Working simultaneously on two levels, Saladin represents the best kind of biography—a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin’s military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Eddé’s narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of the Crusades from an Arab perspective.

Saladin became a legend in his own time, venerated by friend and foe alike as a paragon of justice, chivalry, and generosity. Arab politicians ever since have sought to claim his mantle as a justification for their own exercise of power. But Saladin's world-historical status as the ideal Muslim ruler owes its longevity to a tacit agreement among contemporaries and later chroniclers about the set of virtues Saladin possessed—virtues that can now be tested against a rich tapestry of historical research. This tension between the mythical image of Saladin, layered over centuries and deployed in service of specific moral and political objectives, and the verifiable facts of his life available to a judicious modern historian is what sustains Anne-Marie Eddé's erudite biography, published to acclaim in France in 2008 and offered here in smooth, readable English translation.

Salafism, comprised of fundamentalist Islamic movements whose adherents consider themselves the only “saved” sect of Islam, has been little studied, remains shrouded in misconceptions, and has provoked new interest as Salafists have recently staked a claim to power in some Arab states while spearheading battles against “infidel” Arab regimes during recent rebellions in the Arab world. Robert G. Rabil examines the emergence and development of Salafism into a prominent religious movement in Lebanon, including the ideological and sociopolitical foundation that led to the three different schools of Salafism in Lebanon: quietist Salafists, Haraki (active) Salafists; and Salafi Jihadists.

Emphasizing their manhaj (methodology) toward politics, the author surveys Salafists’ ideological transformation from opponents to supporters of political engagement. Their antagonism to Hezbollah, which they denounce as the party of Satan, has risen exponentially following the party’s seizure of Beirut in 2008 and support of the tyrannical Syrian regime. Salafism in Lebanon also demonstrates how activists and jihadi Salafists, in response to the political weakness of Sunni leadership, have threatened regional and international security by endorsing violence and jihad.

Drawing on field research trips, personal interviews, and Arabic primary sources, the book explores the relationship between the ideologies of the various schools of Salafism and their praxis in relation to Lebanese politics. The book should interest students and scholars of Islamic movements, international affairs, politics and religion, and radical groups and terrorism.

Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill.

The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it.

From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.”

Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.

In this remarkable and deeply felt book, Virginia Kerns uncovers the singular and forgotten life of a young Indian woman who was captured in 1847 in what was then Mexican territory. Sold to a settler, a son-in-law of Brigham Young, the woman spent the next thirty years as a servant to Young’s family. Sally, as they called her, lived in the shadows, largely unseen. She was later remembered as a “wild” woman made “tame” who happily shed her past to enter a new and better life in civilization. 

Drawing from a broad range of primary sources, Kerns retrieves Sally from obscurity and reconstructs her complex life before, during, and after captivity. This true story from the American past resonates deeply in the current moment, attentive as it is to killing epidemics and racial injustices. In telling Sally’s story, Kerns presents a new narrative of the American West. 

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition.This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the Bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume affirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies, but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

“You might think that dancing doesn’t have a lot to do with social research, and doing social research is probably why you picked this book up in the first place. But trust me. Salsa dancing is a practice as well as a metaphor for a kind of research that will make your life easier and better.”

Savvy, witty, and sensible, this unique book is both a handbook for defining and completing a research project, and an astute introduction to the neglected history and changeable philosophy of modern social science. In this volume, Kristin Luker guides novice researchers in: knowing the difference between an area of interest and a research topic; defining the relevant parts of a potentially infinite research literature; mastering sampling, operationalization, and generalization; understanding which research methods best answer your questions; beating writer’s block.

Most important, she shows how friendships, non-academic interests, and even salsa dancing can make for a better researcher.

“You know about setting the kitchen timer and writing for only an hour, or only 15 minutes if you are feeling particularly anxious. I wrote a fairly large part of this book feeling exactly like that. If I can write an entire book 15 minutes at a time, so can you.”

This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.

Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, Saltwater Slavery details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process. She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.

Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story-merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves-made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

Joseph Butwin’s oral history presents conversations with ten Jewish veterans of the ALB. Recorded from 1992–94 in the wake of European communism’s collapse, the interviews explore the milieus that formed the volunteers. Immigrants established the secular Yiddish-speaking socialism that became a part of many Jewish American communities. Their children, reacting to economic depression and the rise of fascism, enlisted in the ALB. Butwin follows their stories from their youthful motives and choices through their lives as Jews and leftists, and records the reckonings that took place as they reflected on their past.

Insightful and revealing, Salud y Shalom explores the forces of identity and history that led young Jewish leftists to fight fascism.

One highly visible example of French influence on the city of Philadelphia is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, modeled on the Champs-Élysées. In Salut!, Lynn Miller and Therese Dolan trace the fruitful, three-centuries-long relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and France. This detailed volume illustrates the effect of Huguenots settling in Philadelphia and 18-year-old William Penn visiting Paris, all the way up through more recent cultural offerings that have helped make the city the distinctive urban center it is today. 

Salut! provides a magnifique history of Philadelphia seen through a particular cultural lens. The authors chronicle the French influence during colonial and revolutionary times. They highlight the contributions of nineteenth-century French philanthropists, such as Stephen Girard and the Dupont family. And they showcase the city’s vibrant visual arts community featuring works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and the Joan of Arc sculpture, as well as studies of artists Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. There is also a profile of renowned Le Bec-Fin chef Georges Perrier, who made Philadelphia a renowned culinary destination in the twentieth century.

With lavish illustrations and enthusiastic text, Salut!celebrates a potpourri of all things French in the Philadelphia region.

This is a political biography of one of the 20th century’s most emblematic left-wing figures - Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile until he was ousted by General Pinochet in a US-supported coup in 1973.

Victor Figueroa Clark guides us through Allende's life and political project, answering some of the most frequently asked questions. Was he a revolutionary or a reformist? A bureaucrat or inspirational democrat? Clark argues that Allende and the Popular Unity Party created a unique fusion which was both revolutionary and democratic.

The process led by Allende was a symbol of hope for the left during his short time in power. Forty years on, and with left governments back in power across Latin America, this book looks back at the man and the process in order to draw vital lessons for the left in Latin America and around the world today.

Thousands of men and women were executed for incompatible religious views in sixteenth-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively for the first time, providing a compelling argument for the importance of martyrdom as both a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

Brad S. Gregory explores Protestant, Catholic, and Anabaptist martyrs in a sustained fashion, addressing the similarities and differences in their self-understanding. He traces the processes and impact of their memorialization by co-believers, and he reconstructs the arguments of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities responsible for their deaths. In addition, he assesses the controversy over the meaning of executions for competing views of Christian truth, and the intractable dispute over the distinction between true and false martyrs. He employs a wide range of sources, including pamphlets, martyrologies, theological and devotional treatises, sermons, songs, woodcuts and engravings, correspondence, and legal records. Reconstructing religious motivation, conviction, and behavior in early modern Europe, Gregory shows us the shifting perspectives of authorities willing to kill, martyrs willing to die, martyrologists eager to memorialize, and controversialists keen to dispute.

The sermon as crafted by the early New England preachers was the most prominent literary form of its day, yet the earliest Puritan texts have as a rule been available only in rare-book collections. This anthology of sermons of the first generation of preachers fills a serious gap in American literature. The preachers collected here, the most widely published of their time, were among the eighty or more who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay during the 1630s. They are John Cotton of Boston, Thomas Shepard of Cambridge, and Thomas Hooker of Hartford, the three foremost "lights of the western churches," and two eminent colleagues, Peter Bulkeley of Concord and John Davenport, first of New Haven and later of Boston.
The selections are chosen to be representative of the lengthy works from which they are drawn, to reflect the major concerns and styles of the preachers' work as a whole, and to demonstrate the genre of the sermon as developed by the early American Puritans. Not only does this anthology represent an important contribution to literary history, but the sermons also illustrate a doctrine uniquely elaborated in this period—a consistent and emphatic narrative, mythlike in its repetition and heroics, of the progress of the soul from a state of nature to a state of salvation. This theme may be seen as a three-stage-development, although individual sermons may vary. These stages—preparation, vocation, and regeneration—determine the order of the selections.

The editors' introductory material supplies a comprehensive and thorough discussion of the early New England sermons, concentrating on their role, history, structure, style, and subject matter. A separate essay on the texts of the sermons describes the relationship between the early printed versions and their form as delivered in the pulpit. The introduction preceding each selection presents original research on the historical circumstances of the preaching and publication of the work from which the sermon is drawn. The editors have also provided brief biographies of the preacfiers represented here, an annotated list of recommended background reading, and the most exhaustive checklist available of authoritative editions of the sermons of these five preachers.

This book will be useful to colonial specialists as well as to students of early American literature, religion, and history. The texts are critically edited for readability, with modernized spelling and annotations of unfamiliar phrases and allusions.

Six-year-old Sam, with his Liberian dad and African American mom, finds a way to bring everyone in his cross-cultural family together at the dinner table

Rice and okra soup: Sam’s auntie from Liberia made it, and it’s Dad’s favorite. Mom, homegrown in Minnesota, made spaghetti and meatballs. And Sam? He’s just hungry, but no matter what he chooses to eat, someone will be disappointed. Caught in the middle of his family’s African and American food fight, Sam gets a little help from his grumbling stomach—and readers of this seriously funny book by Shannon Gibney get a peek at cultures colliding in a family kitchen that work out in a very delicious way. Charly Palmer’s vibrant and captivating illustrations make this gentle lesson in getting along a bright and colorful visual feast as well.

Cassava leaf torbogee or homemade sausage pizza? Sam’s family recipes bring Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight to an apt and happy ending—and readers can decide which dinner is best. But, really, why not both?

This biography of Sam Houston goes beyond the romantic frontier life of the "buckskin hero from Tennessee" to examine seriously his role as an American statesman.

When Sam Houston crossed the Red River for the first time in 1832, he termed Texas the "finest portion of the Globe that has ever blessed my vision." He soon made it his "abiding place" and became a lifelong traveller in his adopted country. By carriage and muleback his diplomatic, military, political, and personal activities took him over what is now the eastern half of the state—and he fell in love with every foot of it. With panoramic vision and broad descriptive power, he expressed his lasting affection for the country in everything he said and wrote.

Sue Flanagan, having read every available word by and about Houston and having followed the trail of every trip he made in Texas, here presents the Texas which Houston knew—through his picturesque language and through the camera's carefully focused lens. Her story provides continuity for Houston's activities and perspective for her photographs; it also provides an expression of Houston's views in his own forthright and emphatic manner.

But the essence of this book is its 113 photographs. The face of Texas east of San Antonio is pictured in all its varied features. With great patience and discernment, Sue Flanagan brought to bear all the skills of her artistic photography to capture the landscapes, buildings, and objects in the most revealing light and in the best atmospheric conditions for catching the appropriate mood. These spots in nature which Houston saw, these objects which he knew, these houses where he was entertained and where he lived—all are tangible reminders of "this colorful, cagey, and controversial man," this Texas hero whose life was a tragedy in divided loyalties.

The Sāmaveda contains the earliest tradition of music from India, which is largely Rigvedic textual material in a form arranged for singing in the solemn Srauta ritual. Since the first editions by Theodor Benfey (1848) and Satyavrata Samasrami (1874–1899), there has been no complete, accented edition that has also included all of its important commentaries.

In this work, B. R. Sharma presents an accented edition that is based on manuscripts collected from all over India and Europe. Its Padapāṭha and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharatasvāmin, and Sayana comprise three volumes totaling 2,500 pages.

These volumes contain the Purvarcika and Uttarārcika portions of the text. The third volume, complete with the indexes and a detailed introduction to the whole work, will be published soon.

In this genial and challenging overview of endless debates over school reform, Rick Hess shows that even bitter opponents in debates about how to improve schools agree on much more than they realize—and that much of it must change radically. Cutting through the tangled thickets of right- and left-wing dogma, he clears the ground for transformation of the American school system.

Whatever they think of school vouchers or charter schools, teacher merit pay or bilingual education, most educators and advocates take many other things for granted. The one-teacher–one-classroom model. The professional full-time teacher. Students grouped in age-defined grades. The nine-month calendar. Top-down local district control. All were innovative and exciting—in the nineteenth century. As Hess shows, the system hasn’t changed since most Americans lived on farms and in villages, since school taught you to read, write, and do arithmetic, and since only an elite went to high school, let alone college.

Arguing that a fundamentally nineteenth century system can’t be right for a twenty-first century world, Hess suggests that uniformity gets in the way of quality, and urges us to create a much wider variety of schools, to meet a greater range of needs for different kinds of talents, needed by a vastly more complex and demanding society.

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please. As Black people around the world live a racial identity that is not shed, in a cultural moment of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book asks how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both dangerous and a space for finding cultural allies. Featuring the work of some of the visionaries of Hip-hop theater including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch, this book explores the work of groundbreaking Hip-hop theater and performance artists who have engaged Hip-hop's Blackness through popular performance. The book challenges how we understand the performance of race, Hip-hop and Blackness in the age of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. In a cultural moment where racial identity is performed through Hip-hop culture's resistance to the status quo and complicity in maintaining it, Hodges Persley asks us to consider who has the right to claim Hip-hop's blackness when blackness itself is a complicated mixtape that offers both consent and resistance to transgressive and inspiring acts of performance.

An account of how Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch promulgated an inclusive vision of Judaism in the context of advancing the civic equality of German Jews in the nineteenth century

In Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Religious Universalism and the German-Jewish Quest for Emancipation, Moshe Miller contends that nineteenth-century German Jews of all denominations actively sought acceptance within German society and aspired to achieve full emancipation from the many legal strictures on their status as citizens and residents. While non-Orthodox Jews sought a large measure of cultural assimilation, Orthodox Jews were content with more delimited acculturation, but they were no less enthusiastic about achieving emancipation and acceptance in German society. There was one issue, though, which was seen by non-Jewish critics of emancipation as a barrier to granting civic rights to Jews: namely, the alleged tribalism of Judaism and the supposedly chauvinistic notion of Jews as “the Chosen People.”

These charges could not go unanswered, and in the writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), the leading thinker of the Orthodox camp, they did not. Hirsch stressed the universalism of the Jewish ethic and the humanistic concern for the welfare of all mankind, which he believed was one of the core teachings of Judaism. His colleagues in the German Orthodox rabbinate largely concurred with Hirsch’s assessment. Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Religious Universalism and the German-Jewish Quest for Emancipation places Hirsch’s views in their historical context and provides a detailed account of his attitude toward non-Jews and the Christianity practiced by the vast majority of nineteenth-century Europeans.

Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti.

Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.

Samuel Bell Maxey was an important political figure in nineteenth-century Texas, but no previous book-length study of his life and career has been published. Louise Horton has utilized his private papers as well as numerous other sources in preparing this biography, which includes many of Maxey's own comments on his contemporaries. The letters also provide new information on the development of railroads across the Southwest.

An emigrant from Kentucky, Samuel Bell Maxey practiced law in North Texas, raised a regiment at the beginning of the Civil War, returned to Texas to defend the Indian Territory during 1863-1865, and was elected on his first candidacy to be the first Democratic senator from Texas after the Civil War. After two years in office he became Texas's senior senator and held that position until defeated by John H. Reagan in 1887. Maxey's term of office spanned the turbulent period immediately following Reconstruction, and a great deal of his influence derived from his moderation. He was concerned that the breach caused by the Civil War be healed. He was influential among Republican congressmen from the North and aided substanially in Texas's regaining its status in the Union. Louise Horton's biography of Maxey emphasizes the contribution he made to the state and the nation and fills a gap in the history of the post-Civil War period.

This readable book is the first authoritative biography of Samuel Gridley Howe, the remarkable Bostonian who actively participated in most of the major reform movements of the nineteenth century. He founded the Perkins School for the Blind which quickly became the foremost institution of its type in the world. There he developed techniques for teaching the deaf-blind, the first man in history to succeed in this field. He supported Horace Mann in reforming the public school system and Dorothea Dix in protecting the interests of the insane. After 1845, he spent most of his energies, political and literary, in abolitionist activities. Yet he found time to give his medical services in the Greek war of independence 1825-1830, and in our Civil War; and he worked on the presidential commission sent to Santo Domingo in 1871.

Schwartz traces Howe's public career, but he also describes Howe's childhood, his choice of a medical career, his membership--together with Longfellow, Cornelius Felton, Charles Sumner, and George Hillard--in the social circle called the Five of Clubs, and his marriage to Julia Ward. This book carries the full flavor of mid-nineteenth-century Boston.

Howe's own activities, the reform movements he supported, and the striking individuals with whom he was associated are merged into one integrated story. The spotlight often shifts from Howe to Horace Mann, John Brown, Theodore Parker, Laura Bridgman, and--most of all--Charles Sumner; and in the background we can see the slow development of the slavery issue, which eventually overrode all other reform movements. Here too is the story of a marriage: Julia Ward Howe led but half a life with a husband whose ideas about a woman's place did not stretch to include her talents.

Schwartz bases his admirable biography on extensive research in primary, and largely untouched, sources: these include the Howe papers--which contain many letters to Mann, Parker, and Sumner, and never used by their biographers--the Sumner and Laura Bridgman papers, and contemporary newspapers as well as Howe's own books, pamphlets, and articles. Schwartz is thus able to cast new light onthe personalities of the Bostonian reformers: harsh, sanctimonious, or unfair as they might appear to their opponents, they were, Schwartz reminds us, basically earnest men who, by acting on their faith in progress and their sense of duty to the helpless did, in fact, improve the lot of humanity.

Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. “Johnsonianissimus,” as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés—though they contain elements of truth—distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt, and depression—a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson’s writing so compelling.

Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin’s biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson’s criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very “modern” figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography, published for the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

He was a servant to the public, a writer for hire. He was a hero, an author adding to the glory of his nation. But can a writer be both hack and hero? The career of Samuel Johnson, recounted here by Lawrence Lipking, proves that the two can be one. And it further proves, in its enduring interest for readers, that academic fashions today may be a bit hasty in pronouncing the "death of the author."

A book about the life of an author, about how an author is made, not born, Lipking's Samuel Johnson is the story of the man as he lived--and lives--in his work. Tracing Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, the book shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship.

Beginning with the defiant letter to Chesterfield that made Johnson a celebrity, Samuel Johnson offers fresh readings of all the writer's major works, viewed through the lens of two ongoing preoccupations: the urge to do great deeds--and the sense that bold expectations are doomed to disappointment. Johnson steers between the twin perils of ambition and despondency. Mounting a challenge to the emerging industry that glorified and capitalized on Shakespeare, he stresses instead the playwright's power to cure the illusions of everyday life. All Johnson's works reveal his extraordinary sympathy with ordinary people. In his groundbreaking Dictionary, in his poems and essays, and in The Lives of the English Poets, we see Johnson becoming the key figure in the culture of literacy that reaches from his day to our own.

"Wright's book establishes, persuasively, that Coleridge's radicalism, both political and theological, was indeed fleeting and that Coleridge made a very significant contribution to what has been called 'the gathering forces of Toryism.' Further, the book traces Coleridge's adaptation of Hooker as he confronted, theologically, the writings of Sacheverell and Warburton and, ultimately, traces his idea of a clerisy and influence on Gladstone and thus the Oxford Movement." --Richard S. Tomlinson, Richland College

"This erudite analysis of Coleridge's theology will provide scholars and critics with valuable new perspectives on a difficult subject." --Duncan Wu, Georgetown University

"This is an impressively focused work detailing Coleridge's biographical journey through radical politics and high Toryism with an initial and final commitment to Anglicanism, despite encounters and affiliations with other denominations. . . . [A]n original work of scholarship that contributes to an understanding of Coleridge's thought and to the study of church-state theory of the nineteenth century." --Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

San Antonio, Texas, is unique among North American cities in having five former Spanish missions: San Antonio de Valero (The Alamo; founded in 1718), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo (1720), Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (1731), San Juan Capistrano (1731), and San Francisco de la Espada (1731). These missions attract a good deal of popular interest but, until this book, they had received surprisingly little scholarly study. The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Land Tenure, a winner in the Presidio La Bahía Award competition, looks at one previously unexamined aspect of mission history—the changes in landownership as the missions passed from sacred to secular owners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Drawing on exhaustive research in San Antonio and Bexar County archives, Félix Almaráz has reconstructed the land tenure system that began with the Spaniards' jurisprudential right of discovery and progressed through colonial development, culminating with ownership of the mission properties under successive civic jurisdictions (independent Mexico, Republic of Texas, State of Texas, Bexar County, and City of San Antonio). Several broad questions served as focus points for the research. What were the legal bases for the Franciscan missions as instruments of the Spanish Empire? What was the extent of the initial land grants at the time of their establishment in the eighteenth century? How were the missions' agricultural and pastoral lands configured? And, finally, what impact has urbanization had upon the former Franciscan foundations?

The findings in this study will be valuable for scholars of Texas borderlands and Hispanic New World history. Additionally, genealogists and people with roots in the San Antonio missions area may find useful clues to family history in this extensive study of landownership along the banks of the Río San Antonio.

"Until Hank Williams came along, it was just Bob Willis," says Willie Nelson. "He was it." And indeed he was, especially for the thousands in the Southwest who knew and loved the King of Western Swing. The colorful band leader-composer-fiddler from Turkey, Texas, lassoed the emotions of country-and-western fans nationwide. In the early 1940s, his records outsold those of any other recording artist. He was voted not only into the Country Music Hall of Fame but also into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the only performer other than Gene Autry to be so honored. 

Affectionately written by a Texan who responded to the legendary fiddler's style, San Antonio Rose captures Wills's magnetism and the musical excitement he created. Charles R. Townsend traces Wills's dynamic life from his birth into a family of frontier fiddlers through his career and stardom and on to the poignant last recording session in 1973 and his death two years later. Townsend shows how Wills brought black and white music together and examines the tremendous impact he had on both popular and country music through the more than 550 selections he recorded and the forty years he and his Texas Playboys performed in dance halls and on radio.

Now back in print with a new introduction by the author, this is the classic study of America's most admired instant city, from its days as a sleepy Mexican village, through the Gold Rush and into its establishment as a major international port. Roger Lotchin examines the urbanizing influences in San Francisco and compares these to other urban centers, doing so against a colorful backdrop of opium dens and other sinful institutions.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party (CP) in San Francisco survived an ineffectual early period to become a force in the trade union heyday of the 1930s. Robert Cherny uses the lives and careers of more than fifty members to tell the story of the city’s CP from its founding through 1958.

Cherny draws on FBI files, the records of the CP at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, interviews, and memoirs to follow male and female party and union leaders, rank-and-file members, and others. His history reveals why people joined the CP while charting the frequent changes in policy, constant member turnover, and disruptive factionalism that limited party aims and successes. Cherny also follows his subjects through their resignations, expulsions, or other reasons for departure and looks at the CP’s influence on their lives in subsequent years.

Vivid and exhaustively researched, San Francisco Reds is a long view account of the personal motivations and activism of an Old Left generation in a West Coast city.

The village of San José de Gracia is not mentioned in any history of Mexico, nor is it referred to in any of the annals of the state of Michoacán. It is not to be found at all on most maps, and almost none show its correct location. It is an unknown point in space, in time, and in the consciousness of the Mexican republic.

In Luis González's classic history of the world of San José, he turns his attention in every direction: toward what is lasting and what is ephemeral, everyday and unusual, material and spiritual. The story is, to some extent, the story of rural life anywhere, in any age; to some extent it is peculiar to the world of the peasant all through Mexico's history; and to some extent it can be said to be true only of San José.

The history of San José is also the history of the village as victim of the megalopolis, not only in Mexico but everywhere in our time. With the small community will be lost traditions and a sense of continuity that may prove irreplaceable and essential to human wellbeing. While Luis González does not suggest that he knows what the fate of San José will be, one feels that he knows all too well, and that his questions are only "How?" and "How soon?"

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 1978

In their efforts to assert dominion over vast reaches of the (now U.S.) Southwest in the seventeenth century, the Spanish built a series of far-flung missions and presidios at strategic locations. One of the most important of these was San Juan Bautista del Río Grande, located at the present-day site of Guerrero in Coahuila, Mexico.

Despite its significance as the main entry point into Spanish Texas during the colonial period, San Juan Bautista was generally forgotten until the first publication of this book in 1968. Weddle's narrative is a fascinating chronicle of the many religious, military, colonial, and commerical expeditions that passed through San Juan and a valuable addition to knowledge of the Spanish borderlands. It won the Texas Institute of Letters Amon G. Carter Award for Best Southwest History in 1969.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection illuminates many previously unexplored aspects of the Basilica of San Lorenzo’s history, extending from its Early Christian foundation to the modern era. Brunelleschi’s rebuilt Basilica, the center of liturgical patronage of the Medici and their grand-ducal successors until the nineteenth century, is today one of the most frequently studied churches in Florence. Modern research has tended, however, to focus on the remarkable art and architecture from ca. 1400–1600.

In this wide-ranging collection, scholars investigate: the urban setting of the church and its parish; San Lorenzo’s relations with other ecclesiastical institutions; the genesis of individual major buildings of the complex and their decorations; the clergy, chapels and altars; the chapter’s administration and financial structure; lay and clerical patronage; devotional furnishings, music, illuminated liturgical manuscripts, and preaching; as well as the annual or ephemeral festal practices on the site. Each contribution offers a profound exploration of its topic, wide-ranging in its chronological scope. One encounters here fresh archival research, the publication of relevant documents, and critical assessments of the historiography. San Lorenzo is represented in this volume as a living Florentine institution, continually reshaped by complex historical forces.

The church of San Marco of Venice has long played a central role in Venetian political, ceremonial, and religious life. Its renowned assemblage of mosaics, sculpture, metalwork, and reliquaries are, in origin, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, or Venetian imitation of Byzantine designs. In San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, the authors assess the significance of the embellishment of the church and its immediate surroundings, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when most of the Byzantine material was acquired, largely from Constantinople. The church and its decoration are studied in relation to Venice’s interests abroad and on mainland Italy. The authors address the diverse styles, sources, meanings, and significance of this art, both individually and as an ensemble.

Building upon developments in scholarship since Otto Demus’s masterly studies of the church, the book offers new insights into the inspiration, purposes, and mutability of San Marco and the myths that inspired and motivated Venetians.

How do people acquire political consciousness, and how does that consciousness transform their behavior? This question launched the scholarly career of David Montejano, whose masterful explorations of the Mexican American experience produced the award-winning books Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986, a sweeping outline of the changing relations between the two peoples, and Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981, a concentrated look at how a social movement “from below” began to sweep away the last vestiges of the segregated social-political order in San Antonio and South Texas. Now in Sancho’s Journal, Montejano revisits the experience that set him on his scholarly quest—“hanging out” as a participant-observer with the South Side Berets of San Antonio as the chapter formed in 1974.

Sancho’s Journal presents a rich ethnography of daily life among the “batos locos” (crazy guys) as they joined the Brown Berets and became associated with the greater Chicano movement. Montejano describes the motivations that brought young men into the group and shows how they learned to link their individual troubles with the larger issues of social inequality and discrimination that the movement sought to redress. He also recounts his own journey as a scholar who came to realize that, before he could tell this street-level story, he had to understand the larger history of Mexican Americans and their struggle for a place in U.S. society. Sancho’s Journal completes that epic story.

Master of mojo storytelling, spinner of over-the-top yarns of horror, suspense, humor, mystery, science fiction, and even the Old West, Joe R. Lansdale has attracted a wide and enthusiastic following. His genre-defying work has brought him numerous awards, including the Grand Master of Horror from the World Horror Convention, the Edgar Award, the American Horror Award, seven Bram Stoker awards, the British Fantasy Award, Italy's Grinzane Prize for Literature, as well as Notable Book of the Year recognition twice from the New York Times.

Sanctified and Chicken-Fried is the first "true best of Lansdale" anthology. It brings together a unique mix of well-known short stories and excerpts from his acclaimed novels, along with new and previously unpublished material. In this collection of gothic tales that explore the dark and sometimes darkly humorous side of life and death, you'll meet traveling preachers with sinister agendas, towns lost to time, teenagers out for a good time who get more than they bargain for, and gangsters and strange goings-on at the end of the world. Out of the blender of Lansdale's imagination spew tall tales about men and mules, hogs and races, that are, in his words, "the equivalent of Aesop meets Flannery O'Connor on a date with William Faulkner, the events recorded by James M. Cain."

Whether you're a long-time fan of Joe R. Lansdale or just discovering his work, this anthology brings you the best of a writer whom the New York Times Book Review has praised for having "a folklorist's eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur's sense of pace."

With new research on building programs in political, religious, and domestic settings in the United States and Europe, this collection of essays offers a fresh look at postwar modernism and the role that architecture played in constructing modern identities.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture.

This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

Heated debates are not unusual when confronting tough medical issues where it seems that moral and religious perspectives often erupt in conflict with philosophical or political positions. In The Sanctity of Human Life, Jewish theologian David Novak acknowledges that it is impossible not to take into account the theological view of human life, but the challenge is how to present the religious perspective to nonreligious people. In doing so, he shows that the two positions—the theological and the philosophical—aren't as far apart as they may seem.

Novak digs deep into Jewish scripture and tradition to find guidance for assessing three contemporary controversies in medicine and public policy: the use of embryos to derive stem cells for research, socialized medicine, and physician-assisted suicide. Beginning with thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietsche, and drawing on great Jewish figures in history—Maimonides, Rashi, and various commentators on the Torah (written law) and the Mishnah (oral law)—Novak speaks brilliantly to these modern moral dilemmas.

The Sanctity of Human Life weaves a rich and sophisticated tapestry of evidence to conclude that the Jewish understanding of the human being as sacred, as the image of God, is in fact compatible with philosophical claims about the rights of the human person—especially the right to life—and can be made intelligible to secular culture. Thus, according to Novak, the use of stem cells from embryos is morally unacceptable; the sanctity of the human person, and not capitalist or socialist approaches, should drive our understanding of national health care; and physician-assisted suicide violates humankind's fundamental responsibility for caring for one another.

Novak's erudite argument and rigorous scholarship will appeal to all scholars and students engaged in the work of theology and bioethics.

The latest title in the Central European Medieval Texts series contains the lives of saints who were canonized in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries in the newly Christianized countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Dalmatia). A rejoinder to the earlier volume in the series, the Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe (CEMT, Vol. 6), containing hermits, missionaries, and martyrs, this second volume of hagiography is dominated by political or ecclesiastical leaders who became saintly patrons of their region and were highly venerated throughout the Middle Ages.

The legends in the volume present the two Hungarian holy kings Stephen and Ladislas, the holy duke Emeric, the Czech holy abbot Prokop of Sázava, three bishops, the Venetian-Hungarian Gellért of Csanád, the Polish Stanislas of Cracow (both martyrs), and the Dalmatian holy bishop Saint John of Trogir. Each “vita” is published in Latin original with an English translation and with prefaces discussing the textual tradition.

Saints’ lives have been recognized as an invaluable source of information on social and economic history, the history of mentalities and everyday life, cultural history, and, above all, as a special genre with crucial importance and prevalence in medieval literature.

Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for History 

Howard Ensign Evans was a brilliant ethologist and systematist for whom the joy of science included lying on his belly in some remote location, digging out and diagramming a wasp’s nest. During his career, Evans described over 900 species and authored more than a dozen books, both technical and popular, on a wide range of entomological and natural history subjects. Upon his death in 2002, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, intended as an update (though not a revision) of his classic 1966 work, The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps. Kevin O’Neill, Evans’s former student and coauthor, has completed and enlarged Evans’s manuscript to provide coverage of all sand-wasp tribes in Evan’s earlier book. The result is a tribe-by-tribe, species-by-species review of studies of the Bembicinae that have appeared over the last four decades.

The Sand Wasps: Natural History and Behavior already has been hailed by specialists as a new bible for those working on solitary wasps and an essential reference for scientists more broadly interested in insect behavioral evolution.

Luther Cressman's 1938 discovery of a 9,000-year-old sandal in Fort Rock Cave revolutionized accepted theories of western prehistory. The recovery of the woven sagebrush-bark sandal, found buried under a layer of volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Mazama, established a human presence in the Oregon Country much earlier than previously thought.

Through six decades of scientific investigation, Cressman worked to uncover the history of the first Oregonians. In The Sandal and the Cave, he offers a brief, lucid introduction to the prehistory of Oregon Indians. Cressman describes their diverse cultures, highlighting similarities and differences between the peoples of various regions: the Oregon Coast, the Klamath Highland, the Northern Great Basin, and the Columbia Plateau.

In a new introduction to Cressman's classic work, Dennis Jenkins provides a short biographical profile of the "father of Oregon archaeology" and discusses the importance of Cressman's excavation results and interpretations. Jenkins also offers a concise summary of recent archaeological research in the Northern Great Basin, bringing readers the most up-to-date information about the oldest known sites in Oregon.

Listen to a short interview with David L. KirpHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

The rich have always valued early education, and for the past forty years, millions of poor kids have had Head Start. Now, more and more middle class parents have realized that a good preschool is the smartest investment they can make in their children's future in a competitive world. As The Sandbox Investment shows, their needs are key to the growing call for universal preschool.

Writing with the verve of a magazine journalist and the authority of a scholar, David L. Kirp makes the ideal guide to this quiet movement. He crouches in classrooms where committed teachers engage lively four-year-olds, and reveals the findings of an extraordinary longitudinal study that shows the life-changing impact of preschool. He talks with cutting-edge researchers from neuroscience and genetics to economics, whose findings increasingly show how powerfully early childhood shapes the arc of children's lives.

Kids-first politics is smart economics: paying for preschool now can help save us from paying for unemployment, crime, and emergency rooms later. As Kirp reports from the inside, activists and political leaders have turned this potent idea into campaigns and policies in red and blue states alike.

The Sandbox Investment is the first full story of a campaign that asks Americans to endorse a vision of society that does well by doing good. For anyone who is interested in politics or the social uses of research--for anyone who's interested in the children's futures--it's a compelling read.

Drawing on previously unknown or unassimilated sources, Donald C. Hodges here presents an entirely new interpretation of the politics and philosophy of Augusto C. Sandino, the intellectual progenitor of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution.

The first part of the book investigates the political sources of Sandino's thought in the works of Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Most, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lenin—a mixed legacy of pre-Marxist and non-Marxist authoritarian and libertarian communists.

The second half of the study scrutinizes the philosophy of nature and history that Sandino made his own. Hodges delves deeply into this philosophy as the supreme and final expression of Sandino's communism and traces its sources in the Gnostic and millenarian occult undergrounds. This results in a rich study of the ways in which Sandino's revolutionary communism and communist spirituality intersect—a spiritual politics that Hodges presents as more realistic than the communism of Karl Marx.

While accepting the current wisdom that Sandino was a Nicaraguan liberal and social reformer, Hodges also makes a persuasive case that Sandino was first and foremost a communist, although neither of the Marxist nor anarchist variety. He argues that Sandino's eclectic communist spirituality was more of an asset than a liability for understanding the human condition, and that his spiritual politics promises to be more relevant than Marxism-Leninism for the twenty-first century. Indeed, Hodges believes that Sandino's holistic communism embraces both deep ecology and feminist spirituality—a finding that is sure to generate lively and productive debate.

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Reeves, or Charles Atlas, there was German-born Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), a muscular vaudeville strongman who used his good looks, intelligence, and business savvy to forge a fitness empire. 

David L. Chapman tells the story of the immensely popular showman who emphasized physique display rather than lifting prowess. But he also looks at Sandow's success off-stage, where the entertainer helped found the fitness movement by establishing a worldwide chain of gyms, publishing a popular magazine, selling exercise equipment, and pioneering the use of food supplements. Chapman explains physical culture's popularity in terms of its wider social implications while delving into how Sandow, by making exercise fashionable, ushered in the fitness craze that continues today. 

This new edition has been revised and enlarged with an afterword that includes unpublished information, new photographs of Sandow and his contemporaries, and an updated index.

Undocumented migration is a huge global phenomenon, yet little is known about the reality of life for those involved. Sans Papiers combines a contemporary account of the theoretical and policy debates with an in-depth exploration of the lived experiences of undocumented migrants in the UK from Zimbabwe, China, Brazil, Ukraine and Turkish Kurdistan.

Built around their voices, the book provides a unique understanding of migratory processes, gendered experiences and migrant aspirations. Moving between the uniqueness of individual experience and the search for commonalities, the book explores the ambiguities and contradictions of being an undocumented migrant.

With its insights into personal experiences alongside analysis of wider policy issues, Sans Papiers will have wide appeal for students, academics, policy-makers and practitioners.

In this rich collection of Sanskrit verse, the late Daniel Ingalls provides English readers with a wide variety of poetry from the vast anthology of an eleventh-century Buddhist scholar.

Although the style of poetry presented here originated in royal courts, Ingalls shows how it was adapted to all aspects of life, and came to address issues as diverse as love, sex, heroes, nature, and peace. More than thirty years after its original publication, Sanskrit Poetry continues to be the main resource for all interested in this multifaceted and elegant tradition.

Runner-up, Bronze Medal, Independent Publishers Book Awards: Memoir/Autobiography Category, 2009

Unclear about his future career path, Steve Reifenberg found himself in the early 1980s working at a small orphanage in a poor neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, where a determined single woman was trying to create a stable home for a dozen or so children who had been abandoned or abused. With little more than good intentions and very limited Spanish, the 23-year-old Reifenberg plunged into the life of the Hogar Domingo Savio, becoming a foster father to kids who stretched his capacities for compassion and understanding in ways he never could have imagined back in the United States.

In this beautifully written memoir, Reifenberg recalls his two years at the Hogar Domingo Savio. His vivid descriptions create indelible portraits of a dozen remarkable kids—mature-beyond-her-years Verónica; sullen, unresponsive Marcelo; and irrepressible toddler Andrés, among them. As Reifenberg learns more about the children's circumstances, he begins to see the bigger picture of life in Chile at a crucial moment in its history.

The early 1980s were a time of economic crisis and political uprising against the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Reifenberg skillfully interweaves the story of the orphanage with the broader national and international forces that dramatically impact the lives of the kids. By the end of Santiago's Children, Reifenberg has told an engrossing story not only of his own coming-of-age, but also of the courage and resilience of the poorest and most vulnerable residents of Latin America.

The Yanomami people of Brazil first attracted anthropological and popular attention in the 1960s, when they were portrayed as essentially primitive and violent in the widely read book Yanomamo: The Fierce People. To this image of the Yanomami another has recently been added: that of victims of the economic rapacity devouring the Amazon.

Sanumá Memories moves beyond these images to provide the first anthropologically sophisticated account of the Yanomami and their social organization, kinship, and marriage, capturing both individual experiences and the broader sociological trends that engulf them. A poignant personal story as well, it draws on Alcida Ramos's extensive fieldwork among the Sanumá (the northernmost Yanomami subgroup) from 1968 to 1992, as she reports on the brutal impact of many invasions—from road construction to the gold rush that brought the Yanomami social chaos, thousands of deaths, devastation of gardens and forest, and a disquietingly uncertain future.

At the cutting edge of anthropological description and analysis, Sanumá Memories ponders the importance of "otherness" to the Sanumá; describes Sanumá spaces, from the grandiosity of the rain forest to cozy family compartments; analyzes their notions of time, from the minute reckoning of routine village life to historical and metaphysical macro-time; shows how power and authority are generated and allocated in space and time; and examines the secrecy of personal names and the all-pervading consequences of disclosing them.

The São Paulo Law School, the oldest institution of higher learning in Brazil, has long been the chief training center for that country’s leadership. For the members of the school’s secret Burschenschaft society, the training consisted principally in leading demonstrations for liberal causes, such as the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of the monarchy. During the Old Republic (1889–1930), the Brazilian presidency and other high posts in Rio de Janeiro were usually occupied by alumni of the powerful society, while its members in São Paulo continued to agitate for political reform. But in the 1920s, when they formed the Nationalist League and the Democratic Party, schisms resulted. Thus the Burschenschaft was weakened before the long rule of Brazil by Getúlio Vargas, starting in 1930, brought an end to the society’s influence.

The role of the school in these and other historical events is carefully reviewed by Dulles before he turns to the school’s well-known resistance to the dictatorship of Vargas. That resistance, the most persistent confronting the dictator, appeared to be unified—especially when it provoked the police into shooting the students. But, as Dulles discovered when interviewing participants and consulting documents and scrapbooks of the early 1940s, the movement was characterized by heated internal strife. In the end, however, the idealism and courage of the participants and the ultimate effectiveness of the movement contributed mightily to the fall of Vargas.

This book is another in Dulles’s series of narrative histories in which he gives flesh and blood to the names and breathes life into the events of twentieth-century Brazilian politics.