republic, the Chinese response in the United States revealed the limits of Chinese nationalism and the emergence of a Chinese American identity. 

Shehong Chen investigates how Chinese immigrants to the United States transformed themselves into Chinese Americans during the crucial period between 1911 and 1927. Chen focuses on four essential elements of a distinct Chinese American identity: support for republicanism over the restoration of monarchy; a wish to preserve Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture; support for Christianity, despite a strong anti-Christian movement in China; and opposition to the Nationalist party's alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party. 

Sensitive and enlightening, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American documents how Chinese immigrants survived exclusion and discrimination, envisioned and maintained Chineseness, and adapted to American society.

We live at a time of unparallelled environmental and moral crisis. Not only do we not believe anything but, despite exponential advances in information production, we do not know very much either. This book is a guide for everyone who, understandably, feels perplexed.

Presenting an explanation of recent findings in science and their relationship with society and politics as we enter the third millennium, the book also seeks to provide guidance towards responsible political action in this current crisis. From new technology's power to preserve the status quo, to the true impetus behind the Human Genome Project, Sean Ó Nualláin brings to topical concerns some much needed clarity.

Complete with reader-friendly summaries to current thought in the biological, physical, and social sciences, the book is designed to be accessible to a general readership, it should also appeal to all those working or studying in the Sciences.

Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

For nearly a hundred years, young women have competed for the title of Miss America—although what it means to wear the crown and be our “ideal” has changed dramatically over time. The Miss America Pageant began as a bathing beauty contest in 1920s Atlantic City, New Jersey, sponsored by businessmen trying to extend the tourist season beyond Labor Day. In the post–World War II years, the pageant evolved into a national coronation of an idealized “girl next door,” as pretty and decorous as she was rarely likely to speak her mind on issues of substance. Since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, the pageant has struggled to find a balance between beauty and brains as it tries to remain relevant to women who aspire to become leaders in the community, not hot babes in swimsuits.

In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating and insightful history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America’s “ideal,” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant’s story, with a special focus on Miss America’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the “gown and crown” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America.

Politicians everywhere tend to attract cynicism and inspire disillusionment. They are supposed to epitomize the promise of democratic government and yet invariably find themselves cast as the enemy of every virtue that system seeks to uphold. In the Pacific, “politician” has become a byword for corruption, graft, and misconduct. This was not always the case—the independence generation is still remembered as strong leaders—but today’s leaders are commonly associated with malaise and despair. Once heroes of self-determination, politicians are now the targets of donor attempts to institute “good governance,” while Fiji’s 2006 coup was partly justified on the grounds that they needed “cleaning up.”

But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay, and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region’s political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job.

Corbett shows that politics is a messy, unpredictable, and, at times, dirty business that nonetheless inspires service and sacrifice. Being a politician has changed since independence, but politics continues to be deeply imbedded in the lives of individuals, families, and communities; an account that belies the common characterization of democracy in the Pacific as a “façade” or “foreign flower.”

Ultimately, this is a sympathetic counter-narrative to the populist critique. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. As such, this book is a must-read for all those who believe in the promise of representative government.

Gold Medal – Networking, Social Media, and Communication – Axiom Business Book Awards, 2022
JP Morgan Summer Reading List 2022

Survival strategies for communicating in a notification-saturated world

As our ability to pay attention in a world of distractions vanishes, it’s no wonder that our ability to be heard and understood—to convey our messages—is also threatened. Whether working with our teams and customers or communicating with our families and friends, it is increasingly difficult to break through the digital devices that get in the way of communication. And the ubiquity of digital devices means that we are often “multicommunicating,” participating in multiple conversations at once. As a result, our ability to be socially present with an audience requires an intentional approach.

This increased strain on attention has never been more clear than during the global pandemic, when our homes suddenly accommodated both work and family life. What are our options when facing professional communications at all hours? Do we ask for the technology to be put away at the dinner table? Establish other ground rules? What about using digital communications to our advantage—how can we facilitate information-sharing in the midst of a world where we are overwhelmed with content?

Drawing from fifteen years of research, interviews, and experience from teaching students and executives, Jeanine W. Turner offers a framework to navigate social presence at work and at home. By exploring four primary communication choices—budgeted, entitled, competitive, and invitational—Turner shows when and where to employ each strategy to most effectively allocate our attention and command the attention of others. Each chapter includes concrete strategies and concludes with reflection questions and exercises to help readers further explore these decisions in professional and personal relationships.

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize

“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

“A gripping work…Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.”
—LSE Review of Books

“These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.”
—Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog

“Tremendously illuminating…Refreshing and field-defining.”
—Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

A leading philosopher explores what it means to be reasonable—and why it matters for the well-being of our society.

Reasonableness plays many roles in our lives. In Anglo-American law, it is the yardstick for a wide range of behavior—the “reasonable-person standard” governs everything from contract enforcement to killing in self-defense. In politics, a state can maintain a liberal democracy only if its citizens are reasonable. In ordinary life, we hold each other accountable to reason: We criticize the unreasonable of bosses who demand too much of our time or of partners who make decisions without regard for our preferences.

But what does it mean to be reasonable? Being reasonable is not the same as being rational. It is also different from being thoughtful. In Being Reasonable, Krista Lawlor argues that a reasonable person seeks to understand what is valuable. A reasonable person must be rational enough to figure out what is valuable and thoughtful enough to care about what other people find valuable, but rationality and thoughtfulness alone do not suffice to make one reasonable. Even an ideally rational and thoughtful person might fail to understand, or lack the concern to understand, what is valuable.

Being Reasonable is the first comprehensive study of reasonableness. Lawlor provides an account of the nature of reasonableness and, further, explains how we manage to be reasonable. Humans discover what is valuable by listening to their emotions and by listening to each other. By taking command over our emotions, and by interacting attentively with others, we can live up to the standard set by society and law.

How can an academic who does not believe evil spirits cause illness harbor the hope that her cancer may be cured by a healer who enters a trance to battle her demons? Whose actions are more (or less) honorable: those of a prostitute who sells her daughter’s virginity to a rich man, or those of a professor who sanctions her daughter’s hook-ups with casual acquaintances? As they immerse themselves in foreign cultures and navigate the relationships that take shape, the authors of these essays, most of them trained anthropologists, find that accepting cultural difference is one thing, experiencing it is quite another. In tales that entertain as much as they illuminate, these writers show how the moral and intellectual challenges of living cross-culturally revealed to them the limits of their perception and understanding.

Their insights were gained only after discomforts resulting mainly from the authors’ own blunders in the field. From Brazil to Botswana, Egypt to Indonesia, Mongolia to Pakistan, mistakes were made. Offering a gift to a Navajo man at the beginning of an interview, rather than the end, caused one author to lose his entire research project. In Côte d’Ivoire, a Western family was targeted by the village madman, leading the parents to fear for the safety of their child even as they suspected that their very presence had triggered his madness. At a time when misunderstanding of cultural difference is an undeniable source of conflict, we need stories like these more than ever before.

The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, created two distinct and mutually exclusive national myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. This book examines the processes that resulted in this dual resolution in the context of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolutions.

Based on original archival material, Lizaveta Kasmach scrutinizes the development of competing concepts of Belarusian nationhood in the context of rivaling national aspirations and imperial policies. The analysis convincingly demonstrates the divisions within the nationalist movement, both politically between the moderates and socialists, and geographically between German-occupied territory with Vilna as a center versus Russian-controlled territory around Minsk. Besides the case study of Belarusian nation-building efforts, the book is a contribution to the study of the First World War in East Central Europe, approaching the war and its aftermath as a mobilizational moment in the region.

How does literature function in the formation of a nation-state? What are its pivotal contributions to national discourse and the production of ideological collective will? And, ultimately, how is literature institutionalized and aestheticized?

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement. 

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 

Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

A comprehensive and essential field reference, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America reveals the spiritual landscape in the American Archaic period

Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America describes, illustrates, and offers nondogmatic interpretations of rituals and beliefs in Archaic America. In compiling a wealth of detailed entries, author Cheryl Claassen has created both an exhaustive reference as well as an opening into new archaeological taxonomies, connections, and understandings of Native American culture.
 
The material is presented in an introductory essay about Archaic rituals followed by two sections of entries that incorporate reports and articles discussing archaeological sites; studies of relevant practices of ritual and belief; data related to geologic features, artifact attributes, and burial settings; ethnographies; and pilgrimages to specific sites. Claassen’s work focuses on the American Archaic period (marked by the end of the Ice Age approximately 11,000 years ago) and a geographic area bounded by the edge of the Great Plains, Newfoundland, and southern Florida. This period and region share specific beliefs and practices such as human sacrifice, dirt mound burial, and oyster shell middens.
 
This interpretive guide serves as a platform for new interpretations and theories on this period. For example, Claassen connects rituals to topographic features and posits the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as a major stimulus to Archaic beliefs. She also expands the interpretation of existing data previously understood in economic or environmental terms to include how this same data may also reveal spiritual and symbolic practices. Similarly, Claassen interprets Archaic culture in terms of human agency and social constraint, bringing ritual acts into focus as drivers of social transformation and ethnogenesis.
 
Richly annotated and cross-referenced for ease of use, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America will benefit scholars and students of archaeology and Native American culture. Claassen’s overview of the archaeological record should encourage the development of original archaeological and historical connections and patterns. Such an approach, Claassen suggests, may reveal patterns of influence extending from early eastern Americans to the Aztec and Maya.

Is women’s inequality supported by the Qur’an? Do men have the exclusive right to interpret Islam’s holy scripture? In her best-selling book Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an, Asma Barlas argues that, far from supporting male privilege, the Qur’an actually encourages the full equality of women and men. She explains why a handful of verses have been interpreted to favor men and shows how these same verses can be read in an egalitarian way that is fully supported by the text itself and compatible with the Qur’an’s message that it is complete and self-consistent.

A Brief Introduction presents the arguments of Believing Women in a simplified way that will be accessible and inviting to general readers and undergraduate students. The authors focus primarily on the Qur’an’s teachings about women and patriarchy. They show how traditional teachings about women’s inferiority are not supported by the Qur’an but were products of patriarchal societies that used it to justify their existing religious and social structures. The authors’ hope is that by understanding how patriarchal traditionalists have come to exercise so much authority in today’s Islam, as well as by rereading some of the Qur’an’s most controversial verses, adherents of the faith will learn to question patriarchal dogma and see that an egalitarian reading of the Qur’an is equally possible and, for myriad reasons, more plausible.

Does Islam call for the oppression of women? Non-Muslims point to the subjugation of women that occurs in many Muslim countries, especially those that claim to be "Islamic," while many Muslims read the Qur’an in ways that seem to justify sexual oppression, inequality, and patriarchy. Taking a wholly different view, Asma Barlas develops a believer’s reading of the Qur’an that demonstrates the radically egalitarian and antipatriarchal nature of its teachings.

Beginning with a historical analysis of religious authority and knowledge, Barlas shows how Muslims came to read inequality and patriarchy into the Qur’an to justify existing religious and social structures and demonstrates that the patriarchal meanings ascribed to the Qur’an are a function of who has read it, how, and in what contexts. She goes on to reread the Qur’an’s position on a variety of issues in order to argue that its teachings do not support patriarchy. To the contrary, Barlas convincingly asserts that the Qur’an affirms the complete equality of the sexes, thereby offering an opportunity to theorize radical sexual equality from within the framework of its teachings. This new view takes readers into the heart of Islamic teachings on women, gender, and patriarchy, allowing them to understand Islam through its most sacred scripture, rather than through Muslim cultural practices or Western media stereotypes.

For this revised edition of Believing Women in Islam, Asma Barlas has written two new chapters—“Abraham’s Sacrifice in the Qur’an” and “Secular/Feminism and the Qur’an”—as well as a new preface, an extended discussion of the Qur’an’s “wife-beating” verse and of men’s presumed role as women’s guardians, and other updates throughout the book.

Apparently, slumber parties in the mid-South 1970s were plied with a strange ritual. At midnight attendees would gather before a mirror and chant “I don’t believe in the Bell Witch” three times to see if the legendary spook would appear alongside their own reflections—a practice that echoes the “Bloody Mary” pattern following the execution of Mary Queen of Scots centuries ago. But that small circuit of preteen gatherings was neither the beginning nor the end of the Bell Witch’s travels. Indeed, the legend of the haint who terrorized the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, is one of the best-known pieces of folklore in American storytelling—featured around the globe in popular-culture references as varied as a 1930s radio skit and a 1980s song from a Danish heavy metal band. Legend has it that “Old Kate” was investigated even by the likes of future president Andrew Jackson, who was reported to have said, “I would rather fight the British ten times over than to ever face the Bell Witch again.”

While dozens of books and articles have thoroughly analyzed this intriguing tale, this book breaks new ground by exploring the oral traditions associated with the poltergeist and demonstrating her regional, national, and even international sweep. Author Rick Gregory details the ways the narrative mirrors other legends with similar themes and examines the modern proliferation of the story via contemporary digital media. The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory ultimately explores what people believe and why they believe what they cannot explicitly prove—and, more particularly, why for two hundred years so many have sworn by the reality of the Bell Witch. In this highly engaging study, Rick Gregory not only sheds light on Tennessee’s vibrant oral history tradition but also provides insight into the enduring, worldwide phenomenon that is folklore.

Research with human subjects has long been controversial because of the conflicts that often arise between promoting scientific knowledge and protecting the rights and welfare of subjects. Twenty-five years ago the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research addressed these conflicts. The result was the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidance for Research Involving Human Subjects, a report that identified foundational principles for ethical research with human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.

Since the publication of Belmont, these three principles have greatly influenced discussions of research with human subjects. While they are often regarded as the single-most influential set of guidelines for biomedical research and practice in the United States (and other parts of the world), not everyone agrees that they provide adequate guidance. Belmont Revisited brings together a stellar group of scholars in bioethics to revisit the findings of that original report. Their responses constitute a broad overview of the development of the Belmont Report and the extent of its influence, especially on governmental commissions, as well as an assessment of its virtues and shortcomings.

Belmont Revisited looks back to reexamine the creation and influence of the Belmont Report, and also looks forward to the future of research—with a strong call to rethink how institutions and investigators can conduct research more ethically.

Founded in Galveston in 1842 with the launch of the Daily News, the Belo Corporation entered the twenty-first century as a powerhouse conglomerate, owning four daily newspapers (including the Dallas Morning News), twenty-six television and cable stations, and over thirty interactive Web sites. The first comprehensive work to bring to life this remarkable success story, Belo blends biography with a history of corporate strategies.

Drawing on company archives and private papers of key figures, including A. H. Belo and G. B. Dealey, former company archivist Judith Garrett Segura brings to life important chapters in the cultural life of Texas, from Galveston's days as the largest and most vibrant town in the Republic of Texas, through the wars that followed statehood, periods of economic hardship, and the effects of sweeping social change. Turning points in the company's history, such as the sale of its Galveston paper when company revenues were dramatically affected by candid reporting of Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1920s, highlight crucial elements of the press's role in the life of a community. Segura also charts technological advances, from the telegraph and the typographers' union to the dawn of the Information Age. Finally, she includes the most complete portrait of the Dallas Times Herald Company to date, documenting the rise and fall of Belo's chief rival.

This is a story of frontier survival and futuristic thinking, marketing genius and historic reporting, nurtured by a family of mavericks.

Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In Belonging in an Adopted World, Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the politics of adoption policy has profoundly affected the families, nations, and children involved in this new form of social and economic migration.

Starting from the transformation of the abandoned child into an adoptable resource for nations that give and receive children in adoption, this volume examines the ramifications of such gifts, especially for families created through adoption and later, the adopted adults themselves. Bolstered by an account of the author’s own experience as an adoptive parent, and fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, Belonging in an Adopted World explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability and contingency behind all human identity.

When the Nazis annexed western Poland in 1939, they quickly set about identifying Polish citizens of German origin and granting them the privileged legal status of ethnic Germans of the Reich. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Soviet-dominated Poland incorporated eastern Germany and proceeded to do just the opposite: searching out Germans of Polish origin and offering them Polish citizenship. Underscoring the processes of inclusion and exclusion that mold national communities, Belonging to the Nation examines the efforts of Nazi Germany and postwar Poland to nationalize inhabitants of the contested Polish-German borderlands.

Histories of the experience of national minorities in the twentieth century often concentrate on the grim logic of ethnic cleansing. John Kulczycki approaches his topic from a different angle, focusing on how governments decide which minorities to include, not expel. The policies Germany and Poland pursued from 1939 to 1951 bear striking similarities. Both Nazis and Communist Poles regarded national identity as biologically determined—and both found this principle difficult to enforce. Practical impediments to proving a person’s ethnic descent meant that officials sometimes resorted to telltale cultural behaviors in making assessments of nationality. Although the goal was to create an ethnically homogeneous nation, Germany and Poland allowed pockets of minorities to remain, usually to exploit their labor. Kulczycki illustrates the complexity of the process behind national self-determination, the obstacles it confronts in practice, and the resulting injustices.

Drawing on evidence from a wide collection of surviving family papers, Beloved Children is a valuable contribution to literature available concerning childhood history in pre-industrial Central Europe.

With the aid of detailed case studies, the volume illustrates every aspect of Hungarian childhood in the early modern age from a variety of contrasting perspectives—birth, care, education, marriage, orphanhood and death. The book also includes a unique portrayal of family life in the Hungarian aristocracy.

Beloved Children is a comprehensive study examining topics such as family intimacy, paternal and maternal attitudes, providing the reader with a valuable insight into a child’s life in Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Interfaith marriage is a visible and often controversial part of American life--and one with a significant history. This is the first historical study of religious diversity in the home. Anne Rose draws a vivid picture of interfaith marriages over the century before World War I, their problems and their social consequences. She shows how mixed-faith families became agents of change in a culture moving toward pluralism.

Following them over several generations, Rose tracks the experiences of twenty-six interfaith families who recorded their thoughts and feelings in letters, journals, and memoirs. She examines the decisions husbands and wives made about religious commitment, their relationships with the extended families on both sides, and their convictions. These couples--who came from strong Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish backgrounds--did not turn away from religion but made personalized adjustments in religious observance. Increasingly, the author notes, women took charge of religion in the home. Rose's family-centered look at private religious decisions and practice gives new insight on American society in a period when it was becoming more open, more diverse, and less community-bound.

Longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Moving Image Category

Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By addressing ordinary actors as a labor force, Kate Fortmueller proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood.

Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood.

Unearthed truths, buried lives: Belvoir reveals the pain, resilience, and reckoning found beneath the soil of a Maryland plantation.

Near Annapolis, Maryland, a former tobacco plantation dating to the 1730s holds centuries of untold history. In Belvoir: An Archaeology of Maryland Slavery, Julie M. Schablitsky leads readers on an archaeological narrative to unearth the lives and stories still buried there.The book begins with an introduction to the estate’s history, detailing its ownership by prominent families such as the Rosses, Scotts, Worthingtons, and Welshes. Schablitsky highlights the landscape of the estate, including the unique thirty-two-square-foot stone quarter built for enslaved people.

With sensitivity and scientific rigor, Schablitsky shifts focus to the enslaved people who lived and labored at Belvoir for more than eighty years. Through detailed excavation of the stone quarter and analysis of everyday artifacts—buttons, tobacco pipes, food remains, ceramics—she reconstructs the daily life, acts of resistance, and the cultural endurance of a community forced to navigate brutality.

Yet what makes Belvoir especially vital is its ethical compass. Schablitsky centers the voices of descendants, allowing their questions, memories, and presence to shape the narrative. The result is a groundbreaking archaeological case study and a blueprint for restorative justice at sites of enslavement. Scholars, archaeologists, and general readers alike will find Belvoir a deeply human, profoundly necessary book, one that confronts the past with clarity, care, and the hope of reconciliation.

Ben Jonson's contemporaries admired him above all other playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. He was the “great refiner” who alchemized the bleakest aspects of everyday life into brilliant images of folly and deceit. He was also a celebrated reprobate and an ambitious entrepreneur. David Riggs illuminates every facet of this extraordinary career, giving us the first major biography of Jonson in over sixty years.

The story of Jonson's life provides a broad view of the literary procession in early modern England and the milieu in which Elizabethan drama was produced. Beginning as a journeyman actor, Jonson was soon a novice playwright; his first important play was staged in 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast. He was by turns the self-styled leader of a literary elite, a writer of court masques, the first dramatist to publish his own Works, a royal pensioner, and a genteel poet. As Jonson transformed himself from an artisan into a gentleman, his need to transcend his class origins led him to murder, to his notorious quarrels with Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Inigo Jones, and to his lifelong rivalry with Shakespeare. Riggs traces the roots of Jonson's aggressiveness back to the turmoil of his childhood and adolescence. He offers new and convincing accounts of Jonson's latent hostility toward his bricklayer stepfather, his reckless marriage to Anne Lewis, and his conflicted relationships with his children.

This vivid portrait synthesizes six decades of scholarship and new historical evidence. Sixty halftones beautifully illustrate the story and capture the spirit of the age. With Riggs' original interpretations of Jonson's masterpieces and lesser known works, Ben Jonson: A Life will prove the standard account of this complex man's life and works for many years to come.

This provocative study provides a radically new perspective on Ben Jonson's comedies. Robert Watson's theory of the “parodic strategy” offers a solution to many of the most perplexing cruxes of Jonson criticism. By betraying the expectations of his characters and his audience, Jonson subsumes and chastises his rival playwrights, and seizes territory within the dramatic genre for his special form of satiric city-comedy.

He builds his complex plots out of the wreckage of more conventional works, in a way that allows him to criticize and combat not only his literary competitors, but also the histrionic tendencies of Renaissance English society. This view of Jonson's notorious borrowings has broad implications for the staging and editing of the comedies, as well as for scholarly criticism. It reveals a Jonson who is more coherent, more consistently funny, and more modernistically aware of the conventions and paradoxes of his medium than has generally been supposed. Watson's approach allows him to reorient major comedies such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, and to rehabilitate the later works that have commonly been dismissed as “dotages.” Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy thus provides fresh and vivid insights into Jonson's changing attitudes toward popular culture and toward his own censorious critical persona.

The Ben Lilly Legend brings back to life a great American hunter—the greatest bear hunter in history after Davy Crockett, by his own account and also by the record. J. Frank Dobie met Lilly and was so struck by this extraordinary man that he collected everything he could find about him.

Lilly was born in Alabama in 1856, followed the bear and the panther westward through Mississippi and Louisiana to Texas, leaving a trail of stories about his prowess as a hunter and his goodness as a man. He was at one time "chief huntsman" to Teddy Roosevelt, hunted in Texas and Mexico, and came to be known as the master sign reader of the Rockies.

Here are all the stories Ben Lilly told and a great many more Frank Dobie heard about him, put together in a fresh and fascinating contribution to American folklore.

In the first, most intense years of the Cold War (1947–1954), New Deal liberals often found themselves in great disfavor. Ben Shahn's experience presents something of a paradox, however, since his paintings appealed in different ways to both liberals and conservatives. Blacklisted by CBS during the McCarthy era and yet, ironically, incorporated into presidential "campaigns of truth" aimed at improving the U.S. image abroad, Ben Shahn is a pivotal figure, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent in this highly polarized moment in American history.

In this pathbreaking study, Frances Pohl traces the political and artistic struggles Ben Shahn became embroiled in as he tried to remain a socially concerned artist during the early Cold War period. She shows how he rejected the argument, voiced by many Abstract Expressionists, that art and politics should not mix, yet at the same time searched for a way to depict, in universal and allegorical terms, the broad human condition rather than simply specific instances of injustice. Perhaps most important, she makes critical connections between U.S. social and political history and the art it provoked, thus illuminating both the later career of Ben Shahn and the Cold War era in American cultural history.

What do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products? As this disturbing book shows, ideological or economic attacks on research are part of an extensive pattern of abuse.

Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics political and corporate advocates use to discredit or suppress research on potential human health hazards. Scientists can find their research blocked, or find themselves threatened with financial ruin. Corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, even government agencies have been caught suppressing or distorting research on the safety of chemical products.

With alarming stories drawn from the public record, McGarity and Wagner describe how advocates attempt to bend science or “spin” findings. They reveal an immense range of tools available to shrewd partisans determined to manipulate research.

Bending Science exposes an astonishing pattern of corruption and makes a compelling case for reforms to safeguard both the integrity of science and the public health.