Since its release in 1932, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang had earned a reputation as one of the few Hollywood products that can be associated directly with social change. Film historians attribute the reform of the southern chain gang system to the public outrage generated by this movie, which depicts a true story.
    In addition to being an important social document, the film remains a gripping experience for filmgoers today because of its unusual dramatic conception, its hauntingly inconclusive ending, and Paul Muni's performance as the good boy forced to go wrong.

This book includes the complete screenplay.

Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, ‘I am an American’ offers precisely the kind of ground-level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.

A definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets.

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.

Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos's life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx literature and culture in the United States.

This study of the Guatemalan legal system during the regimes of two of Latin America’s most repressive dictators reveals the surprising extent to which Maya women used the courts to air their grievances and defend their human rights.

Winner, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2015

Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court.

Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944)—David Carey Jr. explores the ways in which indigenous people, women, and the poor used Guatemala’s legal system to manipulate the boundaries between legality and criminality. Using court records that are surprisingly rich in Maya women’s voices, he analyzes how bootleggers, cross-dressers, and other litigants crafted their narratives to defend their human rights. Revealing how nuances of power, gender, ethnicity, class, and morality were constructed and contested, this history of crime and criminality demonstrates how Maya men and women attempted to improve their socioeconomic positions and to press for their rights with strategies that ranged from the pursuit of illicit activities to the deployment of the legal system.

The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp isn’t performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. I Belong to This Band, Hallelujah! is a vivid portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members’ often profound differences.

Laura Clawson’s research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. Clawson finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs.

I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome—an exhibition and catalog produced by the Yale University Art Gallery—provided the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Responding to the popular success of the exhibit and catalog, Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson here gather ten additional essays by specialists in art history, history, and papyrology to offer further reflections on women in Roman society based on the material evidence provided by art, archaeology, and ancient literary sources.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cornelius C. Vermeule, Rolf Winkes, Mary T. Boatwright, Susan Wood, Eve D'Ambra, Andrew Oliver, Diana Delia, and Ann Ellis Hanson. Their essays, illustrated with black-and-white photos of the art under discussion, treat such themes as mothers and sons, marriage and widowhood, aging, adornment, imperial portraiture, and patronage.

When it comes to personal collections, we live in exciting times. Individuals are living their lives in ways that are increasingly mediated by digital technologies — digital photos and video footage, music, the social web, e-mail,and other day-to-day interactions. Although this mediation presents many technical challenges for long-term preservation, it also provides unprecedented opportunities for documenting the lives of individuals.

Ten authors — Robert Capra, Adrian Cunningham, Tom Hyry, Leslie Johnston, Christopher (Cal) Lee, Sue McKemmish, Cathy Marshall, Rachel Onuf, Kristina Spurgin, and Susan Thomas — share their expertise on the various aspects of the management of digital information in I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era.

The volume is divided in three parts:

Chapters explore issues,challenges, and opportunities in the management of personal digital collections, focusing primarily on born-digital materials generated and kept by individuals.

Contributions to I, Digital represent the depth in thinking about how cultural institutions can grapple with new forms of documentation, and how individuals manage--and could better manage--digital information that is part of contemporary life.

Louis Moore draws on the life stories of African American fighters active from 1880 to 1915 to explore working-class black manhood. As he details, boxers bought into American ideas about masculinity and free enterprise to prove their equality while using their bodies to become self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure rather than respectable labor. Moore shows how each fighter conformed to middle-class ideas of masculinity based on his own judgment of what culture would accept. Finally, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority despite media and government efforts to defend white privilege.

Robert Hart’s forty-five-year administration of China’s customs service was a unique achievement. In these letters Hart speaks to us directly from a time long past in China, but a time that may seem only yesterday to a Western reader. The result is a primary source for the history of modern China and the era of foreign privilege there.

Bearing sole responsibility for the Chinese Maritime Customs as its Inspector General, Hart built up an international staff of thousands, facilitated foreign trade, gave the late-Ch’ing court its principal new revenues, and fostered China’s modernity in administration, schools, naval development, postal service, and many other lines. Behind the scenes Hart was also a diplomat who settled the Sino–French war, changed Macao’s status, got boundaries delimited with Burma and India, and mitigated the disasters of imperialism. His career at Peking, coinciding with that of the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, represented the constructive side of the unequal treaty system and Victorian Britain’s informal empire in East Asia.

The publication of the great I. G.’s weekly or fortnightly letters to his confidant and London commissioner, James Duncan Campbell, gives us an intimate, inside view of Hart’s problems and methods. He appraises his employers in China’s foreign office, the Tsungli Yamen, and comments pithily on the complex flow of events and personalities. He quotes the Confucian Classic but, even more, the Latin poets. His personal life is revealed—standing long hours at his writing desk, finding solace in the violin, keeping his own counsel, constantly isolated by his responsibilities. Having no confidant in Peking, he explains himself to his loyal agent in London.

The Hart–Campbell letters, after five years’ editing and annotation and with an informed introduction by Hart’s final successor as foreign I. G., L. K. Little, thus take their place as one of the great historical treasures that bring a vanished era back to life.

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.

The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.

In I Know That You Know That I Know, Butte explores how stories narrate human consciousness. Butte locates a historical shift in the representation of webs of consciousnesses in narrative—what he calls “deep intersubjectivity”—and examines the effect this shift has since had on Western literature and culture. The author studies narrative practices in two ways: one pairing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British novels (Moll Flanders and Great Expectations, for example), and the other studying genre practices—comedy, anti-comedy and masquerade—in written and film narratives (Jane Austen and His Girl Friday, for example, and Hitchcock’s Cary Grant films).

Butte’s second major claim argues for new ways to read representations of human consciousness, whether or not they take the form of deep intersubjectivity. Phenomenological criticism has lost its credibility in recent years, but this book identifies better reading strategies arising out of what the author calls poststructuralist phenomenology, grounded largely in the work of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Butte criticizes the extreme of transcendental idealism (first-wave phenomenological criticism) and cultural materialism (when it rules out the study of consciousness). He also criticizes the dominant Lacanian framework of much academic film criticism.

How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology

I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.

Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.

McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.

As Americans increasingly question how each of us fits into our nation's cultural tapestry, I Lived to Tell the World presents thirteen inspiring profiles of refugees who have settled in Oregon. They come from Rwanda, Myanmar, Bosnia, Syria, and more-different stories, different conflicts, but similar paths through loss and violence to a new, not always easy, life in the United States. The in-depth profiles are drawn from hours of interviews and oral histories; journalist Elizabeth Mehren worked collaboratively with the survivors to honor the complexity of their experiences and to ensure that the stories are told with, and not just about, them. Mehren also weaves in historical, cultural, and political context alongside these personal stories of resilience.

In the face of global cruelty and hatred, the courage and fortitude of these individuals illuminate the darkness. Their stories inspire readers to reflect on their own experiences and to view newcomers to America with renewed respect. As more states adopt Holocaust and genocide education curricula and as issues around refugees, immigration, and racial justice gain attention, I Lived to Tell the World highlights the purposeful lives led by these Oregonians despite their painful pasts. Their experiences not only humanize the atrocities often seen in headlines, but also convey a universal message of hope. 

Poems that question the world with tenderness and restless introspection

In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane, or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent, at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor, introspection, and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead, they capture the way thoughts shift, contradict, and collide.

Inspired by the poet’s dreams, as well as travels throughout central Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America, the poems are alive in voice and detail, yet the speaker’s connections, and more so, disconnections, turn toward isolationism, solitude, and loneliness. At times, the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry.” Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets.” This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions, observes, and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd, others deeply reflective, but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable. 

Poems that question the world with tenderness and restless introspection

In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane, or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent, at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor, introspection, and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead, they capture the way thoughts shift, contradict, and collide.

Inspired by the poet’s dreams, as well as travels throughout central Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America, the poems are alive in voice and detail, yet the speaker’s connections, and more so, disconnections, turn toward isolationism, solitude, and loneliness. At times, the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry.” Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets.” This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions, observes, and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd, others deeply reflective, but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable. 

When North and South went to war, millions of American families endured their first long separation. For men in the armies—and their wives, children, parents, and siblings at home—letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Yet for many of these Union and Confederate families, taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task. I Remain Yours narrates the Civil War from the perspective of ordinary people who had to figure out how to salve the emotional strain of war and sustain their closest relationships using only the written word.

Christopher Hager presents an intimate history of the Civil War through the interlaced stories of common soldiers and their families. The previously overlooked words of a carpenter from Indiana, an illiterate teenager from Connecticut, a grieving mother in the mountains of North Carolina, and a blacksmith’s daughter on the Iowa prairie reveal through their awkward script and expression the personal toll of war. Is my son alive or dead? Returning soon or never? Can I find words for the horrors I’ve seen or the loneliness I feel? Fear, loss, and upheaval stalked the lives of Americans straining to connect the battlefront to those they left behind.

Hager shows how relatively uneducated men and women made this new means of communication their own, turning writing into an essential medium for sustaining relationships and a sense of belonging. Letter writing changed them and they in turn transformed the culture of letters into a popular, democratic mode of communication.

I Saw Her in My Dreams is a powerful novel about interpersonal and systemic violence, examined through the lens of a relationship between Zahiyya, an anxious middle-class Omani artist, and Faneesh, the Ethiopian domestic worker she hires. When Zahiyya’s husband Amer, a novelist, leaves for Zanzibar in search of his biological mother, Zahiyya is left to confront her anxieties and prejudices. Both Zahiyya and Faneesh begin to suffer a recurring nightmare, prompting Zahiyya to read Fanheesh’s diaries in search of answers. Alone and afraid, Zahiyya reads excerpts from Amer’s novel, written from his father’s diaries about living in Zanzibar, where he fell in love with Amer’s mother, a Zanzibari woman whose absence still haunts him. Weaving between multiple perspectives and stories within stories, the novel explores honestly—but without sensationalizing or self-Orientalizing—the anti-Blackness that has endured in the Arab world and elsewhere.

“Marvelously unconventional...a credo of intense individualism.”—Atlantic

A brilliantly eccentric autobiography from one of the most widely read poets of the twentieth century.

“Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these socalled lectures, that I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.” So begins the first of six delightfully off-kilter “nonlectures” delivered at Harvard in 1952–1953. Gleefully flouting the conventions of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry, which had previously hosted T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and other luminaries, E. E. Cummings declines to offer anything in the way of critical analysis, citing Rainer Maria Rilke’s contention that “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism.”

Instead, six nonlectures presents a kaleidoscopic tour of the great poet’s life, influences, and favorite poems, from Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Swinburne to selections of his own work. After an autobiographical sketch of his youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts—including reflections on his father’s tragic death, accounts of his formative relationships with the pragmatist philosophers William James and Josiah Royce, stories from his days as a Harvard undergraduate, and readings of his earliest attempts at poetry—Cummings captivates with stream-of-consciousness musings on a dizzying array of subjects: freedom and democracy, New York and Paris, Lenin’s tomb and high-speed elevators, death and Santa Claus.

Replete with digressions, irreverent wordplay, and, of course, parentheses, six nonlectures is a moving tribute to the spirit of artistic individuality, that dedication to unmitigated personal truth without which the poet “would cease to exist at all.”

Winner of the National Communication Association’s 2023 Hochmuth-Nichols Award

" . . . An important contribution to studies of the American conservative movement and, more generally, Populist discourse. Recommended." —CHOICE

I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States examines a variety of texts—ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets—to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism, including its manifestation in the racially charged presidential election of 1964, its consolidation at the height of Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, and its character in successive moments that saw its fortunes wax and wane, including 1994, the Obama era, and the rise of Donald J. Trump. theorizing conservative populism as a rhetorical form, Johnson advances scholarship about populism away from a binary ideological framework while offering a useful lens for contextualizing scholarship on American conservatism. I The People emphasizes that the populist roots of conservative hegemony exercise a powerful constraining force on conservative intellectuals, whose power to shape and control the movement to which they belong is circumscribed by the form of its public-facing appeals.

The study also reframes scholarly understandings of the conservative tradition’s seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest an abiding conservative unease regarding capitalism, showing how racist hostility underwrote a compromise with an increasingly economized understanding of humanity. Johnson also contests the narrative that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism’s public vernacular was a white and masculine identity politics reliant on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or President Barack Obama.

“i used to love to dream” is a mixtap/e/ssay that performs hip-hop scholarship using sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music, film, and news clips; and original rap lyrics. As a genre, the mixtap/e/ssay brings together the mixtape—a self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity—and the personal and scholarly essays. “i used to love to dream” names Decatur, Illinois—the author's hometown—as a reference point for place- and time-specific rapped ruminations about the ideas of growing up, moving away, and pondering one's life choices. At the same time, the tracks attempt to account for moral, philosophical, and ethical dimensions undergirding unease about authenticity, or staying true to oneself and to one’s city or neighborhood, as well as the external factors that contribute to such feelings. Using the local to ask questions about the global, “i used to love to dream” highlights outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States.

The tracks are presented along with liner notes and a short documentary about the making of the mixtap/e/ssay, and accompanying articles to provide context for the tracks for listeners both in classrooms and outside of them.

A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation.

I Want Golden Eyes is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook.

Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor’s library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia’s crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president’s expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature’s selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money.

The rules may differ from country to country, but the dating game is a universal constant.

After years of searching for Mr. Right in living-room meetings arranged by family or friends, Ghada Abdel Aal, a young Egyptian professional, decided to take to the blogosphere to share her experiences and vent her frustrations at being young, single, and female in Egypt. Her blog, I Want to Get Married!, quickly became a hit with both men and women in the Arab world. With a keen sense of humor and biting social commentary, Abdel Aal recounts in painful detail her adventures with failed proposals and unacceptable suitors. There's Mr. Precious, who storms out during their first meeting when he feels his favorite athlete has been slighted, and another suitor who robs her in broad daylight, to name just a few of the characters she runs across in her pursuit of wedded bliss.

I Want to Get Married! has since become a best-selling book in Egypt and the inspiration for a television series. This witty look at dating challenges skewed representations of the Middle East and presents a realistic picture of what it means to be a single young woman in the Arab world, where, like elsewhere, a good man can be hard to find.

Like nesting dolls, the poems in I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First contain scenes within scenes, inviting the reader over and over again to sharpen focus on minute details that, though small, reveal much about human perception and imagination.

Angie Mazakis handles these layers of revelation with great tenderness. Her poems wander in the way that a curious mind wanders, so that even though they often end very far from where they started, they are anchored in the familiar, referring to experiences we all share: a moment of distraction in a coffee shop imagining a conversation with someone across the room, or a narrative built around the expressions of the cartoon people on the airplane seatback safety guide.

I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is a testament to the notion that whether through a cosmic or microscopic lens, “You just see one moment; you just see now.”

It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic’s contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may supply justification: Neoanalysis.

This once influential theory held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis, called thus after an Ethiopian prince who allied with Troy against the Greeks, only to be killed by the Greeks’ greatest hero, Achilles. The death of that hero himself, at the hands of Paris, was then described, followed by the suicide of Ajax and preparations for the sack of Troy. The prose summary thus suggests a sequel to Homer’s poem, rather than its source, and for various reasons, especially the theory’s apparent failure to allow for the concept of oral composition, Neoanalysis fell into disfavor. Its recent revival in subtler form, given its vast potential implications for the Iliad’s origins, has inspired this volume’s critical reappraisal of that theory’s more sophisticated reincarnation. In addition, even more than with other lost early epics, the possibility that Greek vase paintings may reflect episodes of the poem must be examined.

Beowulf is one of the finest works of vernacular literature from the European Middle Ages and as such is a fitting title to head the Old English family of texts published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

But this volume offers something unique. For the first time in the history of Beowulf scholarship, the poem appears alongside the other four texts from its sole surviving manuscript: the prose Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and (following Beowulf) the poem Judith. First-time readers as well as established scholars can now gain new insights into Beowulf—and the four other texts—by approaching each in its original context.

Could a fascination with the monstrous have motivated the compiler of this manuscript, working over a thousand years ago, to pull together this diverse grouping into a single volume? The prose translation by R. D. Fulk, based on the most recent editorial understanding, allows readers to rediscover Beowulf’s brilliant mastery along with otherworldly delights in the four companion texts in The Beowulf Manuscript.

A new translation of two medieval Spanish versions of the tale of Apollonius, a story central to the premodern literary imagination and a source for Shakespeare’s Pericles.

Incest, riddling, piracy, prostitution, shipwreck, Lazarus-like resuscitation, and seductive musical performances—the story of King Apollonius and his wanderings, with its riveting plot twists, has been told and retold in many languages since its late antique composition. No conventional romance hero, Apollonius proves his mettle not on the battlefield but through study, sport, music, and courtliness. The equally studious and courtly heroines of the romance—Luciana and Tarsiana, Apollonius’s wife and daughter—embark on their own adventures before the family reunites. Throughout, the king’s trials are cast as a Christian allegory of fortune.

Two Castillian versions are included in The Iberian Apollonius of Tyre. The thirteenth-century poem known as The Book of Apollonius, a creative adaptation by an unknown cleric, focuses on Apollonius as a pilgrim figure and Christianizes the narrative. The fifteenth-century prose Life and History of King Apollonius, a highly literal translation of the Latin Gesta Romanorum text by an anonymous Aragonese translator, is representative of vernacular humanism and linked with the genre of the short chivalric tale.

This volume presents new editions and English translations of these two complete, standalone medieval Spanish versions of the ancient legend.

Since its publication in 1981, this book has established itself as the major new interpretation of the historical concept of Ibn Khaldûn, the great figure of Arab-Islamic letters and of historical thought overall--a figure generally thought to be on a par with Thucydides, Vico, Herder and others of similar stature.

The author has eschewed the ahistorical interpretations to which Ibn Khaldûn has normally been subjected, both by authors who have sought unduly to modernise his thought, and by those who sought to freeze it in stereotypical models of Islamic philosophy.

Ibn Khaldûn is not only a true historical source of his time; he is also taken as the unchallenged sociological and cultural interpreter of medieval North Africa and much of medieval and modern Arab-Islamic culture as well. The validity of his discourse is considered to be so universal as to confer upon his ideas the status of progenitor--or, at least, anticipator--of a great variety of modern ideas.

This book tells the exciting story of the ice ages—what they were like, why they occurred, and when the next one is due. The solution to the ice age mystery originated when the National Science Foundation organized the CLIMAP project to study changes in the earth’s climate over the past 700,000 years. One of the goals was to produce a map of the earth during the last ice age. Scientists examined cores of sediment from the Indian Ocean bed and deciphered a continuous history for the past 500,000 years. Their work ultimately confirmed the theory that the earth’s irregular orbital motions account for the bizarre climatic changes which bring on ice ages.

This is a tale of scientific discovery and the colorful people who participated: Louis Agassiz, the young Swiss naturalist whose geological studies first convinced scientists that the earth has recently passed through an ice age; the Reverend William Buckland, an eccentric but respected Oxford professor who fought so hard against the ice-age theory before accepting it; James Croll, a Scots mechanic who educated himself as a scientist and first formulated the astronomic theory of ice ages; Milutin Milankovitch, the Serbian mathematician who gave the astronomic theory its firm quantitative foundation; and the many other astronomers, geochemists, geologists, paleontologists, and geophysicists who have been engaged for nearly a century and a half in the pressing search for a solution to the ice-age mystery.

Ice Floe, the celebrated and award-winning journal of circumpolar poetry, is here reborn as an annual book series. This first volume features the best of the journal's first seven years, along with evocative new poetry from Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. All work is presented in both its original language and in English translation. With contributors including former Alaska poet laureate John Haines, Gunnar Harding, Robert Bly, Lennart Sjögren, and dozens of other established and emerging poets, this wonderful collection of voices from the northern latitudes is a great read for all lovers of poetry and international literature.

“Wise and illuminating…Merrill’s treatment of the rise of Chevron, and its various twists and turns over the decades, is keenly insightful.” —Cass R. Sunstein, New York Review of Books

“Merrill is one of the brightest and best scholars of administrative law in his generation. This book...is must-reading for any citizen who has an interest in the constitutionality of the administrative state.” —Steven G. Calabresi, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

“A model of how to conduct rigorous, level-headed, and fair-minded analysis of a subject that has generated enormous legal controversy. There is no more judicious mind among American legal scholars than Thomas Merrill’s.”—Nicholas Parrillo, Yale Law School

“A must-read for practicing or prospective administrative lawyers. They, as well as a broader audience, will find much good sense in the author’s judicious treatment of perennial questions of lawful government.”—Michael S. Greve, Claremont Review of Books

The Constitution makes Congress the principal federal lawmaker. But for a variety of reasons, including partisan gridlock, Congress increasingly fails to keep up with the challenges facing our society. Power has shifted to the executive branch agencies that interpret laws and to the courts that review their interpretations.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, this judicial review has been highly deferential: courts must uphold agency interpretations of unclear laws so long as these are “reasonable.” But the Chevron doctrine faces backlash from constitutional scholars and, now, from Supreme Court justices who insist that courts, not administrative agencies, have the authority to say what the law is. Critics of the administrative state charge that Chevron deference enables unaccountable bureaucratic power. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Merrill reviews the history and consequences of the Chevron doctrine and suggests a way forward.

Byzantine and Russian Orthodox icons are perhaps the most enduring form of religious art ever developed—and one of the most mysterious. This book, featuring the painted panels made for churches and for prayer at home, provides an accessible guide to their story and power. Illustrated mostly with Cretan, Greek, and Russian examples from the British Museum, which houses Britain’s most important collection of icons, the book examines icons in the context of the history of Christianity, as well as within the perspective of art history.

Robin Cormack, a preeminent expert on the subject, explains how icons were made, framed, and displayed. He investigates their subject matter, showing how scenes can be identified, how the iconography developed over centuries, and what role portraiture plays in their imagery. Icons have not lost their power in much of the world, and Cormack considers their continuing use in our day—whether in a religious setting or as an inspiration to modern-day artists like Matisse.

A uniquely accessible and authoritative introduction to this distinctive art form, Icons defines its subject’s unusual place at the intersection of religion, Russian culture, and art history.