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Andrei Bely
The Major Symbolist Fiction
Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Harvard University Press, 1985

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Limits to Interpretation
The Meanings of Anna Karenina
Vladimir E. Alexandrov
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Vladimir E. Alexandrov advocates a broad revision of the academic study of literature, proposing an adaptive, text-specific approach designed to minimize the circularity of interpretation inherent in the act of reading. He illustrates this method with the example of Tolstoy's classic novel via a detailed "map" of the different possible readings that the novel can support. The novel Anna Karenina emerges as deeply conflicted, polyvalent, and quite unlike what one finds in other critical studies.
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Educating Artists for the Future
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
Mel Alexenberg
Intellect Books, 2008
In Educating Artists for the Future, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers about higher education in the arts offer fresh directions for educating artists and designers for a post-digital future. A group of artists, researchers, and teachers from a dozen countries here redefine art at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic values. This volume offers groundbreaking guidelines for art educators, demonstrating how the interplay between digital and cultural systems calls for alternative pedagogical strategies that encourage student-centered interactive learning.
 
“Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the ‘media magic’ communicate content?”—Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 

 
 
 
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Future of Art in a Digital Age
From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
Mel Alexenberg
Intellect Books, 2006

This work develops the thesis that the transition from pre-modernism to postmodernism in art of the digital age represents a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture.

Semiotic and morphological analysis of art and visual culture demonstrate the contemporary confluence between the deep structure of Hebraic consciousness and new directions in art that arise along the interface between scientific inquiry, digital technologies, and multicultural expressions.

Complementing these two analytic methodologies, alternative methodologies of kabbalah and halakhah provide postmodern methods for extending into digital age art forms. Exemplary artworks are described in the text and illustrated with photographs.

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The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age
From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness - Second Edition
Mel Alexenberg
Intellect Books, 2011

In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, artist and educator Mel Alexenberg offers a vision of a postdigital future that reveals a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. He ventures beyond the digital to explore postdigital perspectives rising from creative encounters among art, science, technology, and human consciousness. The interrelationships between these perspectives demonstrate the confluence between postdigital art and the dynamic, Jewish structure of consciousness. Alexenberg’s pioneering artwork––a fusion of spiritual and technological realms––exemplifies the theoretical thesis of this investigation into interactive and collaborative forms that imaginatively envisages the vast potential of art in a postdigital future.   

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The Thaw Generation
Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era
Ludmilla Alexeyeva
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
The Thaw Generation offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement--the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.  Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists including Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Yuli Daniel, and Andrei Sinyavsky, through their dedication and their personal and professional sacrifices, focused international attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR.
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Jane Jacobs
Urban Visionary
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Today, we take for granted the wisdom of renovating old factory buildings into malls or condos, of making once decaying waterfronts into vibrant public spaces, of protecting historic buildings under landmark laws, and of building public housing on a human scale rather than as high-rises. In contemporary cities, it is now common for community groups to plant gardens in empty lots and to buy abandoned apartment buildings from the city for a dollar and fix them up.

But these and other urban planning policies and practices have not always been accepted. Before they became widespread, they were the visionary ideas of the writer and urban commentator Jane Jacobs. Best known in the United States for her path-breaking efforts to preserve the character of Greenwich Village, Jacobs is the author of the classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the most influential works ever published in urban studies. The architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in the New York Times that its publication “was one of twentieth-century architecture’s most traumatic events. Its impact is still felt in cities across the land.” 

 In this analysis of Jane Jacobs’s ideas and work, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the remarkable story of a woman who without any formal training in planning became a prominent spokesperson for sensible urban change. Besides writing the seminal book about contemporary cities, Jacobs organized successful community battles in New York against powerful interests. She resisted urban renewal in the West Village in the 1960s, helped defeat the Lower Manhattan Expressway, advocated the pleasures of street life that she called “sidewalk ballet,” and opposed the original Twin Towers plans. She was also active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, which eventually led her to move to Canada. There she continued her grass-roots activism, including helping to prevent the construction of an expressway that would have cut through several neighborhoods in Toronto.

Based on a rich array of interviews and primary source material, this book brings long-overdue attention to Jacobs’s far-reaching influence as an original thinker and effective activist.

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5G Wireless Technologies
Angeliki Alexiou
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017
Mobile data traffic is expected to exceed traffic from wired devices in the next couple of years. This emerging future will be empowered by revolutionary 5G radio network technologies with a focus on application-driven connectivity, transparently deployed over various technologies, infrastructures, users and devices to realise the vision of 'the Internet of Everything'. This book presents a roadmap of 5G, from advanced radio technologies to innovative resource management approaches and novel network architectures and system concepts.
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Disarming Doomsday
The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima
Becky Alexis-Martin
Pluto Press, 2019
Since before the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the history of nuclear warfare has been tangled with the spaces and places of scientific research and weapons testing, armament and disarmament, pacifism and proliferation. Nuclear geography gives us the tools to understand these events as well as the extraordinary human cost of nuclear weapons. Disarming Doomsday explores the secret history of nuclear weapons by studying the places they build and tear apart, from Los Alamos to Hiroshima. It looks at the legacy of nuclear imperialism from weapons testing on Christmas Island and across the South Pacific, as well as the lasting harm this has caused to both indigenous communities and the soldiers that were ordered to conduct tests. Tying these complex geographies together for the first time, Disarming Doomsday takes us forward, describing how geographers and geotechnology continue to shape nuclear war and imagining ways to help prevent it in the future.
 
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The Material Culture of Writing
Cydney Alexis
University Press of Colorado, 2022
The Material Culture of Writing opens up avenues for understanding writing through scholarship in material culture studies. Contributors to this volume each interrogate an object, set of objects, or writing environment to reveal the sociomaterial contexts from which writing emerges. The artifacts studied are both contemporary and historical, including ink, a Victorian hotel visitors’ book, Moleskine notebooks, museum conservators’ files, an early twentieth-century baby book, and a college campus makerspace. Close study of such artifacts not only enriches understanding of what counts as writing but also offers up the potential for rich current and historical inquiry into writing artifacts and environments.
 
The collection features scholars across the disciplines—such as art, art history, English, museum studies, and writing studies—who work as teachers, historians, museum curators/conservators, and faculty. Each chapter features methods and questions from contributors’ own disciplines while at the same time speaking to writing studies’ interest in writers, writing identity, and writing practice. The authors in this volume also work with a variety of methodologies, including literary analysis, archival research, and qualitative research, providing models for the types of research possible using a material culture studies framework. The collection is organized into three sections—Writing Identity, Writing Work, Writing Genre—each with a contextualizing introduction from the editors that introduces the chapters themselves and imagines possible directions for writing studies research facilitated by material culture studies.
 
The Material Culture of Writing serves as an accessible introduction to work in material culture studies for writing studies scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates, especially as it makes a distinctive contribution to writing studies in its material culture studies approach. Because of the interdisciplinarity of material culture studies and this volume’s contributors, this collection will appeal to a wide range of scholars and readers, including those interested in writing studies, the history of the book, print culture, genre studies, archival methods, and authorship studies.
 
Contributors: Cydney Alexis, Debby Andrews, Diane Ehrenpreis, Keri Epps, Desirée Henderson, Kevin James, Jenny Krichevsky, Anne Mackay, Emilie Merrigan, Laura R. Micciche, Hannah J. Rule, Kate Smith
 
 
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Haiti Fights Back
The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte
Yveline Alexis
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Winner of the 2021 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize​

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US scholarly examination of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US military occupation of Haiti. The occupation lasted close to two decades, from 1915-1934. Alexis argues for the importance of documenting resistance while exploring the occupation’s mechanics and its imperialism. She takes us to Haiti, exploring the sites of what she labels as resistance zones, including Péralte’s hometown of Hinche and the nation’s large port areas--Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. Alexis offers a new reading of U.S. military archival sources that record Haitian protests as banditry. Haiti Fights Back illuminates how Péralte launched a political movement, and meticulously captures how Haitian women and men resisted occupation through silence, military battles, and writings. She locates and assembles rare, multilingual primary sources from traditional repositories, living archives (oral stories), and artistic representations in Haiti and the United States. The interdisciplinary work draws on legislation, cacos’ letters, newspapers, and murals, offering a unique examination of Péralte’s life (1885-1919) and the significance of his legacy through the twenty-first century. Haiti Fights Back offers a new approach to the study of the U.S. invasion of the Americas by chronicling how Caribbean people fought back.
 
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Intimate Disconnections
Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan
Allison Alexy
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections, Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore?
 
Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.
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Union Heartland
The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War
Ginette Aley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
The Civil War has historically been viewed somewhat simplistically as a battle between the North and the South. Southern historians have broadened this viewpoint by revealing the “many Souths” that made up the Confederacy, but the “North” has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners—Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s—experienced the war on the home front.
 
Much of the intensifying political and ideological turmoil of the 1850s played out in the Midwest and instilled in its people a powerful sense of connection to this important drama. The 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law and highly visible efforts to recapture former bondsmen and women who had escaped; underground railroad “stations” and supporters throughout the region; publication of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely-influential and best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; the murderous abolitionist John Brown, who gained notoriety and hero status attacking proslavery advocates in Kansas; the emergence of the Republican Party and Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln—all placed the Midwest at the center of the rising sectional tensions.
 
From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several scholars examining the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families’ relationships, issues of women’s loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters.
 
Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.
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Making Modern Spain
Religion, Secularization, and Cultural Production
Azariah Alfante
Bucknell University Press, 2024
In this elegantly written study, Alfante explores the work of select nineteenth-century writers, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and clergy who responded to cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the movement toward secularization in Spain. Focusing on the social experience, this book probes the tensions between traditionalism and liberalism that influenced public opinion of the clergy, sacred buildings, and religious orders. The writings of Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Benito Pérez Galdós, and José María de Pereda addressed conflicts between modernizing forces and the Catholic Church about the place of religion and its signifiers in Spanish society. Foregrounding expropriation (government confiscation of civil and ecclesiastical property) and exclaustration (the expulsion of religious communities), and drawing on archival research, the history of disentailment, cultural theory, memory studies, and sociology, Alfante demonstrates how Spain’s liberalizing movement profoundly influenced class mobility and faith among the populace.
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So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico
Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico
Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp
University of Texas Press, 2007

Middle Eastern immigration to Mexico is one of the intriguing, untold stories in the history of both regions. In So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico, Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp presents the fascinating findings of her extensive fieldwork in Mexico as well as in Lebanon and Syria, which included comprehensive data collection from more than 8,000 original immigration cards as well as studies of decades of legal publications and the collection of historiographies from descendents of Middle Eastern immigrants living in Mexico today.

Adding an important chapter to studies of the Arab diaspora, Alfaro-Velcamp's study shows that political instability in both Mexico and the Middle East kept many from fulfilling their dreams of returning to their countries of origin after realizing wealth in Mexico, in a few cases drawing on an imagined Phoenician past to create a class of economically powerful Lebanese Mexicans. She also explores the repercussions of xenophobia in Mexico, the effect of religious differences, and the impact of key events such as the Mexican Revolution.

Challenging the post-revolutionary definitions of mexicanidad and exposing new aspects of the often contradictory attitudes of Mexicans toward foreigners, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico should spark timely dialogues regarding race and ethnicity, and the essence of Mexican citizenship.

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The Northeast Corridor
The Trains, the People, the History, the Region
David Alff
University of Chicago Press, 2024
All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor.
 
Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.
 
Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.
 
Trains have long made the places that make America, and they still do.
 
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Folgore da San Gimignano and his Followers
The Complete Poems
Fabian Alfie
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019
This translation brings the complete works of three minor but important Italian poets — Dante’s contemporaries at the turn of the 14th century — to English speakers for the very first time. Taken together, the three authors sketch an idealized portrait of courtly life juxtaposed to the gritty, politically fractured world of northern Italy’s mercantile urban centers in which they lived. One poet, Folgore di San Gimignano, idealizes court life during the period; the second, Cenne da la Chitarra, looks at it more realistically and parodies Folgore; and the third, Pietro dei Faitinelli, takes inspiration from Folgore’s political writings and focuses on the politics of the times. The juxtaposition of the three poets in this work is effective and arguably shows them to be a poetic school. Tournaments, dinner tables, and public squares spring to life through vivid, material details, which should catch the interest of cultural historians and literary scholars alike. This translation is especially deft at reproducing the rich variety of culinary and sartorial vocabulary offered by the poets, and the translations of Pietro dei Faitinelli are especially well-executed.
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Foodways of the Ancient Andes
Transforming Diet, Cuisine, and Society
Marta P Alfonso-Durruty
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Eating is essential for life, but it also embodies social and symbolic dimensions. This volume shows how foods and peoples were mutually transformed in the ancient Andes.

Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of Foodways of the Ancient Andes offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. The volume spans time periods and localities in the Andean region to reveal how food is intertwined with multiple aspects of the human experience, from production and consumption to ideology and sociopolitical organization. It illustrates the Andean peoples’ resilience in the face of challenges brought about by food scarcity and environmental change. Chapters dissect the intersection of food, power, and status in early states and empires; examine the impact of food during times of conflict and instability; and illuminate how sacred and high-status foods contributed to the building of the Inka Empire.

Featuring forty-six contributors from ten countries, the chapters employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show that food can provide not only simple nutrition but also a multitude of strategies, social and political relationships, and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.

Contributors
Aleksa K. Alaica
Sonia Alconini
Marta Alfonso-Durruty
Sarah I. Baitzel
Véronique Bélisle
Carolina Belmar
Carrie Anne Berryman
Matthew E. Biwer
Deborah E. Blom
Tamara L. Bray
Matthew T. Brown
Maria C. Bruno
José M. Capriles
Katherine L. Chiou
Susan D. deFrance
Lucia M. Diaz
Richard P. Evershed
Maureen E. Folk
Alexandra Greenwald
Chris Harrod
Christine A. Hastorf
Iain Kendall
Kelly J. Knudson
BrieAnna S. Langlie
Cecilia Lemp
Petrus le Roux
Marcos Martinez
Anahí Maturana-Fernández
Weston C. McCool
Melanie J. Miller
Nicole Misarti
Flavia Morello
Patricia Quiñonez Cuzcano
Omar Reyes
Arturo F. Rivera Infante
Manuel San Román
Francisca Santana-Sagredo
Beth K. Scaffidi
Augusto Tessone
Andrés Troncoso
Tiffiny A. Tung
Mauricio Uribe
Natasha P. Vang
Sadie L. Weber
Kurt M. Wilson
Michelle E. Young
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Entitled Opinions
Doxa after Digitality
Caddie Alford
University of Alabama Press, 2024

A landmark rhetorical theory of the formation and functioning of opinions in social media contexts

Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality offers a rhetorical theory of opinions, especially as opinions operate within social media.

Many urgent contemporary issues—from demagoguery to white ethno-nationalism—compel us to consider opinions seriously. Yet while clichés like “he tells it like it is” and newer imperatives such as #BlackLivesMatter seem straightforward, haptics, emoji, and “like” buttons belie unexamined collective assumptions about how opinions in the digital realm function.

Caddie Alford illuminates this function by deploying the ancient Greek term for opinions: doxa. Doxa translates to “opinion,” but the term can also signal seemingness and expectations. Doxa’s capacious meanings reveal opinions to be more than static or monolithic: With doxa, opinions become emergent, dynamic, relational, and pluralistic.

Masterfully combining rhetorical frameworks as well as scholarship on opinions and digital media entanglements, Alford puts opinions into conversation with such case studies as algorithms, infrastructure, digital illiteracy, virality, and activism. She shows how “doxa” reveals gradations of opinions, from more reputable to less reputable. She demonstrates that these gradations are multifaceted and susceptible to interventions.

Entitled Opinions sheds much of the baggage associated with opinions while opening up more fertile pathways of inquiry. In a world that says, “don’t read the comments,” this book reads the comments, taking seriously content that could be easily dismissed otherwise and alchemizing judgments into implications.

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From Page to Performance
Essays in Early English Drama
John A. Alford
Michigan State University Press, 1995
This book is a collection of 22 essays by scholars in the field of Medieval Drama, mostly relating to performance both past and present. Alford wrote one essay in the book.
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Reel Power
Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy
Matthew Alford
Pluto Press, 2010

Hollywood is often characterised as a stronghold of left-liberal ideals. In Reel Power, Matthew Alford shows that it is in fact deeply complicit in serving the interests of the most regressive US corporate and political forces.

Films like Transformers, Terminator: Salvation and Black Hawk Down are constructed with Defence Department assistance as explicit cheerleaders for the US military, but Matthew Alford also emphasises how so-called 'radical' films like Three Kings, Hotel Rwanda and Avatar present watered-down alternative visions of American politics that serve a similar function.

Reel Power is the first book to examine the internal workings of contemporary Hollywood as a politicised industry as well as scores of films across all genres. No matter what the progressive impulses of some celebrities and artists, Alford shows how they are part of a system that is hard-wired to encourage American global supremacy and frequently the use of state violence.

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Motorcycle
Steven E. Alford
Reaktion Books, 2007
Easy Rider. Motocross Grand Prix. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The motorcycle is a global icon of untamed freedom, symbolizing a daring and reckless lifestyle of adventure. Yet there are few books that chronicle how and when this legendary vehicle roared down the open road. Motorcycle explores the roots of the rebel’s ultimate ride.

After early incarnations as a nineteenth-century steam-powered bicycle and multi-wheeled vehicles, the modern motorcycle came into its own as a cheap, mobile military asset during World War I. From there, it rapidly spread through modern culture as a symbol of rebellion and subversive power, and Motorcycle tracks the symbolic role that the bike has played in literature, art, and film. The authors also investigate the international subcultures that revolve around the motorcycle and scooter. They chart the emergence of American biker culture in the 1950s, when decommissioned fighter pilots sought new ways to satiate their desire for thrill and danger, and explore how the motorcycle came to represent the untamed nonconformity of the American West. In contrast, smaller scooters such as the Vespa and moped became the utilitarian vehicle of choice in space-starved metropolises across Europe and Asia. Ultimately, the authors argue, the motorbike is the exemplary Modernist object, dependent on the perfect balance of man and machine.

An unprecedented and wholly engrossing account, Motorcycle is an essential reading for the Harley-Davidson roadhog, bike collector, or anyone who’s felt the power of the unmistakable king of the road.
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Raising the Bar
The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia
William P. Alford
Harvard University Press
Over the past two decades, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been engaged in unprecedented efforts to recast and rapidly expand the legal profession—with profound implications not only for law, but also for politics, international relations, and society itself. Raising the Bar is the first book-length study in English of this phenomenon. It examines a broad range of topics, including changes underway in the profession’s size and composition, its evolving relationship to state authority, the outlet it may be providing for historically disadvantaged sectors of society, and its impact on economic and political development. The book also explores the implications of these findings for broader theoretical work about both the legal profession and globalization. Contributors include William Alford, Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth, Ryo Hamano, JaeWon Kim, Toshimitsu Kitagawa, Daniel Lev, Benjamin Liebman, Setsuo Miyazawa, Luke Nottage, Sang-Hyun Song, and Jane Kaufman Winn.
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Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization
The Evolution of an Urban Landscape
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the “cradle of civilization,” owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE.
            In Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, Guillermo Algaze draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium affected the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. He argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to easily transport commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, Algaze argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.

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The Uruk World System
The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Archaeologists and historians have long been keenly interested in the emergence of early cities and states in the ancient Near East, particularly in the growth of early Sumerian civilization in the lowlands of Mesopotamia during the second half of the fourth millennium B.C. Most scholars have focused on the internal transformations attending this process, such as the development of new forms of spatial organization, socio-political relationships, and economic arrangements.

In The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze concentrates instead on the unprecedented and wide-ranging process of external expansion that coincided with the rapid initial crystallization of Mesopotamian civilization. He contends that the rise of early Sumerian polities cannot be understood without also taking into account developments in surrounding peripheral areas.

Algaze reviews an extensive body of archaeological evidence for cross-cultural exchange between the nascent city-states in the Mesopotamian lowlands and communities in immediately surrounding areas. He shows that at their very inception the more highly integrated lowland centers succeeded in establishing a variety of isolated, far-flung outposts in areas at the periphery of the Mesopotamian lowlands. Embedded in an alien hinterland characterized by demonstrably less complex societies, the outposts were commonly established at the apex of preexisting regional settlement hierarchies and invariably at focal nodes astride important trade routes. Algaze argues that these early colonial out-posts served as collection points for coveted peripheral resources acquired in exchange for core manufactures and that they reflect an inherently asymmetrical system of economic hegemony that extended far beyond areas under the direct political control of Sumerian polities in southern Mesopotamia. From this he concludes that economic exploitation of less developed peripheral areas was integral to the earliest development of civilization in the ancient Near East.
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The Uruk World System
The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization, Second Edition
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Most archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have focused on the internal transformations that led to the emergence of early cities and states. In The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze concentrates on the unprecedented and wide-ranging process of external expansion that coincided with the rapid initial crystallization of Mesopotamian civilization. In this extensive study, he contends that the rise of early Sumerian polities cannot be understood without also taking into account the developments in surrounding peripheral areas. This new edition includes a substantial new chapter that explores recent data and interpretations of the expansion of Uruk settlements across Syro-Mesopotamia.
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The Original Guitar Hero and the Power of Music
The Legendary Lonnie Johnson, Music, and Civil Rights
Dean Alger
University of North Texas Press, 2014

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Cat Culture
The Social World Of A Cat Shelter
Janet Alger
Temple University Press, 2002
Even people who live with cats and have good reason to know better insist that cats are aloof and uninterested in relating to humans. Janet and Steven Alger contend that the anti-social cat is a myth; cats form close bonds with humans and with each other. In the potentially chaotic environment of a shelter that houses dozens of uncaged cats, they reveal a sense of self and build a culture—a shared set of rules, roles, and expectations that organizes their world and assimilates newcomers.As volunteers in a local cat shelter for eleven years, the Algers came to realize that despite the frequency of new arrivals and adoptions, the social world of the shelter remained quite stable and pacific. They saw even feral cats adapt to interaction with humans and develop friendships with other cats. They saw established residents take roles as welcomers and rules enforcers. That is, they saw cats taking an active interest in maintaining a community in which they could live together and satisfy their individual needs. Cat Culture's intimate portrait of life in the shelter, its engaging stories, and its interpretations of behavior, will appeal to general readers as well as academics interested in human and animal interaction.
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Authentication Technologies for Cloud Computing, IoT and Big Data
Yasser M. Alginahi
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Critical systems and infrastructure rely heavily on ICT systems and networks where security issues are a major concern. Authentication methods verify that messages come from trusted sources and guarantee the smooth flow of information and data. In this edited reference, the authors present state-of-art research and development in authentication technologies including challenges and applications for Cloud Technologies, IoT and Big Data. Topics covered include authentication; cryptographic algorithms; digital watermarking; biometric authentication; block ciphers with applications in IoT; identification schemes for Cloud and IoT; authentication issues for Cloud applications; cryptography engines for Cloud based on FPGA; and data protection laws.
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America Eats
Nelson Algren
University of Iowa Press, 1992

Think of Nelson Algren, and many images come to mind—Chicago's unappreciated genius, champion of the poor and disenfranchised, lover of Simone de Beauvoir, author ofThe Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side—but the author of a cookbook? Here it is: the never-before-published America Eats, a delightful, thoroughly entertaining look at who we are and what we love to eat.

The origins of America Eats are as fascinating as the book itself. In the late 1930s Nelson Algren joined such writers as Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Margaret Alexander, and Arna Bontemps in the employ of the Illinois Writers Project, a branch of the federal Works Progress Administration. Algren's assignment: to collect information for the national "America Eats" program, a pioneering enterprise whose members hoped to produce a series of regional guides describing types of immigration, settlement, and customs as these factors related to the universal language of food. Algren completed his project, a look at the foodways of the Midwest, but by the early 1940s the fruits of "America Eats" had been filed away as the government mobilized for war.

Now at long last Algren's America Eats is published as one of the inaugural volumes in the Iowa Szathmáry Culinary Arts Series. This cookbook, part anecdotal history, part culinary commentary, is an engaging romp through the attitudes and activities surrounding food in the Midwest. An enticing and useful feature of the book is an all-new recipe section tested in the kitchens of the Culinary Arts Division of Johnson &Wales University under the watchful eye of Chef Laureate Louis Szathmáry.

Those same interviewing skills that led to Algren's successful depiction of Chicago's inner-city residents served him well as he spoke with a variety of cooks, casual and accomplished, and gathered all kinds of recipes, tried and traditional. Algren recorded it all in his inimitable style, and modern readers are richer for his efforts. From descriptions of the rituals at an Indiana family reunion ("When a slacking off in the first rush of eating is indicated by the gradual resumption of conversation, the servers start a second attack, urging everyone to have another helping of everything") to the holiday specialty on a Minnesota immigrant's table, lutefisk ("Any newcomer present will be assured, 'You won't like it, nobody likes lutefisk at first'"), America Eats offers all readers a true feast.

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Chicago
City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
Nelson Algren
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."

"This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."—New York Herald Tribune

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.
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Chicago
City on the Make: Sixtieth Anniversary Edition
Nelson Algren
University of Chicago Press, 2011

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.

Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.

The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”

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Al-'Arabiyya
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic. Volume 49, Volume 49
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Georgetown University Press

Al-'Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and serves scholars in the United States and abroad. Al-'Arabiyya includes scholarly articles and reviews that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

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Al-'Arabiyya
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, Volume 50, Volume 50
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Georgetown University Press

Al-'Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and serves scholars in the United States and abroad. Al-'Arabiyya includes scholarly articles and reviews that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

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Al-'Arabiyya
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, Volume 54, Volume 54
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Georgetown University Press

Al-‘Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Society for Teachers of Arabic. It includes scholarly articles that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

The five articles published in Volume 54 of Al-‘Arabiyya contribute to timely topics in their own respective fields within Arabic language: morphosyntax, first language acquisition, heritage speakers, language and medicine, and online technical and scientific terminology portals.

This volume also includes five reviews of books whose contents and scope range from Arabic foreign language pedagogy, Arabic sociolinguistics, Arabic translation in early modern Spain, Islamic architecture and related artistic and cultural history, and to cross-cultural encounters in pre-modern Moroccan and European travel writings.

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Al-'Arabiyya
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, Volume 51, Volume 51
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Georgetown University Press

Al-'Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and serves scholars in the United States and abroad. Al-'Arabiyya includes scholarly articles and reviews that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

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Power System Strength
Evaluation methods, best practice, case studies, and applications
Hassan Haes Alhelou
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
Power systems need to incorporate rising shares of intermittent renewables. The penetration levels of renewable energy sources, inverter-based resources and inverter-based loads have grown, which has negative impacts on the stability and system strength of existing power systems.
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Industrial Demand Response
Methods, best practices, case studies, and applications
Hassan Haes Alhelou
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Demand response (DR) describes controlled changes in the power consumption of an electric load to better match the power demand with the supply. This helps with increasing the share of intermittent renewables like solar and wind, thus ensuring use of the generated clean power and reducing the need for storage capacity.
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Trouble Sleeping
Abdul Ali
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2015
"Ali’s poems consistently engage black history and pop culture as windows into more personal, yet deeply political, realms: 'Begin with a shooting,/ a controversial art exhibit, a mob throwing dung at the Black Madonna'. . . Ali’s willful, complex collection marks him as a poet to watch."

— Publisher’s Weekly
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High Speed Data Converters
Ahmed M.A. Ali
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016
High speed data converters represent one of the most challenging, important and exciting analog and mixed-signal systems. They are ubiquitous in our modern and highly connected world. Understanding and designing this class of converters require proficiency in analog circuit design, digital design, and signal processing. This book covers high speed data converters from the perspective of a leading high speed ADC designer and architect, and with a strong emphasis on high speed Nyquist A/D converters.
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Media Localism
The Policies of Place
Christopher Ali
University of Illinois Press, 2017
We live in a boosterish era that exhorts us to play local and buy local. But what does it mean to support local media? How should we define local media in the first place? Christopher Ali delves into our ideas about localism and their far-reaching repercussions for the discourse of federal media policy and regulation. His critique focuses on the new interest in localism among regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As he shows, the many different and often contradictory meanings of localism complicate efforts to study local voices. At the same time, market factors and regulators' unwillingness to critically examine local media blunt challenges to the status quo. Ali argues that reconciling the places where we live with the spaces we inhabit will point regulators toward effective policies that strengthens local media. That new approach will again elevate local media to its rightful place as a vital part of the public good.
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Dongola
A Novel of Nubia
Idris Ali
University of Arkansas Press, 1998

The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997

In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.

Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?

Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.

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Using Numbers in Arabic
Jamal Ali
Georgetown University Press, 2013

Using Numbers in Arabic is an invaluable reference for the intermediate to advanced learner of Arabic. The proper use of numbers can often be perplexing for students of the Arabic language. While most Arabic grammars and textbooks include a chapter or discussion on the topic, that coverage is inadequate for serious students, scholars, and researchers.

This guide shows the reader, using clear explanations and examples, exactly how to use cardinal and ordinal numbers in Arabic, from one to the billions and beyond. Each entry features a brief description in English followed by examples in Arabic from actual written and recorded texts; each example is also accompanied by an English translation. All information is based on real-world practice, with helpful citations from literature and media to illustrate each principle. In a second section, the author covers useful number-related topics, such as dates, times, fractions, decimals, and percentages, as well as basic arithmetic functions. While focusing on Modern Standard Arabic, the volume also covers Classical Arabic and describes and illustrates differences between classical and modern practice. The volume’s glossary, bibliography, and index will also be useful to students.

Using Numbers in Arabic is a handy addition to the reference shelf of every serious student of the Arabic language, and it will be welcomed by native speakers with fluency in English interested in a reference on how to render numbers correctly.

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Planning the Family in Egypt
New Bodies, New Selves
Kamran Asdar Ali
University of Texas Press, 2002

In this ethnographic study, the author examines the policies and practices of family planning programs in Egypt to see how an elitist, Western-informed state attempts to create obliging citizens. The state sees voluntary compliance with the law for the common good as the cornerstone of modernity. Family planning programs are a training ground for the construction of self-disciplined individuals, and thus a rewarding area of study for the fate of social programs in developing countries.

Through a careful examination of state-endorsed family planning practices in urban and rural contexts, the author shows us the pervasive, high-pressure persuasion of women, who are encouraged to think as individual decision makers of their immediate families and their national interests. But what of the other forces at work in these women’s lives, binding them to their extended families and to their religious identities? And what of the laws that allow for polygamy and discriminate against women in marriage, inheritance, and as part of the workforce?

These forces operate against the received wisdom of the state. Is the Muslim community thought to end at the borders of Egypt? What about local constructions of masculinity when the state appeals to wives to decide for themselves? How does widespread labor migration to foreign countries affect attitudes toward family planning? How is female contraception viewed by the Islamic Brotherhood and other modern Muslim groups?

This book questions much that we have taken for granted and gives us grounds for reexamining our assumptions about family planning and the individual and state in developing countries such as Egypt.

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FASTING FOR RAMADAN
Notes from a Spiritual Practice
Kazim Ali
Tupelo Press, 2011
Fasting for Ramadan is structured as a chronicle of daily meditations, during two cycles of the 30-day rite of daytime abstinence required by Ramadan for purgation and prayer. Estranged in certain ways from his family’s cultural traditions when he was younger, Ali has in recent years re-embraced the Ramadan ritual, and brings to this rediscovery an extraordinary delicacy of reflection, a powerfully inquiring mind, and the linguistic precision and ardor of a superb poet.
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Silver Road
Kazim Ali
Tupelo Press, 2018
In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called “Secret Piece,” an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.
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The Lives of Muhammad
Kecia Ali
Harvard University Press, 2014

Recent outbursts sparked by a viral video and controversial cartoons powerfully illustrate the passions and sensitivities that continue to surround the depiction of the seventh-century founder of Islam. The Lives of Muhammad delves into the many ways the Prophet’s life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, Kecia Ali shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent.

Since the nineteenth century, two separate streams of writing, one hagiographic and the other polemical, have merged into a single, contentious story about the life of Muhammad. Protestant missionaries, European Orientalists, Indian and Egyptian modernists, and American voices across the spectrum, including preachers, scholars, Islamophobes, journalists, academics, and new-age gurus, debated Muhammad’s character and the facts of his life. In the process, texts written symbolically came to be read literally. Muhammad’s accomplishments as a religious and political leader, his military encounters with Meccans and Medinan Jews, and—a subject of perennial interest—his relationships with women, including his young wife Aisha, are among the key subjects writers engaged, repurposing early materials for new circumstances.

Many of the ideas about Muhammad that Muslims embrace today—Muhammad the social reformer, Muhammad the consummate leader, Muhammad the ideal husband—arose in tandem and in tension with Western depictions. These were in turn shaped by new ideas about religion, sexuality, and human accomplishments.

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Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam
Kecia Ali
Harvard University Press, 2010

What did it mean to be a wife, woman, or slave in a society in which a land-owning woman was forbidden to lay with her male slave but the same slave might be allowed to take concubines? Jurists of the nascent Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi‘i legal schools frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. Juggling scripture, precedent, and custom on one hand, and the requirements of logical consistency on the other, legal scholars engaged in vigorous debate. The emerging consensus demonstrated a self-perpetuating analogy between a husband’s status as master and a wife’s as slave, even as jurists insisted on the dignity of free women and, increasingly, the masculine rights of enslaved husbands.

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam presents the first systematic analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage—its rights and obligations—using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery. Kecia Ali explores parallels between marriage and concubinage that legitimized sex and legitimated offspring using eighth- through tenth-century legal texts. As the jurists discussed claims spouses could make on each other—including dower, sex, obedience, and companionship–they returned repeatedly to issues of legal status: wife and concubine, slave and free, male and female.

Complementing the growing body of scholarship on Islamic marital and family law, Ali boldly contributes to the ongoing debates over feminism, sexuality, and reform in Islam.

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Mad Heart Be Brave
Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali
Mohammed Kazim Ali
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Born and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) came to the United States in the mid-1970s to pursue graduate study in literature; by the mid-1980s, he had begun to establish himself as one of the most important American poets of the late 20th century.
 
Mad Heart Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali is the first comprehensive examination of all stages of his career, from his earliest work published in India but never reissued in the U.S., through his seven poetry volumes from American publishers, ultimately collected as The Veiled Suite. The essays, written by a range of poets and scholars, many of whom knew and studied with Ali, consider his early free verse poetry; his transition into writing more formalist poetry; his correspondence with poets Anthony Hecht and James Merrill; his literary engagement with the political realities of contemporary Kashmir; his teaching and mentorship of young poets; and Ali’s championing of the ghazal, a traditional Eastern poetic form, in English. Some essays have a predominantly scholarly focus, while others are more personal in their tone and content. All exhibit a deep appreciation for Ali’s life and work.
 
Contributors to this volume include Sejal Shah, Rita Banerjee, Amanda Golden, Ravi Shankar, Abin Chakraborty, Amy Newman, Christopher Merrill, Jason Schneiderman, Stephen Burt, Raza Ali Hassan, Syed Humayoun, Feroz Rather, Dur e Aziz Amna, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Mahwash Shoaib, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Grace Schulman, and Ada Limón. Mad Heart Be Brave closes with a long biographical sketch and elegy by Agha Shahid Ali’s friend Amitav Ghosh and a comprehensive bibliography assembled by scholar Patricia O’Neill with Reid Larson.

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Orange Alert
essays on poetry, art, and the architecture of silence
Mohammed Kazim Ali
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Orange Alert is a poetic and yogic salvo across the bows of our defensive imperial posturing. Kazim Ali's essays leap deftly from homages to avant-garde artists (Yoko Ono, Agnes Martin, John Cage) to awestruck meditations on ancient architecture, from analyses of poets (Jane Cooper, Agha Shahid Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Lucille Clifton) to twitter aphorisms. Orange Alert is a revelation, a salve, an invitation to breathe again."
---Philip Metres, Associate Professor, Department of English, John Carroll University

"With their delicacy of attention and bold range of subjects, Kazim Ali's essays hold many quiet surprises. In each art he searches for insight and craft---the virtues of his own patient writing."
---Susan Stewart, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets; and Professor, Princeton University

"Kazim Ali's essays, like his poems, are alive with curiosity and humanity. . . . Orange Alert makes a compelling case for the necessity of poetry on a planet wracked by war and devastation."
---Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Kazim Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding.

In Orange Alert, Ali discusses poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Bhanu Kapil, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Samuel Beckett. He considers painters Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian, musicians Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono, and philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard. Ali links the poetic endeavor to such diverse texts as Moby-Dick, Battlestar Galactica, and Marilyn Buck's prison journals.

Ali discusses contemporary poetry in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television; film; and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook.

He shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture.

Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a memoir, Bright Felon: Autobiographyand Cities. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He has been a regular columnist for American Poetry Review.

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Resident Alien
On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine
Mohammed Kazim Ali
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Kazim Ali uses a range of subjects—the politics of checkpoints at international borders; difficulties in translation; collaborations between poets and choreographers; and connections between poetry and landscape, or between biotechnology and the human body—to situate the individual human body into a larger global context, with all of its political and social implications. He finds in the quality of ecstatic utterance his passport to regions where reason and logic fail and the only knowledge is instinctual, in physical existence and breath. This collection includes Ali’s essays on topics such as Anne Carson’s translations of Euripides; the poetry and politics of Mahmoud Darwish; Josey Foo’s poetry/dance collaborations with choreographer Leah Stein; Olga Broumas’ collaboration with T. Begley; Jorie Graham’s complication of Kenneth Goldsmith’s theories; the postmodern spirituality of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic poet Lalla; translations of Homer, Mandelstam, Sappho, and Hafez; as well as the poet Reetika Vazirani’s practice of yoga.

“Ali has a vibrant and generous personality that lets one hear the inner music that makes us remember what it is to be human.”
Painted Bride Quarterly
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Jean Valentine
This-World Company
Mohammed Kazim Ali
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Over the course of more than four decades, contemporary American poet Jean Valentine has written eleven books of stunning, spirit-inflected poetry. This collection of essays, assembled over several years by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler, brings together twenty-six pieces on all stages of Valentine's career by a range of poets, scholars, and admirers.

Valentine's poetry has long been valued for its dreamlike qualities, its touches of the personal and the political, and its mesmerizing phrasing. Valentine is a National Book Award winner and was named the State Poet of New York in 2008. She has taught a number of popular workshops and has been awarded a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize.

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Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage in Power Grids
Mohd. Hasan Ali
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Energy storage is key to integrating renewable power. Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems store power in the magnetic field in a superconducting coil. Once the coil is charged, the current will not stop and the energy can in theory be stored indefinitely. This technology avoids the need for lithium for batteries. The round-trip efficiency can be greater than 95%, but energy is needed for the cooling of the superconducting coil, and the material is expensive. So far, SMES systems are primarily used for improving power quality through short time storage, but further applications are being researched.
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Mantle of Mercy
Islamic Chaplaincy in North America
Muhammad A. Ali
Templeton Press, 2022
This engaging collection presents thirty essays by Muslim chaplains reflecting on their experiences as spiritual caregivers. Through their first-hand accounts, they impart how they skillfully apply the mercy and compassion of the Prophet Muhammad to the people in their care. They also share how their faith informs their service, how they navigate the obstacles of a predominantly Christian profession, and how they administer to the spiritual needs of people of different faiths or of no faith at all.

Working in a variety of settings—including hospitals, prisons, universities, and the armed forces—Muslim chaplains encounter unique challenges on a daily basis, requiring them to call upon the resources of their Islamic faith with wisdom and tenderness.  The contributors to this volume explore these circumstances vividly and honestly. Their personal stories are instructive of how Islamic principles can be employed with spiritual insight to bring strength and comfort to the sick and suffering.  
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In the Balance of Power
Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States
Omar H. Ali
Ohio University Press, 2020

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

Reveals the multiple independent political tactics and strategies that African Americans have used to expand democracy and uphold civil and political rights since the founding of the nation.

This new edition of Ali’s groundbreaking narrative includes an epilogue by independent political analyst and leader Jacqueline Salit. New material addresses the historic presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as well as the rising tide of independent and anti-party sentiments.

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In the Balance of Power
Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States
Omar H. Ali
Ohio University Press, 2008
Historically, most black voters in the United States have aligned themselves with one of the two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal and, since the New Deal—and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement—the Democratic Party. However, as In the Balance of Power convincingly demonstrates, African Americans have long been part of independent political movements and have used third parties to advance some of the most important changes in the United States, notably the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, and the enforcement of civil rights. Since the early nineteenth century, there has been an undercurrent of political independence among African Americans. They helped develop the Liberty Party in the 1840s and have continued to work with third parties to challenge the policies of the two major parties. But despite the legal gains of the modern civil rights movement, elements of Jim Crow remain deeply embedded in our electoral process. In the Balance of Power presents a history and analysis of African American third-party movements that can help us better understand the growing diversity among black voters today.
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Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts
Saleem H. Ali
University of Arizona Press, 2003
From sun-baked Black Mesa to the icy coast of Labrador, native lands for decades have endured mining ventures that have only lately been subject to environmental laws and a recognition of treaty rights. Yet conflicts surrounding mining development and indigenous peoples continue to challenge policy-makers.

This book gets to the heart of resource conflicts and environmental impact assessment by asking why indigenous communities support environmental causes in some cases of mining development but not in others. Saleem Ali examines environmental conflicts between mining companies and indigenous communities and with rare objectivity offers a comparative study of the factors leading to those conflicts.

Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts presents four cases from the United States and Canada: the Navajos and Hopis with Peabody Coal in Arizona; the Chippewas with the Crandon Mine proposal in Wisconsin; the Chipewyan Inuits, Déné and Cree with Cameco in Saskatchewan; and the Innu and Inuits with Inco in Labrador. These cases exemplify different historical relationships with government and industry and provide an instance of high and low levels of Native resistance in each country. Through these cases, Ali analyzes why and under what circumstances tribes agree to negotiated mining agreements on their lands, and why some negotiations are successful and others not.

Ali challenges conventional theories of conflict based on economic or environmental cost-benefit analysis, which do not fully capture the dynamics of resistance. He proposes that the underlying issue has less to do with environmental concerns than with sovereignty, which often complicates relationships between tribes and environmental organizations. Activist groups, he observes, fail to understand such tribal concerns and often have problems working with tribes on issues where they may presume a common environmental interest.

This book goes beyond popular perceptions of environmentalism to provide a detailed picture of how and when the concerns of industry, society, and tribal governments may converge and when they conflict. As demands for domestic energy exploration increase, it offers clear guidance for such endeavors when native lands are involved.
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A Religion, Not a State
Ali 'Abd al-Raziq's Islamic justification of Political Secularism
Souad T Ali
University of Utah Press, 2009

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

In this notable work, Souad T. Ali examines the seminal writings of Egyptian reformist scholar Ali'Abd al-Raziq, often regarded as the intellectual father of Islamic secularism, and his controversial argument that the caliphate should be considered a human innovation, rather than a religious imperative. 'Abd al Raziq contended that Islam is "a religion, not a state; a message, not a government," a major departure from the traditional view that religious and political spheres are intertwined and inseparable in Islam.

Opponents denounced 'Abd al-Raziq's ideas as a foreign corruption imported from the West.  Ali's careful, objective, and scholarly examination of 'Abd al-Raziq's work, however, reveals that his arguments are not based in Western thought.  Rather, they sit firmly within the dictates of Islam's sacred texts, particularly the Quran and Hadith, and also enjoy considerable support from the historical record.

This analysis critically challenges prevalent misinterpretations of Islam that have endured for centuries.  Ali recognizes the varied models and discourses that have arisen throughout different epochs, especially so the role that Western intervention has played in placing the question of Islam's modernity at the forefront of intellectual debate.  Throughout, the study emphasizes the atmosphere of openness and tolerance that is a requisite for free, intelligent debate.

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The New International Money Game
Robert Z. Aliber
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Previous editions of Robert Z. Aliber's The New International Money Game have been widely acclaimed as the best and most entertaining introduction to the arcane enigmas of international finance. Since its original publication, the book has become a classic primer for beginning students, businesspersons, and anyone interested in a clear explanation of international monetary and financial issues.

With expert knowledge and a wry sense of humor, Aliber demystifies international finance by breaking through the jargon barrier and presenting technical issues in a clear and concise manner. Aliber takes the reader on a tour of a multiplicity of international finance issues, included fixed and floating exchange rates, devaluations, money markets, monetary policy, and the concepts that lie behind the esoteric language of financial economists.

This sixth edition tracks the changes that have taken place in the world economy since the previous editions by exploring financial globalization, postcommunist transition, European integration, and the Asian economic crisis. It is an indispensable and highly readable guide to the complex and increasingly fragile system through which the world's business is financed.
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Engaging Modernity
Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger
Ousseina D. Alidou
University of Wisconsin Press

Engaging Modernity is Ousseina Alidou’s rich and compelling portrait of Muslim women in Niger as they confront the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. Contrary to Western stereotypes of passive subordination, these women are taking control of their own lives and resisting domination from indigenous traditions, westernization, and Islam alike.
    Based on thorough scholarly research and extensive fieldwork—including a wealth of interviews—Alidou’s work offers insights into the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger. Mixing biography with sociological data, social theory and linguistic analysis, this is a multilayered vision of political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath. A gripping look at one of the Muslim world’s most powerful untold stories.

Runner-up for the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association

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Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya
Leadership, Representation, and Social Change
Ousseina D. Alidou
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
In education, journalism, legislative politics, social justice, health, law, and other arenas, Muslim women across Kenya are emerging as leaders in local, national, and international contexts, advancing reforms through their activism. Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya draws on extensive interviews with six such women, revealing how their religious and moral beliefs shape reform movements that bridge ethnic divides and foster alliances in service of creating a just, multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious democratic citizenship.
            Mwalim Azara Mudira opened a school of theology for Muslim women. Nazlin Omar Rajput of The Nur magazine was a pioneer in reporting on HIV/AIDS in the Muslim community. Amina Abubakar, host of a women's radio show, has publicly addressed the sensitive subject of sexual crimes against Muslim women. Two women who are members of parliament are creating new socioeconomic and political opportunities for girls and women, within a framework that still embraces traditional values of marriage and motherhood.
            Examining the interplay of gender, agency, and autonomy, Ousseina D. Alidou shows how these Muslim women have effected change in the home, the school, the mosque, the media, and more—and she illuminates their determination as actors to challenge the oppressive influences of male-dominated power structures. In looking at differences as opportunities rather than obstacles, these women reflect a new sensibility among Muslim women and an effort to redefine the meaning of women's citizenship within their own community of faith and within the nation.
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Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change
Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders
Ousseina D. Alidou
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina Alidou examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences.

While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.
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Vita Nova
Dante Alighieri
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Receipient, 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship

Dante’s Vita Nova (circa 1292–1295) depicts the joys and sorrows, the discoveries and conflicts of Dante’s early love for Beatrice—who would achieve later and even greater fame in Commedia—starting with his first sighting of her and culminating in his prevision of Beatrice among the beatified in heaven. Award-winning translator and poet Andrew Frisardi channels the vigor and nuance of Dante’s first masterpiece for a modern audience.

The “little book,” as Dante calls it, consists of thirty-one lyric po­ems—mostly sonnets—embedded in a prose narrative, which both re­counts an apparently autobiographical set of events also evoked in the poems and offers analysis of the poems’ construction in the medieval critical tradition of divisio textus, or division of the text. Dante selected poetry he had written before age twenty-eight or so and wrote the prose to shape it into a story. The poems anthologize Dante’s growth as a poet, from the influence of his earliest mentors to the stylistic and thematic breakthroughs of his poetic coming-of-age.

The interplay of poetry and prose in Vita Nova, along with the fur­ther distinction in the latter between autobiography and critical divisioni, presents a particular challenge for any translator. Frisardi faithfully voices the complex meter and rhyme schemes of the poetry while capturing the tone of each of the prose styles. His introduction and in-depth annotations provide additional context for the twenty-first-century reader.

 
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The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Northwestern University Press, 2010

At the midpoint of his life, during Holy Week in 1300, Dante awakes to himself in the middle of a forest so dark that the sun’s light cannot penetrate its gloom. of the wildness and brutality of the woods, Dante cries out for help, and thus begins one of Western literature’s greatest epic journeys.

The Divine Comedy follows Dante the pilgrim—guided by the great Roman poet Virgil, then by the love of his life, Beatrice—as he travels downward through Hell, then upward through Purgatory in order to reach Paradise and witness the love that moves the sun and the stars. Raffel’s translation vividly captures the divine contrapasso, the ultimate case of the punishment the crime, in the Inferno, while fathoming the complexity of the Purgatorio and the ecstasy of the Paradiso.

One of the world’s greatest works of literature, Dante’s Commedia revolutionized poetry and the Italian language. This epic poem was the to be written in the vernacular of the Italian people rather than in Latin. In it, Dante weaves the best of classical literature from Virgil, Statius, Aristotle, and Ovid with staples from the Christian tradition (including the Scriptures, Augustine, and Aquinas), into a colorful medieval tapestry that depicts at once the vividly checkered history of church and empire.

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Choke Points
Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson
Pluto Press, 2017
The global economy seems indomitable. Goods travel all over the globe, supplying just-in-time retail stocks, keeping consumers satisfied and businesses profitable.
            But there are vulnerabilities, and Choke Points reveals them—and the ways that workers are finding ways to make use of the power that those choke points afford them. Exploring a number of case studies around the world, this book uncovers a little-known network of resistance by logistics workers worldwide who are determined to contest their exploitation by the forces of global capital. Through close accounts of wildcat strikes, roadblocks, and boycotts, from South China to Southern California, the contributors build a picture of a movement that flies under the radar, but carries the potential to force dramatic change.
 
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The Cost of Free Shipping
Amazon in the Global Economy
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson
Pluto Press, 2021

Winner of the United Association for Labor Education Book Award 2021, this is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the role of Amazon in our economy and society. With Amazon, supply-chain, and unionization in the news, it is both timely and incredibly informative.

Amazon is the most powerful corporation on the planet and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, has become one of the richest individuals in history, and one of the few people to profit from a global pandemic. Its dominance has reshaped the global economy itself: we live in the age of “Amazon Capitalism.” 

“One-click” instant consumerism and its immense variety of products has made Amazon a worldwide household name, with over 60% of US households subscribing to Amazon Prime. In turn, these subscribers are surveilled by the corporation. Amazon is also one of the world's largest logistics companies, resulting in weakened unions and lowered labor standards.

The company has also become the largest provider of cloud-computing services and home surveillance systems, not to mention the ubiquitous Alexa.

With cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. The Cost of Free Shipping shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate, and be primed to resist.
 

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Lake Effect
Along Superior’s Shores
Erika Alin
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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Moving Images
Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration
Jasmine Alinder
University of Illinois Press, 2011
When the American government began impounding Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor, photography became a battleground. The control of the means of representation affected nearly every aspect of the incarceration, from the mug shots criminalizing Japanese Americans to the prohibition of cameras in the hands of inmates. The government hired photographers to make an extensive record of the forced removal and incarceration but forbade Japanese Americans from photographically documenting the conditions of the camps or any aspect of their lives. In this insightful study, Jasmine Alinder explores the photographic record of the imprisonment in war relocation centers such as Manzanar, Tule Lake, Jerome, and others. She investigates why photographs were made, how they were meant to function, and how they have been reproduced and interpreted subsequently by the popular press and museums in constructing versions of public history.

Considering such factors as artistic intention, institutional deployment, critical interpretation, and popular reception, Alinder provides calibrated readings of the photographs from this period. She uncovers the tension between Dorothea Lange's moving and critical images of the camps and the War Relocation Authority's blindly positive captions. She also analyzes Ansel Adams's attempt to combat negative war propaganda through humanizing photographs of Japanese Americans and locates the limits of such a counternarrative in the midst of a national mobilization against Japan.

Moving Images examines the work of Japanese American photographers operating both during and after the incarceration, including Manzanar inmate Toyo Miyatake, who constructed his own camera to document the complicated realities of camp life for his fellow inmates. More recently, contemporary artists Patrick Nagatani and Masumi Hayashi have used photography to reckon with the legacy of incarceration by journeying to the camp sites and creating photographs that bridge the intergenerational divides between their parents, themselves, and their children.

Illustrated with more than forty photographs, Moving Images reveals the significance of the camera in the process of incarceration as well as the construction of race, citizenship, and patriotism in this complex historical moment.

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Academic Librarianship
Camila Alire
American Library Association, 2010

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City of Ash
Eugenijus Alisanka
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Although the title of this sensitive collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, City of Ash serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context. Through his poetry, Eugenijus Alisanka searches for personal and historical meaning within the framework of time, recognizing both the demands of the self and the impossibility of avoiding what came before, whether human or cultural.
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When Informal Institutions Change
Institutional Reforms and Informal Practices in the Former Soviet Union
Huseyn Aliyev
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Huseyn Aliyev examines how, when, and under which conditions democratic institutional reforms affect informal institutions in hybrid regimes, or countries transitioning to democracy. He analyzes the impact of institutional changes on the use of informal practices and what happens when democratic reforms succeed. Does informality disappear, or do elites and populations continue relying on informal structures?

When Informal Institutions Change engages with a growing body of literature on informal practices and institutions in political science, economics, sociology, and beyond. Aliyev proposes expanding the analysis of the impact of institutional reforms on informal institutions beyond disciplinary boundaries, and combines theoretical insights from comparative politics with economic and social theories on informal relations. In addition, Aliyev offers insights that are relevant to democratization, institutionalism, and human geography. Detailed case studies of three transitional post-Soviet regimes—Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine—illustrate the contentious relationship between democratic institutional reforms and informality in the broader post-Soviet context.

Aliyev shows that in order for institutional reform to succeed in strengthening, democratizing, and formalizing institutions, it is important to approach informal practices and institutions as instrumental for its effectiveness. These findings have implications not only for hybrid regimes, but also for other post-Soviet or post-communist countries.


 
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Prehistoric Settlement Patterns and Cultures in Susiana, Southwestern Iran
The Analysis of the F.G.L. Gremliza Survey Collection
Abbas Alizadeh
University of Michigan Press, 1992
This book reports the results of an archaeological survey undertaken in southwestern Iran by a remarkable researcher: Dr. F.G.L. Gremliza. The author, Abbas Alizadeh, presents Gremliza’s survey data and provides an analysis of the developmental implications.
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Modern Iraqi Arabic with MP3 Files
A Textbook, Second Edition
Yasin M. Alkalesi
Georgetown University Press, 2006

Modern Iraqi Arabic with MP3 Files is an introductory textbook—suitable for classroom or self-study—for those with no previous knowledge of Arabic or those who know Arabic but want to learn the Iraqi dialect. A detailed discussion of the consonants, vowels, and other characteristics of Iraqi phonetics—including pronunciation exercises on the CD—serves the needs of travelers, businesspeople, diplomats, archaeologists, and scholars who want to learn to speak the language quickly and efficiently.

Using the dialect of middle-class Baghdad, twenty lessons are arranged in a story-like format and are based on everyday travel situations. From arriving at the airport to getting to the hotel, students will learn proper greetings and introductions; how to ask for directions, take a taxi, and tell time; and prepare for daily activities like visiting the bank, museum, post office, and restaurants. The book contains basic dialogue, grammar, vocabulary, drills, and an extensive glossary. A section of idiomatic phrases, accompanied by their cultural, religious, or proverbial explanations, offers insight into current Iraqi culture.

NEW TO THIS EDITION: • Arabic script has been added so the reader has a choice of following the Arabic writing or the transcription in the Roman alphabet. • Four entirely new lessons cover medical care, media (radio, television, and journalism), telephone conversations, and cultural and folkloric tales. • All audio materials from the first edition—plus new audio materials for the new lessons—are included as MP3 files on a CD bound into the book.

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The African American Experience in Cyberspace
A Resource Guide to the Best Web Sites on Black Culture and History
Abdul Alkalimat
Pluto Press, 2003
The World Wide Web is the greatest source of information used by students and teachers, media and library professionals, as well as the general public. There is so great a flow of information that it is necessary to have a tool for guiding one to the best and most reliable sources. This important new guide to the African American experience in cyberspace fills this need for people in all areas of Black Studies and Multiculturalism. There is no search engine list that can match the quality of sites to be found in this book.

Alkalimat provides an easy to use directory to the very best websites that deal with the African American Experience. The first section covers every aspect of African American history, while a second section deals with a diverse set of topics covering society and culture. Each chapter has a brief essay, extensively annotation on the five best sites for each topic, and then a group of good sites and a short bibliography. This book is designed for a course at the high school or college level. This book should be kept near every home computer that people use to surf the web for Black content.

Most people have found out that the major corporations and governments have been the dominant uploaders of information into cyberspace. This volume is different because it is a serious introduction to the full democratic use of the web. These websites will introduce people to the people who are serious about ending the digital divide because they are busy uploading information about the most excluded and marginalized people, the African American community. Many of these sites are being established by Black Studies academic programmes, as well as community based organizations and institutions.
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The History of Black Studies
Abdul Alkalimat
Pluto Press, 2021

A surge of African American enrolment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programs are taught at more than 1,300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened.

Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come. Structured in three broadly chronological sections - Black Studies as intellectual history; as social movement; and as academic profession - the book demonstrates how Black people themselves established the field long before its institutionalization in university programs.

At its heart, Black Studies is profoundly political. Black Power, the New Communist Movement, the Black women’s and students’ movements – each step in the journey for Black liberation influenced and was influenced by this revolutionary discipline.

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The Wall of Respect
Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago
Abdul Alkalimat
Northwestern University Press, 2017
The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is the first in-depth, illustrated history of a lost Chicago monument. The Wall of Respect was a revolutionary mural created by fourteen members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) on the South Side of Chicago in 1967. This book includes photographs by Darryl Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Roy Lewis, and Robert A. Sengstacke, and gathers historic essays, poetry, and previously unpublished primary documents from the movement’s founders that provide a guide to the work’s creation and evolution.

The Wall of Respect received national critical acclaim when it was unveiled on the side of a building at Forty-Third and Langley in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Painters and photographers worked side by side on the mural's seven themed sections, which featured portraits of Black heroes and sheroes, among them John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Wall became a platform for music, poetry, and political rallies. Over time it changed, reflecting painful controversies among the artists as well as broader shifts in the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements.

At the intersection of African American culture, politics, and Chicago art history, The Wall of Respect offers, in one keepsake-quality work, an unsurpassed collection of images and essays that illuminate a powerful monument that continues to fascinate artists, scholars, and readers in Chicago and across the United States.
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The Screams of War
Selected Poems
Akram Alkatreb
Seagull Books, 2024
Lyrical and powerful poems that serve as a powerful reminder of the human cost of war.

“Those who believe in the currency of patience / Were burned out in the alleyway.”

The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb’s verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere “murmurs engraved on stones,” long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At the heart of Alkatreb’s work lies a preoccupation with trauma and the profound burden of alienation that accompanies exile. Nascent memories are shrouded by the “scars of sleep,” and words find themselves nostalgic for destruction. The ubiquity of violence that Alkatreb channels into his poetry does not tolerate enclaves of innocence. The Screams of War is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a stark reminder of the harsh realities faced by those trapped in conflict.
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Survival Pending Revolution
The History of the Black Panther Party
Paul Alkebulan
University of Alabama Press, 2007
The Black Panther Party (BPP) seized the attention of America in the frenetic days of the late 1960s when a series of assassinations, discontent with the Vietnam War, and impatience with lingering racial discrimination roiled the United States, particularly its cities. The BPP inspired dread among the American body politic while receiving support from many urban black youths. The images of angry and armed young black radicals in the streets of U.S. cities seemed a stunning reversal and repudiation of the accommodationist and assimilationist black goals associated with Martin Luther King’s movement, as well as an unprecedented defiance of the civil power.
 
Although many have written about the BPP in memoirs and polemics, Survival Pending Revolution contributes to a new generation of objective, analytical BPP studies that are sorely needed. Alkebulan displays the entire movement’s history: its lofty and even idealistic goals and its in-your-face rhetoric, its strategies, tactics, and the internal divisions and ego clashes, drawing upon public records as well as the memories of both leaders and foot soldiers, to attempt a description that both understands the inner workings of the BPP and its role in the greater society.
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The Last Mask
Hamann's Theater of the Grotesque
Brian Alkire
Diaphanes, 2021
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) remains one of the most influential and yet least understood figures in the history of German thought and literature. Throughout his life, he had major influence on figures as diverse as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and a host of others. Hamann is also one of the most difficult-to-read authors in the German language, writing in an ultracondensed, hyperallusive language for which he became infamous—and which his detractors constantly used to dismiss him. Today, Hamann has been picked up by literary theorists as a precursor of the linguistic turn.
 
The Last Mask focuses on Hamann’s final work, Entkleidung und Verklärung (1786), which was consciously conceived of as an “Abschluss” of his “kleine Autorschaft” and a final defense against his critics. Equally philological and theoretical, it identifies a number of previously unnoticed manuscript alterations that help answer some long-standing questions in Hamann scholarship as well as open new doors for inquiry.
 
Importantly, the manuscripts show that Hamann is one of the earliest theorists of the virtual in our sense of the word today, using the word “virtualiter” to describe his own theory. He links this theory with the concept of the mask or disguise, and conceives of texts as fabrics or textiles composed of threads and strings. The philological focus is on Hamann’s understanding of intertextuality, and on the basis of his dominant string images his notion of virtuality is brought into conversation with Deleuze’s idea of a plane of immanence through the image of a skein of immanence, a knotted bundle of thread which solidifies into a three-dimensional virtual space—a new perspective in contemporary discussions surrounding the nature of virtuality.
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Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline
Paul Kent Alkon
Northwestern University Press, 1967
Paul Kent Alkon’s Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline provides reading of Johnson that emphasizes his moral discourse.  Shortly after its publication, Alkon’s book became first of all the standard reading of Johnson’s essays, contrasting them with the moral ideas Johnson discussed in his sermons, as moral writings, and second, as one of the first books on Johnson to explore the essayist’s focus on moral thinking as central to his writing.

 
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The First American Women Architects
Sarah Allaback
University of Illinois Press, 2007
By 1920, there were over two hundred women practicing architecture in the United States, actively working on major design and building projects before they were even given the right to vote. These women designed thousands of buildings nationwide: apartments in Kansas City, hotels in the nation's national parks, churches in Michigan, and mansions on the coast of California, to name a few. In The First American Women Architects, Sarah Allaback chronicles the lives and careers of more than seventy pioneering female architects practicing in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly all of whom have been forgotten--until now.

Organized alphabetically as a reference guide, this volume provides a biographical sketch of each architect's life, education, and professional career, and a list of known works and sources for further research. Many of these remarkable women have never before appeared in any other history, making The First American Women Architects a unique and invaluable reference for students and scholars interested in women's history and architecture. As an instructive record of the legacy of women in architectural history, this book will also serve as a stimulating indicator of the broadening potential for women and other minorities within the field of architecture.

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Designs of Destruction
The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century
Lucia Allais
University of Chicago Press, 2018

The twentieth century was the most destructive in human history, but from its vast landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts, but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. This movement was motivated by hopeful idealism as much as by a pragmatic belief in bureaucracy. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government, and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi.
          Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, for the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. More than the story of an emergent canon, Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, practices. Yet as entire nations’ monumental geographies became part of survival plans, Allais also shows, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Thus Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.

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Economy and Interest
A New Presentation of the Fundamental Problems Related to the Economic Role of the Rate of Interest and Their Solutions
Maurice Allais
University of Chicago Press, 2024

The essential work from the Nobel Prize-winning virtuoso of twentieth-century economics, translated to English for the first time.

Few scholars advanced the frontier of economic modeling more than French economist Maurice Allais. Allais’s contributions—beyond his famous Allais’s Paradox—earned him the Nobel Prize and drew comparisons to the works of Paul Samuelson and even some modern mathematical behavioral economists. 

Allais’s accomplishments, however, went largely unread by non-Francophone readers due to the challenge of their translation for publishers. The effects of this gap are immeasurable. As Paul Samuelson wrote, “Had Allais's earliest writings been in English, a whole generation of economic theory would have taken a different course.”

Economy and Interest is the milestone translation of Allais's most influential work, one whose staggering findings predate their accepted formulations by other famed economists decades later. In its sweep and technical virtuosity, Economy and Interest is certain to delight and challenge new generations of English-language readers.

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Voices of the Nakba
A Living History of Palestine
Diana Allan
Pluto Press, 2021

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

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Saharan Winds
Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara
Joanna Allan
West Virginia University Press, 2024
As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future. 

Saharan Winds contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries--how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind--in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in one space, Western Sahara, to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of windfarms; the distribution of energy that windfarms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.
 
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Silenced Resistance
Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea
Joanna Allan
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Spain’s former African colonies—Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara—share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men. In this innovative work, Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to a subject that has often been looked at through the lens of literary studies to examine how concerns for equality and women’s rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects. She reveals how Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with Western states and corporations, conjure a mirage of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women’s rights in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals, and other natural resources. This genderwashing, along with historical local, indigenous, and colonially imposed gender norms mixed with Western misconceptions about African and Arab gender roles, plays an integral role in determining the shape and composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.
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The Mystery of A Yellow Sleuth
Detective Sergeant Nor Nalla, Federated Malay States Police
Ronald Allan
National University of Singapore Press, 2018
In 1931 a book full of thrilling adventures set mostly in Malaya appeared in London under the title A Yellow Sleuth: Being the Autobiography of “Nor Nalla” (Detective-Sergeant Federated Malay States Police). Reviewers concluded that the stories were just barely plausible, but agreed that the author knew Malaya intimately.
Nor Nalla is an anagram for Ron Allan, who spent four years working on a rubber plantation in Malaya shortly before World War I. Like Kipling’s famous colonial spy, Kim, the “yellow sleuth” is a master of undercover operations, and this reissued work explores vast locales, from the forests of Malaya to the ports of Java, from London’s underbelly to the camps of Chinese laborers in WWI Flanders.  Throughout, readers are left to differentiate between fiction and fact, and ponder questions of authorship, in this “impossible fantasy of hybridity,” as Phillip Holden calls it in his perceptive introduction.
Contemporary readers will not only savor the book’s tales of adventure and detection, they will also appreciate the ways that the author brings to life— and reveals the contradictions of—late colonial society.
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Gustave Caillebotte
Painting Men
Scott Allan
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.

More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.
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Reckoning with Millet's "Man with a Hoe," 1863–1900
Scott Allan
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
A revelatory exploration of one of Jean-François Millet’s most contentious paintings.

A monumentalizing portrayal of a peasant bowed over by brutal toil, Man with a Hoe (1860–62) by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) is arguably the most art historically significant painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century European art. This volume situates the work in the arc of Millet’s career and traces its fascinating and contentious reception, from its scandalous debut at the 1863 Paris Salon to the years following its acquisition by American collectors in the 1890s. The essays examine the painting’s tumultuous public life, beginning in France, where critics attacked it on aesthetic and political grounds as a radical realist provocation; through its transformative movement in the art market during the remaining years of the artist’s life and following his death; to its highly publicized arrival in California as a celebrated masterpiece. In the United States it was enlisted to serve philanthropic interests, became the subject of a popular poem, and once again became embroiled in controversy, in this case one that was strongly inflected by American racial politics. This is the first publication dedicated to the work since its acquisition by the Getty Museum in 1985.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from September 12 to December 10, 2023.
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Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart
Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music was a “pure play” of key and theme, more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook’s innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythms and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.
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Places in Need
The Changing Geography of Poverty
Scott W. Allard
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
Americans think of suburbs as prosperous areas that are relatively free from poverty and unemployment. Yet, today more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities themselves. In Places in Need, social policy expert Scott W. Allard tracks how the number of poor people living in suburbs has more than doubled over the last 25 years, with little attention from either academics or policymakers. Rising suburban poverty has not coincided with a decrease in urban poverty, meaning that solutions for reducing poverty must work in both cities and suburbs. Allard notes that because the suburban social safety net is less-developed than the urban safety net, a better understanding of suburban communities is critical for understanding and alleviating poverty in metropolitan areas.
 
Using census data, administrative data from safety net programs, and interviews with nonprofit leaders in the Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. metropolitan areas, Allard shows that poor suburban households resemble their urban counterparts in terms of labor force participation, family structure, and educational attainment. In the last few decades, suburbs have seen increases in single-parent households, decreases in the number of college graduates, and higher unemployment rates. As a result, suburban demand for safety net assistance has increased. Concerning is evidence suburban social service providers­—which serve clients spread out over large geographical areas, and often lack the political and philanthropic support that urban nonprofit organizations can command—do not have sufficient resources to meet the demand.
 
To strengthen local safety nets, Allard argues for expanding funding and eligibility to federal programs such as SNAP and the Earned Income Tax Credit, which have proven effective in urban and suburban communities alike.  He also proposes to increase the capabilities of community-based service providers through a mix of new funding and capacity-building efforts.
 
Places in Need demonstrates why researchers, policymakers, and nonprofit leaders should focus more on the shared fate of poor urban and suburban communities. This account of suburban vulnerability amidst persistent urban poverty provides a valuable foundation for developing more effective antipoverty strategies.
 
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Confederate Colonels
A Biographical Register
Bruce S. Allardice
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Among field officers in the Confederate Army, colonels had the greatest life-or-death power over the average soldier. Usually regimental commanders who were charged with instructing their men in drill, many also led brigades or divisions, and the influence of an outstanding colonel could be recognized throughout the army.
While several books have dealt with the Confederacy’s generals, this is the first comprehensive study of its colonels. Bruce S. Allardice has undertaken exhaustive research to uncover a wealth of facts not previously available and to fill in many gaps in previous scholarship on the 1,583 men who achieved the rank of full colonel by the end of their careers—including both staff and line officers and members of all armies.
A biographical article on each man includes such data as date and place of birth, education, prewar occupation and military experience, service record, instances of being wounded or captured, postwar life and death, and available writings on the officer or manuscript collections of his papers. Throughout, Allardice follows Confederate law and surviving government records in determining an officer’s true rank, and he uses the regimental designations from the compiled service records in the National Archives as the most familiar to researchers. Appendixes list state army colonels, colonels who became generals, and colonels whose rank cannot be proved.
In his introduction, Allardice gives readers a clear understanding of the characteristics of a colonel in the Confederacy. He explains how one became a colonel—the mustering process, election of officers, reorganizing of regiments—and exposes the inadequacies of the officer-nominating process, questions of seniority, and problems of “rank inflation.” He highlights such notable figures as John S. Mosby, the “Grey Ghost,” and George Smith Patton, great-grandfather of WWII general George S. Patton, and also provides statistics on such matters as states of origin, age, and casualties.
This single-volume compendium sheds new light on these interesting and important military figures and features more standard information than can be found in similar references. Confederate Colonels belongs at the side of every Civil War historian or buff, whether as a research tool or as a touchstone for other readings.
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The Dysfunctional Workplace
Theory, Stories, and Practice
Seth Allcorn
University of Missouri Press, 2015

This book explores an aspect of organizational life that is at times difficult to acknowledge and often painful to recall. Stories invite reflection and the development of greater understanding of organizational dynamics. This fresh scholarship provides a theoretical framework for discussion. Throughout this book, Allcorn and Stein utilize a psychoanalytically informed perspective to help readers understand why a leader, colleague or friend behaves in ways that are destructive of others and the organization and provides a basis for organizations to survive and thrive in a dysfunctional workplace.

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Trauma and Recovery on War's Border
A Guide for Global Health Workers
Kathleen Allden
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
An increasing number of students and professionals are choosing to travel the globe to engage with the realities of trauma and human suffering through mental health aid. But in the field of global mental health, good intentions are not enough to ensure good training, development, and care. The risk of harm is real when outsiders deliver mental health aid in culturally inappropriate and otherwise naïve ways. This book, based on the experiences of the co-editors and their colleagues at Burma Border Projects (BBP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the mental health and psychosocial well-being of the displaced people of Burma, sets out global mental health theory allied with local perspectives, experiences, real-life challenges, strengths, and best practices. Topics include assessment and intervention protocols, vulnerable groups and the special challenges they present, and supervision and evaluation programs. An introduction by the editors establishes the political and health contexts for the volume. Written in a style appropriate for academic audiences and lay readers, this book will serve as a fundamental text for clinicians, interns, volunteers, and researchers who work in regions of the world that have suffered the violence of war, forced displacement, human rights violations, poverty, and oppression.
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The Algerian Memoirs
Days of Hope and Combat
Henri Alleg
Seagull Books, 2011

The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian Conflict. Best known for his book The Question, a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence, Alleg is famous both for having brought the issue of French torture to the public eye and for his passionate work as a writer, a newspaperman, and a communist activist.

Beginning with his arrival in Algiers in 1939, when he fell immediately in love with the vibrant city, to his departure in 1965, after Boumédienne seized power, this is a critical work of history made devastatingly personal. Algerian Memoirs recounts his experience under the Vichy regime and such watershed moments in colonial history as the infamous Battle of Algiers. In these pages, he relives the violence and the summary executions, the communist struggle, and his party’s strained relations with the National Liberation Front. And, of course, he revisits in stark detail his arrest and torture by the French, his years in prison, and eventual escape to Czechoslovakia.
 
In the telling of his own story, Alleg explores some of the key events in the history of Europe and North Africa and in the history of the radical press. This is an irreplaceable document of colonialism and its tragic aftermath.
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Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland
Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America
Linda Allegro
University of Illinois Press, 2019
This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at outside factors affecting migration, including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government. They also reveal how cultural affinities like religion, strong family ties, farming, and cowboy culture attract these newcomers to the Heartland. Throughout, essayists point to how hostile neoliberal policy reforms have made it difficult for Latin American immigrants to find social and economic stability.

Filled with varied and eye-opening perspectives, Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland reveals how identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities.

Contributors: Linda Allegro, Tisa M. Anders, Scott Carter, Caitlin Didier, Miranda Cady Hallett, Edmund Hamann, Albert Iaroi, Errol D. Jones, Jane Juffer, László J. Kulcsár, Janelle Reeves, Jennifer F. Reynolds, Sandi Smith-Nonini, and Andrew Grant Wood.

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Uncommon Vernacular
The Early Houses of Jefferson County, West Virginia, 1735-1835
John C. Allen, Jr.
West Virginia University Press, 2011
Within the picturesque borders of Jefferson County, West Virginia remain the vestiges of a history filled with Civil War battles and political rebellion. Yet also woven into the historical landscapeof this small county nestled within the Shenandoah Valley is an unusual collection of historic homes. 
 
In this fascinating architectural exploration, John C. Allen, Jr. details his expansive seven-year survey of Jefferson County’s historic residences. By focusing on dwellings built from the mid-eighteenth century to the arrival of the railroad and canal in 1835, Allen unfolds the unique story of this area’s early building traditions and architectural innovations. The 250 buildings included in this work—from the plantation homes of the Washington family to the log houses of yeomen farmers—reveal the unique development of this region, as Allen categorizes structures and establishes patterns of construction, plan, and style.

Allen’s refreshing perspective illuminates the vibrant vernacular architecture of Jefferson County, connecting the housing of this area to the rich history of the Shenandoah Valley. Varying features of house siting, plan types, construction techniques, building materials, outbuildings, and exterior and interior detailing illustrate the blending of German, Scots-Irish, English, and African cultures into a distinct, regional style.
 
Adorned with over seven hundred stylish photographs by Walter Smalling and elegant drawings, floor plans, and maps by Andrew Lewis, Uncommon Vernacular explores and preserves this historic area’s rich architectural heritage.
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Building Little Saigon
Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs
Erica Allen-Kim
University of Texas Press, 2024

An in-depth look at the diverging paths of Vietnamese American communities, or “Little Saigons,” in America’s built environment.

In the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese who were evacuated or who made their own way out of the country resettled in the United States. Finding themselves in unfamiliar places yet still connected in exile, these refugees began building their own communities as memorials to a lost homeland. Known both officially and unofficially as Little Saigons, these built landscapes offer space for everyday activities as well as the staging of cultural heritage and political events.

Building Little Saigon examines nearly fifty years of city building by Vietnamese Americans—who number over 2.2 million today. Author Erica Allen-Kim highlights architecture and planning ideas adapted by the Vietnamese communities who, in turn, have influenced planning policies and mainstream practices. Allen-Kim traveled to ten Little Saigons in the United States to visit archives, buildings, and public art and to converse with developers, community planners, artists, business owners, and Vietnam veterans. By examining everyday buildings—who made them and what they mean for those who know them—Building Little Saigon shows us the complexities of migration unfolding across lifetimes and generations.

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Arc and the Sediment
a Novel
Christine Allen-Yazzie
Utah State University Press, 2007
Gretta Bitsilly, a gin-steeped mother of two and self-proclaimed expert at standing just outside the margins of ethnicity and peering in, has been all but eclipsed by the world that eludes her—as a wife, as a writer, as a skeptic in "the other land of Zion," Utah. Gretta has set off to Fort Defiance, Arizona, where she hopes to convince her Navajo husband, who has escaped not from his family but from alcoholism, to come home. Over a sputtering two-steps-forward, one-step-back desert journey, Gretta is diverted by chance, by seizures, an inconstant memory, and the disjointed character of her irresolute quest. She is fueled by a volatile mix of rage and curiosity and is rendered careless by ambivalence toward her marriage—she knows a welcome mat will not be waiting for her, "that white girl" who can't seem to get anything right. On route Gretta fi nds herself lost in the landscape, in strange company, or in her own convolution of language and inner space. With a dictionary and a laptop she attempts to write herself into a better existence—a hopeful existence—and to connect points of intellectual, physical, even spiritual reference.

This tale, though dark and difficult, is infused with tart, twisted humor. Confused, disheveled, self-deprecating, and self-destructive, Gretta is also sharp and funny. Here, first-time novelist Christine Allen-Yazzie breaks apart her own narrative arc but with gritty reality seals it near-shut again, if in rearrangement, drawing us into Gretta's wrestling match with herself, her husband, her addiction, and the road.

The Arc and the Sediment received an honorable mention from the James Jones First Novel Competition, and it won the Utah Arts Council Annual Writing Competiton Publishing Prize.
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Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914
Ann Taylor Allen
Rutgers University Press, 1991

European historians have noted the prominent role of the maternal ethic -- the idea that woman's role as mother extends into society as a whole -- in the theory and practice of German feminism from 1840 to 1914. This body of ideas, however, has seldom been taken seriously.  German feminism has been interpreted as a political strategy, not as an intellectual tradition. Historians have portrayed German feminists as conservative, in contrast to their liberal counterparts in other countries who were more likely to campaign for equal rights. Ann Allen revises these views by analyzing German feminism as an attempt to create a symbolic framework for understanding the world rather than simply to attain practical results. She examines the relationship between the experiences of individual female activists and the evolving intellectual traditions of German culture and of international feminism.

    

Women thought their maternal role led to empowerment and ethical authority. The role gave them the legitimacy to give speeches, to organize reform movements, and to build feminist institutions. They campaigned for infant welfare and the expansion of state responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children. German feminists responded to central public issues, including revolution, national unification, and urbanization. They worked to transform both public and private worlds by extending their ethical values, developed in the family, to political and social issues. 

    

To make her argument, Allen examines the lives and work of the women who were important to the history of German feminism. They centered their careers on issues relating to motherhood and childcare. Allen relates their stories to a broader theme:  the relationship of women's experience, under specific historical conditions, to the development of feminist ideology and practice.

    

Allen assesses the historical significance of German feminism in the context of German history and of similar feminist movements in other countries, particularly the U.S.  Allen calls for the ideas of German feminists to be judged with reference to the specific, local conditions under which they developed, rather than to essentialist notions of feminism.  Some historians have identified equal rights ideologies as progressive and maternalist ones as conservative.  But the women themselves did not perceive the antithesis between these two forms of ideology. 

                                   

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