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Blaming Teachers
Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History
Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Historically, Americans of all stripes have concurred that teachers were essential to the success of the public schools and nation. However, they have also concurred that public school teachers were to blame for the failures of the schools and identified professionalization as a panacea.
 
In Blaming Teachers, Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz reveals that historical professionalization reforms subverted public school teachers’ professional legitimacy. Superficially, professionalism connotes authority, expertise, and status. Professionalization for teachers never unfolded this way; rather, it was a policy process fueled by blame where others identified teachers’ shortcomings. Policymakers, school leaders, and others understood professionalization measures for teachers as efficient ways to bolster the growing bureaucratic order of the public schools through regulation and standardization. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of municipal public school systems and reaching into the 1980s, Blaming Teachers traces the history of professionalization policies and the discourses of blame that sustained them.
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Blaming the Poor
The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty
Greenbaum, Susan D
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In 1965, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—then a high-ranking official in the Department of Labor—sparked a firestorm when he released his report “The Negro Family,” which came to be regarded by both supporters and detractors as an indictment of African American culture. Blaming the Poor examines the regrettably durable impact of the Moynihan Report for race relations and social policy in America, challenging the humiliating image the report cast on poor black families and its misleading explanation of the causes of poverty.
 
A leading authority on poverty and racism in the United States, Susan D. Greenbaum dismantles Moynihan’s main thesis—that the so called matriarchal structure of the African American family “feminized” black men, making them inadequate workers and absent fathers, and resulting in what he called a tangle of pathology that led to a host of ills, from teen pregnancy to adult crime. Drawing on extensive scholarship, Greenbaum highlights the flaws in Moynihan’s analysis. She reveals how his questionable ideas have been used to redirect blame for substandard schools, low wages, and the scarcity of jobs away from the societal forces that cause these problems, while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about African Americans. Greenbaum also critiques current policy issues that are directly affected by the tangle of pathology mindset—the demonization and destruction of public housing; the criminalization of black youth; and the continued humiliation of the poor by entrepreneurs who become rich consulting to teachers, non-profits, and social service personnel.  
 
A half century later, Moynihan’s thesis remains for many a convenient justification for punitive measures and stingy indifference to the poor. Blaming the Poor debunks this infamous thesis, proposing instead more productive and humane policies to address the enormous problems facing us today.
 
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Blaming the Victim
How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty
Jairo Lugo-Ocando
Pluto Press, 2014
Poverty, it seems, is a constant in today's news, usually the result of famine, exclusion or conflict. In Blaming the Victim, Jairo Lugo-Ocando sets out to deconstruct and reconsider the variety of ways in which the global news media misrepresent and decontextualise the causes and consequences of poverty worldwide. The result is that the fundamental determinant of poverty - inequality - is removed from their accounts.

The books asks many biting questions. When - and how - does poverty become newsworthy? How does ideology come into play when determining the ways in which 'poverty' is constructed in newsrooms - and how do the resulting narratives frame the issue? And why do so many journalists and news editors tend to obscure the structural causes of poverty?

In analysing the processes of news production and presentation around the world, Lugo-Ocando reveals that the news-makers' agendas are often as problematic as the geopolitics they seek to represent. This groundbreaking study reframes the ways in which we can think and write about the enduring global injustice of poverty.
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BLANCHE LAZZELL
THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MODERNIST
ROBERT C. BRIDGES
West Virginia University Press, 2004

Blanche Lazzell went from Maidsville, West Virginia, to the leading edge of twentieth-century American art. A member of the prominent art communities of Paris and Provincetown, MA during the '20s and '30s, Lazzell was always on the fringe of important developments in the modern art world. Her studies in Paris led her to adopt the techniques of modernism as well as other emerging styles. Among her groundbreaking works were some of the first examples of abstraction in America. Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist is a significant contribution to the history of twentieth-century American art.

Know primarily as a Provincetown printmaker, Lazzell’s full life and career are presented here, generously accompanied by color reproductions of her work, showing the breadth of her accomplishment in painting, printmaking, and hooked rugs. Lazzell's true contribution to American art history was never fully appreciated during her lifetime. A renewed interest in the artist has developed over the past fifteen years, due mostly to the critical appreciation of her color wood block prints. She is worth remembering not only for her own work, but also for her role as a translator of the achievements of the European modernists for her colleagues in America. In Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist, nine essays and hundreds of full-color illustrations bring this incredibly talented and influential artist's work to life.

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Blank Darkness
Africanist Discourse in French
Christopher L. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 1986
"Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have . . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world."—James Olney, Louisiana State University
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Blank Verse
A Guide to Its History and Use
Robert B. Shaw
Ohio University Press, 2007

Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others. A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. Blank Verse is the first book since 1895 to offer a detailed study of the meter’s technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. Robert B. Shaw gives ample space and emphasis to the achievements of modern and postmodern poets working in the form, an area neglected until now by scholarship.

With its compact but inclusive survey of more than four centuries of poetry, Blank Verse is filled with practical advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it. Enriched with numerous examples, Shaw’s discussions of verse technique are lively and accessible, inviting not only to apprentice poets but to all readers of poetry.

Shaw’s approach should reassure those who find prosody intimidating, while encouraging specialists to think more broadly about how traditional poetic forms can be taught, learned, practiced, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. Besides filling a conspicuous gap in literary history, Blank Verse points the way ahead for poets interested in exploring blank verse and its multitude of uses.

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Blanket Weaving in the Southwest
Joe Ben Wheat; edited by Ann Lane Hedlund
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Exquisite blankets, sarapes and ponchos handwoven by southwestern peoples are admired throughout the world. Despite many popularized accounts, serious gaps have existed in our understanding of these textiles—gaps that one man devoted years of scholarly attention to address.

During much of his career, anthropologist Joe Ben Wheat (1916-1997) earned a reputation as a preeminent authority on southwestern and plains prehistory. Beginning in 1972, he turned his scientific methods and considerable talents to historical questions as well. He visited dozens of museums to study thousands of nineteenth-century textiles, oversaw chemical tests of dyes from hundreds of yarns, and sought out obscure archives to research the material and documentary basis for textile development. His goal was to establish a key for southwestern textile identification based on the traits that distinguish the Pueblo, Navajo, and Spanish American blanket weaving traditions—and thereby provide a better way of identifying and dating pieces of unknown origin.

Wheat's years of research resulted in a masterful classification scheme for southwestern textiles—and a book that establishes an essential baseline for understanding craft production. Nearly completed before Wheat's death, Blanket Weaving in the Southwest describes the evolution of southwestern textiles from the early historic period to the late nineteenth century, establishes a revised chronology for its development, and traces significant changes in materials, techniques, and designs.

Wheat first relates what Spanish observers learned about the state of native weaving in the region—a historical review that reveals the impact of new technologies and economies on a traditional craft. Subsequent chapters deal with fibers, yarns, dyes, and fabric structures—including an unprecedented examination of the nature, variety, and origins of bayeta yarns—and with tools, weaves, and finishing techniques.

A final chapter, constructed by editor Ann Hedlund from Wheat's notes, provides clues to his evolving ideas about the development of textile design. Hedlund—herself a respected textile scholar and a protégée of Wheat's—is uniquely qualified to interpret the many notes he left behind and brings her own understanding of weaving to every facet of the text. She has ensured that Wheat's research is applicable to the needs of scholars, collectors, and general readers alike. Throughout the text, Wheat discusses and evaluates the distinct traits of the three textile traditions. More than 200 photos demonstrate these features, including 191 color plates depicting a vast array of chief blankets, shoulder blankets, ponchos, sarapes, diyugi, mantas, and dresses from museum collections nationwide. In addition, dozens of line drawings demonstrate the fine points of technique concerning weaves, edge finishes, and corner tassels. Through his groundbreaking and painstaking research, Wheat created a new view of southwestern textile history that goes beyond any other book on the subject. Blanket Weaving in the Southwest addresses a host of unresolved issues in textile research and provides critical tools for resolving them. It is an essential resource for anyone who appreciates the intricacy of these outstanding creations.

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Blaschke Products
Bounded Analytic Functions
Peter Colwell
University of Michigan Press, 1985
Blaschke products are an important class of functions in analytic function theory in the unit disk, both because of their involvement in factorization theorems and their utility for the construction of examples. This book gathers the principal results about Blaschke products heretofore scattered in research papers over the past 70 years and provides an extensive bibliography of over 300 items. It is hoped that research workers in and students of function theory will find the book a useful guide and reference to the subject of Blaschke products.
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Blaze Orange
Whitetail Deer Hunting in Wisconsin
Travis Dewitz
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
In Blaze Orange, photographer Travis Dewitz captures the joy, excitement, and camaraderie of deer hunting in Wisconsin. A lone hunter in a tree stand as dawn arrives. A girl and her grandfather scanning a field in the fresh snow. Tired hunters laughing around the evening fire back at camp. These are snapshots of a culture touchstone. With more than 600,000 hunters taking to the fields and woods of the state each year, the whitetail deer season is by far Wisconsin’s largest sporting event. Dewitz documents the hunt and more as he rides along with hunters and a game warden, visits local mom-and-pop stores where hunters gather, and records the industries that operate alongside the deer season—a taxidermist and knife maker, butchers and sausage makers. The result is a stunning and keen-eyed chronicle of one season of the Wisconsin deer hunt.
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Blazing Cane
Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959
Gillian McGillivray
Duke University Press, 2009
Sugar was Cuba’s principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and during that time, the majority of the island’s population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. In Blazing Cane, Gillian McGillivray examines the development of social classes linked to sugar production, and their contribution to the formation and transformation of the state, from the first Cuban Revolution for Independence in 1868 through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. She describes how cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power.

Focusing on sugar communities in eastern and central Cuba, McGillivray recounts how farmers and workers pushed the Cuban government to move from exclusive to inclusive politics and back again. The revolutionary caudillo networks that formed between 1895 and 1898, the farmer alliances that coalesced in the 1920s, and the working-class groups of the 1930s affected both day-to-day local politics and larger state-building efforts. Not limiting her analysis to the island, McGillivray shows that twentieth-century Cuban history reflected broader trends in the Western Hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.

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Blazing the Trail
Waymarks in the Exploration of Symbols
Victor Turner
University of Arizona Press, 1992
A collection of Turner's writings that gathers seven late pieces that reflect his thoughts on such subjects as pilgrimage, sacrifice, and liminal processes.

"The essays reveal a passionate struggle between a committed conceptualization and a dedication to the telling detail. Turner is willing to address the moral and spiritual dimensions of being human, which are all too easily set aside by much social science."—Anthropos
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Bleak Houses
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
Lisa Surridge
Ohio University Press, 2005

The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

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Bleak Joys
Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility
Matthew Fuller
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of life


Bleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.

Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.

Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.

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Bleak Liberalism
Amanda Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on “realistic” conceptions of humanity, liberalism’s assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged.

Amanda Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.
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Bleakonomics
A Heartwarming Introduction to Financial Catastrophe, the Jobs Crisis and Environmental Destruction
Rob Larson
Pluto Press, 2012
Bleakonomics is a short and darkly humorous guide to the three great crises plaguing today's world: environmental degradation, social conflict in the age of austerity and financial instability.

Written for anyone who is wondering how we’ve come to this point, Rob Larson holds mainstream economic theory up against the grim reality of a planet in meltdown. He looks at scientists’ conclusions about climate change, the business world’s opinions about its own power, and reveals the fingerprints of finance on American elections.

With a unique and engaging approach to each crucial subject, students, academics and activists will find a lot to appreciate in this quiet call-to-arms for a saner and more stable world.
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Bleeder
A Memoir
Shelby Smoak
Michigan State University Press, 2013
I am Caucasian, five foot eleven, have sandy brown hair, blue eyes, and am a tender slip of bone. And I am at the hospital.
A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood transfusion at the start of his college career. This devastating and destabilizing news led Smoak to see his world from an entirely new perspective, one in which life-threatening illness was perpetually just around the corner. Set in the 1990s along the North Carolina coast, Bleeder traces Smoak’s quest for love in a world that feels increasingly dangerous, and despite a future that feels increasingly uncertain. From the bedroom to the operating room, and from one hospital to the next, Smoak seeks out hope and better health. Winner of a PEN American Center award for writers living with HIV, Smoak, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, constructs this unforgettable story of life and love against insurmountable difficulties in breathtaking, tightly drawn prose.
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Blemished Kings
Suitors in the Odyssey, Blame Poetics, and Irish Satire
Andrea Kouklanakis
Harvard University Press, 2023

Each of the suitors in the Odyssey is eager to become the king of Ithaca by marrying Penelope and disqualifying Telemachus from his rightful royal inheritance. Their words are contentious, censorious, and intent on marking Odysseus’ son as unfit for kingship. However, in keeping with other reversals in the Odyssey, it is the suitors who are shown to be unfit to rule.

In Blemished Kings, Andrea Kouklanakis interprets the language of the suitors—their fighting words—as Homeric expressions of reproach and critique against unsuitable kings. She suggests that the suitors’ disparaging expressions, and the refutations they provoke from Telemachus and from Odysseus himself, rest on the ideology whereby a blemished king cannot rule. Therefore, the suitors vehemently reject Telemachus’ suggestion that they are to be blamed. She shows that in the Odyssey there is linguistic and semantic evidence for the concept that blame poetry can physically blemish, hence disqualify, rulers. In her comparative approach, Kouklanakis looks towards the regulatory role of satire in early Irish law and myth, particularly the taboo against a blemished-face king, offering thereby a socio-poetic context for the suitors’ struggles for kingship.

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Blessed Are the Activists
Catholic Advocacy, Human Rights, and Genocide in Guatemala
Michael J. Cangemi
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Documents the history of Catholic activism to mitigate human rights abuses in Guatemala and the failed US policies in the country and region during the 1970s and 1980s
 
Blessed Are the Activists examines US Catholic activists’ influence on US-Guatemalan relations during the Guatemalan civil war’s most violent years in the 1970s and 1980s. Cangemi argues that Catholic activists’ definition of human rights, advocacy methods, and structure caused them to act as a transnational human rights NGO that engaged Guatemalan and US government officials on human rights issues, reported on Guatemala’s human rights violations, and criticized US foreign policy decisions as a contributing factor in Guatemala’s inequality, poverty, and violence. His work foregrounds how Catholic activists emphasized dignity for Guatemala’s poorest citizens and the connections they made between justice, solidarity, and peace and brought Guatemala’s violence, poverty, and inequality to greater global attention, often at great personal risk.

Cangemi pays considerable attention to multiple facets of the strained US-Guatemala diplomatic relationship, including how and why Guatemala’s military dictatorship exposed the internal flaws within the Carter administration’s decision to link military aid to human rights and how internal foreign policy debates in the Carter and Reagan administrations helped to intensify Guatemala’s bloody civil war. He also includes interviews conducted with Guatemalan genocide survivors and refugees to provide firsthand accounts of the consequences of those policymaking decisions. Finally, he offers readers an in-depth examination of the US Catholic press’s sharp rebukes of US policies on Guatemala and all of Central America when the broader Roman Catholic Church began to move farther toward the ideological right under John Paul II.

Blessed Are the Activists offers rich, original research and a gripping narrative. With Guatemala and other countries in Latin America still experiencing human rights abuses, this book will continue to provide context. It will appeal to a broad swath of readers, from scholars to the general public and students.
 
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Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Poems
Brionne Janae
Northwestern University Press, 2022

Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize

At once interested in the cyclical nature of domestic dysfunction and what we do when secrets of buried harm come to light, Blessed Are the Peacemakers asks what it means to make peace in the wake of intrafamilial violence and child sexual assault. These poems explore the ways the truth is often hidden behind layers of bleach and shame, and the ways we fail survivors by dismissing their stories and tolerating their abusers.

Filled with elegies to the people who have been murdered by state violence, racism, and anti-Blackness in the United States, Blessed Are the Peacemakers interrogates the lengths and limitations of grace. Brionne Janae examines what it means to survive—particularly as a Black girl, woman, queer person, or human—and uses self-portraiture to explore how familial and communal trauma plague our mental health. How do we survive the grief of the past and present without becoming numb to or consumed by it? How do we remember, despite our pain, to enjoy our bodies and our lives while we still have them?

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Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology
Suzanne Kesler Rumsey
University of Alabama Press, 2021
An uncommon and intimate account of the lives of two conscientious objectors
 
In the summer of 2013, Suzanne Kesler Rumsey discovered hundreds of letters exchanged between her late grandparents, Miriam and Benjamin Kesler. The letters, written between 1941 and 1946, were filled with typical wartime sentiments: love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty about the war and the country’s future, and attempts at humor to keep their spirits up. What is unusual about their story is that Ben Kesler was not writing from a theater of war. Instead, Ben, a member of the Dunkard Brethren Church, was a conscientious objector. He, along with about 12,000 other men, opted to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) and contribute to “work of national importance” at one of the 218 CPS camps around the country.

In Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Rumsey has mined not only her grandparents’ letters but also archival research on CPS camps and historical data from several Mennonite and Brethren archives to recapture the narrative of Ben’s service at two different camps and of Miriam’s struggle to support herself and her husband financially at the young age of seventeen. Ben and Miriam’s life during the war was extraordinarily ordinary, spanning six years of unrecognized and humble work for their country. Ben was not compensated for his work in the camps, and Miriam stayed home and worked as a day laborer, as a live-in maid, as a farmhand, and in the family butcher shop in order to earn enough money to support them both. Small histories like that of her grandparents, Rumsey argues, provide a unique perspective on significant political and historical moments.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers also explores the rhetorical functions of letter writing as well as the methodology of family history writing. Ben and Miriam’s letters provide an apt backdrop to examine the genre, a relatively understudied mode of literacy. Rumsey situates the young couple’s correspondence within ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, granting new insights into the genre and how personal accounts shape our understanding of historical events.
 
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Blessed Mary and the Monks of England, 1000-1215
Matthew J. Mills
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
In the study of historical Mariology, the monastic communities of England before and after the Norman conquest receive too little attention. Classic surveys, such as Hilda Graef’s, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (2 vols, orig. 1963, 1965), highlight key figures and developments; and a fine book by Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (1990), takes scholarship as far as the early-eleventh century. The present volume, building upon such works, delves more deeply into the prayerful, intellectual and artistic contemplation of Mary during the age of monasticism, roughly the two hundred years prior to the advent of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. In the history of England, this was a time of high drama: conquest, power struggle, martyrdom; for English monasticism, it was marked by suppression, reform and renewal, patronage, and new currents of prayer and thought. Against this backdrop, Matthew Mills uncovers many vibrant contributions to Marian doctrine and devotion by theologians and communities living according to the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict: the Benedictines and their successors, the Cistercians, who arrived in England in 1128. In a thematic unfolding of Mary’s life and identity, from conception to assumption and intercession, a picture emerges of a Mariology shaped by the constant of monastic liturgy, anchored in deep biblical and patristic wisdom, cherished and transmitted by the Englishman, St Bede (d. 735), and animated by profound love. Towering figures, St Anselm (d. 1109) and St Ælred (d. 1167), are placed within a wider landscape, alongside lesser-known but still significant individuals, including the Cistercian abbot, John of Forde (d. 1214), royal confessor and pioneer of Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs. England’s monastic Mariology was colored by Greek as well as Latin influences and touched by key experiences of the contemporary church at large: apocalyptic disappointment, eleventh-century reform (sometimes called, ‘Gregorian’), sacramentalism, intense yearning for salvation. This book also sheds light upon the significance of Mary for medieval monks’ understanding of their own profession; their mother and their lady, she was, in addition, their icon and exemplar of life in St Benedict’s ‘school for the Lord’s service’ (Rule, Prol. 45).
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A Blessed Rage for Order
Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos
Alexander J. Argyros
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Recent developments in a range of disciplines, from high-energy physics to biogenetic anthropology, suggest a stunningly beautiful model of the cosmos. In A Blessed Rage for Order, Alexander Argyros explores the implications these discoveries might hold for literary criticism, for art, and, more broadly, for our understanding of the place of human culture in cosmic evolution. Argyros challenges deconstructionist paradigms, basing his own model largely on developing chaos theory, in combination with J. T. Graser's theory of evolution. He argues that the kind of dualism that postulates an unbreachable gap between human culture and prehuman nature must be replaced by a view of the universe as a communicative, dynamic, and evolving system: a model that allows the natural and cultural worlds to exist in an endlessly innovative continuum. Argyros presents a strong argument that although socio-institutional contexts play a large role in defining and constituting the world of human beings, other contexts must also be taken into account. The study draws on the work of E. O. Wilson, Douglas Hofstadter, Ilya Prigogine, and Karl Popper, among others, in proposing a new, interdisciplinary chaotic paradigm that Argyros believes can reaffirm such concepts as universality, identity, meaning, truth, and beauty.
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Blessed Rage for Order
The New Pluralism in Theology
David Tracy
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In Blessed Rage for Order, David Tracy examines the cultural context in which theological pluralism emerged. Analyzing orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, and radical models of theology, Tracy formulates a new 'revisionist' model. He considers which methods promise the most certain results for a revisionist theology and applies his model to the principal questions in contemporary theology, including the meanings of religion, theism, and of christology.
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Blessing Same-Sex Unions
The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage
Mark D. Jordan
University of Chicago Press, 2005
At most church weddings, the person presiding over the ritual is not a priest or a pastor, but the wedding planner, followed by the photographer, the florist, and the caterer. And in this day and age, more wedding theology is supplied by Modern Bride magazine or reality television than by any of the Christian treatises on holy matrimony. Indeed, church weddings have strayed long and far from distinctly Christian aspirations. The costumes and gestures might still be right, but the intentions are hardly religious.

Why then, asks noted gay commentator Mark D. Jordan, are so many churches vehemently opposed to blessing same-sex unions? In this incisive work, Jordan shows how carefully selected ideals of Christian marriage have come to dominate recent debates over same-sex unions. Opponents of gay marriage, he reveals, too often confuse simplified ideals of matrimony with historical facts. They suppose, for instance, that there has been a stable Christian tradition of marriage across millennia, when in reality Christians have quarreled among themselves for centuries about even the most basic elements of marital theology, authorizing experiments like polygamy and divorce.

Jordan also argues that no matter what the courts do, Christian churches will have to decide for themselves whether to bless same-sex unions. No civil compromise can settle the religious questions surrounding gay marriage. And queer Christians, he contends, will have to discover for themselves what they really want out of marriage. If they are not just after legal recognition as a couple or a place at the social table, do they really seek the blessing of God? Or just the garish melodrama of a white wedding? Posing trenchant questions such as these, Blessing Same-Sex Unions will be a must-read for both sides of the debate over gay marriage in America today.
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Blessing the Exoskeleton
Poems
Andrew Hemmert
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Blessing the Exoskeleton is a southerner’s book about Michigan. Written over a two-year period in Kalamazoo, Andrew Hemmert’s poems address climate change, labor, love, and his attempts to live joyfully in a deteriorating world. Though the majority of these poems are narrative, they approach their stories in roundabout and slanted ways. A meditation on job seeking begets a story about the author’s father attempting to catch an owl in a fishing net. A fire down the road from the author’s apartment begets a meditation on telemarketing. Personal histories collide with headlines, resulting in poems that convey everyday experience and seek to praise it. Despite the northern cold and the tyranny of the news, Hemmert develops his own theories for navigating his life, finding beauty in an unfamiliar landscape and climate.

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Blessing the House
Jim Daniels
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in.  In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.
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Blessing the World
Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion
Derek A. Rivard
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
In Blessing the World, Derek A. Rivard studies liturgical blessing and its role in the religious life of Christians during the central and later Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the blessings of the Franco-Roman liturgical tradition from the tenth to late thirteenth centuries.
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Blessings Beyond the Binary
Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family
Nora Rubel
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Transparent made history as the first television show to feature a transgender character in the main role, as the first streaming series to win the Golden Globe for Best Television Series, and as, in the words of journalist Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “the Jewiest show ever.” No television show in history has depicted the lives of American Jews with as much attention to Jewish rituals, quirks, or culture. And no series has portrayed issues of gender and sexuality alongside Judaism with such nuance and depth, making Transparent a landmark series in the history of television.
 
Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family brings together leading scholars to analyze and offer commentary on what scholar Josh Lambert calls, “the most important work of Jewish culture of the century so far.” The book explores the show’s depiction of Jewish life, religion, and history, as well as Transparent’s scandals, criticisms, and how it fits and diverges from today’s transgender and queer politics. 
 
The first book to focus on Transparent, Blessings Beyond the Binary offers a rich analysis of the groundbreaking series and its connections to contemporary queer, trans, and Jewish life.
 
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Blessings for the Hands
Matthew Schwartz
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From The Sky Inside the Shaking Tree

What you feel
reveals you.
 
Watch
for the sustenance
inclined to a source,
 
enamored of singularity,
quickly here and quickly
 
gone, shadow from which
the body's courage comes.
 
Fireflies
apparently stumbling.
 
I slapped one on my leg.
Its blood glowed.
 
Blessings for the Hands follows various speakers—often disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pity—through the haunted dreamscape of “normalcy.” Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects of Blessings for the Hands are real and imagined confrontations—and reconciliations—between family members, friends, strangers, and animals. Matthew Schwartz’s quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers’ daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality. Blessings for the Hands is a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead.
 
Blessings for the Hands is emotionally strong and imaginatively wild, distinctive, deeply moving, without an ort of self-pity, and pervaded by ‘compassion down to your fingertips’ (which Chekhov said is ‘the only method’ both to write and to live). This angle of vision is sharp enough to unify much disparate material. The poems are clear and musical and consequently a pleasure to read and reread despite their gravity. I think this may be lasting work.”—Michael Ryan
 
 
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Blessings for the Table - Birkon L'Shabbat
Rabbi Elyse D. Frishman
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1997
An essential book for families and groups . This attractive 34-page pamphlet contains prayers and blessings for Kabbalat Shabbat, Birkat Hamazon, and Havdalah, as well as a song section and inserts for the holidays.
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Blessings from Beijing
Inside China's Soft-Power War on Tibet
Greg C. Bruno
University Press of New England, 2018
As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet—and the subsequent creation of the Tibetan exile community—the question of the diaspora’s survival looms large. Beijing’s foreign policy has grown more adventurous, particularly since the post-Olympic expansion of 2008. As the pressure mounts, Tibetan refugee families that have made their homes outside China—in the mountains of Nepal, the jungles of India, or the cold concrete houses high above the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala—are migrating once again. Blessings from Beijing untangles the chains that tie Tibetans to China and examines the political, social, and economic pressures that are threatening to destroy Tibet’s refugee communities. Journalist Greg Bruno has spent nearly two decades living and working in Tibetan areas. Bruno journeys to the front lines of this fight: to the high Himalayas of Nepal, where Chinese agents pay off Nepali villagers to inform on Tibetan asylum seekers; to the monasteries of southern India, where pro-China monks wish the Dalai Lama dead; to Asia’s meditation caves, where lost souls ponder the fine line between love and war; and to the streets of New York City, where the next generation of refugees strategizes about how to survive China’s relentless assault. But Bruno’s reporting does not stop at well-worn tales of Chinese meddling and political intervention. It goes beyond them—and within them—to explore how China’s strategy is changing the Tibetan exile community forever.
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Blessings in Disguise
or, the Morality of Evil
Jean Starobinski
Harvard University Press, 1993

In the literature and aesthetic theory of modern times, we have witnessed the revival of the claim that the conventions and artifices of civilization are the source of many ills. Far from establishing harmonious relationships between individuals, they have sometimes legitimized forms of violence and oppression. But while conventions and artifices may be a source of evil, they are also a means by which evils can be reduced or overcome.

One of our greatest living critics, Jean Starobinski pursues this line of reflection by taking us back to the thought of the eighteenth century. Civilization, he argues, has always been entangled with barbarism. As a form of politeness, a refinement of manners, civilization was said to legitimize deceit. But aren’t the conventions of civilized living, however objectionable, a blessing in disguise? It is the task of art, he contends, to make the most of these conventions, to use the very disguises of civilization to counter the barbarism they mask. Tracing this idea through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, Starobinski charts the historical and intellectual limits of criticism itself.

These reflections are nourished by a series of sensitive and perceptive studies: the use of the word "civilization" in the Age of Enlightenment; the classical doctrine of civility and the art of flattery; fable and mythology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the relations between exile, satire, and tyranny in Montesquieu; philosophy and style in the writings of Voltaire; and the search for the remedy of the disease in the thought of Rosseau. A development and refinement of themes that have preoccupied Starobinski throughout his career, Blessings in Disguise is criticism at its best, testing its own limits and extending ours.

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Blessingway
With Three Versions of the Myth Recorded and Translated from the Navajo by Father Berard Haile, O.F.M.
Leland C. Wyman
University of Arizona Press, 1970
An outstanding work crafted from the handwritten pages of translations from the Navajo of the late Father Berard Haile giving three separate versions of the Blessingway rite with each version consisting of a prose text accompanied by the ritual songs and prayers. Valuable insights into the character and use of the Blessingway rite; its ceremonial procedures, its mythology, and its drypaintings.
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The Blind
Edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
Intellect Books, 2015
Images of animals are all around us. Yet the visibility offered by wildlife photography can't help but contribute to an image of the animal as fundamentally separate from the human. But how can we get closer to animals without making them aware of us or changing their relationship to their environment?

The Blind might be the answer. Developed for naturalists by the Institute of Critical Zoologists, the Blind is a camouflage cloak that works on the principle that an object vanishes from sight if light rays striking it are not reflected, but are instead forced to flow around as if it were not there. In fifty stunning color photographs, this volumeshows the cloak tested in nature reserves, grasslands, and urban environments. By taking the human out of the picture, The Blind offers an opportunity to explore how we see animals in photography. 
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The Blind African Slave
Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace
Jeffrey Brace, as told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.
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Blind Date
Sex and Philosophy
Anne Dufourmantelle. Translated by Catherine Porter.
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Bringing sex and philosophy together on a blind date, Anne Dufourmantelle’s provocative study uses this analogy to uncover and examine philosophy’s blind spot. Delightful and startling comparisons spring from the date: both sex and philosophy are dangerous, both are socially subversive, and both are obsessions. Although sex and philosophy have much in common, however, they have scarcely known one another until now.

Socrates and Diogenes had little to say about sex, and although it was notoriously explored by the Marquis de Sade, this study explains why philosophy has never been fully sexualized nor sex really philosophized. Blind Date highlights the marked deletion of sexual topics and themes from philosophical works, while also opening doors for their union. Inviting readers to remember that thought does not require repressed desire, Dufourmantelle argues that sex is everywhere, and it affects all kinds of thinking.

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Blind in Early Modern Japan
Disability, Medicine, and Identity
Wei Yu Wayne Tan
University of Michigan Press, 2022
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment.

The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability. 
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The Blind Masseuse
A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia
Alden Jones
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions, rites of passage, and understandings of her place as a citizen of the world. With sharp insight and stylish prose, Jones asks: Is there a right or wrong way to travel? The Blind Masseuse concludes that there is, but that it's not always black and white.

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The Blind Masseuse
A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia
Alden Jones
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions, rites of passage, and understandings of her place as a citizen of the world. With sharp insight and stylish prose, Jones asks: Is there a right or wrong way to travel? The Blind Masseuse concludes that there is, but that it's not always black and white.

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Blind Rage
Letters to Helen Keller
Georgina Kleege
Gallaudet University Press, 2006

As a young blind girl, Georgina Kleege repeatedly heard the refrain, “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” Kleege’s resentment culminates in her book Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, an ingenious examination of the life of this renowned international figure using 21st-century sensibilities. Kleege’s absorption with Keller originated as an angry response to the ideal of a secular saint, which no real blind or deaf person could ever emulate. However, her investigation into the genuine person revealed that a much more complex set of characters and circumstances shaped Keller’s life.

Blind Rage employs an adroit form of creative nonfiction to review the critical junctures in Keller’s life. The simple facts about Helen Keller are well-known: how Anne Sullivan taught her deaf-blind pupil to communicate and learn; her impressive career as a Radcliffe graduate and author; her countless public appearances in various venues, from cinema to vaudeville, to campaigns for the American Foundation for the Blind. But Kleege delves below the surface to question the perfection of this image. Through the device of her letters, she challenges Keller to reveal her actual emotions, the real nature of her long relationship with Sullivan, with Sullivan’s husband, and her brief engagement to Peter Fagan. Kleege’s imaginative dramatization, distinguished by her depiction of Keller’s command of abstract sensations, gradually shifts in perspective from anger to admiration. Blind Rage criticizes the Helen Keller myth for prolonging an unrealistic model for blind people, yet it appreciates the individual who found a practical way to live despite the restrictions of her myth.

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Blind Speed
A Novel
Josh Barkan
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize 2009

Not since Don DeLillo and George Saunders has a writer caught the humor and irreverent seriousness of our time like Barkan has through his protagonist Paul Berger, a flawed hero whose so-called fate drives him toward enlightenment just as surely as it propels him to destruction. Berger is stunned when he receives an ominous palm reading from a savvy guru at a health retreat in Iowa, of all places. And now it seems the prophecy is coming true. His fiancée, who is about to leave him, is shot at a historic reenactment of the Revolutionary War in Concord. One of his brothers, an astronaut, dies on 9/11 in the Pentagon. And his more famous brother, a lawyer and politician, kidnaps him in a media campaign to win an election. But is Paul’s life really controlled by fate? Or is the prophecy a lie he has latched onto ever since his band went under, leaving him almost famous yet unknown—a teacher at a community college, struggling to keep his job?

Blind Speed is a wildly entertaining exploration of intersecting lives in which what happens is never solely by chance or choice. Barkan has built a uniquely American satirical novel, a thoroughly twisted journey of discovery that pops and fires from its first shot in Concord to its last rifle blast, which echoes across the heartland. With global warming, 9/11, government and corporate deceit, and ecoterrorism, the novel dives into epic ideas, capturing America in all its dangerous myths.

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Blind Spot
Myriam Tadessé
Seagull Books, 2021
Set in the entertainment world in France, this searing memoir explores the realities of being a mixed or biracial French citizen.

In Blind Spot, Myriam Tadessé exposes the difficulty, even the impossibility, for France to truly understand and celebrate the lived realities of mixed or biracial French citizens. What the French word métis—which translates to “half-breed” or “mixed-race”—hides is how central the notion of race actually is in a society that claims to repudiate it. The French film and theater world, in which Tadessé has made her career, appears unable to confront the individuality of the performers. They are required to correspond to categories—often based on race—that don’t allow for biracial identities. This classification not only contradicts France’s asserted ideals but also views as anomalies those who defy ethno-racial assumptions.
 
Drawing on her personal experiences as a biracial Ethiopian-French woman and her family history, Tadessé explores the realities of life for mixed-race individuals in France through her searing and honest memoir.
 
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Blind to Sameness
Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies
Asia Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 2013
What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but Asia Friedman pushes this question further still. How, she asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness?

Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—Blind to Sameness answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing Friedman to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.
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Blinders, Blunders, and Wars
What America and China Can Learn
David C. Gompert
RAND Corporation, 2014
The history of wars caused by misjudgments, from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia to America’s invasion of Iraq, reveals that leaders relied on cognitive models that were seriously at odds with objective reality. Blinders, Blunders, and Wars analyzes eight historical examples of strategic blunders regarding war and peace and four examples of decisions that turned out well, and then applies those lessons to the current Sino-American case.
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Blinding Polyphemus
Geography and the Models of the World
Franco Farinelli
Seagull Books, 2016
Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture, and the notion of “space.”

Following the lessons of nineteenth-century critical German geography, this is a manual of geography without any map. To indicate where things are means already responding, in implicit and unreflective ways, to prior questions about their nature. Blinding Polyphemus not only takes account of the present state of the Earth and of human geography, it redefines the principal models we possess for the description of the world: the map, above all, as well as the landscape, subject, place, city, and space.
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Blindness and Insight
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
Paul De Man
University of Minnesota Press, 1983

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Blindness Through the Looking Glass
The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body
Gili Hammer
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision “on display” by discussing people’s auditory, tactile, and olfactory experiences as well as vision and sight, and by exploring ways that individuals perform blindness and “sightedness” in their everyday lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 blind women in Israel and anthropological fieldwork, the book investigates the social construction and daily experience of blindness in a range of domains. Uniquely, the book brings together blind symbolism with the everyday experiences of blind and sighted individuals, joining in mutual conversation the fields of disability studies, visual culture, anthropology of the senses, and gender studies.
 
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Bliss
Clara Magnani
Seagull Books, 2021
An engrossing novel about love and grief that introduces an important francophone author to English-speaking readers.

Rome, 2014, late summer. While he is reading on his sun-drenched terrace, Giangiacomo’s heart stops. A quick, painless death—something he had always hoped for, his daughter, Elvira, remembers. A few days later, Elvira comes across an unfinished manuscript in her father’s flat. In it, she discovers a love story between Giangiacomo—Gigi, to his loved ones—and a Belgian journalist, Clara, which had been going on for over four years. Gigi’s manuscript tells of how their “mature love,” an expression that became code between Gigi and Clara, blossomed unexpectedly and of the happiness of their meetings, the abandon of their bodies, their laughter, the films they watched and rewatched together. As she struggles to cope with the loss of Gigi, Clara writes her own version of their story. Her “journal of absence” is first addressed to Gigi, then, gradually, to Elvira. She confides in the young woman on the threshold of adult life, with discretion and tenderness, describing the fullness of the hidden love she shared with her father.
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The Blithedale Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Harvard University Press, 2010
One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author’s experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale (“Happy Valley”), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne’s grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel “the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest” of Hawthorne’s “unhumorous fictions”). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers biographical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel’s ironic first-person narrator.The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Blithedale Romance in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Bloc by Bloc
How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order
Steven Weber
Harvard University Press, 2019

At a time when globalization is taking a step backward, what’s the best way to organize a global enterprise? The key, explains political economist Steven Weber, is to prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions defined by their own rules and standards.

Globalization has taken a hit as trade wars and resistance to mass migrations dominate headlines. Are we returning to the old world of stand-alone nations? Political economist Steven Weber argues that we are heading toward something new. Global connectedness will not dissolve but will be defined by “regional” blocs, demarcated more by the rules and standards they follow than by territory. For leaders of firms and NGOs with global ambitions, navigating this transformation is the strategic challenge of the decade.

Not long ago, we thought the world was flattening out, offering a level playing field to organizations striving for worldwide reach. As global economic governance expanded, firms shifted operations to wherever was most efficient—designing in one country and buying, manufacturing, and selling in others. Today, the world looks bumpier, with rising protectionism, national struggles over data control, and tensions over who should set worldwide standards. Expect emerging regional blocs to be dominated by the major rule-makers: the US, China, and possibly the EU. Firms and NGOs will need to remake themselves by building complete, semi-independent organizations in each region. Every nation will choose which rule-maker it wants to align with, and it may not be the one next door. This new world has the potential to be more prosperous, Weber argues, but friction between the dynamics of geography and technology will make it more risky.

Pioneering research, creative thinking, and colorful storytelling from the frontlines of the global economy combine to make this a must-read for leaders and analysts facing tomorrow’s world.

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Block by Block
Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side
Amanda I. Seligman
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America.

Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the "flight" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.
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Blockade Runners of the Confederacy
Hamilton Cochran
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A readable, exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War

Within four weeks of the fall of Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of over four thousand miles of Confederate coastline, from Cape Henry in Virginia to the Mexican border. In response, professional runners, lured by both profits and patriotism, built faster, sleeker, low-profile ships and piloted them through the ever-thickening Northern cordon. The tonnage they imported, including items ranging from straight pins to marine engines, sustained the South throughout the conflict. This exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War also provides an overall assessment of the blockades conception, effectiveness, and impact on the Southern populace.

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A Blockaded Family
Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War
Parthenia Hague
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during the blockade imposed on the South by the federal navy

Parthenia Hague experienced the Civil War while employed as a schoolteacher on a plantation near Eufaula, Alabama. This book recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during the blockade imposed on the South by the federal navy. The memoir of Parthenia Hague is a detailed look at the ingenious industry and self-sufficiency employed by anxious citizens as the northern army closed in.
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Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands
Civil War on Florida's Gulf Coast, 1861-1865
George E. Buker
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Chronicles the role of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron as an important Federal contingent in Florida
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Blockading the Border and Human Rights
The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement
By Timothy J. Dunn
University of Texas Press, 2009

To understand border enforcement and the shape it has taken, it is imperative to examine a groundbreaking Border Patrol operation begun in 1993 in El Paso, Texas, "Operation Blockade." The El Paso Border Patrol designed and implemented this radical new strategy, posting 400 agents directly on the banks of the Rio Grande in highly visible positions to deter unauthorized border crossings into the urban areas of El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juárez—a marked departure from the traditional strategy of apprehending unauthorized crossers after entry. This approach, of "prevention through deterrence," became the foundation of the 1994 and 2004 National Border Patrol Strategies for the Southern Border. Politically popular overall, it has rendered unauthorized border crossing far less visible in many key urban areas. However, the real effectiveness of the strategy is debatable, at best. Its implementation has also led to a sharp rise in the number of deaths of unauthorized border crossers.

Here, Dunn examines the paradigm-changing Operation Blockade and related border enforcement efforts in the El Paso region in great detail, as well as the local social and political situation that spawned the approach and has shaped it since. Dunn particularly spotlights the human rights abuses and enforcement excesses inflicted on local Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as well as the challenges to those abuses. Throughout the book, Dunn filters his research and fieldwork through two competing lenses, human rights versus the rights of national sovereignty and citizenship.

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Blockchain
Sandra Hirsh and Susan Alman
American Library Association, 2019

This book in the Library Futures Series examines blockchain technology, a concept with far-reaching implications for the future of the information professions. Blockchain uses a distributed database (multiple devices not connected to a common processor) that organizes data into records (blocks) that have cryptographic validation. The data are timestamped and linked to previous records so that they can only be changed by those who own the encryption keys to write to the files. In this book, editors Hirsh and Alman offer a primer of what librarians and information professionals need to understand about blockchain technology. Several speculative visions for how blockchain could support the core work of libraries are included to help librarians understand the possibilities for improved operations and services. Featuring essays from a range of information professionals who have interest and experience in blockchain technologies, this book presents valuable ideas for exploration relevant to everyone interested in the future of librarianship.

 

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Blockchain and Machine Learning for e-Healthcare Systems
Balusamy Balamurugan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Blockchain and machine learning technologies can mitigate healthcare issues such as slow access to medical data, poor system interoperability, lack of patient agency, and data quality and quantity for medical research. Blockchain technology facilitates and secures the storage of information in such a way that doctors can see a patient's entire medical history, but researchers see only statistical data instead of any personal information. Machine learning can make use of this data to notice patterns and give accurate predictions, providing more support for the patients and also in research related fields where there is a need for accurate data to predict credible results.
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Blockchain and the Law
The Rule of Code
Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright
Harvard University Press, 2018

“Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how.”
—Lawrence Lessig


“Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace—explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order… Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It’s also a moral one.”
Fortune


Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?

The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities’ ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

“If you…don’t ‘get’ crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

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Blockchain for 5G Healthcare Applications
Security and privacy solutions
Sudeep Tanwar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
A secured system for Healthcare 4.0 is vital to all stakeholders, including patients and caregivers. Using the new Blockchain system of trusted ledgers would help guarantee authenticity in the multi-access system that is Healthcare 4.0. This is the first comprehensive book that explores how to achieve secure systems for Healthcare 4.0 using Blockchain, with emphasis on the key challenges of privacy and security.
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Blockchain Foundations
For the Internet of Value
Mary C. Lacity
Epic Books, 2020
While there are many books on blockchains, this guide focuses on blockchain applications for business. The target audience is business students, professionals, and managers who want to learn about the overall blockchain landscape — the investments, the size of markets, major players and the global reach — as well as the potential business value of blockchain applications and the challenges that must be overcome to achieve that value. We present use cases and derive action principles for building enterprise blockchain capabilities. Readers will learn enough about the underlying technologies to speak intelligently to technology experts in the space, as the guide also covers the blockchain protocols, code bases and provides a glossary of terms. We use this guide as the textbook for our undergraduate and graduate Blockchain Fundamentals course at the University of Arkansas. Other professors interested in adopting this guide for instructional purposes are welcome to contact the author for supporting instructional materials.
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Blockchain Fundamentals for Web 3.0
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Mary C. Lacity
Epic Books, 2022
Our book explains the movement to establish online trust through the decentralization of value, identity, and data ownership. This movement is part of ‘Web 3.0’, the idea that individuals rather than institutions will control and benefit from online social and economic activities. Blockchain technologies are the digital infrastructure for Web 3.0. While there are many books on blockchains, crypto, and digital assets, we focus on blockchain applications for Web 3.0. Our target audience is students, professionals, and managers who want to learn about the overall Web 3.0 landscape—the investments, the size of markets, major players, and the global reach—as well as the economic and social value of applications.
 
We present applications that use Web 3.0 technologies to unlock value in DeFi, NFTs, supply chains, media, identity, credentials, metaverses, and more. Readers will learn about the underlying technologies, the maturity of Web 3.0 today, and the future of the space from thought-leaders. This textbook is used by undergraduate and graduate Blockchain Fundamentals courses at the University of Arkansas, the University of Wyoming, and other universities around the world. Professors interested in adopting this book for instructional purposes are welcome to contact the authors for supporting instructional materials.
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Blockchain Technology for Secure Social Media Computing
Robin Singh Bhadoria
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023
Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions duplicated and distributed across an entire network of computer systems on the blockchain which makes it more difficult to hack or tamper with. The popularity of blockchain has been increasing with the growth of social media and the internet of things (IoT). Social media are interactive digitally mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing and exchange of information, ideas, opinions and interests via virtual communities and social network platforms. However, unmonitored social accounts can be the target of hackers who post fraudulent messages or virus-infected links that spread to contacts and followers, and "employee weakness" is responsible for 20% of cyberattacks in companies. So, it has become essential to secure both personal and professional social media networks, accounts and data.
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Blockchain Technology for Smart Grids
Implementation, management and security
H.L. Gururaj
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Smart grids with distributed clean energy generation, storage and prosumers are the future of energy systems. They need two-way digital communication between multiple customers and suppliers of energy, to produce, buy and sell electricity to the grid at small scales. These arrangements need a system that maintains, checks, and registers information about transactions.
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Blockchain Technology in e-Healthcare Management
Suyel Namasudra
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
The healthcare arena has seen a shift in recent years, with more healthcare provisions being delivered or managed via electronic means. Healthcare providers can now provide patients with diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, or a prescription without ever sharing the same physical space. With so much more patient data now stored and accessed electronically, the security of this information is ever more critical to the delivery of effective and efficient healthcare services. As blockchains are resistant to modification of their data, blockchain technology therefore provides traceable and reliable security to e-Healthcare systems and services.
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Blockchains for Network Security
Principles, technologies and applications
Haojun Huang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Blockchain technology is a powerful, cost-effective method for network security. Essentially, it is a decentralized ledger for storing all committed transactions in trustless environments by integrating several core technologies such as cryptographic hash, digital signature and distributed consensus mechanisms.
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Blonde Indian
An Alaska Native Memoir
Ernestine Hayes
University of Arizona Press, 2006
In the spring, the bear returns to the forest, the glacier returns to its source, and the salmon returns to the fresh water where it was spawned. Drawing on the special relationship that the Native people of southeastern Alaska have always had with nature, Blonde Indian is a story about returning.

Told in eloquent layers that blend Native stories and metaphor with social and spiritual journeys, this enchanting memoir traces the author’s life from her difficult childhood growing up in the Tlingit community, through her adulthood, during which she lived for some time in Seattle and San Francisco, and eventually to her return home. Neither fully Native American nor Euro-American, Hayes encounters a unique sense of alienation from both her Native community and the dominant culture. We witness her struggles alongside other Tlingit men and women—many of whom never left their Native community but wrestle with their own challenges, including unemployment, prejudice, alcoholism, and poverty.

The author’s personal journey, the symbolic stories of contemporary Natives, and the tales and legends that have circulated among the Tlingit people for centuries are all woven together, making Blonde Indian much more than the story of one woman’s life. Filled with anecdotes, descriptions, and histories that are unique to the Tlingit community, this book is a document of cultural heritage, a tribute to the Alaskan landscape, and a moving testament to how going back—in nature and in life—allows movement forward.
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The Blondes of Wisconsin
Anthony Bukoski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Like stones cast into a river, these sixteen moving, intimate stories illuminate how devotion and degeneration ripple through a working-class Polish American community in the postindustrial Midwest. At the heart of the collection is Eddie “The Bronko” Bronkowski, a boxer with a losing record whose reputation as a human punching bag precedes him. In each of Anthony Bukoski’s rich stories, tough yet sympathetic characters—the second cook on a Great Lakes freighter, a World War II veteran, the emcee of a female boxing troupe—take all that life throws at them, protecting those around them as best they can.
 
In Bukoski’s interconnected tales, the heart seeks its due despite familial conflict, the challenges of maritime work, and the slow yet inexorable decline of dementia. Beautiful vignettes express transformative moments: tenderness that can turn a cardboard crown into gold and the faint ghosts of memories long forgotten. A tour-de-force, The Blondes of Wisconsin knows what love is—and what it means to lose it.
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Blood and Bone
Poems by Physicians
Angela Belli
University of Iowa Press, 1998

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Blood and Boundaries
The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America
Stuart B. Schwartz
Brandeis University Press, 2020

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

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Blood and Capital
The Paramilitarization of Colombia
Jasmin Hristov
Ohio University Press, 2009

WOLA-Duke Book Award Finalist

In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies.

Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

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Blood and Culture
Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Duke University Press, 2009
Over the past decade, immigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe’s cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of national belonging. In Blood and Culture, Cynthia Miller-Idriss provides a rich ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations. Drawing on research she conducted at German vocational schools between 1999 and 2004, Miller-Idriss examines how the working-class students and their middle-class, college-educated teachers wrestle with their different views about citizenship and national pride. The cultural and demographic trends in Germany are broadly indicative of those underway throughout Europe, yet the country’s role in the Second World War and the Holocaust makes national identity, and particularly national pride, a difficult issue for Germans. Because the vocational-school teachers are mostly members of a generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and hold their parents’ generation responsible for National Socialism, many see national pride as symptomatic of fascist thinking. Their students, on the other hand, want to take pride in being German.

Miller-Idriss describes a new understanding of national belonging emerging among young Germans—one in which cultural assimilation takes precedence over blood or ethnic heritage. Moreover, she argues that teachers’ well-intentioned, state-sanctioned efforts to counter nationalist pride often create a backlash, making radical right-wing groups more appealing to their students. Miller-Idriss argues that the state’s efforts to shape national identity are always tempered and potentially transformed as each generation reacts to the official conception of what the nation “ought” to be.

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Blood and Diamonds
Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa
Steven Press
Harvard University Press, 2021

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.

Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.

In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.

Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

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Blood and Fire
La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953
Mary Roldan
Duke University Press, 2003
Between 1946 and 1966a surge of violence in Colombia left 200,000 dead in one of the worst conflicts the western hemisphere has ever experienced. the first seven years of this little-studied period of terror, known as la Violencia, is the subject of Blood and Fire. Scholars have traditionally assumed that partisan politics drove La Violencia, but Mary Roldán challenges earlier assessments by providing a nuanced account of the political and cultural motives behind the fratricide. Although the author acknowledges that partisan animosities played an important role in the disintegration of peaceful discourse into violence, she argues that conventional political conflicts were intensified by other concerns.
Through an analysis of the evolution of violence in Antioquia, which at the time was the wealthiest and most economically diverse region of Colombia, Roldán demonstrates how tensions between regional politicians and the weak central state, diverse forms of social prejudice, and processes of economic development combined to make violence a preferred mode of political action. Privatization of state violence into paramilitary units and the emergence of armed resistance movements exacted a horrible cost on Colombian civic life, and these processes continue to plague the country.
Roldan’s reading of the historical events suggests that Antioquia’s experience of la Violencia was the culmination of a brand of internal colonialism in which regional identity formation based on assumptions of cultural superiority was used to justify violence against racial or ethnic "others" and as a pretext to seize land and natural resources. Blood and Fire demonstrates that, far from being a peculiarity of the Colombians, la Violencia was a logical product of capitalist development and state formation in the modern world.
This is the first study to analyze intersections of ethnicity, geography, and class to explore the genesis of Colombian violence, and it has implications for the study of repression in many other nations.
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Blood and Ink
The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History
Jacob Crane
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic.

Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.

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Blood and Religion
The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State
Jonathan Cook
Pluto Press, 2006
"Timely and important . . . by far the most penetrarting and comprehensive [book] on the subject to date. . . . This work should be required reading." --Nur Masalha, Director of Holy Land Studies, St. Mary's College, University of Surrey, and author of The Politics of Denial

"An original and powerful book." --Ilan Pappe, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Haifa University, and author of A Modern History of Palestine

"Very impressive. . . . Some of his findings will astound even the knowledgeable reader." --Salim Tamari, Director, Institute of Jerusalem Studies

What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the buildiing of a 700 km wall? Journalist Jonathan Cook presents a lucid account of the motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region's Palestinians--Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories--become a majority. Inevitable omparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate responses, including military repression of Palestinian dissent; a ban on marriages between Israel's Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return "through the back door;" and the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded state. Ultimately, the author concludes, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.

Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has written for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
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Blood and Voice
Navajo Women Ceremonial Practitioners
Maureen Trudelle Schwarz
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Adulthood in the Navajo world is marked by the onset of menstruation in females and by the deepening of the voice in males. Accordingly, young adults must accept responsibility over the powers manifest in blood and voice: for women, the forces that control reproduction and growth; for men, the powers of protection and restoration of order that come through maintaining Navajo oral tradition.

The maintenance of the latter tradition has long been held to be the function of the Navajo singer, a role usually viewed as male. But despite this longstanding assumption, women can and do fill this role. Drawing on interviews with seventeen Navajo women practitioners and five apprentices, Maureen Trudelle Schwarz explicates women's role as ceremonial practitioners and shows that it is more complex than has previously been thought. She examines gender differences dictated by the Navajo origin story, details how women came to be practitioners, and reveals their experiences and the strategies they use to negotiate being both woman and singer.

Women who choose careers as singers face complex challenges, since some rules prohibit menstruating women from conducting ceremonies and others regarding sexual continence can strain marital relationships. Additionally, oral history places men in charge of all ceremonial matters. Schwarz focuses on how the reproductive life courses of Navajo women influence their apprenticeships and practices to demonstrate how they navigate these issues to preserve time-honored traditions. Through the words of actual practitioners, she shows how each woman brings her own unique life experience to the role. While differing among individuals, these experiences represent a commitment to shared cultural symbols and result in a consensus that sustains social cohesion.

By showing the differences and similarities between the apprenticeship, initiation, and practice of men and women singers, Blood and Voice offers a better understanding of the role of Navajo women in a profession usually viewed as a male activity—and of the symbolic construction of the self in Navajo culture. It also addresses classic questions concerning the sexual division of labor, menstrual taboos, gender stereotypes, and the tension between tradition and change that will enlighten students of other cultures.
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Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes
Performing the Wild West in German Festivals
A. Dana Weber
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
"Nineteenth-century writer Karl May wrote novels about a fictionalized American Wild West that count among the most popular books of German literature to this day. His stories left an imprint on German culture, resulting in a variety of Wild West festivals featuring Native Americans and frontier settlers. These Karl May festivals are hosted widely throughout German-speaking countries today.
This book, based on years of fieldwork observing and studying the festivals, plays, events, and groups that comprise this subculture, addresses a larger, timely issue: cultural transfer and appropriations. Are Germans dressing up in American Indian costumes paying tribute or offending the cultures they are representing? Avoiding simplistic answers, A. Dana Weber considers the complexity of cultural enactments as they relate both to the distinctly German phenomenon as well as to larger questions of cultural representations in American and European live performance traditions."
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Blood Feather
Karla Kelsey
Tupelo Press, 2020
An inspired and engaging perspective of feminist art-making in a fractured world, Blood Feather reimagines resistance. With the help of three fictive narrators, an actress, a thinker, and a filmmaker create boundless opportunities for relatability. Caught up in a hurricane of identities, the actress wonders where the performance of character stops, saying, “rain has/a way of showing costumes for/what they really are”. The thinker, a so-called muse for her architect husband, searches for her self in a lyric embodying the molting process of a bird. This kind of evolution is central to all narratives, inspiring the reader to reflect on their own passages of growth. Taking its title from a vulnerable new feather of a bird that contains a constant flow of blood, Blood Feather reminds us of the essential yet fragile position of art. Protest and resistance can take that vital place of the blood inside of the feather in order to assert the importance of artful poetry such as this.
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Blood in the Arena
The Spectacle of Roman Power
By Alison Futrell
University of Texas Press, 1997

From the center of Imperial Rome to the farthest reaches of ancient Britain, Gaul, and Spain, amphitheaters marked the landscape of the Western Roman Empire. Built to bring Roman institutions and the spectacle of Roman power to conquered peoples, many still remain as witnesses to the extent and control of the empire.

In this book, Alison Futrell explores the arena as a key social and political institution for binding Rome and its provinces. She begins with the origins of the gladiatorial contest and shows how it came to play an important role in restructuring Roman authority in the later Republic. She then traces the spread of amphitheaters across the Western Empire as a means of transmitting and maintaining Roman culture and control in the provinces.

Futrell also examines the larger implications of the arena as a venue for the ritualized mass slaughter of human beings, showing how the gladiatorial contest took on both religious and political overtones. This wide-ranging study, which draws insights from archaeology and anthropology, as well as Classics, broadens our understanding of the gladiatorial contest and its place within the highly politicized cult practice of the Roman Empire.

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Blood in the Fields
Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform
Matthew Philipp Whelan
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
On March 24, 1980, a sniper shot and killed Archbishop Óscar Romero as he celebrated mass. Today, nearly four decades after his death, the world continues to wrestle with the meaning of his witness. Blood in the Fields: Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform treats Romero’s role in one of the central conflicts that seized El Salvador during his time as archbishop and that plunged the country into civil war immediately after his death: the conflict over the concentration of agricultural land and the exclusion of the majority from access to land to farm. Drawing extensively on historical and archival sources, Blood in the Fields examines how and why Romero advocated for justice in the distribution of land, and the cost he faced in doing so. In contrast to his critics, who understood Romero’s calls for land reform as a communist-inspired assault on private property, Blood in the Fields shows how Romero relied upon what Catholic Social Teaching calls the common destination of created goods, drawing out its implications for what property is and what possessing it entails. For Romero, the pursuit of land reform became part of a more comprehensive politics of common use, prioritizing access of all peoples to God’s gift of creation. In this way, Blood in the Fields reveals how close consideration of this conflict over land opened up into a much more expansive moral and theological landscape, in which the struggle for justice in the distribution of land also became a struggle over what it meant to be human, to live in society with others, and even to be a follower of Christ. Understanding this conflict and its theological stakes helps clarify the meaning of Romero’s witness and the way God’s work to restore creation in Christ is cruciform.
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Blood in the Tracks
The Minnesota Musicians behind Dylan's Masterpiece
Paul Metsa
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album

When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—and something about that original recording led him to a studio in his native Minnesota to re-record five songs, including “Idiot Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” Six Minnesota musicians participated in that two-night recording session at Sound 80, bringing their unique sound to some of Dylan’s best-known songs—only to have their names left off the album and their contribution unacknowledged for more than forty years. This book tells the story of those two nights in Minneapolis, introduces the musicians who gave the album so much of its ultimate form and sound, and describes their decades-long fight for recognition.

 

Blood in the Tracks takes readers behind the scenes with these “mystery” Minnesota musicians: twenty-one-year-old mandolin virtuoso Peter Ostroushko; drummer Bill Berg and bass player Billy Peterson, the house rhythm section at Sound 80; progressive rock keyboardist Gregg Inhofer; guitarist Chris Weber, who owned The Podium guitar shop in Dinkytown; and Kevin Odegard, whose own career as a singer-songwriter had paralleled Dylan’s until he had to take a job as a railroad brakeman to make ends meet. Through in-depth interviews and assiduous research, Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik trace the twists of fate that brought these musicians together and then set them on different paths in its wake: their musical experiences leading up to the December 1974 recording session, the divergent careers that followed, and the painstaking work required to finally obtain the official credit that they were due. 

 

A rare look at the making—or remaking—of an all-time great album, and a long overdue recognition of the musicians who made it happen, Blood in the Tracks brings to life a transformative moment in the history of rock and roll, for the first time in its true context and with its complete cast of players.

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Blood in Their Eyes
The Elaine Massacre of 1919
Grif Stockley
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
On September 30, 1919, local law enforcement in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, attacked black sharecroppers at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The next day, hundreds of white men from the Delta, along with US Army troops, converged on the area “with blood in their eyes.” What happened next was one of the deadliest incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States, leaving a legacy of trauma and silence that has persisted for more than a century. In the wake of the massacre, the NAACP and Little Rock lawyer Scipio Jones spearheaded legal action that revolutionized due process in America.

The first edition of Grif Stockley’s Blood in Their Eyes, published in 2001, brought renewed attention to the Elaine Massacre and sparked valuable new studies on racial violence and exploitation in Arkansas and beyond. With contributions from fellow historians Brian K. Mitchell and Guy Lancaster, this revised edition draws from recently uncovered source material and explores in greater detail the actions of the mob, the lives of those who survived the massacre, and the regime of fear and terror that prevailed under Jim Crow.
 
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Blood in Their Eyes
The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919
Grif Stockley
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Winner of the 2002 Booker Worthen Literary Prize

American Association of State and Local History Award 2003

In late September 1919, black sharecroppers met to protest unfair settlements for their cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke up the union's meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the Delta—and troops of the U.S. Army itself—converged on Phillips County, Arkansas, to "put down" the black sharecroppers' "insurrection." In riveting, novelistic prose, writer and Delta native Grif Stockley considers the evidence and tells the full story of this incident for the first time, concluding that black people were murdered in Elaine by white mobs and federal soldiers. Five white men died as a result of the conflict; contemporary estimates of African American deaths ranged from 20 to an even more horrifying 856. White officials jailed hundreds of black workers, torturing some of them. Twelve black men were charged with first-degree murder. Their legal battles lasted six years, but national and local silence has persisted much longer.

Stockley takes on this silence and shows that it resulted from sustained official efforts to convince the public that only blacks who had resisted lawful authority were killed. He shows too that it is part of a larger silence in which the fear and terror that were the daily staples of the African American experience have been summed up all too easily in the term "Jim Crow" in a failure to fully confront the anguish of the period.
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Blood, Ink, and Culture
Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition
Roger Bartra
Duke University Press, 2002
Pens and swords, words and blows: for Roger Bartra, the culture of ink and the culture of blood offer two contrasting approaches to the political transformations of our time. In this compilation of essays, Bartra thinks through these transformations by tracing the complex interplay between popular culture, nationalist ideology, civil society, and the state in contemporary Mexico.

Written with verve over a period of twenty years, these essays—most translated into English here for the first time—suggest why Bartra has become one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from the canonical forms of Mexican culture to the meaning of postnational identity in a globalizing age, from the repercussions of the 1994 Zapatista uprising to the 2000 election of Vicente Fox and the end of the PRI’s seven-decade rule. Across this range of topics, Bartra imparts astute insights into a critical period of transition in Mexican history, stressing throughout the importance of democracy, the complexity of identity, and the vibrancy of the Left. In Blood, Ink, and Culture, he provides a stimulating inside look at political and intellectual life in the southern reaches of North America.

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Blood is the Life
Vampires in Literature
Leonard G. Heldreth
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
Today the vampire is a major cultural icon and can be found in breakfast foods, comics, television, computer games, films, and books from academic studies to best-selling novels. While readers may be familiar with such figures as Dracula and Lestat, few are aware of the range of the vampire legacy that stretches from the early nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth. The essays in this volume use a humanistic viewpoint to explore the evolution and significance of the vampire in literature. Contributors examine—besides Dracula—characters such as Lord Ruthven, Carmilla Karnstein, Stephen King’s Kurt Barlow, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, and Anne Rice’s recoded vampires. Other authors investigated include George R. R. Martin, Brian Stableford, Kim Newman, Colin Wilson, Poppy Z. Brite, and Tanith Lee.
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Blood Kin
A Novel
Mark Powell
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
Set in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the late summer of 1970, Blood Kin tells the story of the Burden family and the community of outcasts that surrounds them. James Burden is the eldest son in the Burden family. A Korean War veteran and former prisoner-of-war, he struggles with inner demons and drug addiction. He has returned home after almost two decades of absence to find his family members consumed with struggles all their own. His former wife is haunted by her thoughts of an unborn child. His brothers, both Vietnam veterans, are troubled by their experiences there. Roy Burden returned a hero, while Enis Burden saw no combat at all. The younger brothers are also dealing with troubles with love and the hopes of starting their own families. James’s father is himself disturbed by his memories of his own father’s dark deeds and death. And James’s mother is plagued by worry for her husband and sons. The Burdens face their struggles within a community of misfits, including a reluctant sheriff, a runaway thief, a forgotten fire-talker, a religious con man and his actress girlfriend, a local apple baron, and a failed prophet. All of them are living on the fringes of a rural South racing toward a middle-class modernity that has little use for any of them. Blood Kin was awarded the 2005 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, an award named for one of the South’s most celebrated writers. The annual prize, co-sponsored by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the University of Tennessee Press, endeavors to bring to light novels of high literary quality, thereby honoring Peter Taylor’s own practice of assisting writers who care about the craft of fiction.
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The Blood Libel Legend
A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore
Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history.  According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah.  Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend.   Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. 
      The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances,  and twentieth-century American cases.  The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different  locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” 
    These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend.  The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend.  The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the  belief system that Christians developed about Jews.
    This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

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Blood Libel
On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth
Magda Teter
Harvard University Press, 2019

A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today.

Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived.

Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions.

The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.

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Blood Libel
The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History
Hannah R. Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2012

The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.

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Blood Lines
Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature
By Sheila Marie Contreras
University of Texas Press, 2008

2009 — Runner-up, Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature examines a broad array of texts that have contributed to the formation of an indigenous strand of Chicano cultural politics. In particular, this book exposes the ethnographic and poetic discourses that shaped the aesthetics and stylistics of Chicano nationalism and Chicana feminism. Contreras offers original perspectives on writers ranging from Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa to Lorna Dee Cervantes and Alma Luz Villanueva, effectively marking the invocation of a Chicano indigeneity whose foundations and formulations can be linked to U.S. and British modernist writing.

By highlighting intertextualities such as those between Anzaldúa and D. H. Lawrence, Contreras critiques the resilience of primitivism in the Mexican borderlands. She questions established cultural perspectives on "the native," which paradoxically challenge and reaffirm racialized representations of Indians in the Americas. In doing so, Blood Lines brings a new understanding to the contradictory and richly textured literary relationship that links the projects of European modernism and Anglo-American authors, on the one hand, and the imaginary of the post-revolutionary Mexican state and Chicano/a writers, on the other hand.

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Blood Loss
A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art
Keiko Lane
Duke University Press, 2024
In 1991, 16-year-old activist Keiko Lane joined the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP. They protested against legislation aimed at dismantling rights for LGBTQ people, people living with HIV, and immigrants, while fighting for needle exchange programs, reproductive justice, safer sex education, hospice funding, and the right to die with dignity. At the same time, they were a queer chosen family of friends and lovers who took care of one another in sickness and in health. Sometimes they helped each other die. By the time Lane turned 22, most of them had died of AIDS. In her evocative memoir, Lane weaves together the love stories and afterlives of queer resistance and survival, against the landscape of the Rodney King Rebellion, the movement for queer rights, and the censorship of queer artists and sexualities. Lane interrogates the social construction of power against and in queer communities of color, and the recovery of sexual agency in the midst and aftermath of violence. Luminous and powerfully moving, Blood Loss explores survival after those we love have died.
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Blood Memory
Colleen J. McElroy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Blood Memory, Colleen J. McElroy's collection of narrative poetry, emerges from deep seated memories with enormous emotion. Through the rhythms and musicality unique to McElroy's voice, it portrays an extended family, a complex culture spanning several decades, multiple victories and failures, and a single brilliant soul that frames the poems.  Dedicated to McElroy's mother, the book is universal in its scope, inescapable in its earthy particularity.  McElroy writes, “I am the last female of a family/ of women who wove the fabric/ of stories into doilies and slip covers…/" Blood Memory offers consummate storytelling and unforgettable poetry capturing a place and time gone forever. And as an evolving history, the poetry has a cinematic quality, large and intimate and at the same time, characters utterly vivid.
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Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold
Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance
Rebecca Zorach
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance. With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how, eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess.
 
Throughout the book, abundance and excess flow in liquids-blood, milk, ink, and gold-that highlight the materiality of objects and the human body, and explore the value (and values) accorded to them. The arts of the lavish royal court at Fontainebleau and in urban centers are here explored in a vibrant tableau that illuminates our own contemporary relationship to excess and desire.
 
From marvelous works by Francois Clouet to oversexed ornamental prints to Benvenuto Cellini's golden saltcellar fashioned for Francis I, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold covers an astounding range of subjects with precision and panache, producing the most lucid, well-rounded portrait of the cultural politics of the French Renaissance to date.
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Blood Mysteries
Dixie Salazar
University of Arizona Press, 2003
A Jehovah's Witness is stabbed in her home by a stranger she once allowed in. A homeless woman masturbates on a park bench. A statue of the Virgin Mary, "plaster receptacle of petitions and foolish pleas," is found in a dump, a missing hand suggesting the sound of a one-handed rosary.

Through images brutally honest and disarmingly off-center, Dixie Salazar explores the hidden lives of everyday people, objects, and experiences—and their transformation in the hidden realms of the heart. Charting furious descents into the darkest crevices of our souls, Salazar paints for us a lost city that exists below our mundane consciousness. Blood Mysteries is a tribute to lost souls, from a suicidal mental patient who doesn't believe she exists—"melting out of a landscape spotted with shadows, washing her hands in an empty basin of light"—to Marilyn Monroe, victim even in the morgue. In finely tuned lyricism showing an uncanny grasp of frayed lives, she gives flesh and vitality to women normally encountered only as statistics. The incarcerated, the homeless, the hopeless. Missing young girls who turn up violated and murdered.

Salazar presents us with blood mysteries not only of women, but of family as well. In poems invoking her dual heritage, she explores the identity crises brought on by having a Spanish father and a mother from the deep South, leaving her a product of American meltdown with a predisposition to check "other" for race on applications. "Other can be a place," she reminds us, "a residence for those of us without / papers, where halos of lightning bugs / swarm the rickety family tree." Salazar writes with toughness and grit "for all the shipwrecked saints / and wretches among us." But beneath the surface of words sometimes gritty, sometimes playful, lies a testament to the power of empathy, giving voice to those whose voices have been stifled and offering hope for those who have found none. Blood Mysteries is a forceful prayer for the disenfranchised that offers not merely hope, but transcendence.
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Blood Narrative
Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts
Chadwick Allen
Duke University Press, 2002
Blood Narrative is a comparative literary and cultural study of post-World War II literary and activist texts by New Zealand Maori and American Indians—groups who share much in their responses to European settler colonialism. Chadwick Allen reveals the complex narrative tactics employed by writers and activists in these societies that enabled them to realize unprecedented practical power in making both their voices and their own sense of indigeneity heard.
Allen shows how both Maori and Native Americans resisted the assimilationist tide rising out of World War II and how, in the 1960s and 1970s, they each experienced a renaissance of political and cultural activism and literary production that culminated in the formation of the first general assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. He focuses his comparison on two fronts: first, the blood/land/memory complex that refers to these groups' struggles to define indigeneity and to be freed from the definitions of authenticity imposed by dominant settler cultures. Allen's second focus is on the discourse of treaties between American Indians and the U.S. government and between Maori and Great Britain, which he contends offers strong legal and moral bases from which these indigenous minorities can argue land and resource rights as well as cultural and identity politics.
With its implicit critique of multiculturalism and of postcolonial studies that have tended to neglect the colonized status of indigenous First World minorities, Blood Narrative will appeal to students and scholars of literature, American and European history, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and comparative cultural studies.
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The Blood of Abraham
Insights into the Middle East
Jimmy Carter
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
In The Blood of Abraham, originally published in 1985 with updates to the afterword in 1993 and 2007, President Carter explains his understanding of the Middle East and seeks to provide an enlightening and reconciling vision for greater peace in the region.
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Blood of Brothers
Life and War in Nicaragua, With New Afterword
Stephen Kinzer
Harvard University Press, 2007

In 1976, at age twenty-five, Stephen Kinzer arrived in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist—and became a witness to history. He returned many times during the years that followed, becoming Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe in 1981 and joining the foreign staff of the New York Times in 1983. That year he opened the New York Times Managua bureau, making that newspaper the first daily in America to maintain a full-time office in Nicaragua.

Widely considered the best-connected journalist in Central America, Kinzer personally met and interviewed people at every level of the Somoza, Sandinistas and contra hierarchies, as well as dissidents, heads of state, and countless ordinary citizens throughout the region.

Blood of Brothers is Kinzer’s dramatic story of the centuries-old power struggle that burst into the headlines in 1979 with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. It is a vibrant portrait of the Nicaraguan people and their volcanic land, a cultural history rich in poetry and bloodshed, baseball and insurrection.

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The Blood of Guatemala
A History of Race and Nation
Greg Grandin
Duke University Press, 2000
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades.
Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants.
This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.
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Blood of Mugwump
A Tiresian Tale of Incest
Doug Rice
University of Alabama Press, 1996
Rice's parasitical language is akin to the acts of those naked 18th century pirates of desire. In Blood of Mugwump, Rice cannibalizes the likes of Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, Eliot, and a whole host of angelic others. Now trapped inside a kinetic body that is always changing from male to female, Doug Rice (the youngest Mugwump) sets out to discover himself in his sister's body. All the while the familial matriarch, Grandma Mugwump, feeds on the flesh of young Doug. Once through the looking glass, Doug realizes that Caddie (his polysexual Faulknerian nightmare of a sister) is more terrifying and holy than the average saint. A frenzied sexual virus, genetically conveyed, mutates and possesses the meat of Doug's and Caddie's bodies forcing them to love each other in unspeakable, yet classical, ways. 
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Blood Of Requited Love
Manuel Puig
University of Minnesota Press, 1999


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