In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas.

A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism--and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.

Still the Promised City? addresses the question of why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. Does the increase in immigration bear some responsibility for the failure of more blacks to rise, for their disappearance from many occupations, and for their failure to establish a presence in business?

The two most popular explanations for the condition of blacks invoke the decline of manufacturing in New York and other major American cities: one claims that this decline has closed off job opportunities for blacks that were available for earlier immigrants who lacked skills and education; the other emphasizes "globalization"--the movement of manufacturing jobs offshore to areas with lower labor costs. But Roger Waldinger shows that these explanations do not fit the facts. Instead, he points out that a previously overlooked factor--population change--and the rapid exodus of white New Yorkers created vacancies for minority workers up and down the job ladder. Ethnic succession generated openings both in declining industries, where the outward seepage of whites outpaced the rate of job erosion, and in growth industries, where whites poured out of bottom-level positions even as demand for low-level workers increased. But this process yielded few dividends for blacks, who saw their share of the many low-skilled jobs steadily decline. Instead, advantage went to the immigrants, who exploited these opportunities by expanding their economic base.

Waldinger explains these disturbing facts by viewing employment as a queuing process, with the good jobs at the top of the job ladder and the poor ones at the bottom. As economic growth pulls the topmost ethnic group up the ladder, lower-ranking groups seize the chance to fill the niches left vacant. Immigrants, remembering conditions in the societies they just left, are eager to take up the lower-level jobs that natives will no longer do. By contrast, African-Americans, who came to the city a generation ago, have job aspirations similar to those of whites. But the niches they have carved out, primarily in the public sector, require skills that the least educated members of their community do not have. Black networks no longer provide connections to the lower-level jobs, and relative to the newcomers, employers find unskilled blacks to be much less satisfactory recruits. The result is that a certain number of well-educated blacks have good middle-class jobs, but many of the less educated have fallen back into an underclass. Grim as this analysis is, it points to a deeper understanding of America's most serious social problem and offers fresh approaches to attacking it.

You probably knew Molly Ivins as an unabashed civil libertarian who used her rapier wit and good ole Texas horse sense to excoriate political figures she deemed unworthy of our trust and respect. But did you also know that Molly was one helluva cook? And we're not just talking chili and chicken-fried steak, either. Molly Ivins honed her culinary skills on visits to France—often returning with perfected techniques for saumon en papillote or delectable clafouti aux cerises. Friends who had the privilege of sharing Molly's table got not only a heaping helping of her insights into the political shenanigans of the day, but also a mouth-watering meal, prepared from scratch with the finest ingredients and assembled with the same meticulous attention to detail that Molly devoted to skewering a political recalcitrant.

In Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins, her longtime friend, fellow reporter, and frequent sous-chef Ellen Sweets takes us into the kitchen with Molly and introduces us to the private woman behind the public figure. She serves up her own and others' favorite stories about Ivins as she recalls the fabulous meals they shared, complete with recipes for thirty-five of Molly's signature dishes. These stories reveal a woman who was even more fascinating and complex than the "professional Texan" she enjoyed playing in public. Friends who ate with Molly knew a cultured woman who was a fluent French speaker, voracious reader, rugged outdoors aficionado, music lover, loyal and loving friend, and surrogate mom to many of her friends' children, as well as to her super-spoiled poodle. They also came to revere the courageous woman who refused to let cancer stop her from doing what she wanted, when she wanted. This is the Molly you'll be delighted to meet in Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins.

Jennifer Ring questions the forces that try to keep girls who want to play baseball away from the game. Focusing on a history that, unfortunately, repeats itself, Ring describes the circumstances that twice stole baseball from American girls: once in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and again in the late twentieth century, after it was no longer legal to exclude girls who wanted to play. In the early twentieth century, Albert Goodwill Spalding--sporting goods magnate, baseball player, and promoter--declared baseball off limits for women and envisioned global baseball on a colonialist scale, using the American sport to teach men from non-white races and non-European cultures to become civilized and rational. And by the late twentieth century, baseball had become serious business for boys and men at all levels, with female players perceived as obstacles or detriments to rising male players' chances of success.

Stolen Bases also looks at the backgrounds of American softball, which was originally invented by men who wanted to keep playing baseball indoors during cold winter months but has become the consolation sport for most female players. Throughout her analysis, Ring searches for ways to rescue baseball from its arrogance and sense of exclusionary entitlement.

For centuries scholars have pondered and speculated over the uses of the chipped stone implements uncovered at archaeological sites. Recently a number of researchers have attempted to determine prehistoric tool function through experimentation and through observation of the few remaining human groups who still retain this knowledge. Learning how stone tools were made and used in the past can tell us a great deal about ancient economic systems, exchange networks, and the social and political structure of prehistoric societies.

Suzanne M. Lewenstein used the artifacts from Cerros, an important Late Preclassic (200 BC–AD 200) Mayan site in northern Belize, to study stone tool function. Through a comprehensive program of experimentation with stone tool replicas, she was able not only to infer the tasks performed by individual tool specimens but also to recognize a wide variety of past activities for which stone tools were used.

Unlike previous works that focused on hunter-gatherer groups, Stone Tool Use at Cerros is the first comprehensive experimental study of tool use in an agricultural society. The lithic data are used in an economic interpretation of a lowland Mayan community within a hierarchically complex society.

Apart from its significance to Mayan studies, this innovative work offers the beginnings of a reference collection of identifiable tool functions that may be documented for sedentary, complex society. It will be of major interest to all archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as those interested in economic specialization and artisanry in complex societies.

Welcoming 800,000 visitors each year, Stonehenge is the most famous prehistoric monument in all of Europe. It has inspired modern replicas throughout the world, including one constructed entirely of discarded refrigerators. This curious structure is the subject of cult worship, is a source of pride for Britons, and offers an intellectual challenge for academics. It has captured the imagination and the attention of thousands of people for thousands of years.

Over the centuries, “experts” have tried to discover the meaning behind Stonehenge. While each new theory contradicts earlier speculation, every new proposal attributes a purpose to the site. From bards of the twelfth century to Black Sabbath, from William Blake to archaeologists of the twenty-first century, Stonehenge has embodied a wealth of intention. Was it designed for winter solstice, for goddess worship, or as a funerary temple? While all have been suggested, even “proven,” the mystery continues.

Through the eyes of its most eloquent apologists, Rosemary Hill guides the reader on a tour of Stonehenge in all its cultural contexts, as a monument to many things—to Renaissance Humanism, Romantic despair, Victorian enterprise, and English Radicalism. In the end, the stones remain compelling because they remain mysterious—apparently simple yet incomprehensible—that is the wonder, the enchantment, of Stonehenge.

The Stonemans is an eye-opening slice of Americana---a trip through nearly twenty years of country music history following a single family from their native Blue Ridge Mountains to the slums of Washington, D.C., and the glitter of Nashville. As early as 1924 Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman realized the potential of what is now known as country music, and he tried to carve a career from it. Successful as a recording artist from 1925 through 1929, Stoneman foundered during the Great Depression. He, his wife, and their nine children went to Washington in 1932, struggling through a decade of hardship and working to revive the musical career Pop still believed in. The Stoneman Family won the Country Music Association's Vocal Group of the Year Award in 1967. After Pop's death a year later, some of the children scattered to pursue their own careers. 

Ivan Tribe relies on extensive interviews with the Stonemans and their friends in this chronicle of a family whose members have clung to their musical heritage through good times and bad.

A crucial text for any university course on the interaction of archaeology and the Bible

The world of early Christians was not a world lived in texts; it was a world saturated with material reality and concerns: what, where and when to eat or drink; how to present oneself in the space of bodily life and that of death; how to move from one place to another; what impacted status or the adjudication of legal charges. All these and more controlled so much of life in the ancient world. The Christians were not immune from the impact of these realities. Sometimes they absorbed their surrounds; sometimes they quite explicitly rejected the material practices bearing in on them; frequently they modified the practice and the rationale to create a significant Christian alternative. The collection of essays in this volume come from a range of international scholars who, for all their different interests and critical commitments, are yet united in treasuring research into the Greek and Roman worlds in which Christians sought to make their way. They offer these essays in honor of one who has made a lifetime's work in mining ancient material culture to extract nuggets of insight into early Christian dining practices: Dennis E. Smith.

Features

• Rich examples of method in the utilization of ancient material culture for biblical interpretation.
• Thirteen essays with a response from Dennis E. Smith
• Maps, diagrams, and plates

A delightful blend of memoir, opinion, and sports from an Alabama original.

For 31 years, Clyde Bolton wrote four sports columns per week for the Birmingham News. By his estimation, this makes him the most widely read Alabamian in history. He may be right.

In Stop the Presses (So I Can Get Off) he takes the reader along on a joyride through more than three decades of Alabama sports. Unsurprisingly, tales of Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan, Roll Tide and War Eagle, dominate, but at one point or another, Clyde covered just about every type of sporting event in the state. Personalities and events from the realms of high school sports, minor league baseball, college basketball, and Nextel Cup Racing are just some of the many facets of his personal and professional life that he shares in this, his 17th book.

In relating the outlines of his life, Bolton pays homage to his mentors, including famed sports editor Benny Marshall, and shares some insights he’s gained after a lifetime in the newspaper game. But throughout the book, he never forgets that any good journalist—any good writer—is in the business of telling stories. And oh, what stories!

Bolton writes of meeting Michael Jordan during the basketball star’s year with the Birmingham Barons; of having dinner with Muhammad Ali at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house at Auburn University; of walking incognito down sunny Birmingham sidewalks with Hall-of-Famer Johnny Unitas. He explains why Bear Bryant, in his opinion, is the greatest football coach ever, tells of interviewing Joe Namath in the men’s bathroom, and reveals why his grandmother watched professional wrestling on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the television.

Stop the Presses (So I Can Get Off) is a joyous romp through the SEC, the Nextel Cup Circuit, and, in the end, life itself.

 

With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to The Invention of Love (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably the preeminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard's work in nearly a decade. He takes an in-depth look at the three newest plays (Arcadia,Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love) and the recently revised versions of Travesties and Hapgood, as well as at four other major plays (Rosencrantz,Jumpers,Night and Day, and The Real Thing). Drawing on Stoppard's personal papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC), Fleming also examines Stoppard's previously unknown play Galileo, as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of his published plays.

Fleming also mines Stoppard's papers for a fuller, more detailed overview of the evolution of his plays. By considering Stoppard's personal views (from both his correspondence and interviews) and by examining his career from his earliest scripts and productions through his most recent, this book provides all that is essential for understanding and appreciating one of the most complex and distinctive playwrights of our time.

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933

The Pulitzer prize-winning The Store is the second novel of Stribling’s monumental trilogy set in the author’s native Tennessee Valley region of north Alabama. The action begins in 1884, the year in which Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the end of the Civil War; and it centers about the emergence of a figure of wealth in the city of Florence.

In The Store, Stribling succeeds in presenting the essence of an age through the everyday lives of his characters. In the New Yorker, reviewer Robert M. Coates compared Stribling with Mark Twain in his ability to convey the “very life and movement” of a small Southern town: “Groups move chatting under the trees or stand loitering in the courthouse square, townsfolk gather at political ‘speakings’ and drift homeward separately afterward; always, in their doings, one has the sense of a whole community surrounding them, binding them together.” Gerald Bullet wrote in The New Statesman and Nation that the novel “is a first-rate book…filled with diverse and vital characters; and much of it cannot be read without that primitive excitement, that eagerness to know what comes next, which is, after all, the triumph of the good story teller.”

Winner, Arvey Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2001
Honorable Mention, Honorable Mention, George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, Art Libraries Society of North America, 2001

The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today.

This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos.

Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

The Kuna Indians of Panama, probably best known for molas, their colorful appliqué blouses, also have a rich literary tradition of oral stories and performances. One of the largest indigenous groups in the South American tropics, the majority of them (about 70,000) reside in Kuna Yala, a string of island and mainland villages stretching along the Caribbean coast. It is here that Joel Sherzer lived among them, photographing and recording their verbal performances, which he feels are representative of the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the oral literary traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America.

This book is organized into three types of texts: humorous and moralistic stories; myths and magical chants; and women's songs. While quite different from one another, they share features characteristic of Kuna literature as a whole, including appreciation of their environment and a remarkable knowledge of their plants and animals; a belief in spirits as an important component of their world in curing, magic, and aesthetics; and, especially, great humor and a sense of play.

Vividly illustrated by a Kuna artist and accompanied by photographs that lend a sense of being present at the performances, the texts provide readers with a unique aesthetic perspective on this rich culture while preserving an endangered and valuable indigenous oral tradition.

Stories of Freedom in Black New York recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to observe the style of black men and women, to watch their public behavior, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen.

Taking center stage in this story is the African Company, a black theater troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often of disgust by many whites for whom the theater's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation.

Stories of Freedom in Black New York brilliantly intertwines black theater and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites, and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.

Throughout American history there has been an oddly close relationship between the seductive appeals of narrative fiction and those of political rhetoric and advocacy. The aim of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience is to explore what political narratives and the cultural poetics behind them reveal about the way our personal and intimate lives are deeply connected with the public arena and the political process.

The first section of the book, “The Politics of Fictions,” contains essays focused on works of fiction consciously dramatizing the political realm. The second group of contributions, “The Fictions of Politics,” explores structures and motifs from the narrative arts in discourses of American political life, and the interactions of public institutions and policy with forms of fictional representation, from novels to popular music and TV drama.

The essays presented here broaden the conversation in American literary studies about what constitutes “the political” in literature and culture by reintroducing the dimension of institutional or representative politics. Likewise, Stories of Nation aims to repair the lines of communication between the idea that all fiction is political, and the view that political speech is a subgenre of literature all the more in need of examination in a highly polarized society.

The range of perspectives in Stories of Nation will engage students of literature, popular culture, and politics alike.

MARTIN GRIFFIN is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (2009) and co-author, with Constance DeVereaux, of Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (2013).

CHRISTOPHER HEBERT is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee and is former senior acquisitions editor at the University of Michigan Press. He is the author of the novels Angels of Detroit (2016) and The Boiling Season (2012).

Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.

Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.

Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives—what white people must do—to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built.

Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource.

A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive.

Multinational enterprises—what they are and the challenge they pose to national objectives—have never been so clearly delineated. Raymond Vernon cuts through polemic and propaganda to place in perspective the spread of large companies from their home bases to foreign countries. He draws upon the variety of recent studies and his own vast scholarly endeavors and firsthand experience to answer such questions as: Are multinational enterprises and nation-states incompatible in goals and outlook? Should their economic (and political) behavior differ in underdeveloped countries as compared to modernized states?

After reviewing the growing interrelationships of the world's economies, Vernon takes a close-up look at multinationals, commenting on their size, business activity, and patterns of management and control. He identifies the real problems these large enterprises generate, sorting them out from the ills that are associated with industrialization in general. He traces these problems in the developing world and in industrialized countries. In the process, he explores the ramifications of the multinational double identity—each enterprise must comport itself as a national of the country that sanctioned its creation, while at the same time it must respond to the link that ties it to units of the same company in other countries.

Finally, Vernon reviews proposals that have been made to alter the relationship between the enterprises and their host countries, and he suggests scenarios for the future. The issues run deep and the threat of conflict grows, he asserts, and if policymakers hope to deal constructively with problems associated with multinational enterprises, they will have to recognize some of the basic difficulties that have so far blocked progress. His book, by setting forth the issues clearly and without special pleading, makes significant progress in pointing the way to solutions.

Reaching 20,320 feet into and above the clouds, the peak of Denali is the highest and coldest summit in North America. In this novel of adventure, adversity, and ambition by renowned mountaineer and writer Nicholas O’Connell, four men set out to conquer it. Among the sharply drawn team members is narrator John Walker, a family man trying to choose between domestic stability and mountaineering’s uncertain glory. In the course of their ascent the group battles avalanches, fierce winds, and mind-numbing cold before their bond begins to splinter, leading inexorably to tragedy.

This work unfolds the idea of “nothing” out of a Titian painting of Danaë and the shower of gold. Michele Jaffe’s philological and pictorial argument links, across several languages, such seemingly disparate concepts as money, coins, mothers (through the mint’s matrix), subjects, courtiers, prostitutes (through etymologies that join minting, standing-under, standing-for), ciphers, codes, and the codex form.

This ambitious book is a cultural history of the “cipher” zero as code and as nothing, as the absence of value and the place-holder constructing value. It traces the wide-ranging implications of “nothing”—not only in mathematics but also in literature. Along the way, it makes important points about the orthography and editing of early modern texts, and about the material affinities of these texts with painting and minting.

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression.

Karski was a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. He became a member of the Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. He was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, and entered the Nazi’s Izbica transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Karski’s courage and testimony, conveyed in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the narrative of one of the world’s greatest eyewitnesses and an inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights. This definitive edition—which includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos, notes, further reading, and a glossary—is an apt legacy for this hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in modern history.

Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll’s imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthrall and delight readers of all ages.

The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell’s death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll’s books and other works of Victorian literature.

In the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era, Douglas-Fairhurst shows, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the line between the actual and the possible was continually blurred.

A breathtaking country of rugged mountain peaks, uninhabited desert, and spectacular river canyons, Big Bend is one of the United States' most remote national parks and among Texas' most popular tourist attractions. Located in the great bend of the Rio Grande that separates Texas and Mexico, the park comprises some 800,000 acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, and draws over 300,000 visitors each year.

The Story of Big Bend National Park offers a comprehensive, highly readable history of the park from before its founding in 1944 up to the present. John Jameson opens with a fascinating look at the mighty efforts involved in persuading Washington officials and local landowners that such a park was needed. He details how money was raised and land acquired, as well as how the park was publicized and developed for visitors. Moving into the present, he discusses such issues as natural resource management, predator protection in the park, and challenges to land, water, and air. Along the way, he paints colorful portraits of many individuals, from area residents to park rangers to Lady Bird Johnson, whose 1966 float trip down the Rio Grande brought the park to national attention.

This history will be required reading for all visitors and prospective visitors to Big Bend National Park. For everyone concerned about our national parks, it makes a persuasive case for continued funding and wise stewardship of the parks as they face the twin pressures of skyrocketing attendance and declining budgets.

This literally "refreshing" collection is based on the notion that the future of bioethics is inseparable from its past. Seminal works provide a unique and relatively unexplored vehicle for investigating not only where bioethics began, but where it may be going as well. In this volume, a number of the pioneers in bioethics—Tom Beauchamp, Lisa Sowle Cahill, James Childress, Charles E. Curran, Patricia King, H. Tristram Engelhardt, William F. May, Edmund D. Pellegrino, Warren Reich, Robert Veatch and LeRoy Walters—reflect on their early work and how they fit into the past and future of bioethics. Coming from many disciplines, generations, and perspectives, these trailblazing authors provide a broad overview of the history and current state of the field. Invaluable to anyone with a serious interest in the development and future of bioethics, at a time when new paths into medical questions are made almost daily, The Story of Bioethics is a Baedeker beyond compare.

Gabriel Farrell tells the story of blindness historically and from a social point of view. He describes the achievements of sightless persons, and he emphasizes the responsibility of society toward the blind. Blindness may befall anyone, through accident at any age or through the normal degeneration of sight in old age. Farrell stresses the economic provision that must be made for the blind and he tells how the blind have been helped to overcome their deficiencies in various ways.

The author offers a comprehensive record of the work for the blind, including the deaf-blind, through the centuries, and in many countries. He approaches his subject both analytically and historically. Many interesting points are raised for their connection with the subject—such as the fact that the typewriter was invented as the result of searching for a writing machine for the blind. Of course the full story of braille is covered, as are many other educational matters that have been prepared and developed for use by the blind.

Explore how food shaped humanity in this compelling archaeological journey. 
 
The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are uses case studies from recent archaeological research to tell the story of food in human prehistory. Beginning with the earliest members of our genus, Robyn E. Cutright investigates the role of food in shaping who we are as humans during the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and through major transitions in human prehistory such as the development of agriculture and the emergence of complex societies.

This fascinating study begins with a discussion of how food shaped humans in evolutionary terms by examining what makes human eating unique, the use of fire to cook, and the origins of cuisine as culture and adaptation through the example of Neandertals. The second part of the book describes how cuisine was reshaped when humans domesticated plants and animals and examines how food expressed ancient social structures and identities such as gender, class, and ethnicity. Cutright shows how food took on special meaning in feasts and religious rituals and also pays attention to the daily preparation and consumption of food as central to human society.

Cutright synthesizes recent paleoanthropological and archaeological research on ancient diet and cuisine and complements her research on daily diet, culinary practice, and special-purpose mortuary and celebratory meals in the Andes with comparative case studies from around the world to offer readers a holistic view of what humans ate in the past and what that reveals about who we are.

 

To open this book is to enter a world of living history, of pomp and pageantry, royal fiats and popular revolutions, naval exploits and mercantile triumphs, and soaring scientific achievements. This is the world of Greenwich, England, home of a now mysterious temple in the days of the ancient Romans and of the Millennium Dome in our own, biding its time on the Thames and, flush with the line of longitude zero, keeping the time of the world. Clive Aslet conducts us through the streets and byways of this storied city, showing us scenes from its prodigious history at every turn. His richly illustrated book is a journey through time as it has been lived, and marked, in this city like no other in the world.



Here Sir Walter Raleigh laid down his cloak for Elizabeth I. Here Elizabeth signed the death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scots. A place of royal haunts and regal courting, Greenwich was also the site of Wat Tyler's revolt in the fourteenth century. Home to the navy that supported the world's greatest maritime empire, the city saw the funeral of England's most celebrated naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson. Aslet revisits these events, immersing us in courtly drama and popular ferment, cosmopolitan grandeur and bustling commerce. He shows us the remarkable buildings that hold so much of Greenwich's history, from the palaces embellished by Henry VIII to the structures designed by England's renowned architects--from Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones--to the observatories that house the massive telescopes and nautical clocks that have put Greenwich at the forefront of scientific invention and discovery.



Whether recalling the literary marks that writers such as Marlowe and Dickens have left on the city, or tracking London's first railway into Greenwich, or recounting the tales of navigators and statesmen, monarchs and common and uncommon folk, this book tells the story of Greenwich for all time.

The literary jewel of Telegu civilization, translated for the first time into any language.

Manucaritramu, or The Story of Manu, by the early sixteenth-century poet Allasani Peddana, is the definitive literary monument of Telugu civilization and a powerful embodiment of the imperial culture of Vijayanagara, the last of the great premodern south Indian states. It is the story of Svarochisha Manu, who ruled over the previous cosmic age and who serves here as prototype for the first human being. Peddana explores the dramatic displacements, imaginative projections, and intricate workings of desire necessary for Manu’s birth and formation. The Story of Manu is also a book about kingship and its exigencies at the time of Krishnadevaraya, the most powerful of the Vijayanagara rulers, who was a close friend and patron of the poet.

The Story of Manu, presented in the Telugu script alongside the first translation into any language, is a true masterpiece of early modern south Indian literature.

Greek myths have long been admired as beautiful, thrilling stories but dismissed as serious objects of belief. For centuries scholars have held that Greek epics, tragedies, and the other compelling works handed down to us obscure the “real” myths that supposedly inspired them. Instead of joining in this pursuit of hidden meanings, Sarah Iles Johnston argues that the very nature of myths as stories—as gripping tales starring vivid characters—enabled them to do their most important work: to create and sustain belief in the gods and heroes who formed the basis of Greek religion.

By drawing on work in narratology, sociology, and folklore studies, and by comparing Greek myths not only to the myths of other cultures but also to fairy tales, ghost stories, fantasy works, modern novels, and television series, The Story of Myth reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which these ancient Greek tales forged enduring bonds between their characters and their audiences, created coherent story-worlds, and made it possible to believe in extraordinary gods. Johnston captures what makes Greek myths distinctively Greek, but simultaneously brings these myths into a broader conversation about how the stories told by all cultures affect our shared view of the cosmos and the creatures who inhabit it.

With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa.

Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's people. Her story reaches from the beginnings of Afrikaner nationalism to the recent past: the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, and the Soweto uprising.

As a result of his rejection of liberal and socialist realism, Coetzee has been branded an escapist, but Gallagher ably defends him from this charge. Her cogent, convincingly argued examination of his novels demonstrates that Coetzee's fictional response is "apocalyptic in the most profound Biblical sense, obscurely pointing toward ineffable realities transcending discursive definition." Viewing Coetzee's fiction in this context, Gallagher describes a new kind of novel "that arises out of history, but also rivals history." This analysis reveals Coetzee's novels to be profound responses to their time and place as well as richly rewarding investigations of the storyteller's art.

The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn is a critical edition and translation of a long narrative poem written by the secretary to the French ambassador in London within two weeks of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It was intended as a diplomatic dispatch, relating the astonishing news of the queen’s demise (along with that of five alleged lovers). Uniquely among diplomatic correspondence, this dispatch was written in verse form. It thus straddles the domains of literature and history, of chronicle and fiction.  

The base text for this edition is a previously unstudied manuscript housed at the British Library. Variants are given from all other known manuscripts found in Europe, including several key verses that were previously unpublished and that shed new light on the interpretation of the poem. The book features a sense-for-sense translation into modern English in free verse form, along with extensive explanatory notes. It also provides a study focusing on the historical background to the poem, an essay on the poet and the reception of his work, and a literary analysis of the poem.

"This is a fascinating, well-researched text that scholars, musicians, collectors, and luthiers will treasure as a gem of information.”
—Scott Suter, author of Shenandoah Valley Folklife

Perhaps no instrument better represents the music of Appalachia than the fretted dulcimer. The instrument was no longer confined to back porches and local music halls when Jean Ritchie so melodically thrust herself and her dulcimer into the national limelight during the folk revival of the 1950s. But where did the dulcimer, known to exist in no other folk culture in the world, come from?

In The Story of the Dulcimer, Ralph Lee Smith traces the dulcimer’s beginnings back to European immigration to America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania and Appalachia, they brought with them scheitholts, a type of northern European fretted zither. As German immigrants intermingled with English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, the scheitholt, which was customarily played to a slower tempo in German cultural music, began to be musically integrated into the faster tempos of English and Scotch-Irish ballads and folk songs. As Appalachia absorbed an increasing flow of English and Scotch-Irish immigrants and the musical traditions they brought with them, the scheitholt steadily evolved into an instrument that reflected this folk music amalgamation, and the modern dulcimer was born.

In this second edition, Smith brings the dulcimer’s history into the twenty-first century with a new preface and updates to the original edition. Copiously illustrated with images of both antique scheitholts and contemporary dulcimers, The Story of the Dulcimer is a testament to the enduring musical heritage of Appalachia and solves one of the region’s musical mysteries.

RALPH LEE SMITH is a musician specializing in traditional Appalachian music and, along with the late Jean Ritchie, is widely regarded as the leading authority on the music and history of the dulcimer. He is the author of seven collections of folk songs relating to the dulcimer. He recently published a memoir/songbook, Greenwich Village: The Happy Folk Singing Days, 1950s–1960s, which recounts his time in New York City during the folk revival.

The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells is an introduction and definitive guide to the self-taught quilter whose expansive body of work serves as testament to the sweeping tides of American life and Wells’s significance as a major figure within the folk art and art world writ large.

Beginning when she was nearly 40 years old and without formal training, Wells created her first quilt for practical use but was soon hand stitching appliqué figures into bold, original designs that unleashed her voice as a storyteller. Incorporating a wide variety of symbolic materials and unconventional objects—“anything I can stick a needle in”—Wells’s vivid story quilts reveal a fearless and encyclopedic vision ranging from the intimately autobiographical to iconic scenes from African American history, the Bible, Southern culture, and contemporary headlines.

The result of years of close collaboration between Stacy I. Morgan and Wells herself, The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells is richly illustrated with more than 100 quilts accompanied by narratives about each, told in the artist's own words, and interspersed with in-depth essays documenting Wells’s unique artistic practice and creative journey during her five-decade art career.