Nowadays most consumers are aware of the European dimensions of their electricity supply. But what ideas lie behind this European network? In constructing electricity networks, Europe performed a Janus-faced function. On the one hand, a European network would bolster economic growth and peace. On the other, economic growth through electrification would increase military potential.
By combining a wide array of rarely used sources, this book unravels how engineers, industrialists, and policymakers used ideas of Europe to gain support for building a European system. By focusing on transnational and European actors, this book is a valuable addition to existing national histories of electrification. It is an original contribution to the history of technology, while also making the role of technology visible in more mainstream European history.

The empirical chapters show how ideas of European cooperation in general became intertwined with network planning during the Interwar period, although the Depression and WWII prevented a European electricity network from being constructed. The subsequent chapters describe the influence of the Marshall Plan on European network-building, focusing on both its economic and military aspects. The last chapter portrays how the Iron Curtain was contested. The troubled expansion of networks and capacity in Western Europe provided an underpinning for political rapprochement with the East in the 1970s and 1980s. Political and economic turmoil after 1989 accelerated this process, leading to an interconnected European system by 1995.

The love affair between humans and the machines that have made us faster and more powerful has expanded into cyberspace, where computer technology seems to offer both the promise of heightened erotic fulfillment and the threat of human obsolescence. In this pathfinding study, Claudia Springer explores the techno-erotic imagery in recent films, cyberpunk fiction, comic books, television, software, and writing on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to reveal how these futuristic images actually encode current debates concerning gender roles and sexuality.

Drawing on psychoanalytical and film theory, as well as the history of technology, Springer offers the first sustained analysis of eroticism and gender in such films as RoboCop, The Terminator, Eve of Destruction, and Lawnmower Man; cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, A Fire in the Sun, and Lady El; the comic books Cyberpunk and Interface, among others; and the television series Mann and Machine. Her analysis demonstrates that while new electronic technologies have inspired changes in some pop culture texts, others stubbornly recycle conventions from the past, refusing to come to terms with the new postmodern social order.

Written to be accessible and entertaining for students and general readers as well as scholars, Electronic Eros will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience.

A library user can’t access an article. Your log in credentials won’t work. In the realm of electronic resources everything runs smoothly—until suddenly, without warning, it doesn’t. Invariably, systems will break down, but a trial and error approach to finding out what’s wrong is highly inefficient. This hands-on guide from two expert ERM librarians walks you through the essentials of troubleshooting. It outlines a methodical process that will help you identify the source of a problem even when it’s not obvious and take steps to reach a resolution. With the goal of developing a library-wide workflow in mind, this guide will teach you how to

• familiarize yourself with the components of electronic resources, using flowchart diagrams of common access chains such as discovery services, knowledge bases, research guides, and library services platforms;
• navigate the complete triage and troubleshooting workflow, illustrated through 14 in-depth examples;
• recognize the symptoms of common access disruptions;
• conduct efficient troubleshooting interviews;
• manage help tickets and design problem reports that capture key information without overburdening the user;
• create publicly available help pages for problems originating with users’ devices or computers;
• communicate with vendors and IT personnel for speedy resolutions, providing dozens of clear definitions of library and technology terms that will help you minimize confusion; and
• customize your own troubleshooting workflow chart for common use across departments and staff hierarchies.

Whether people want to play games and download music, engage in social networking and professional collaboration, or view pornography and incite terror, the Internet provides myriad opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other. The contributors to this book argue that these self-selected online groups are best understood as tribes, with many of the same ramifications, both positive and negative, that tribalism has in the non-cyber world.

In Electronic Tribes, the authors of sixteen competitively selected essays provide an up-to-the-minute look at the social uses and occasional abuses of online communication in the new media era. They explore many current Internet subcultures, including MySpace.com, craftster.org, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, music downloading, white supremacist and other counterculture groups, and Nigerian e-mail scams. Their research raises compelling questions and some remarkable answers about the real-life social consequences of participating in electronic tribes. Collectively, the contributors to this book capture a profound shift in the way people connect, as communities formed by geographical proximity are giving way to communities—both online and offline—formed around ideas.

In an exploration of the life and customs of the Hungarian nobility, this book compares historical reality and legal literature on the example of one noble family--the Elefánthy kindred from northern Hungary (present-day Slovakia). The author begins by outlining the customary law regarding noble status, inheritance and marriage, as summarized in the famous code of Stephen Werbőczy (1514). He then compares these norms with the documentary evidence and establishes the fact that the legal literature differs in regard to social mobility and kindred solidarity.

With this frame of reference in mind, the fate of the Elefánthy family is traced through several generations, enabling the author to make some general statistical statements on inheritance, the rise and fall of various branches, marriage strategies, and the "survival skills" of the kindred. In his summary, the author outlines some of the major avenues for further research, including the peculiar Hungarian form of retainership (familiaritas), and the relationships between noble families and between the nobility and local communities.

Learned love poems from the early Augustan age.

The passionate and dramatic elegies of Propertius gained him a reputation as one of Rome’s finest love poets. Here he portrays the exciting, uneven course of his love affair with Cynthia and tells us much about his contemporaries and the society in which he lives, while in later poems he turns to mythological themes and the legends of early Rome.

Born in Assisi about 50 BC, Propertius moved as a young man to Rome, where he came into contact with a coterie of poets, including Virgil, Tibullus, Horace, and Ovid. Publication of his first book brought immediate recognition and the unwavering support of Maecenas, the influential patron of the Augustan poets. He died perhaps in his mid-thirties, leaving us four books of elegies that have attracted admirers throughout the ages.

In this new edition of Propertius, G. P. Goold solves some longstanding questions of interpretation and gives us a faithful and stylish prose translation. His explanatory notes and glossary-index offer steady guidance and a wealth of information.

Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756–763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712–770), widely considered China’s greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives.

In Elegies for Empire, Gregory Patterson maps out a poetics of memory in Du Fu’s poems from his prolific period of residence in Kuizhou, a remote border town in the Yangzi River Three Gorges. Patterson argues that, for Du Fu, memory held the promise of rebuilding frameworks of belonging under conditions of displacement and dynastic crisis. Remembering also led the poet to think through the material underpinnings on which cultural transmission depends; therefore, these late poems are distinguished by a highly creative, often melancholy engagement with the forms and media that preserve memory, such as monuments, paintings, and poetry. Elegies for Empire elucidates the vital roles of place, memory, and media in poems that are among the most influential in the Chinese literary tradition.

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities.

Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art.

At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

Much revised since its first appearance in 1941, Willard Van Orman Quine’s Elementary Logic, despite its brevity, is notable for its scope and rigor. It provides a single strand of simple techniques for the central business of modern logic. Basic formal concepts are explained, the paraphrasing of words into symbols is treated at some length, and a testing procedure is given for truth-function logic along with a complete proof procedure for the logic of quantifiers.

Fully one third of this revised edition is new, and presents a nearly complete turnover in crucial techniques of testing and proving, some change of notation, and some updating of terminology. The study is intended primarily as a convenient encapsulation of minimum essentials, but concludes by giving brief glimpses of further matters.

In addition to providing the full text, Uihlein and the contributors trace Ricker’s career and delve into his practice of teaching. Subject experts explore specific topics. Thomas Leslie surveys contemporary construction practices in Chicago. Tom F. Peters considers Ricker’s writings in the context of the time while Rachel Will looks at masonry know-how and testing. Donald Friedman examines the teaching of iron and steel construction.

An illuminating look at a field and a legacy, The Elements of Construction rediscovers a figure that shaped the teaching of architecture and trained a generation that forever changed Chicago.

Elements of Knowledge is an engaging introductory text, effectively and imaginatively designed to bring a working understanding and appreciation of the fundamental tenets and methods of the American school of philosophy known as pragmatism, as articulated by its founder C. S. Peirce, to undergraduates and general readers. It presents and explains the basic pragmatic tools that are the common thread in our acquisition and development of knowledge, whether in an academic, vocational, or professional setting, or in life at large. Pragmatism guides, without dictating, examinations of ordinary human experience, creative learning in all fields, and progress in academic disciplines.

This book is intended for use by both general readers and students, particularly those in introductory logic or related philosophy courses. It will also fit well in the design of many "core curriculum" or "general education" course requirements. It is ultimately meant to be accessible and beneficial to anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the unifying principles for acquiring and assessing the soundness of all knowledge.

Francis Wayland's The Elements of Moral Science, first published in 1835, was one of the most widely used and influential American textbooks of the nineteenth century. Direct and simple in its presentation, the book was more a didactic manual than a philosophic discussion of ethical problems. But because of its success, and because it set the tone and form for so much educational writing that was to follow, this first important American textbook in moral philosophy is now of great value as a document in the history of education.

The book grew naturally out of the lectures Wayland prepared for the senior course in moral philosophy he taught as President of Brown University beginning in 1827. Courses of this kind were common at the time. As an undergraduate at Union College, Wayland himself had taken one under President Eliphalet Nott, who was to become his lifelong supporter. Loosely organized, such courses gave the college president, most often interested in the training of character rather than in learning for its own sake, an opportunity to impress his personality and moral views on the seniors before turning them out in the world. Wayland's course at Brown, less rambling than many, was described by a former student as "one garden spot in the waste of the curriculum."

In his lectures and, finally, in his book, Wayland stood in opposition to the utilitarian ethics of the eighteenth century which based moral judgments on the consequences of men's acts. He held instead that conscience was a faculty directing man's actions in accordance with moral law. Wayland developed this idea in the first part of his book, called "Theoretical Ethics." In the second part, "Practical Ethics," he established three working principles: the eternal validity of moral law as revealed in the Scriptures, the right of private judgment in accordance with Protestant tradition, and the Jeffersonian republican limitation of the powers of government. These he then applied to moral practice, vindicating and validating the desirable virtues of justice, veracity, chastity, and benevolence.

One section of Wayland's otherwise inoffensive text turned out to be highly controversial. Under the heading "Personal Liberty" he discussed the question of slavery, coming at length to the conclusion that the duty of masters to slaves was to free them, while the duty of slaves to masters was to obey them and be faithful to them. In the climate of that time, his recommendation to leave action to the Christian conscience of the individual master was no more acceptable to the growing abolitionist sentiment of the North than to the defensive, proslavery feeling of the South. The Elements of Moral Science went on, nevertheless, to a long and popular life, going through several revisions (in which the slavery section was progressively altered) as well as translations, and selling 100,000 copies by the end of the century.

Francis Wayland (1796-1865), Mr. Blau writes, stands as 'a central figure in the first great movement for reform of education in the United States." Ordained first as a minister, he served as President of Brown from 1827 to 1855, advocating a wider, more liberal, more practical curriculum at a time when courses of study were still tightly bound to the classics. In politics anti-expansionist, and a pacifist by conviction, he bitterly opposed the Mexican War and the admission of Texas. His opposition to slavery gradually increased until, on the outbreak of the Civil War, he could write, "Can it be doubted on which side God will declare himself?... The best place to meet a difficulty is just where God puts it. If we dodge it, it will come in a worse place..."

This text reproduces the 1837 revision of The Elements of Moral Science. Minor variations from other editions are included as footnotes. Variant versions of longer passages are carried in full in appendices.

Why do some surprises delight—the endings of Agatha Christie novels, films like The Sixth Sense, the flash awareness that Pip’s benefactor is not (and never was!) Miss Havisham? Writing at the intersection of cognitive science and narrative pleasure, Vera Tobin explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that define a “well-made surprise.”

By tracing the prevalence of surprise endings in both literary fiction and popular literature and showing how they exploit our mental limits, Tobin upends two common beliefs. The first is cognitive science’s tendency to consider biases a form of moral weakness and failure. The second is certain critics’ presumption that surprise endings are mere shallow gimmicks. The latter is simply not true, and the former tells at best half the story. Tobin shows that building a good plot twist is a complex art that reflects a sophisticated understanding of the human mind.

Reading classic, popular, and obscure literature alongside the latest research in cognitive science, Tobin argues that a good surprise works by taking advantage of our mental limits. Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory conspire with stories to produce wondrous illusions, and also provides a sophisticated how-to guide for writers. In Tobin’s hands, the interactions of plot and cognition reveal the interdependencies of surprise, sympathy, and sense-making. The result is a new appreciation of the pleasures of being had.

This translation focuses on publications by Donald E. Knuth, one of the world’s leading computer programmers, that were addressed primarily to a general audience rather than to specialists. These fifteen papers discuss the history of computer science from ancient Babylon to modern times and survey the field of computer science and the nature of algorithms.

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book
A BBC Sky at Night Best Book

“An impressively comprehensive bird’s-eye view of a research topic that is both many decades established and yet still at the very cutting edge of astronomy and physics.”
—Katie Mack, Wall Street Journal

“Schilling has craftily combined his lucid and accessible descriptions of science with the personal story of those unlocking the finer details of the missing mass mystery. The result is enthralling…A captivating scientific thriller.”
—BBC Sky at Night

“Fascinating…A thorough and sometimes troubling account of the hunt for dark matter…You will come away with a very good understanding of how the universe works. Well, our universe, anyway.”
—Michael Brooks, New Scientist

When you train a telescope on outer space, you can see luminous galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. But if you add all that together, it constitutes only 15 percent of the matter in the universe. Despite decades of research, the nature of the remaining 85 percent is unknown. We call it dark matter.

Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos—some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. It is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Govert Schilling interviews believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research. The Elephant in the Universe is a vivid tale of scientists puzzling their way toward the true nature of the universe.

The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.

In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.

The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.

Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.

The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was swallowed up by corporate corruption.

At 8 a.m. on February 3, 1975, Eli Black leapt to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building. The immigrant-turned-CEO of United Brands—formerly United Fruit, now Chiquita—Black seemed an embodiment of the American dream. United Brands was transformed under his leadership—from the “octopus,” a nickname that captured the corrupt power the company had held over Latin American governments, to “the most socially conscious company in the hemisphere,” according to a well-placed commentator. How did it all go wrong?

Eli and the Octopus traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing.

Now, two decades after Google’s embrace of “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto, debates about “ethical capitalism” are more heated than ever. Matt Garcia presents an unvarnished portrait of Black’s complicated legacy. Exploring the limits of corporate social responsibility on American life, Eli and the Octopus offers pointed lessons for those who hope to do good while doing business.

An American literary take on the Nordic noir genre

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

This book explores the diplomatic role of women in early modern European dynastic networks through the study of Aragonese marriage alliances in late fifteenth-century Italy and Hungary. It challenges the frequent erasure of dynastic wives from diplomatic and political narratives to show how elite women were diplomatically active agents for two dynasties.

Chapters analyze the lives of Eleonora (1450-1493) and Beatrice d'Aragona (1457-1508), daughters of King Ferrante of Naples (1423-1494), and how they negotiated their natal and marital relationships to achieve diplomatic outcomes. While Ferrante expected his daughters to follow paternal imperatives and to remain engaged in collective dynastic strategy, the extent of his kinswomen's continued participation in familial projects was dependent on the nature of their marital relationships. The book traces the access to these relationships that enabled courtly women to re-enter the diplomatic space after marriage, not as objects, but as agents, with their own strategies, politics, and schemes.

This book is a detailed comparative analysis of development politics in four urban regions of Latin America, two in Mexico and two in Colombia. John Walton has based his studies on the assumption that the problems of economic growth are essentially political, that is, are problems of choice, decision-making, and the exercise of power. His fundamental purpose has been to discover how elites of different kinds are more and less successful in the promotion of economic development, which he defines as a process in the organization of a society leading not only to higher levels of efficient output but also to a more equitable distribution of benefits.

At the time, the four cities compared were the second- and third-largest metropolitan areas in each country, Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico, Medellín and Cali in Colombia. This selection allows the author to pair, across countries, cases of early and large-scale industrialization (Monterrey and Medellín) with cases of more recent industrial growth in agricultural-commercial centers (Guadalajara and Cali). Walton presents historical introductions to each of the regions and integrates these with original fieldwork and interviews with more than three hundred members of the political and economic elites.

The findings are extensive, but in general they demonstrate that where political and economic power is more broadly distributed, where elites are more open and accessible, and where organizational life is more active and coordinated, regions tend to develop qualitatively as well as quantitatively, showing increases both in productivity and in such benefits as public services, housing, education, and a more balanced distribution of income. If these characteristics are absent, regions may be industrialized but do not provide a broad sharing of the benefits. Walton places a good deal of emphasis on the role of foreign investments, demonstrating that the more penetrated regions are also the less developed.

Finally, the results of these studies are used to evaluate and advance theories of underdevelopment and particularly of economic dependency.

What equality means in three modern democracies, both to leaders of important groups and to challengers of the status quo, is the subject of this wide-ranging canvass of perceptions and policy. It is based on extensive questionnaire data gathered from leaders in various segments of society in each countrybusiness, labor unions, farm organizations, political parties, the media-as well as from groups that are seeking greater equalityfeminists, black leaders in the United States, leaders of the Burakumin in Japan. The authors describe the extent to which the same meanings of equality exist, both within and across nations, and locate the areas of consensus and conflict over equality. No other book has compared data of this sort for these purposes.



The authors address several major substantive and theoretical issues: the role of values in relation to egalitarian outcomes; the comparison of values and perceptions about equality in economics (income equality) and politics (equality of influence); and the difference among the nations in the ways political institutions affect the incorporation of new demands for equality into the policymaking process. They pay particular attention to how policy is set on issues of gender equality.

This book will be controversial, for some see no room in the understanding of political economy for the analysis of values. It will be consulted by a general audience interested in politics and culture as well as by social scientists. Elites and the Idea of Equality is an informative sequel to Equality in America by Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren (Harvard University Press), which considers similar topics in a national context.

The interactions between the elites and the lower classes of Latin America are explored from the divergent perspectives of three eminent historians in this volume. The result is a counterbalance of viewpoints on the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, and the Europeanized and the traditional of Latin America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

E. Bradford Burns advances the view that two cultures were in conflict in nineteenth-century Latin America: that of the modernizing, European-oriented elite, and that of the “common folk” of mixed racial background who lived close to the earth. Thomas E. Skidmore discusses the emerging field of labor history in twentieth-century Latin America, suggesting that the historical roots of today’s exacerbated tensions lie in the secular struggle of army against workers that he describes. In the introduction, Richard Graham takes issue with both authors on certain basic premises and points out implications of their essays for the understanding of North American as well as Latin American history.

A Financial Times and Scientific American Best Book of the Year.

A story of alchemy in Bohemian Paris, where two scientific outcasts discovered a fundamental distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals that inaugurated an enduring scientific mystery.

For centuries, scientists believed that living matter possessed a special quality—a spirit or essence—that differentiated it from nonliving matter. But by the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that the building blocks of one were identical to the building blocks of the other. Elixir tells the story of two young chemists who were not convinced, and how their work rewrote the boundary between life and nonlife.

In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent were working in Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux, drawing on alchemical traditions that equated a plant’s vitality with its aroma. In their spare time they hunted the vital force that promised to reveal the secret to life itself. Their ideas, roundly condemned by established chemists, led to the discovery of structural differences between naturally occurring molecules and their synthetic counterparts, even when the molecules were chemically identical.

Scientists still can’t explain this anomaly, but it may point to critical insights concerning the origins of life on Earth. Rich in sparks and smells, brimming with eccentric characters, experimental daring, and the romance of the Bohemian salon, Elixir is a fascinating cultural and scientific history.

A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year
A Financial Times Summer Reading Favorite

“[V]ividly evokes cultural life in Bohemian Paris, the turbulence of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the feuds that plagued rival scientists…Levitt’s social history, especially of perfume, is fascinating.” —Wall Street Journal

“A delightful history of science and scent at the dawn of the modern age.” —Financial Times

“Pulling from historical publications and personal writings, Theresa Levitt vividly explains why perfume—bathed in, lathered on, and orally consumed—had a chokehold on Parisian life.” —Scientific American

“[A] fascinating account of the birth pangs of organic chemistry in 19th-century Paris…[Levitt] has caught well these dreaming, competitive, daring men in the act of living, each striving compulsively for the giddy, intoxicating bliss of insight into the making of the world.” —The Times

Until the 1800s, scientists believed that living matter possessed a spirit or essence that differentiated it from nonliving matter. But even as scientific consensus shifted toward the view that all matter shares the same building blocks, some were not convinced. 

Elixir tells the story of two dissenters—chemists who redrew the boundary between life and nonlife. In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent worked at Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day, they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux. In their spare time, they hunted the vital force underlying life itself. Their ideas, roundly condemned by established chemists, led to the discovery of structural differences between naturally occurring molecules and their synthetic counterparts.

Scientists still can’t explain this anomaly, but it may point to critical insights concerning the origins of life. Rich in sparks and smells, brimming with eccentric characters, experimental audacity, and the romance of the Bohemian salon, Elixir gives a fascinating tour of the alchemical revelations that shaped nineteenth-century Paris—and the modern world.

In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye.

Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies.

Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.

The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history, its location in New Jersey's political economy, and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the USA.

This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three notable Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. In elegant prose it traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of nineteenth-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers. Yet Peabody has also been one of the most scandalously neglected and caricatured female intellectuals in American history.

Bruce Ronda has recaptured Peabody from anecdotal history and even blue-stocking portrayals in film--most recently by Jessica Tandy in Henry James's The Bostonians. Peabody was a reformer devoted to education in the broadest, and yet most practical, senses. She saw the classroom as mediating between the needs of the individual and the claims of society. She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the famous Dial and other imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.

A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land until the frontier was opened for ranching, Ella and Tom Bird typified the Old West ideals of self-sufficiency and generosity, with a hesitancy to complain about the hard life in the late 1800s.

Yet, in one important way, Ella Dumont was unsuited for life on the frontier. Endowed with an instinctive desire and ability to carve and sculpt, she was largely prevented from pursuing her talents by the responsibilities of marriage and frontier life and later, widowhood with two small children. Even though her second marriage, to Auguste Dumont, made life more comfortable, the realities of her existence still prevented the fulfillment of her artistic longings.

Ella Bird Dumont’s memoir is rich with details of the frontier era in Texas, when Indian depredations were still a danger for isolated settlers, where animals ranged close enough to provide dinner and a new pair of gloves, and where sheer existence depended on skill, luck, and the kindness of strangers. The vividness and poignancy of her life, coupled with the wealth of historical material in the editor’s exhaustive notes, make this Texas pioneer’s autobiography a very special book.

For many years Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow has been regarded as a classic American regional novelist. But Glasgow is far more than a Southern writer, as Linda Wagner demonstrates in this fascinating reassessment of her work.

A Virginia lady, Glasgow began to write at a time when the highest praise for a literary woman was to be mistaken for a male writer. In her early fiction, published at the turn of the century, all attention is focused on male protagonists; the strong female characters who do appear early in these novels gradually fade into the background.

But Ellen Glasgow grew to become a woman who, born to be protected from the very life she wanted to chronicle, moved “beyond convention” to live her life on her own terms. And as her own self-image changed, the perspective of her novels became more feminine, the female characters moved to center stage, and their philosophies became central to her themes. Glasgow’s best novels, then—Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, and the romantic trilogy that includes The Sheltered Life—came late in her life, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists.

Glasgow’s increased self-assurance as writer and woman led to a far greater awareness of craft. Her style became more highly imaged, more suggestive, as though she wished to widen the range of resources available to move her readers. She became a writer both popular and respected. Her novels appeared as selections of the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one became a best seller. At the same time she was chosen as one of the few female members of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1942 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life.

Ellen Wilkinson was a key radical figure in the 20th century British socialist and feminist movement, a woman of passionate energy who was involved in most of the major struggles of her time.

Born in October 1891 into a working-class textile family, Wilkinson was involved in women’s suffrage, helped found the British Communist Party, led the Labour Party’s anti-fascist campaign, headed the iconic Jarrow Crusade and was the first female Minister of Education.

In this lively and engaging biography, Paula Bartley charts the political life of this extraordinary campaigner who went from street agitator to government minister whilst keeping her principles intact.

Expansive and essential, Elliott Carter Speaks opens up the artist's teaching and introspection to new contemporary perspectives on his thought and art.

Please note that the order and arrangement of materials in this book differs from that of Elliott Carter’s original lectures.

The story of the most acclaimed literary biography of the twentieth century—an ingeniously plotted, behind-the-scenes account of how the literary critic and scholar Richard Ellmann shaped James Joyce’s reputation.

Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” Frank Kermode thought the book would “fix Joyce’s image for a generation,” a prediction that was if anything too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a preeminent modernist.

Ellmann’s Joyce provides the biography of the biography, exploring how Ellmann came to his subject, gained the cooperation of Joyce’s family and estate, shrewdly, doggedly collected vital papers and interviews, placated publishers, thwarted competitors, and carefully balanced narrative with literary analysis. Ellmann’s Joyce also removes the veil from the biographer—richly rewarded in public, admirable in private life, but also possessed of a startling secret life. An eminent biographer himself, Zachary Leader constructs a powerful argument not only in support of Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims but also on behalf of literary biography generally. In the process, he takes readers on a rare tour through midcentury publishing houses in New York and London, as well as the corridors and classrooms of elite universities, from Yale to Oxford. The influence of Ellmann’s book, recognized instantly, persists to this day, among literary scholars and Joyce fans alike.

Filled with surprising details, tales of intrigue from the heyday of literary publishing, and intimate portraits of the Joyce and Ellmann families, Ellmann’s Joyce is as immersive as a walk around town with Leopold Bloom and as moving as the thickly drifted snow on Michael Furey’s grave.

 "A magisterially written, well-researched, informative, and entertaining biography of a woman who helped throw open the doors to broader participation and power for women in the Republican Party and American politics."
---Dave Dempsey, author of William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate

"Elly Peterson will be a text to which historians and researchers turn for insight into the yin and yang of mainstream politics in the mid-century."
---Patricia Sullivan, past president, Journalism and Women Symposium

"This lively portrait of a leading woman in the Republican Party between 1952 and 1982 also charts the party's shift to the right after 1964, revealingly viewed through the eyes of liberal Republican women. Intensively researched with ethnographic attention to the subtleties of political culture, Fitzgerald's book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Republican Party changed during the turbulent decades after 1960 and how women and women's issues shaped those changes."
---Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, State University of New York, Binghamton

"Sara Fitzgerald tells Peterson's story in this superb and timely biography. It carries a message that deserves the widest audience as the nation struggles to find needed consensus on critical issues amid poisonous political partisanship that has made it increasingly difficult for public officials to bridge their differences. I hope that every American reads it."
---Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson, from the Foreword

"To understand the quest for equal rights in America you really need to meet those women who were active at the time of transition. In this gripping biography we meet one woman who entered a male dominated world and triumphed."
---Francis X. Blouin Jr., Director, Bentley Historical Library

"Sara Fitzgerald's writing is as intelligent as it is entertaining."
---Best-selling novelist Diane Chamberlain

Elly Peterson was one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.

Elly Peterson's story is a missing chapter in the political history of Michigan, as well as the United States. This new biography, written by Sara Fitzgerald (a Michigan native and former Washington Post editor), finally gives full credit to one of the first female political leaders in this country.

When Peterson resigned in 1970 as assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote that "her abilities would have earned her the national chairmanship, were it not for the unwritten sex barrier both parties have erected around that job."

Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.