A trailblazing exploration of the political stakes of curiosity

Curiosity is political. Who is curious, when, and how reflects the social values and power structures of a given society. In Curiosity and Power, Perry Zurn explores the political philosophy of curiosity, staking the groundbreaking claim that it is a social force—the heartbeat of political resistance and a critical factor in social justice. He argues that the very scaffolding of curiosity is the product of political architectures, and exploring these values and architectures is crucial if we are to better understand, and more ethically navigate, the struggle over inquiry in an unequal world. 

Curiosity and Power explores curiosity through the lens of political philosophy—weaving in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida in doing so—and the experience of political marginalization, demonstrating that curiosity is implicated equally in the maintenance of societies and in their transformation. Curiosity plays as central a role in establishing social institutions and fields of inquiry as it does in their deconstruction and in building new forms of political community. Understanding curiosity is critical to understanding politics, and understanding politics is critical to understanding curiosity. 

Drawing not only on philosophy and political theory but also on feminist theory, race theory, disability studies, and trans studies, Curiosity and Power tracks curiosity in the structures of political marginalization and resistance—from the Civil Rights Movement to building better social relationships. Curiosity and Power insists that the power of curiosity be recognized and engaged responsibly.

Robert Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread—in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified human behaviors. Upon investigation, these instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be uniquely valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species.

Many activities showcased in Curious Behavior are contagious, but none surpasses yawning in this regard—just reading the word can make one succumb. Though we often take it as a sign of sleepiness or boredom, yawning holds clues to the development of our sociality and ability to empathize with others. Its inescapable transmission reminds us that we are sometimes unaware, neurologically programmed beasts of the herd. Other neglected behaviors yield similar revelations. Tickling, we learn, may be the key to programming personhood into robots. Coughing comes in musical, medical, and social varieties. Farting and belching have import for the evolution of human speech. And prenatal behavior is offered as the strangest exhibit of all, defying postnatal logic in every way. Our earthiest acts define Homo sapiens as much as language, bipedalism, tool use, and other more studied characteristics.

As Provine guides us through peculiarities right under our noses, he beckons us to follow with self-experiments: tickling our own feet, keeping a log of when we laugh, and attempting to suppress yawns and sneezes. Such humble investigations provide fodder for grade school science projects as well as doctoral dissertations. Small Science can yield big rewards.

A twisting path through Austin’s underground music scene in the twentieth century’s last decade, narrated by the people who were there.

It’s 1990 in Austin, Texas. The next decade will be a tipping point in the city's metamorphosis from sleepy college town to major city. Beneath the increasingly slick exterior, though, a group of like-minded contrarians were reimagining an underground music scene. Embracing a do-it-yourself ethos, record labels emerged to release local music, zines cheered and jeered acts beneath the radar of mainstream media outlets, and upstart clubs provided a home venue for new bands to build their sound.

This vibrant scene valued expression over erudition, from the razor-sharp songcraft of Spoon to the fuzzed-out poptones of Sixteen Deluxe, and blurred the boundaries between observer and participant. Evolving in tandem with the city’s emergence on the national stage via the film Slacker and the SXSW conference and festivals, Austin’s musical underground became a spiritual crucible for the uneasy balance between commercial success and cultural authenticity, a tension that still resonates today.

The first book about Austin underground music in the ’90s, A Curious Mix of People is an oral history that tells the story of this transformative decade through the eyes of the musicians, writers, DJs, club owners, record-store employees, and other key figures who were there.

New directions and fresh insight for scholars and students

The single greatest catalyst and contributor to our developing understanding of priestly literature has been Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010), whose seminal articles, provocative hypotheses, and comprehensively probing books vastly expanded and significantly altered scholarship regarding priestly and related literature. Nineteen articles build on Milgrom's work and look to future directions of research. Essays cover a range of topics including the interpretation, composition and literary structure of priestly and holiness texts as well as their relationships to deuteronomic and extra-biblical texts. The book includes a bibliography of Milgrom's work published between 1994 and 2014.

Features:

This volume provides the most comprehensive overview of archaeological research into the late Pleistocene and early Holocene occupation of the North American Far West in over a decade. It focuses on the relationship between stemmed and fluted point technologies in the region, which has recently risen to the forefront of debate about the initial settlement of the Americas. Established and early career researchers apply a wide range of analytical approaches to explore chronological, geographical, and technological aspects of these tools and what they reveal about the people who made them. While such interrelationships have intrigued archaeologists for nearly a century, until now they have not been systematically examined together in a single curated volume.

Contributions are organized into three main sections: stemmed point technologies, fluted point technologies, and broader interactions. Topics range from regional overviews of chronologies and technologies to site-level findings containing extensive new data. The culmination of many years of work by dozens of researchers, this volume lays new groundwork for understanding technological innovation, diversity, and exchange among early Indigenous peoples in North America.

In this invited volume, experts in Spanish linguistics who subscribe to the Chomskyian thory of Universal Grammar, along with the editors, approach the general applicability of this model from the perspectives of their subdisciplines: language acquisition, syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. Their research points to the verification of the Chomskyian linguistic theory as a general framework for explaining phenomena in language acquistion and use—and, more generally, to the possible development of a model of mind based on linguistic theory. Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics will interest all specialists in Spanish and theoretical linguistics, as well as those interested in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.

Current Thought in Musicology covers a variety of topics, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present and touching on all the major disciplines of musicology: music history, theory and composition, music education, and performance. Taken together, the nine papers constitute a broad overview of the direction of music scholarship in the 1970s.

In “Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus: Model of the Systems of Human Communication,” Charles Seeger presents a model of the situations in which the study of humanistic art may best be conducted. Charles Hamm writes in “The Ecstatic and the Didactic: A Pattern in American Music” of the pattern of conflicting points of view in music history and theory. American composer Elliott Carter, in his chapter titled “Music and the Time Screen,” presents a lucid explanation of his compositional process, including his concept of musical time. In “Instruments and Voices in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson,” Howard Mayer Brown suggests the nature of fifteenth-century performance, drawn from iconography and various musical sources. “Nottebohm Revisited,” by Lewis Lockwood, reexamines Beethoven’s sketchbooks, showing the extent to which performing editions of his work must be updated. Daniel Heartz’s article, “The Chanson in the Humanist Era,” is multidisciplinary and will interest a variety of scholars, including French historians and French literary historians. Gilbert Chase applies structuralism to musicological studies in his chapter, “Musicology, History, and Anthropology: Current Thoughts.” The concluding essays, “The Prospects for Research in Medieval Music in the 1970’s,” by Gilbert Reaney, and “The Library of the Mind: Observations on the Relationship between Musical Scholarship and Bibliography,” by Vincent Duckles, provide a unique view of the opportunities for further work in these areas.

The volume also includes an introduction by the editor, notes on the contributors, and an index. Current Thought in Musicology is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.

Over a century and a half ago, a French physician reported the bizarre behavior of a young aristocratic woman who would suddenly, without warning, erupt in a startling fit of obscene shouts and curses. The image of the afflicted Marquise de Dampierre echoes through the decades as the emblematic example of an illness that today represents one of the fastest-growing diagnoses in North America. Tourette syndrome is a set of behaviors, including recurrent ticcing and involuntary shouting (sometimes cursing) as well as obsessive-compulsive actions. The fascinating history of this syndrome reveals how cultural and medical assumptions have determined and radically altered its characterization and treatment from the early nineteenth century to the present.

A Cursing Brain? traces the problematic classification of Tourette syndrome through three distinct but overlapping stories: that of the claims of medical knowledge, that of patients' experiences, and that of cultural expectations and assumptions. Earlier researchers asserted that the bizarre ticcing and impromptu vocalizations were psychological--resulting from sustained bad habits or lack of self-control. Today, patients exhibiting these behaviors are seen as suffering from a neurological disease and generally are treated with drug therapy. Although current clinical research indicates that Tourette's is an organic disorder, this pioneering history of the syndrome reminds us to be skeptical of medical orthodoxies so that we may stay open to fresh understandings and more effective interventions.

Custodians of Place provides a new theoretical framework that accounts for how different types of cities arrive at decisions about residential growth and economic development. Lewis and Neiman surveyed officials in hundreds of California cities of all sizes and socioeconomic characteristics to account for differences in local development policies. This book shows city governments at the center of the action in shaping their destinies, frequently acting as far-sighted trustees of their communities.

They explain how city governments often can insulate themselves for the better from short-term political pressures and craft policy that builds on past growth experiences and future vision. Findings also include how conditions on the ground—local commute times, housing affordability, composition of the local labor force—play an important role in determining the approach a city takes toward growth and land use.

What types of cities tend to aggressively pursue industrial or retail firms? What types of cities tend to favor housing over business development? What motivates cities to try to slow residential growth? Custodians of Place answers these and many other questions.

2024 George Perkins Marsh Prize Runner-up
 

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. 

Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment.

Cutover Capitalism is an innovative historical study that combines methodological approaches from labor history, environmental history, and the new history of capitalism. The book tells a character-driven yet theoretically sophisticated story about what it was like to live through this process of industrialization. 

Explores what horror movies tell us about issues of taste.

Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

Cyber Blockades is the first book to examine the phenomena of blockade operations in cyberspace, large-scale attacks on infrastructure or systems that aim to prevent an entire state from sending or receiving electronic data. Cyber blockades can take place through digital, physical, and/or electromagnetic means. Blockade operations have historically been considered acts of war, thus their emergence in cyberspace has significant implications for international law and for our understanding of cyber warfare.

The author defines and explains the emerging concept of “cyber blockades” and presents a unique comparison of blockade operations in five different domains—on land, at sea, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace—identifying common elements as well as important distinctions. Alison Lawlor Russell’s framework for defining cyber blockades, understanding how they occur, and considering the motivations of actors who employ them is applied with in-depth analysis of the cyber attacks on Estonia in 2007 and on Georgia during the 2008 Georgia-Russia War.

Blockade operations have occurred in cyberspace and will doubtlessly be used again in the future, by both state and non-state actors alike, because of the unique advantages of this type of attack. This book offers recommendations for policymakers contemplating or confronted by such attacks. Cyber Blockades is also a must-read for scholars and students of security studies, terrorism, substate groups, and the future of warfare.

Reconceptualizes the relationship between participatory democracy, technology, and space

The Internet has been billed by some proponents as an "electronic agora" ushering in a "new Athenian age of democracy." That assertion assumes that cyberspace’s virtual environment is compatible with democratic practice. But the anonymous sociality that is intrinsic to the Internet seems at odds with theories of democracy that presuppose the possibility, at least, of face-to-face meetings among citizens. The Internet, then, raises provocative questions about democratic participation: Must the public sphere exist as a physical space? Does citizenship require a bodily presence?

An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia traces how digital evangelism has driven the worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the utopian presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. 

Providing an incisive critique of the push for open access and open-source software and the legal battles over online censorship and net neutrality, Cyberlibertarianism details how the purportedly democratic internet has been employed as an organizing tool for terror and hate groups and political disinformation campaigns. As he unpacks our naively utopian conception of the digital world, Golumbia highlights technology’s role in the advancement of hyperindividualist and antigovernment agendas, demonstrating how Silicon Valley corporations and right-wing economists; antiestablishment figures such as Julian Assange, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Edward Snowden, and Mark Zuckerberg; and seemingly positive voices such as John Perry Barlow, Cory Doctorow, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and Wikipedia all have worked to hamper regulation and weaken legal safeguards against exploitation.

Drawing from a wide range of thought in digital theory, economics, law, and political philosophy as well as detailed research and Golumbia’s own experience as a software developer, Cyberlibertarianism serves as a clarion call to reevaluate the fraught politics of the internet. In the hope of providing a way of working toward a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian future for digital technology, this magisterial work insists that we must first understand the veiled dogmas from which it has been constructed.

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Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma's writings, presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career. Here, through words and astonishing photos, is Mumma's chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century: his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music; his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music; performances with the Sonic Arts Union; and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In addition, Mumma describes his collaborations with composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

Candid and insightful, Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observer.

In a very short time, individuals and companies have harnessed cyberspace to create new industries, a vibrant social space, and a new economic sphere that are intertwined with our everyday lives. At the same time, individuals, subnational groups, and governments are using cyberspace to advance interests through malicious activity. Terrorists recruit, train, and target through the Internet, hackers steal data, and intelligence services conduct espionage. Still, the vast majority of cyberspace is civilian space used by individuals, businesses, and governments for legitimate purposes.

Cyberspace and National Security brings together scholars, policy analysts, and information technology executives to examine current and future threats to cyberspace. They discuss various approaches to advance and defend national interests, contrast the US approach with European, Russian, and Chinese approaches, and offer new ways and means to defend interests in cyberspace and develop offensive capabilities to compete there. Policymakers and strategists will find this book to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to ensure national security and answer concerns about future cyberwarfare.

Cycles of Invention and Discovery offers an in-depth look at the real-world practice of science and engineering. It shows how the standard categories of “basic” and “applied” have become a hindrance to the organization of the U.S. science and technology enterprise. Tracing the history of these problematic categories, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Toluwalogo Odumosu document how historical views of policy makers and scientists have led to the construction of science as a pure ideal on the one hand and of engineering as a practical (and inherently less prestigious) activity on the other. Even today, this erroneous but still widespread distinction forces these two endeavors into separate silos, misdirects billions of dollars, and thwarts progress in science and engineering research.

The authors contrast this outmoded perspective with the lived experiences of researchers at major research laboratories. Using such Nobel Prize–winning examples as magnetic resonance imaging, the transistor, and the laser, they explore the daily micro-practices of research, showing how distinctions between the search for knowledge and creative problem solving break down when one pays attention to the ways in which pathbreaking research actually happens. By studying key contemporary research institutions, the authors highlight the importance of integrated research practices, contrasting these with models of research in the classic but still-influential report Science the Endless Frontier. Narayanamurti and Odumosu’s new model of the research ecosystem underscores that discovery and invention are often two sides of the same coin that moves innovation forward.

The simple question "How did the Maya come up with a calendar that had only 260 days?" led Vincent Malmström to discover an unexpected "hearth" of Mesoamerican culture. In this boldly revisionist book, he sets forth his challenging, new view of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican calendrical systems—the intellectual achievement that gave rise to Mesoamerican civilization and culture.

Malmström posits that the 260-day calendar marked the interval between passages of the sun at its zenith over Izapa, an ancient ceremonial center in the Soconusco region of Mexico's Pacific coastal plain. He goes on to show how the calendar developed by the Zoque people of the region in the fourteenth century B.C. gradually diffused through Mesoamerica into the so-called "Olmec metropolitan area" of the Gulf coast and beyond to the Maya in the east and to the plateau of Mexico in the west.

These findings challenge our previous understanding of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican civilization. Sure to provoke lively debate in many quarters, this book will be important reading for all students of ancient Mesoamerica—anthropologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, geographers, and the growing public fascinated by all things Maya.

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode.

In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Three plays by ancient Greece’s third great tragedian.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in six volumes.

In Volume I of the edition are Cyclops, the only complete satyr play that has survived from antiquity; Alcestis, the story of a woman who agrees, in order to save her husband's life, to die in his place; and Medea, a revenge tragedy in which Medea kills her own children to punish their father.

When Hermann Seele anived in New Braunfels in 1845, the raw colony was plagued by poverty, disease, lack of food, and hostile Indians. This personal record of the Germans in Texas shows their evolution from struggling colonists to prosperous citizens.

From his viewpoint of a hardworking yet imaginative pioneer, Seele presents first a history of German immigration and settlement in Texas during the nineteenth century. Next, his autobiographical writings range from a "sentimental recollection" of his first Christmas Eve in Texas to his first day of teaching in New Braunfels, from accounts of the popular singing society to murder and justice along the Comal River. In addition, Seele's romantic novel, The Cypress, is a delightful though improbable tale of a traveling botanist, a chieftain's daughter, and a savage Indian cult.

Hermann Seele—farmer, lawyer, teacher, lay preacher, mayor, state representative, Civil War major, and editor—epitomizes the best of the German immigrants who established their communities as models of respectability and prosperity.

The Cypria, so named because its poet supposedly came from the island of Cyprus, was an early Greek epic that is known to us primarily through quotations and references to passages by later authors, as well as through a prose summary of its plot and contents.

Malcolm Davies uses linguistic evidence from the available verbatim fragments, along with other considerations, to suggest that the Cypria was written after Homer and was intended as a sort of prequel to the plot of the Iliad. In light of this evidence, it is noteworthy that many of the incidents described in the Cypria seem markedly un-Homeric; to give just one example, the Judgment of Paris, a popular subject in later Greek literature and art, most likely received its first detailed treatment in the Cypria, whereas the Iliad mentions it only fleetingly.

Here Davies collects and translates the extant fragments of the Cypria and provides a commentary that anchors it in the Homeric context as well as in the broader world of ancient Greek art and literature.

A royal education.

Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this “March Up-Country” (Anabasis); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honor, but he preferred to retire to Corinth.

Xenophon’s Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides’ account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in LCL 168). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato’s picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial. Xenophon’s Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon’s ideas about rulers and government; the Loeb edition is in two volumes.

We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the last of the seven volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Xenophon.

A royal education.

Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this “March Up-Country” (Anabasis); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honor, but he preferred to retire to Corinth.

Xenophon’s Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides’ account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in LCL 168). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato’s picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial. Xenophon’s Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon’s ideas about rulers and government; the Loeb edition is in two volumes.

We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the last of the seven volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Xenophon.

The edited volume Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore re-contextualizes Cyrus’s foundational act and epoch in light of recent scholarship, while examining his later reception in antiquity and beyond. Among the many themes addressed in the volume are: the complex dossier of Elamo-Persian acculturation; the Mesopotamian antecedents of Cyrus’s edict and religious policy; Cyrus’s Baupolitik at Pasargadae, and the idiosyncratic genesis of Persian imperial art; the Babylonian exile, the Bible, and the First Return; Cyrus’s exalted but conflicted image in the later Greco-Roman world; his reception and programmatic function in genealogical constructs of the Hellenistic and Arsacid periods; and finally Cyrus’s conspicuous and enigmatic evanescence in the Sasanian and Muslim traditions.

The sum of these wide-ranging contributions assembled in one volume, as well as a new critical edition and English translation of the Cyrus Cylinder, allow for a more adequate evaluation of Cyrus’s impact on his own age, as well as his imprint on posterity.

Established in 1918, as a new state the First Czechoslovak Republic was keen to project a distinct image. Participation in World Fairs offered the perfect opportunity-. In this comprehensive account of Czechoslovak participation in international exhibitions of the interwar period Marta Filipová looks beyond the sleek façade of the modernist pavilions to examine the intersections of architecture, art and design with commercial interests, state agendas, individual action and the public, offering a complex insight into the production and reception of national displays.

The rich collection of images – mainly photographs – provides a close look at the Czechoslovak pavilions. The design, content and context of the displays convey an idealized narrative that was created for the fairs and the myths on which the Czechoslovak nation and state were built. Heavy machinery, modern art, tourist destinations, and food and drink were presented as Czechoslovak, while many aspects of social life – particularly women or ethnic minorities – were strikingly underrepresented or absent. The book argues that the objects and ideas that the pavilion organizers put on display legitimized and validated the existence of the new state through the inclusion and exclusion of exhibits, people, and ideas.

While Marta Filipová primarily focuses on Czechoslovakia, she also offers insights into how other emerging nations projected and sustained their image during this historical period and how interwar world’s fairs accommodated them.