V. N. Vološinov’s important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others.

Vološinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Vološinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.

How does one explain the presence of educated recruits in movements that were overwhelmingly working class in composition? How did intellectuals function within the movements? In the first in-depth exploration of this question, Stanley Pierson examines the rise, development, and ultimate failure of the German Social Democrats, the largest of the European socialist parties, from 1887 to 1912. Prominent figures, such as Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eduard Bernstein are discussed, but the book focuses primarily on the younger generation. These forgotten intellectuals—Max Schippel, Paul Kampffmeyer, Conrad Schmidt, Paul Ernst, and others—struggled most directly with the dilemmas arising out of the attempt to translate Marxist doctrines into practical and personal terms.

These young writers, speakers, and politicians set out to supplant old ways of thinking with a Marxist understanding of history and society. Pierson weaves together over thirty intellectual biographies to explore the relationship between ideology and politics in Germany. He examines the conflict within Social Democracy between the “revisionist” intellectuals, who sought to adapt Marxist theory to changing economic and social realities, and those “orthodox” and “radical” intellectuals who attempted to remain faithful to the Marxist vision. By examining the struggles of the socialist intellectuals in Germany, Pierson brings out the special features of German cultural, social, and political life before World War I. His study of this critical time in the development of the German Social Democratic party also illuminates the wider development of Marxism in Europe during the twentieth century.

Daniel Brudney traces the development of post-Hegelian thought from Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer to Karl Marx's work of 1844 and his Theses on Feuerbach, and concludes with an examination of The German Ideology. Brudney focuses on the transmutations of a set of ideas about human nature, the good life, and our relation to the world and to others; about how we end up with false beliefs about these matters; about whether one can, in a capitalist society, know the truth about these matters; and about the critique of capitalism which would flow from such knowledge.

Brudney shows how Marx, following Feuerbach, attempted to reveal humanity's nature and what would count as the good life, while eschewing and indeed polemicizing against "philosophy"--against any concern with metaphysics and epistemology. Marx attempted to avoid philosophy as early as 1844, and the central aims of his texts are the same right through The German Ideology. There is thus no break between an early and a late Marx; moreover, there is no "materialist" Marx, no Marx who subscribes to a metaphysical view, even in The German Ideology, the text canonically taken as the origin of Marxist materialism. Rather, in all the texts of this period Marx tries to mount a compelling critique of the present while altogether avoiding the dilemmas central to philosophy in the modern era.

Mary Austin Holley found life challenging and made it interesting for others. As wife and widow of Horace Holley, eminent orator, clergyman, and educator, and as cousin and friend of Stephen F. Austin, founder of the first Texas colony, she formed friendships among important people. From New Haven to New Orleans and Brazoria, Texas, she was beloved.

The panorama of her life, described in vivid detail by a former head of the English Department at Texas Christian University, transports the reader to the tempestuous early years of the American Republic and, finally, to Texas during its colonization and early Republic years. Throughout this charming book Mrs. Holley's "intuition for important people" brings the reader into the company of many of America's great and accomplished: Noah Webster, John Quincy Adams, President and Mrs. Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, and many others.

Why did some early Christians consider Mary Magdalene to be an apostle while others did not? Some Christian texts, underlining her role as one of the very first witnesses to the resurrection, portray Mary Magdalene as the "apostle to the apostles," while other sources exclude or replace her in their resurrection accounts.

This book examines how the conferral, or withholding, of apostolic status operated as a tool of persuasion in the politics of early Christian literature. Drawing on both canonical and noncanonical literature in her comprehensive study, the author reveals some intriguing correlations between the prominence of Peter in a text and a corresponding diminishment of women's leadership and apostolicity.

This historical study of early Christian tensions has serious implications for current denominational discourse because authority, apostolic status, and the ordination of women continue to be highly disputed topics within many Christian circles today.

Mary McLeod Bethune was born on May 10, 1875, in a log cabin in rural Sumter County, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth child among seventeen siblings but the first born free of the bonds of slavery. As a child she attended a Presbyterian mission school in nearby Mayesville and Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. After some years at Scotia she was admitted in 1894 to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Her two years of training at Moody did not lead to missionary work in Africa, as she had dreamed, but to missionlike teaching positions in the South and eventually her founding, in 1904, of the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Girls, in Daytona Beach, Florida. That institution would grow to the present-day Bethune-Cookman University.

In this religious biography, author Yahya Jongintaba traces Bethune’s life of service in lively prose, structuring his book in a five-part framework that organizes his subject’s life in parallel with the Lord’s Prayer and virtues identified by Bethune herself: freedom, creativity, integrity, discipline, and love. With unfettered access to Bethune’s personal archive, Jongintaba paints a picture of a mother figure and mentor to generations, a nearsaint who lived “a blameless life for four-score years.” With deep empathy and the kind of “spiritual understanding” that Bethune had despaired of finding in a biographer in her own lifetime (despite attempts by publishers and herself to find just the right person), Jongintaba endeavors to achieve in his biography what Bethune wrote that she hoped to accomplish in an autobiography that never materialized: to “give to the world the real Mary McLeod Bethune’s life as I have lived it.”

The physical signs of Roman Catholicism pervade the Mexican countryside. Colonial churches and neighborhood chapels, wayside shrines, and mountaintop crosses dot the landscape. Catholicism also permeates the traditional cultures of rural communities, although this ideational influence is less immediately obvious. It is often couched in enigmatic idiom and imagery, and it is further obscured by the vestiges of pagan customs and the anticlerical attitudes of many villagers. These heterodox tendencies have even led some observers to conclude that Catholicism in rural Mexico is little more than a thin veneer on indigenous practice.

In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer John M. Ingham attempts to develop a modern semiotic and structuralist interpretation of traditional Mexican culture, an interpretation that accounts for the culture's apparent heterodoxy. Drawing on field research in Tlayacapan, Morelos, a village in the central highlands, he shows that nearly every domain of folk culture is informed with religious meaning. More precisely, the Catholic categories of spirit, nature, and evil compose the basic framework of the villagers' social relations and subjective experiences.

A Mother who nurtures, empathizes, and heals... a Warrior who defends, empowers, and resists oppression... the Virgin Mary plays many roles for the peoples of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. Devotion to the Virgin inspired and sustained medieval and Renaissance Spaniards as they liberated Spain from the Moors and set about the conquest of the New World. Devotion to the Virgin still inspires and sustains millions of believers today throughout the Americas.

This wide-ranging and highly readable book explores the veneration of the Virgin Mary in Spain and the Americas from the colonial period to the present. Linda Hall begins the story in Spain and follows it through the conquest and colonization of the New World, with a special focus on Mexico and the Andean highlands in Peru and Bolivia, where Marian devotion became combined with indigenous beliefs and rituals. Moving into the nineteenth century, Hall looks at national cults of the Virgin in Mexico, Bolivia, and Argentina, which were tied to independence movements. In the twentieth century, she examines how Eva Perón linked herself with Mary in the popular imagination; visits contemporary festivals with significant Marian content in Spain, Peru, and Mexico; and considers how Latinos/as in the United States draw on Marian devotion to maintain familial and cultural ties.

Extensively illustrated, with over 100 drawings and 11 unique Mary Schafer patterns, Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker is a must-have book for anyone passionate about American quilting.

While we take that passion for granted today, author Gwen Marston shows that it wasn't always so; indeed, one woman, Mary Schafer, was largely responsible for the restoration of interest in one of our greatest folk arts -- long before the American bicentennial turned quilting into what seemed like an overnight sensation.

Marston presents Schafer as an unassuming scholar: the anonymous quilter, remaining humble and somewhat retiring. Behind the modest façade, however, Schafer displayed a remarkable devotion to research, historical accuracy, and community through her efforts to make quilting available to as many people as possible.

Nonquilters will find Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker a welcome addition to their collection of the work of masters of American folk art, while quilting aficionados will appreciate it not only for the story it tells, but for the generous selection of patterns and illustrations it offers.

Gwen Marston is a nationally known quilt maker, teacher, and author. She is the author of over fifteen books on quilting, including Liberated String Quilts, 70 Classic Quilting Patterns, and Amish Quilting Patterns.

Examining the legal lives of early modern women through Milton’s literary works

In his History of Britain, John Milton writes, “Laws are Masculin Births . . . nothing [is] more awry from the Law of God and Nature, then that a Woman should give Laws to Men.” In this interdisciplinary study, Lynne Greenberg explores the normative and nonnormative legal lives of early modern women as depicted in Milton’s works—unmarried and married women, mothers, heiresses, widows, and queens—providing cogent overviews of the laws of multiple jurisdictions to offer critical context for each case study. Greenberg explores a wide range of legal-juridical materials and previously unexplored archival and private family documents. As she demonstrates, while Milton’s narratives are at times enmeshed in existing jural paradigms, they also offer resistant responses to marital, custodial, property, inheritance, and criminal laws and even imagine alternative jural paradigms for women. Through Masculine Births: Milton, Women and the Law, Greenberg deftly reveals that Milton both reproduces seventeenth-century legal constructs and gives birth to laws that move us toward greater equality for women.

Many societies assign sharply distinguished roles to men and women. Personality differences, as well as physical differences, between men and women are used to justify these different sex roles, and women are seen as more emotionally and interpersonally sensitive than men, while men are said to be more competent, achievement oriented, and assertive than women. A widely held view is that not only do men and women differ but that possession of "masculine" characteristics precludes possession of "feminine" characteristics. This bipolar conception has led to the definition of masculinity and femininity as opposites. Acceptance of this idea has caused social scientists and laypersons to consider men and women who possess cross-sex personality characteristics as less emotionally healthy and socially adjusted than those with sex-appropriate traits. Previous research by the authors and others, done almost exclusively with college students, has shown, however, that masculinity and femininity do not relate negatively to each other, thus supporting a dualistic rather than a bipolar conception of these two psychological dimensions.

Spence and Helmreich present data showing that the dualistic conception holds for a large number of groups, varying widely in age, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and patterns of interest, whose psychological masculinity and femininity were measured with an objective instrument, the Personality Attributes Questionnaire, devised by the authors. Many individuals are shown to be appropriately sex-typed; that is, men tend to be high in masculinity and low in femininity and women the reverse. However, a substantial number of men and women are androgynous—high in both masculine and feminine characteristics—while some are not high in either. Importantly, the authors find that androgynous individuals display more self-esteem, social competence, and achievement orientation than individuals who are strong in either masculinity or femininity or are not strong in either.

One of the major contributions of the work is the development of a new, multifaceted measure of achievement motivation (the Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire), which can be used successfully to predict behavior in both males and females and is related to masculinity and femininity in both sexes.

In addition to investigating the correlates of masculinity and femininity, the authors attempt to isolate parental factors that contribute to the development of these characteristics and achievement motivation. The book includes analyses of data from students on their perception of their parents, which enable the authors to examine the influence of parental masculinity and femininity and parental behaviors and child-rearing attitudes on the development of masculinity and femininity and achievement motivation characteristics in their children. The important implications of these findings for theories of sex roles, personality development, and achievement motivation are examined.

Locating the roots of toxic masculinity and finding its displacement in unruly culture
 

Masculinity in Transition analyzes shifting relationships to masculinity in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and film, as well as in twenty-first-century media, performance, and transgender poetics. Focusing on “toxic masculinity,” which has assumed new valence since 2016, K. Allison Hammer traces its roots to a complex set of ideologies embedded in the histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and political fraternity, and finds that while toxic strains of masculinity are mainly associated with straight, white men, trans and queer masculinities can be implicated in these systems of power. 

Hammer argues, however, that these malignant forms of masculinity are not fixed and can be displaced by “unruly alliances”—texts and relationships that reject the nationalisms and gender politics of white male hegemony and perform an urgently needed reimagining of what it means to be masculine. Locating these unruly alliances in the writings, performances, and films of butch lesbians, gay men, cisgender femmes, and trans and nonbinary individuals, Masculinity in Transition works through an archive of works of performance art, trans poetics, Western films and streaming media, global creative responses to HIV/AIDS, and working-class and “white trash” fictions about labor and unionization.

Masculinity in Transition moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity.

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In Masking Inequality with Good Intentions, Heather M. Falconer examines the impact of systemic bias on disciplinary discourse acquisition and identity development by asking “How do the norms and expectations of higher education and STEM, specifically, impact the development of scientific identity and discursive skill?” and “What role do societal markers like race and gender play in the negotiation of identity in STEM learning environments?”

Drawing on the experiences and writings of six students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, each participating in an undergraduate research program, Falconer discusses how programmatic and pedagogical choices can work to either further marginalize students and disrupt their writing and identity development as scientists or create counterspaces—spaces where students can thrive and push back against dominant, oppressive forces. Practical applications for pedagogy, curriculum, and program design are included.

"What matters about a play is not the extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is different," writes Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. "This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences received the performances.... My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold: ... to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure ... and to include in one collection analyses of plays so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly defined norm."

Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. From the wealth of material that has come down to us the author has chosen six plays for analysis. He reminds us that the plays were written to be seen and heard, and only secondarily to be studied. The listeners expected each play to have a specific objective, and to exhibit its own mood. These the author attempts to recover for us, by listening to what each play, in its own right, has to say. His principal concern is with the tragic diction and the tragic ideas, designed to release certain massive responses in the large theater-going group of ancient Athens. In exploring the characters and the situations of the plays he has chosen, the author transports his reader to the world of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and establishes the relevance of that world to our own experience.

The essays are not introductory in nature. No space is given, for instance, to basic information about the playwrights, the history of Greek drama, or the special features of the Attic stage. Yet the book addresses itself to classicists and nonclassicists alike. The outgrowth of a series of lectures to nonspecialists, its particular appeal is to students of literature and the history of Western thought. Parallels are drawn between the writings of the philosophers and the tragedies, and attention is paid to certain popular Greek beliefs that colored the tragic formulations. Ultimately, however, the approach is not historical but critical; it is the author's intention to demonstrate the beauty and the craftsmanship of the plays under discussion.

“Deeply researched and highly readable.” —Eric Foner, Times Literary Supplement

“A rich history of regional distinctions, especially as they shaped the antebellum Republic.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A fitting testament to a career marked by boundary-crossing curiosity and stalwart service to the historical profession…[a] splendid new history.” —Richard Bell, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Fascinating…does justice to the full sweep and complexity of American history by expertly tracing a century of change across one especially revealing patch of ground.” —James H. Read, American Political Thought

“Erudite, gripping, and highly significant. Gray puts his talents as a historian of the American Revolution and the early republic to excellent use, persuasively arguing that the Mason-Dixon Line is worth seeing as a geopolitical border.” —Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost

Acclaimed scholar Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line, a border at the center of early American political contestation. Formalized in 1767 to fully and finally demarcate Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, the Line resolved a longstanding jurisdictional conflict that had provoked bloodshed among colonists and ensnared Lenape and Susquehannock populations. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated a new phase, as the Line became a boundary between free and slave states and their distinct legal regimes. Then, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Line became a federal instrument to arrest freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line’s significance fade, though it haunted the geography of Jim Crow.

Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors—all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that transformed American history.

“A magisterial yet highly nuanced account that ventures back and forth across Mason and Dixon’s fabled demarcation line as audaciously as 18th-century raiding parties once did.”—Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal

The first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line—a dramatic story of imperial rivalry and settler-colonial violence, the bonds of slavery and the fight for freedom.

The United States is the product of border dynamics—not just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America’s colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America’s defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland—complicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives—had led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line’s history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland–Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans—enslaved and free—faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line’s significance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold.

Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors—all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.

As United States television programs, movies, music, and other cultural products make their way around the globe, a vigorous debate over "cultural imperialism" is growing in many countries. This book brings together experts in economics, sociology, anthropology, the humanities, and communications to explore what effects the North American Free Trade Agreement will have on the flow of cultural products among Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

After an overview of free trade and the cultural industries, the book covers the following topics: dominance and resistance, cultural trade and identity in relation to Mexico and to French Canada, and intellectual property rights. Based on present trends, the contributors predict that there will be a steadily increasing flow of cultural products from the United States to its neighbors.

This book grew out of a 1994 conference that brought together leaders of the cultural industries, policy makers, and scholars. It represents state-of-the-art thinking about the global influence of U.S. cultural industries.

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.

This book is a celebration of the masses—their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by “the ostentatious display of surface.”

With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer’s later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.

In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him—including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals—and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.

In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company offered the first portable camera that allowed users to conveniently take photos, using leisure travel as a primary marketing feature to promote it. The combination of portability, ease of use, and mass advertising fed into a national trend of popular photography that drew on Americans' increasing mobility and leisure time. The Kodak Company and the first generation of tourist photographers established new standards for personal archiving that amplified the individual's role in authoring the national narrative. But not everyone had equal access to travel and tourism, and many members of the African American, Native American, and gay and lesbian communities used the camera to counter the racism, homophobia, and classism that shaped public spaces.

In this groundbreaking history, Tammy S. Gordon tells the story of the camera's emerging centrality in leisure travel across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its role in “the mass production of memory,” a process in which users crafted a visual archive attesting to their experiences, values, and circumstances, setting the stage for the customizable visual culture of the digital age.

Well known for its world-renowned art museums—from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—Massachusetts is also home to numerous institutions with more eclectic collections and, oftentimes, lower profiles. These include Mansfield's National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture, Watertown's Plumbing Museum, and Granville's Noble and Cooley Center for Historic Preservation.

In Massachusetts Treasures, Chuck D'Imperio explores more than forty museums scattered throughout the Bay State, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires. Many—but not all—might be considered “offbeat,” and each and every one is enchanting. Through personal visits and interviews with founders and directors, D'Imperio offers an inside glimpse into some of the Commonwealth's most unique museums, providing a valuable guide for road warriors and history buffs discovering Massachusetts either for the first or the tenth time.

In 1887, more than 30 Chinese gold miners were massacred on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. Massacred for Gold, the first authoritative account of the unsolved crime—one of the worst of the many crimes committed by whites against Chinese laborers in the American West—unearths the evidence that points to an improbable gang of rustlers and schoolboys, one only 15, as the killers.

The crime was discovered weeks after it happened, but no charges were brought for nearly a year, when gang member Frank Vaughan, son of a well-known settler family, confessed and turned state’s evidence. Six men and boys, all from northeastern Oregon’s remote Wallowa country, were charged—but three fled, and the others were found innocent by a jury that a witness admitted had little interest in convicting anyone. A cover-up followed, and the crime was all but forgotten for the next 100 years, until a county clerk found hidden records in an unused safe.

In bringing this story out of the shadows, Nokes examines the once-substantial presence of Chinese laborers in the interior Pacific Northwest, describing why they came, how their efforts contributed to the region’s development, and how too often mistreatment and abuse were their only reward.

A beautifully designed selection of the finest Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections, giving remarkable insight into the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history.

This book features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections in Lille, Rennes and Chantilly.

Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting.

The main body of the book showcases 112 of the finest drawings by more than 40 Italian Renaissance masters, including Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, accompanied by a concise sketch of the life and work of each artist. Arranged chronologically, they reveal stylistic and geographical trends as well as personal interactions between the artists themselves, and provide an extraordinary insight in to the artistic world of Renaissance Italy.

Readers of Herodotus’s Histories are familiar with its reports of bizarre portents, riddling oracles, and striking dreams. But Herodotus draws our attention to other types of signs too, beginning with human speech itself as a coded system that can manipulate and be manipulated. Objects, gifts, artifacts, markings, even the human body, are all capable of being invested with meaning in the Histories and Herodotus shows that conventionally and culturally determined actions, gestures, and ritual all need decoding.

This book represents an unprecedented examination of signs and their interpreters, as well as the terminology Herodotus uses to describe sign transmission, reception, and decoding. Through his control and involvement in this process he emerges as a veritable “master of signs.”

The interest in the performance of ancient Greek poetry has grown dramatically in recent years. But the competitive dimension of Greek poetic performances, while usually assumed, has rarely been directly addressed. This study provides for the first time an in-depth examination of a central mode of Greek poetic competition—capping, which occurs when speakers or singers respond to one another in small numbers of verses, single verses, or between verse units themselves. With a wealth of descriptive and technical detail, Collins surveys the wide range of genres that incorporated capping, including tragic and comic stichomythia, lament, forms of Platonic dialectic and dialogue, the sympotic performance of elegy, skolia, and related verse games, Hellenistic bucolic, as well as the rhapsodic performance of epic. Further, he examines historical evidence for actual performances as well as literary representations of live performances to explore how the features of improvisation, riddling, and punning through verse were developed and refined in different competitive contexts.

Anyone concerned with the performance of archaic and classical Greek poetry, or with the agonistic social, cultural, and poetic gamesmanship that prompted one performer to achieve "mastery" over another, will find this authoritative volume indispensable.

Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2011

Texas's King Ranch has become legendary for a long list of innovations, the most enduring of which is the development of the first official cattle breed in the Americas, the Santa Gertrudis. Among those who played a crucial role in the breed's success were Librado and Alberto "Beto" Maldonado, master showmen of the King Ranch. A true "bull whisperer," Librado Maldonado developed a method for gentling and training cattle that allowed him and his son Beto to show the Santa Gertrudis to their best advantage at venues ranging from the famous King Ranch auctions to a Chicago television studio to the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. They even boarded a plane with the cattle en route to the International Fair in Casablanca, Morocco, where they introduced the Santa Gertrudis to the African continent.

In The Master Showmen of King Ranch, Beto Maldonado recalls an eventful life of training and showing King Ranch Santa Gertrudis. He engagingly describes the process of teaching two-thousand-pound bulls to behave "like gentlemen" in the show ring, as well as the significant logistical challenges of transporting them to various high-profile venues around the world. His reminiscences, which span more than seventy years of King Ranch history, combine with quotes from other Maldonado family members, co-workers, and ranch owners to shed light on many aspects of ranch life, including day-to-day work routines, family relations, women's roles, annual celebrations, and the enduring ties between King Ranch owners and the vaquero families who worked on the ranch through several generations.

Mastering Boston Harbor chronicles how America's most glorious and historically significant harbor was rescued from decades of pollution and neglect by a community of caring citizens who were linked to an environmentally committed judge and his special harbor master. This dynamic public-private team shaped novel legal and political procedures for governing and restoring the harbor.

Charles Haar provides a fascinating study of the convergence of judicial supervision with political, environmental, financial, and technological interests. He challenges those who will instantly decry an "activist" judiciary and pulls back the curtain on the serious problems a court faces when it must grapple with an intractable problem affecting public interest. Haar demonstrates that at times only a resolute judiciary can energize and coordinate the branches of government to achieve essential contemporary social goals--goals that are endorsed and supported by a majority whose voice is often ignored in legislative and executive back rooms.

Because of his experience as special master in the dispute, Haar provides the reader with an insider's view of a modern brand of judicial decision-making that is not anti-majoritarian, and could be applied to similar crises in which the legislative and executive branches of government are impotent. Citizens concerned about the conflict between unbridled economic liberty and environmental protection will gain important insight from this eyewitness account of how the "harbor of shame" became a vibrant focal point for the renewal of Boston as a world-class city.

While language instructors recognize the value of debate as a means of facilitating Advanced- and Superior-level skills, no single advanced Chinese textbook exists that provides level-specific scaffolded language exercises, rhetorical strategies, and topic-specific texts within the context of debate. Mastering Chinese through Global Debate, designed to meet the ACTFL proficiency guidelines and featuring content written by a professional Chinese journalist, offers learners the means to develop sophisticated language skills with the goal of achieving Superior-level proficiency.

The textbook provides sets of readings and exercises that culminate in debates on key cultural topics with fellow students at home and/or with native speakers abroad via teleconference technology. Each of the six chapters includes detailed explanations, idea maps, word banks, writing and speaking samples, varied drills, and a rhetorical methods section—all of which foster language and critical thinking skills and prepare students to analyze and debate on complex topics.

The textbook’s audio companion is available at press.georgetown.edu and includes MP3 files of the feature article and a mock debate in each chapter, as well as transcripts of the audio, encouraging students to both listen and read. Instructors can also access a free answer key on the Georgetown University Press website.

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

Mastering English through Global Debate brings together rhetorical traditions and the best practices of ESL instruction to facilitate superior-level proficiency in the English language. Each chapter addresses a rich topic of debate, providing students with a set of prereading activities, texts covering both sides of a debate topic, and postreading comprehension and lexical development exercises—all of which foster the language and critical thinking skills needed for successful debates. A rhetorical methods section in each chapter integrates language and practice and prepares students for end-of-chapter debates. Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, in both synchronous online teaching and the individual classroom. Students are prepared to participate fully in debates with their classmates—at home, abroad, or both.

Critical engagement with complex global issues that provides an effective approach to promoting linguistic proficiency and social responsibility

Mastering Italian through Global Debate is a one-semester textbook designed for students with Advanced-level Italian language skills, moving toward Superior and above. Over the course of each chapter, students gain linguistic and rhetorical skills as they prepare to debate on broad, timely topics, including environmental consciousness, immigration, wealth distribution, surveillance and privacy, cultural diversity, and education. Discussion of compelling issues promotes not only linguistic proficiency but social responsibility through critical engagement with complex global challenges.

Each chapter includes topic-specific reading texts and position papers, giving students insight into issues being widely discussed—and debated—in Italy today. In addition to pre- and post-reading activities, students benefit from lexical development exercises, rhetorical methods sections, and listening exercises with audio available on the Press website. Online resources for instructors include pedagogical recommendations and an answer key.

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Mastering Russian through Global Debate brings together the rhetorical traditions of the communications field and the best practices of adult second-language instruction to facilitate Superior-level proficiency in the Russian language. Each chapter addresses a rich topic of debate, providing students with a set of prereading activities, texts covering both sides of a debate topic, and continues with postreading comprehension and lexical development exercises—all of which foster the language and critical thinking skills needed for successful debates. A rhetorical methods section in each chapter integrates language and practice and prepares students for end-of-chapter debates. Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, in both synchronous online teaching and the individual classroom. Students are prepared to participate fully in debates with their classmates—at home, abroad, or both.

Building superior Spanish language proficiency through critical engagement with global challenges

Mastering Spanish through Global Debate is a one-semester textbook designed for students with Advanced-level Spanish language skills, moving toward Superior. Over the course of each chapter, students gain linguistic and rhetorical skills as they prepare to debate on broad, timely topics, including environmental consciousness, immigration, wealth distribution, surveillance and privacy, cultural diversity, and education. Discussion of compelling issues promotes not only linguistic proficiency but social responsibility through critical engagement with complex global challenges.

Each chapter includes topic-specific reading texts and position papers by writers from various Spanish-speaking countries. In addition to pre- and post-reading activities, students benefit from lexical development exercises, rhetorical methods sections, and listening exercises with audio available on the Press website. An online instructor’s manual provides pedagogical recommendations and an answer key.

Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song is a critical study of MPB (música popular brasileira), a term that refers to varieties of urban popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, incorporating samba, Bossa Nova, and new materials.

A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi.

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Cutting a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In this ambitious and elegantly written account of the conquest of the West, Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.

Lee traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.

Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike.

This account of the financial crisis of 2008–2009 compares banking systems in the United States and the United Kingdom to those of Canada and Australia and explains why the system imploded in the former but not the latter. Central to this analysis are differences in bankers’ beliefs and incentives in different banking markets.

A boom mentality and fear of being left behind by competitors drove many U.S. and British bank executives to take extraordinary risks in creating new financial products. Intense market competition, poorly understood trading instruments, and escalating system complexity both drove and misled bankers. Formerly illiquid assets such as mortgages and other forms of debt were repackaged into complex securities, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). These were then traded on an industrial scale, and in 2007 and 2008, when their value collapsed, economic activity fell into a deep freeze. The financial crisis threatened not just investment banks and their insurers but also individual homeowners and workers at every level. In contrast, because banks in Canada and Australia could make good profits through traditional lending practices, they did not confront the same pressures to reinvent themselves as did banks in the United States and the United Kingdom, thus allowing them to avoid the fate of their overseas counterparts.

Stephen Bell and Andrew Hindmoor argue that trading and systemic risk in the banking system need to be reined in. However, prospects for this are not promising given the commitment of governments in the crisis-hit economies to protect the “international competitiveness” of the London and New York financial markets.

This impressive collection features Richard Herrnstein's most important and original contributions to the social and behavioral sciences--his papers on choice behavior in animals and humans and on his discovery and elucidation of a general principle of choice called the matching law.

In recent years, the most popular theory of choice behavior has been rational choice theory. Developed and elaborated by economists over the past hundred years, it claims that individuals make choices in such a way as to maximize their well-being or utility under whatever constraints they face; that is, people make the best of their situations. Rational choice theory holds undisputed sway in economics, and has become an important explanatory framework in political science, sociology, and psychology. Nevertheless, its empirical support is thin.

The matching law is perhaps the most important competing explanatory account of choice behavior. It views choice not as a single event or an internal process of the organism but as a rate of observable events over time. It states that instead of maximizing utility, the organism allocates its behavior over various activities in exact proportion to the value derived from each activity. It differs subtly but significantly from rational choice theory in its predictions of how people exert self-control, for example, how they decide whether to forgo immediate pleasures for larger but delayed rewards. It provides, through the primrose path hypothesis, a powerful explanation of alcohol and narcotic addiction. It can also be used to explain biological phenomena, such as genetic selection and foraging behavior, as well as economic decision making.

This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies, Materia Magica identifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.

Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used. Materia Magica approaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.

Materia Magica develops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.

This book demonstrates the potential of material culture, including artworks and archaeological finds, to shed new light on Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval and early modern times. Previous studies have focused on areas where Jews lived as a minority under Christian rule, such as in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire. This book, on the other hand, explores the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia, the Red Sea and India, where Jews and Christians interacted on a different footing.

Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Bill Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity.

Brown's story begins on the Jersey Shore, in Asbury Park, where Crane became a writer in the shadow of his father, a grimly serious Methodist minister who vilified the popular amusements his son adored. The coastal resorts became the stage for debates about technology, about the body's visibility, about a black service class and the new mass access to leisure. From this snapshot of a recreational scene that would continue to inspire Crane's sensational modernism, Brown takes us to New York's Bowery. There, in the visual culture established by dime museums, minstrel shows, and the Kodak craze, he exhibits Crane dramatically obscuring the typology of race.

Along the way, Brown demonstrates how attitudes toward play transformed the image of war, the idea of childhood and nationhood, and the concept of culture itself. And by developing a new conceptual apparatus (with such notions as "recreational time," "abstract leisure," and the "amusement/knowledge system"), he provides the groundwork for a new politics of pleasure. A crucial theorization of how cultural studies can and should proceed, The Material Unconscious insists that in the very conjuncture of canonical literature and mass culture, we can best understand how proliferating and competing economies of play disrupt the so-called "logic" and "work" of culture.

Prasun (Wasi, Paruni) has long had a reputation for being the most aberrant of the Nuristani group of Indo-European languages. Only after the publication of a considerable number of Prasun texts in 2016 as volume 80 in this series has it been possible to analyze the language based on the solid foundation of a large text corpus. Georg Buddruss collected the source texts in the Prasun Valley in 1956 and 1970. That edition comprises texts in several dialectal varieties of Prasun.

The present volume is the outcome of extensive work on this text corpus. It is the first comprehensive grammar of Prasun as well as the most detailed description of any Nuristani language yet published. Among the topics addressed in this volume are: morphology, verbal categories, subordination, relative clauses, mirativity, verbal particles, and the complicated system of directional morphemes. This grammatical analysis is amply supported by quotations from the text volume. This book is a major contribution to studies of Nuristani and other languages of the Hindukush-Karakoram region.

Prasun (Wasi) is the most aberrant of the Nuristani languages, part of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. It is spoken in the Prasun Valley of the Pech River in northeast Afghanistan. Prasun is a non-literary, unwritten language, and it varies from village to village. Materialien zur Prasun-Sprache des Afghanischen Hindukusch is the fruit of many years of work by Georg Buddruss, assisted in the last few years by Almuth Degener. The texts, in prose and a few songs, were collected by Buddruss in 1956 and 1970. Included are all the texts collected, along with a German translation, a glossary, lists of numbers, place and personal names, and the Prasun calendar system. The volume also includes a brief Introduction in English. A second volume to come will contain an extensive grammar.

Apart from its linguistic value, the present book is also very important as it includes many “Kafiri” myths, still known in 1956, from the time before the forced Islamization in 1895. The ancient pagan religion has survived only in the texts and in some customs described in this book.

This interdisciplinary volume offers new ways to think about how disease and death, and healing and health, were considered, experienced, displayed, and portrayed across the global medieval world. Reaching across conventional disciplinary, historiographical, and geographical boundaries, Materialities of Disease investigates a broad selection of visual and material artefacts emerging from across the globe—from Western Europe, Western Africa, and Anatolia, to Japan, India, China, and New Spain. 

This volume focuses on non-textual narratives about disease that can be read in historical images, objects, human remains, archaeological remains, architectural spaces, materia medica, and other surviving artefacts. Taken together, these contributions, which are diverse and interdisciplinary, highlight and nuance some of the recent critical advances in scholarship being made in and for medical history across many fields

Materializing Magic Power paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. The first book to explore contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, it analyzes these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework and traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

In this groundbreaking study, Wei-Ping Lin offers a fresh perspective on the divine power of Chinese deities as revealed in two important material forms—god statues and spirit mediums. By examining the significance of these religious manifestations, Lin identifies personification and localization as the crucial cultural mechanisms that bestow efficacy on deity statues and spirit mediums. She further traces the social consequences of materialization and demonstrates how the different natures of materials mediate distinct kinds of divine power.

The first part of the book provides a detailed account of popular religion in villages. This is followed by a discussion of how rural migrant workers cope with challenges in urban environments by inviting branch statues of village deities to the city, establishing an urban shrine, and selecting a new spirit medium. These practices show how traditional village religion is being reconfigured in cities today.