”Every social mechanism appears to have a dual potential for good and evil. Prepayment for medical care is no exception. On the one hand, it provides assurance of necessary care as a safeguard to health, economic well-being, and peace of mind. On the other hand, it opens the way to wasteful and harmful care, to price inflation, and to concealed redistributions in socially undesirable directions. The problem is to devise a plan that allows us to reap the most advantages while we incur the fewest drawbacks.”

Benefits in Medical Care Programs is a comprehensive treatment of this problem. Dr. Donabedian begins with a clear and straight forward analysis of his own assumptions about the social mandate for medical care benefits, the objectives of medical care programs, and the magnitude and distribution of the unmet need that these programs are designed to alleviate. The problem of defining and measuring the need for care is considered within the con text of the data yielded by alternative definitions. The analysis then shifts to the impact of benefits on certain key features of the medical care system.

Program benefits are weighed against program objectives, and policy implications are drawn from this comparison. We are shown what can and cannot be accomplished through medical care benefits and what goals are served by specific aspects of existing or proposed plans. Although Dr. Donabedian counsels a fairly thorough reform of existing systems, he remains skeptical about the possibility of designing a perfect system, and he does not hesitate to point out that increased access to care "increases exposure to both what is good and what is bad in our system of medical care. . . The machinery of medical care has a sinister potential for those who fall into it in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dr. Donabedian's previous book Aspects of Medical Care Administration has been called the "bible" of its field. Benefits in Medical Care Programs should prove equally invaluable.

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award
Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.

As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

This book brings together two of the most important figures of twentieth-century criticism, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to consider a topic that was central to their thinking: the place of and reason for art in society and culture. Thijs Lijster takes us through points of agreement and disagreement between the two on such key topics as the relationship between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public. He also addresses the continuing relevance of Benjamin and Adorno to ongoing debates in contemporary aesthetics, such as the end of art, the historical meaning of art, and the role of the critic.

An action-packed retelling of the life and work of the polymath and so-called First American, Benjamin Franklin.
 
All Benjamin Franklin biographers face a major challenge: they must compete with their subject. In one of the greatest autobiographies in world literature, Franklin has already told his own story, and subsequent biographers have often taken Franklin at his word. In this exciting new account, Kevin J. Hayes takes a different approach.
 
Hayes begins when Franklin is eighteen and stranded in London, describing how the collection of curiosities he viewed there fundamentally shaped Franklin’s intellectual and personal outlook. Subsequent chapters take in Franklin’s career as a printer, his scientific activities, his role as a colonial agent, his participation in the American Revolution, his service as a diplomat, and his participation in the Constitutional Convention. Containing much new information about Franklin’s life and achievements, Hayes’s critical biography situates Franklin within his literary and cultural milieu.

Ever the chronicler and teacher, Franklin wrote an autobiography, ostensibly for his illegitimate son William. Apart from hurried additions when he was in his eighties, his story halts at 1757. Tracing his footsteps centuries later, Franklin’s most celebrated biographer completes the last twenty-five years of the autobiography by drawing on Franklin’s most personal and insightful letters and writings—even making additions within the interrupted Autobiography to give us the expository memoir that Franklin intended. Indeed, as he wrote it.

Benjamin Franklin is well known to most of us, yet his fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to science are still not adequately understood. Until now he has usually been incorrectly regarded as a practical inventor and tinkerer rather than a scientific thinker. He was elected to membership in the elite Royal Society because his experiments and original theory of electricity had made a science of that new subject. His popular fame came from his two lightning experiments—the sentry-box experiment and the later and more famous experiment of the kite—which confirmed his theoretical speculations about the identity of electricity and provided a basis for the practical invention of the lightning rod. Franklin advanced the eighteenth-century understanding of all phenomena of electricity and provided a model for experimental science in general.

I. Bernard Cohen, an eminent historian of science and the principal elucidator of Franklin’s scientific work, examines his activities in fields ranging from heat to astronomy. He provides masterful accounts of the theoretical background of Franklin’s science (especially his study of Newton), the experiments he performed, and their influence throughout Europe as well as the United States. Cohen emphasizes that Franklin’s political and diplomatic career cannot be understood apart from his scientific activities, which established his reputation and brought him into contact with leaders of British and European society. A supplement by Samuel J. Edgerton considers Franklin’s attempts to improve the design of heating stoves, another practical application that arose from theoretical interests.

This volume will be valuable to all readers wanting to learn more about Franklin and to gain a deeper appreciation of the development of science in America.

"This is an important book that uses the long and distinguished historical career of Benjamin Shambaugh to place public or 'applied' history into a much-needed historical context. . . . Conard's narrative and analysis provide new insights into continuing debates about the proper role of federal and state governments in collecting and writing history. . . . an important contribution to American historiography in the twentieth century."--Barbara Franco, executive director, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. "In Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History, Rebecca Conard has written a useful and intriguing book. . . . The historical profession and the people of Iowa are indebted to Rebecca Conard for this book, which explores the impressive career of Benjamin Shambaugh and sheds new light on the fundamentals of the public history movement."--Annals of Iowa ". . . an unexpectedly engaging and useful examination and analysis of the ideologies, arguments, and politics surrounding the rise of history as a professional and academic discipline from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, especially as they were often rancorously expressed in disputes between the East and Midwest, state and national perspectives, and academic and professional practice."--The Journal of American History "Conard has provided the history profession with a layered narrative of its development and fragmentation or redevelopment over time, and has explored the meanings of its own histories."--Janelle Warren-Findley, The American Historical Review "Conard's biography is well written and interesting, and her strategies for engaging in dialog with a variety of texts produce a fresh method for defining and assessing public history."--The Journal of Heritage Stewardship Although his name is little known today outside Iowa, during the early part of the twentieth century Benjamin Shambaugh (1871 - 1940) was a key figure in the historical profession. Using his distinguished career as a lens, Conard's seminal work is the first book to consider public history as an integral part of the intellectual development of the historical profession as a whole in the United States. Conard draws upon an unpublished, mid-1940s biography by research historian Jacob Swisher to trace the forces that shaped Shambaugh's early years, his administration of the State Historical Society of Iowa, his development of applied history and commonwealth history in the 1910s and 1920s, and the transformations in his thinking and career during the 1930s. Framing this intriguingly interwoven narrative are chapters that contextualize Shambaugh's professional development within the development of the historical profession as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and assess his career within the post-World War II emergence of the modern public history movement. Shambaugh's career speaks to those who believe in the power of history to engage and inspire local audiences as well as those who believe that historians should apply their knowledge and methods outside the academy in pursuit of the greater public good. Rebecca Conard, associate professor of history and codirector of the Public History Program at Middle Tennessee State University, is also the author of Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves, and Environmentalism (Iowa, 1997), which won the Benjamin Shambaugh Award. "Rebecca Conard provides an elegant discussion of a complex topic: the emergence of public history in the twentieth century. . . . a sophisticated addition to public history historiography."--The Public Historian

“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.

Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings.

Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

Distinguished scholars contextualize and critically assess Jeremy Bentham’s writings on Australia.

This volume considers Jeremy Bentham’s Australian writings. In the first part of the volume, Bentham’s works are placed in their historical contexts, while the second part provides a critical assessment of the historical accuracy and plausibility of Bentham’s arguments against transportation from the British Isles. In the third part, attention turns to Bentham’s claim that New South Wales was founded illegally and to the imperial and colonial constitutional ramifications of that claim. The authors also discuss Bentham’s work of 1831 in which he supports the establishment of a free colony on the southern coast of Australia. In the final part, the authors shed light on the history of Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, his views on the punishment and reform of criminals and what role, if any, religion had to play in that regard, and discuss apparently panopticon-inspired institutions built in the Australian colonies.
 
This collection will appeal to readers interested in Bentham’s life and thought, the history of transportation from the British Isles and of British penal policy more generally, colonial and imperial history, Indigenous history, legal and constitutional history, and religious history.

Bentham and the Arts considers the skeptical challenge presented by Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism to the existence of the aesthetic, as represented in the oft-quoted statement that, ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either.’ Ranging from poetry and sexual nonconformity to the auto-icon and public sculpture, from Hume, Kant, and de Staël to Freud and Michel Onfray, an excellent crew of contributors brings Jeremy Bentham out from the shadow cast by John Stuart Mill with much new to say on taste and politics.
 

A full account of the St Petersburg Panopticon, the only panopticon built by the Bentham brothers themselves.

The jurist and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and his lesser-known brother, Samuel, a talented naval architect, engineer, and inventor, had a long love affair with Russia. Jeremy hoped to assist Empress Catherine II with her legislative projects. Samuel went to St Petersburg to seek his fortune in 1780 and came back with the rank of Brigadier-General and the idea, famously publicized by Jeremy, of the Panopticon. The Bentham Brothers and Russia chronicles the brothers’ later involvement with the Russian Empire when Jeremy focused his legislative hopes on Catherine’s grandson Emperor Alexander I and Samuel found a unique opportunity to build a Panopticon in St Petersburg—the only one ever built by the Benthams themselves. Setting the Benthams’ projects within an in-depth portrayal of the Russian context, Roger Bartlett illuminates an important facet of their later careers and offers insight into their worldview and thought. He also contributes to the history of legal codification in Russia and the demythologizing of the Panopticon, made notorious by Michel Foucault.
 

The name "Beowulf" lingers in our collective memory, although today fewer people have heard the tale of the Germanic hero's fight with Grendel, the dreadful Monster of the Mere, as recounted in this Anglo-Saxon epic.

This edition of Beowulf makes the poem more accessible than ever before. Ruth Lehmann's imitative translation is the only one available that preserves both the story line of the poem and the alliterative versification of the Anglo-Saxon original. The characteristic features of Anglo-Saxon poetry— alliterative verse with first-syllable stress, flexible word order, and inflectional endings—have largely disappeared in Modern English, creating special problems for the translator. Indeed, many other translations of Beowulf currently available are either in prose or in some modern poetic form. Dr. Lehmann's translation alone conveys the "feel" of the original, its rhythm and sound, the powerful directness of the Germanic vocabulary.

In her introduction, Dr. Lehmann gives a succinct summary of the poem's plot, touching on the important themes of obligation and loyalty, of family feuds, unforgivable crimes, the necessity of revenge, and the internal and external struggles of the Scandinavian tribes. She also describes the translation process in some detail, stating the guiding principles she used and the inevitable compromises that were sometimes necessary.

Ever since Tolkien’s famous lecture in 1936, it has been generally accepted that the poem Beowulf is a fantasy, and of no use as a witness to real history. This book challenges that view, and argues that the poem provides a plausible, detailed, and consistent vision of pre-Viking history which is most unlikely to have been the poet’s invention, and which has moreover received strong corroboration from archaeology in recent years. Using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources are combined to form a picture of events in the North in the fifth and sixth centuries: at once a Dark and a Heroic Age, and the time of the formation of nations. Among other things, this helps answer two long-unasked questions: why did the Vikings come as such a shock? And what caused the previous 250 years of security from raiders from the sea?

This is a community translation of the earliest English epic poem. Beowulf tells the story of a mythical hero in northern Europe in, perhaps, the sixth century. Alongside his story, multiple other shorter narratives are told and many other voices are heard, making it a rich and varied account of the poet’s views of heroism, conflict, loyalty, and the human condition. The poem is widely taught in schools and universities, and has been adapted, modernized, and translated dozens of times, but this is the first large-scale polyvocal translation. Readers will encounter the voices of over two hundred individuals, woven together into a reading experience that is at once productively dissonant, yet strangely coherent in its extreme variation. We hope that it turns the common question "Why do we need yet another translation?" on its head, asking instead, "How can we hear from more translators?," and "How can previously unheard, or marginalized voices, find space, like this, in the world of Old English Studies?" With this in mind we invite a new generation of readers to try their own hand at translating Beowulf in the workbook space provided opposite this community translation. It is often through the effort of translating that we see the reality of the original.

Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the "mind-forg'd manacles" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.

Like many indigenous groups that have endured centuries of subordination, the Berber/Amazigh peoples of North Africa are demanding linguistic and cultural recognition and the redressing of injustices. Indeed, the movement seeks nothing less than a refashioning of the identity of North African states, a rewriting of their history, and a fundamental change in the basis of collective life. In so doing, it poses a challenge to the existing political and sociocultural orders in Morocco and Algeria, while serving as an important counterpoint to the oppositionist Islamist current.

This is the first book-length study to analyze the rise of the modern ethnocultural Berber/Amazigh movement in North Africa and the Berber diaspora. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman begins by tracing North African history from the perspective of its indigenous Berber inhabitants and their interactions with more powerful societies, from Hellenic and Roman times, through a millennium of Islam, to the era of Western colonialism. He then concentrates on the marginalization and eventual reemergence of the Berber question in independent Algeria and Morocco, against a background of the growing crisis of regime legitimacy in each country. His investigation illuminates many issues, including the fashioning of official national narratives and policies aimed at subordinating Berbers in an Arab nationalist and Islamic-centered universe; the emergence of a counter-movement promoting an expansive Berber "imagining" that emphasizes the rights of minority groups and indigenous peoples; and the international aspects of modern Berberism.

Upon his death on October 6, 1959, Bernard Berenson left to Nicky Mariano the vast collection of correspondence which he had accumulated during the nearly sixty years of his residence at Villa I Tatti. On the centennial of Berenson’s birth, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, now established at I Tatti, arranged to publish this inventory of the correspondence in order to make available to interested scholars a knowledge of its contents. The inventory is divided into two parts: all correspondents are listed, with cross references, in Part One; letters written by Bernard or Mary Berenson, or by Nicky Mariano, are listed in Part Two by recipient.

An interrogation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration through the lens of performance.

Humans have always marked time, whether by tracing the earth’s natural rhythms or looking at a clock. Unlike pre-industrial people, living in an age of social acceleration is dominated by clock time and network time, presenting many more options than can be achieved in a human lifespan.

This book explores the possibility of an alternative experience of time, one closer to the concept of pure duration described by philosopher Henri Bergson. Connecting Bergson’s thought with key ideas from psychology and anthropology, the discussions in this book contribute to contemporary performance analysis, philosophy, and Bergson studies and explore aspects of immersive and participatory performance, walking practices, and ritual and online performance. Using durational performances as case studies, James Layton offers new insights into Bergson’s philosophy alongside the work of key theorists in psychology and anthropology. Through a series of performance analyses, Bergson’s philosophy of duration is coupled with ideas from Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Victor Turner to speculate on the potential of durational performance to challenge living in a world in which time is short, but the possibility of experience is abundant.

Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down.

Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient "nude dancing," and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment.

Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances--as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt.

This book gives us a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin’s lifetime, one of his “large-scale defeats.” Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered “final version” that contains the author’s own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin’s recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin’s West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified “expeditions into the depths of memory.” In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child—a collector, flâneur, and allegorist in one. This book is also one of Benjamin’s great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood—the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.

As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin’s attempt to do philosophy concretely.

The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.

Since becoming the capital of reunited Germany, Berlin has had a dose of global money and international style added to its already impressive cultural veneer. Once home to emperors and dictators, peddlers and spies, it is now a fashion showplace that attracts the young and hip. Moving beyond descriptions of Berlin's fashion industry and its ready-to-wear clothing, Berliner Chic charts the turbulent stories of entrepreneurially-savvy manufacturers and cultural workers striving to establish their city as a fashion capital, and being repeatedly interrupted by politics, ideology, and war. There are many stories to tell about Berlin's fashion industry and Berliner Chic tells them all with considerable expertise.

For three decades, beginning with the Symphonie fantastique composed in 1830, Hector Berlioz and his music embodied the élan and exuberance of the Romantic era. This captivating and sumptuously illustrated biography is not only a complete account of Berlioz’s life, but an acute analysis of his compositions and description of his work as conductor and critic, as well as a vivid picture of his musical world.

D. Kern Holoman paints a full-length portrait of Berlioz: his personal and family life, his intellectual development and pursuits, his methods of composing (Berlioz at his work table, so to speak), the aim and style of his music criticism and travel writing, his innovations in staging and conducting performances, and his interaction with other composers, including Liszt, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann, Glinka, Brahms, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Gounod. In discussing Berlioz’s music, Holoman talks about specific techniques, takes note of influences and borrowings, and analyzes the concept of programmatic music developed in Symphonie fantastique, Harold in Italy, Romeo and Juliet, and The Damnation of Faust.

While following Berlioz’s career, we get a rich sense of the world in which he moved. We see the requirements and excitements of foreign concert tours, the music publishing and instrument-making businesses, the development of the modern concept of orchestral conducting, the use of newspapers for publicity, the composer’s working relations with impresarios and soloists.

A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world.

Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution and six short “object lessons” meant as conversation starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception. 

Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) put the connoisseurship of Renaissance art on a firm footing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His monument is the library and collection of Italian painting, Islamic miniatures, and Asian art at Villa I Tatti in Florence. The authors in this collection of essays explore the intellectual world in which Berenson was formed and to which he contributed. Some essays consider his friendship with William James and the background of perceptual psychology that underlay his concept of “tactile values.” Others examine Berenson’s relationships with a variety of cultural figures, ranging from the German-born connoisseur Jean Paul Richter, the German art historian Aby Warburg, the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the American medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter to the African-American dance icon Katherine Dunham, as well as with Kenneth Clark, Otto Gutekunst, Archer Huntington, Paul Sachs, and Umberto Morra.

Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage makes an important contribution to the rising interest in the historiography of the discipline of art history in the United States and Europe during its formative years.

Critic, arbiter of taste, renowned authority on Renaissance painting, and oracle to millionaire art collectors, Bernard Berenson was the most formidable presence in the Anglo-American art world for more than thirty years. His Villa I Tatti near Florence was a magnet for European and American intellectuals; he was able to say, late in life, that most of the Italian paintings that had come to the United States had “my visa on their passport.” Twenty years after his death he remains a paradoxical figure—fit challenge for a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer.

The story of the making of the connoisseur spans four decades, from Berenson’s childhood in Lithuania and in an immigrant enclave in Boston to the triumphant tour of the United States that confirmed his international reputation. Ernest Samuels interweaves with great skill the many threads of the narrative. No less fascinating than Berenson’s own development, and the accidents that shaped his career, are his relations with an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives impinged on his—among them George Santayana, William James, Bertrand Russell, Logan Pearsall Smith, Norman and Hutchins Hapgood, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, the Michael Fields, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Roger Fry, and, most notably, the fabled Mrs. Jack Gardner. His relationship with Mary Smith Costelloe, who left her husband and children for him and eventually became his wife, was so close that the book is almost as much her story as his.

Drawing on the thousands of letters B.B. and Mary wrote and the diaries she kept, Samuels is able to convey Berenson’s thoughts and impressions as well as the outward events of these crucial years of his life. He blends sympathy and irony in his many-faceted portrayal of a complex man and a remarkable career. It is a compelling book.

Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it—as reported at first hand in his and Mary’s letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail.

Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner build her great collection and performed similar though lesser services for other wealthy Americans. It was merely an avocation and a useful source of income; his vocation was scholarship. But after 1904, when the book opens, his expertise was in ever-greater demand: a purchaser’s only assurance of the authorship of an Italian painting was the opinion of an expert, and in this field Berenson was preeminent. Increasingly he was drawn into the lucrative world of the art dealers; inevitably Joseph Duveen found it essential to enlist his services, at first ad hoc, then by contractual agreement. Samuels charts the course of Berenson’s long association with Duveen Brothers, detailing the financial arrangements, the humdrum chores and major contested attributions, the periodic clashes between the stubborn scholar and the arrogant entrepreneur.

The portrayal of Berenson’s relationship with Mary is especially intriguing: a union of opposites in all but brains and wit, bonded—despite love affairs, jealousies, recriminations—no longer by passion but by shared concerns. Impinging on their lives are those of a huge circle of friends and acquaintances in America and the beau monde of Europe. Both as biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, it is a compelling book.

Published in cooperation with the Dr. Daly Project Association

Bernard Daly escaped the Irish Famine and with his family emigrated to America, where he became the town doctor in Lakeview, Oregon, and then a state legislator, Oregon Agricultural College regent, county judge, rancher, and banker. When he died in 1920, his estate, valued at about a million dollars, established a college scholarship for the youth of Lake County, ensuring that most of them could attend college.

It’s hard to imagine a place more distant from higher education than Lake County in south central Oregon, a county about the size of New Jersey with a population under eight thousand. When the Bernard Daly scholarship was first awarded in 1922, less than two percent of America’s youth went to college, and the percentage was even lower in Lake County.

Today, Lake County students are much more likely to go to college, graduate in four years without debt, go on to graduate school, have successful careers, and contribute to the larger community—all because of a scholarship established a hundred years ago by an immigrant who sought a better life, not only for himself but also for others.

Drawing on more than a hundred personal interviews, an extensive web-based survey, and archival materials, Bernard Daly’s Promise offers unique insights into the benefits of higher education and how it might best be supported—questions that we are struggling with today.

By almost any measure Bernardino Barbatelli, called Poccetti, was a successful and sought after painter in late sixteenth-century Florence, but his works have remained largely overlooked. This study situates representative examples of his religious painting within their respective contexts to demonstrate how Poccetti and his patrons negotiated the increasingly fraught terrain of sacred painting in the period of religious reform. These case studies demonstrate how patrons ranging from the Dominicans to the Carthusians to prominent Florentine patricians relied on Poccetti’s skill in creating compelling narratives that reflected current concerns within the Catholic world. In the process, Poccetti invoked an august Florentine tradition of fresco painting, shaping it to better address the demands placed on religious imagery at the end of the Renaissance.

This introduction to a challenging contemporary composer delves into the theory and philosophy of repetition.
 
The work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang elides easy categorization. While rooted simultaneously in DJ culture, free jazz, pop culture and the Austro-European new music scene, his oeuvre explicitly foregrounds repetition. He is, in his own words, a “repeat offender.”
 
Bernhard Lang serves as a critical guide to the composer’s music and traces the phenomenon of repetition throughout his oeuvre. To examine Lang’s repetitive aesthetics, Christine Dysers employs various philosophical methods, such as Gilles Deleuze’s differential ontology. Fusing critical musicology, aesthetic theory, poststructuralist thought, and music analysis, Bernhard Lang brings fresh insight to the work of an award-winning contemporary composer.

What is it about the small fruits of field and wood that encourage rapture? These gifts of the earth—flagrant in hedgerows, carpeting the forest floor or coloring tablelands—are so ubiquitous as to be commonplace and yet so extraordinary that we have woven them into our folklore, our fables, and our art. Strawberries were painted in the frescoes of Pompeii, brambles twined into the borders of medieval miniatures, and mulberries have been embroidered on silks and linens. Today, the huge demand for these nutrient-rich fruits is pushing berry cultivation into new territories, from South America to Scandinavia, and changing the nature of our relationship with these much-loved fruits. In this delightful, surprising, and occasionally juicy botanical exploration, Victoria Dickenson traces the humble berry’s journey across cultures and through centuries with humor and passion.

Folk singer and folk music collector, writer, painter, journalist, art critic, whalerman, sheep station roustabout, Marxist, and much more - this is the story of A. L. (Bert) Lloyd's extraordinary life.

A. L. Lloyd played a key part in the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s, but that is only part of his story. Dave Arthur documents how Lloyd became a member of the Communist Party, forceful antifascist, trade unionist and an important part of left-wing culture from the early 1930s to his death in 1982. Following his return from Australia as a 21-year-old, self-educated agricultural labourer, he was at the heart of the most important left-wing movements and highly respected for his knowledge in various fields.

Dave Arthur recounts the life of a creative, passionate and life-loving Marxist, and in so doing provides a social history of a turbulent twentieth century.

Like her colleagues—Cassatt, Degas, Monet, and Renoir—Berthe Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the nineteenth century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into impressionist paintings.

Higonnet presents a clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making enormously popular among nineteenth-century women and industrialized feminine imagery dominated by the fashion plate provide a background and context for Morisot's imagery. Focusing on formal choices—poses, composition, brushwork—Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Cassatt, Degas, and Manet. And she examines critical themes: Morisot’s self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.

In Beside You in Time Elizabeth Freeman expands biopolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discipline as a regime that yoked the human body to time, Freeman shows how time became a social and sensory means by which people assembled into groups in ways that resisted disciplinary forces. She tracks temporalized bodies across many entangled regimes—religion, secularity, race, historiography, health, and sexuality—and examines how those bodies act in relation to those regimes. In analyses of the use of rhythmic dance by the Shakers; African American slave narratives; literature by Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Herman Melville, and others; and how Catholic sacraments conjoined people across historical boundaries, Freeman makes the case for the body as an instrument of what she calls queer hypersociality. As a mode of being in which bodies are connected to others and their histories across and throughout time, queer hypersociality, Freeman contends, provides the means for subjugated bodies to escape disciplinary regimes of time and to create new social worlds.