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Beethoven Essays
Maynard Solomon
Harvard University Press

Maynard Solomon is the author of a classic biography of Beethoven which has become a standard work throughout the world, having been translated into seven languages. In Beethoven Essays, he continues his exploration of Beethoven’s inner life, visionary outlook, and creativity, in a series of profound studies of this colossal figure of our civilization.

Solomon deftly fuses a variety of investigative approaches, from rigorous historical and ideological studies to imaginative musical and psychoanalytic speculations. Thus, after closely documenting Beethoven’s birth and illegitimacy fantasies, his “Family Romance,” and his pretense of nobility, Solomon offers extraordinary interpretations of the composer’s dreams, deafness, and obsessive relationship to his nephew. And, following his detailed uncovering of a complex network of recurrent patterns in the Ninth Symphony, he considers the narrative and mythic implications of Beethoven’s formal design.

Solomon examines the broad patterns of Beethoven’s creative evolution and processes of composition, the radical modernism of his music, and his intellectual, religious, and utopian strivings. A separate section on the “Immortal Beloved” includes the fullest biography of Antonia Brentano yet published. Closing the volume is Solomon’s translation and annotated edition of Beethoven’s Tagebuch, the moving, intimate diary that the composer kept during the critical period that culminated in his last style. Here, as throughout Beethoven Essays, Solomon offers scholarship that is at the cutting edge of Beethoven research.

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Beethoven Essays
Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes
Lewis Lockwood
Harvard University Press, 1984
Significant new insights into Beethoven's life and style are offered in this volume in honor of Elliot Forbes, whose revision of Thayer's Life of Beethoven is the standard modern edition of that classic. Essays by James Webster, Martin Staehelin, Alan Tyson, Maynard Solomon, and Michael Ochs look carefully at aspects of Beethoven's career and also deal with Thayer and his work as biographer. Studies of individual works include Edward T. Cone's completion of an unfinished cadenza for the First Piano Concerto and Geoffrey Block's look at sources for the Second Piano Concerto. Sieghard Brandenburg provides an essay on the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony based on an exhaustive scrutiny of its sources. Christopher Reynolds writes on the Violin Sonata Op. 30, no. 1. J. Merrill Knapp contributes an article on the Mass in C major, Op. 86, and Robert Winter discusses the origins of the Missa solemnis, Op. 123.
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Beethoven for a Later Age
Living with the String Quartets
Edward Dusinberre
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces of music ever written. Originally composed and performed between 1798 and 1826, they have inspired artists of all kinds—not only musicians—and have been subject to endless reinterpretation. But what is it like to personally take up the challenge of these compositions, not only as a musician, but as a member of a quartet, where each player has ideas about style and expression? To answer this question, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the renowned Takács Quartet, offers a rare peek inside the workings of his ensemble, while providing an insightful history of the compositions and their performance.

Founded in Hungary in 1975 and now based in Boulder, Colorado, the Takács is one of the world’s preeminent string quartets, and performances of Beethoven have been at the center of their work together for over forty years. Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as a foundation, Beethoven for a Later Age provides a backstage look at the daily life of a quartet, showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group and how four people can at the same time forge a lasting artistic connection and enjoy making music together over decades. The key, Dusinberre reveals, to a quartet crafting its own sound is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation—a theme that lies at the heart of Beethoven’s remarkable compositions. In an accessible style, suitable for novices and chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety and contradictions of Beethoven's quartets, which were composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and he brings the technical aspects of the music to life.

Beethoven for a Later Age vividly shows that creative engagement with Beethoven’s radical and brilliant quartets continues to be as stimulating now as it was for its first performers and audiences. Musicians and music lovers will be intrigued by Dusinberre’s exploration of the close collaboration at the heart of any great performance.
 
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Beethoven in Beijing
Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China
Jennifer Lin
Temple University Press, 2022

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. 

A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China—now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

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Beethoven
Studies in the Creative Processes
Lewis Lockwood
Harvard University Press, 1992

It is well known that Mozart developed his works in his head and then simply transcribed them onto paper, while Beethoven labored assiduously over sketches and drafts--"his first ideas," in Stephen Spender's words, "of a clumsiness which makes scholars marvel at how he could, at the end, have developed from them such miraculous results." Indeed Beethoven's extensive sketchbooks (which total over 8,000 pages) and the autograph manuscripts, covering several stages of development, reveal the composer systematically exploring and evolving his musical ideas.

Through close investigation of individual works, Lewis Lockwood traces the creative process as it emerges in Beethoven's sketches and manuscripts. Four studies address the composition of the Eroica Symphony from various viewpoints. The chamber works discussed include the Cello Sonata in A Major, Opus 69 (of which the entire autograph manuscript of the first movement is published here in facsimile), the string quartet Opus 59 No. 1, and the Cavatina of the later quartet Opus 130. Lockwood's lucid analysis enhances our understanding of Beethoven's musical strategies and stylistic developments as well as the compositional process itself In a final chapter the author outlines the importance of Beethoven's autographs for the modern performer.

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The Beethoven Violin Sonatas
History, Criticism, Performance
Edited by Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Beethoven's ten violin sonatas have long been cornerstones of the chamber music repertoire. The "Spring" and "Kreutzer" sonatas are the best known of these works, which stand at the pinnacle of music for violin and piano.
 
Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll's volume The Beethoven Violin Sonatas is the first scholarly book in English devoted exclusively to the Beethoven sonatas, and deals with them in unprecedented depth. It presents seven critical and historical essays by some of the most important American and European Beethoven specialists of our time. The authors examine the sonatas within the history of the genre, the social and cultural context in which they were written, their significance within Beethoven's life and works, and the issues they raise regarding performance practices of the period.
 
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Beethoven's French Piano
A Tale of Ambition and Frustration
Tom Beghin
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Using a replica of Beethoven’s Erard piano, scholar and performer Tom Beghin launches a striking reinterpretation of a key period of Beethoven’s work.

In 1803 Beethoven acquired a French piano from the Erard Frères workshop in Paris. The composer was “so enchanted with it,” one visitor reported, “that he regards all the pianos made here as rubbish by comparison.” While Beethoven loved its sound, the touch of the French keyboard was much heavier than that of the Viennese pianos he had been used to. Hoping to overcome this drawback, he commissioned a local technician to undertake a series of revisions, with ultimately disappointing results. Beethoven set aside the Erard piano for good in 1810.
 
Beethoven’s French Piano returns the reader to this period of Beethoven’s enthusiasm for all things French. What traces of the Erard’s presence can be found in piano sonatas like his “Waldstein” and “Appassionata”? To answer this question, Tom Beghin worked with a team of historians and musicians to commission the making of an accurate replica of the Erard piano. As both a scholar and a recording artist, Beghin is uniquely positioned to guide us through this key period of Beethoven’s work. Whether buried in archives, investigating the output of the French pianists who so fascinated Beethoven, or seated at the keyboard of his Erard, Beghin thinks and feels his way into the mind of the composer, bringing startling new insights into some of the best-known piano compositions of all time.
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Beethoven's Ninth
A Political History
Esteban Buch
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Who hasn't been stirred by the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That's a good question, claims Esteban Buch. German nationalists and French republicans, communists and Catholics have all, in the course of history, embraced the piece. It was performed under the direction of Leonard Bernstein at a concert to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it also serves as a ghastly and ironic leitmotif in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Hitler celebrated his birthdays with it, and the government of Rhodesia made it their anthem. And played in German concentration camps by the imprisoned, it also figured prominently at Mitterand's 1981 investiture.

In his remarkable history of one of the most popular symphonic works of the modern period, Buch traces such complex and contradictory uses—and abuses—of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony since its premier in 1824. Buch shows that Beethoven consciously drew on the tradition of European political music, with its mix of sacred and profane, military and religious themes, when he composed his symphony. But while Beethoven obviously had his own political aspirations for the piece—he wanted it to make a statement about ideal power—he could not have had any idea of the antithetical political uses, nationalist and universalist, to which the Ninth Symphony has been put since its creation. Buch shows us how the symphony has been "deployed" throughout nearly two centuries, and in the course of this exploration offers what was described by one French reviewer as "a fundamental examination of the moral value of art." Sensitive and fascinating, this account of the tangled political existence of a symphony is a rare book that shows the life of an artwork through time, shifted and realigned with the currents of history.
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Beethoven's Symphonies
Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas
Martin Geck
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven’s work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven’s Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer’s approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output.

Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven’s intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon’s decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements—a pitch, a chord, a musical theme—that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew.

Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history’s greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.
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Beetle
Adam Dodd
Reaktion Books, 2015
Ancient and strange, beetles call to mind a lost world of Egyptian magic and belief—a reminder of the fascination they’ve long held for human culture. In Beetle, Adam Dodd offers a richly illustrated, engaging account of the natural and cultural history of the beetle, from its origins more than two hundred and fifty million years ago to the present, when its anatomy is inspiring cutting-edge developments in cybernetics. Along the way, Dodd explores the incredible variety of beetles on earth—there are more than 350,000 species—and their amazing ability to exploit nature’s niches. He also takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of the countless ways that beetles have infiltrated our art, folklore, literature, and religious beliefs. Stolid, secretive, and still-mysterious, beetles continue to exert a powerful pull on naturalists and collectors today, and no beetle fanatic will want to miss Dodd’s winning appreciation of their history.
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The Befana Is Returning
The Story of a Tuscan Festival
Steve Siporin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
On the night of January 5, in certain areas of southern Tuscany, a costumed, singing troupe of characters visits residents’ homes, expecting to be fed and feted in a folk custom that has recurred in the region for centuries. This is the Befanata, a mumming tradition centered in Tuscany, whose main character—the Befana—is a kindly old woman or grandmotherly witch who delivers toys, candies, and gifts. Part of the Christmas season, the Befana is familiar in some form in much of Italy, but very little has been written about her, despite sustained interest in European mumming traditions in general.
 
The Pigitliano Befanata is distinct in its emphasis on song and strong in its richly symbolic use of food, which is not only consumed at each home but is also carried away as a gift. The characters who make up the squad are unique to the Italian practice. They always include the Befana and her husband, the Befano, but other members of the befanotti vary from place to place over time. Siporin combines fieldwork and archival evidence to introduce the Befanata and its historical and social contexts: what it is, what it means, and how it feels. The Befana Is Returning is a deeply researched, deftly insightful presentation of this living tradition that adds a large missing piece to the array of contemporary ethnographic scholarship on mumming.
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Before Amoris Laetitia
The Sources of the Controversy
Jaroslaw Kupczak
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The publication of Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia started the most important theological debate in the Catholic Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The cardinals, bishops, theologians, priests, lay Catholics found themselves on the opposite sides of this crucial and complicated discussion. This book attempts to shed some light on this debate by tracing its genealogy. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal document, the large part of the book is devoted to the theological analysis of the two Synods of Bishops convoked by Pope Francis in the first years of his pontificate: the extraordinary in October 2014 and the ordinary that took place a year later. The main topics for the two synods were determined, however, in the speech given by Cardinal Walter Kasper during the cardinals consistory in February 2014 whose main aim was to prepare the possibility of admitting divorced persons who live in second unions to Holy Communion. The arguments of Cardinal Kasper are presented in the first chapter of the book and confronted with the most significant statements of the Magisterium of the Church on the issue of admittance to the Holy Communion. This book is a study at the intersection of Church history, the history of theology, and systematic theology: dogmatic and moral. Kupczak is interested in the chronology of the events connected to the two synods on the family but in the context of theological problems discussed therein: the theological significance of contemporary cultural changes; the relation of the Church to the world; the understanding of the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage and the Eucharist; the methods of ethically assessing human acts, particularly the concept of so-called intrinsically evil acts (intrinsece malum); and the relation of conscience to the general moral norm. The non-partisan ambition of this book is to serve as a “road map”— a help in navigation for the reader in the complicated discussions leading to publication of Amoris Laetitia. The uniqueness of this book consists in combining the historical analysis of the events leading to the publication of Amoris Laetitia with research of the theological discussion that ensued. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal exhortation, this book rests on the assumption that crucial for its understanding is a thorough analysis of its genealogy. Only in the light of this historical and theological perspective the debates surrounding Amoris Laetitia may be understood.
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Before and After an Oil Spill
The Arthur Kill
Burger, Joanna
Rutgers University Press, 1994

In January 1990, the New York Harbor suffered a major oil spill when an underwater pipe at an Exxon refinery leaked into the Arthur Kill, the fifteen-mile strait that runs between New Jersey and Staten Island. The waterway is home to herons and egrets, fiddler crabs and sea turtles, and a favorite place for recreational fishing, bird-watching, hiking, and boating. It is also lined with refineries and a busy corridor for oil tankers. Because this industrial activity posed such an imposing threat to the fragile ecosystem, biologists had been monitoring the region’s water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife for some time before the oil spill. Thus, we have before -and-after data about the habitat—the only oil spill anywhere for which this is true.

This unique book discusses the human consequences of the oil spill as well as providing detailed studies of its effects on the plants and animals of the Arthur Kill. Biologists, environmentalists, lawyers, and officials worldwide will find this book an essential guide to dealing with—and possibly preventing—future environmental disasters.

The contributors areJohn Brzorad, Angela Christini, Keith Cooper, Lynn Frink, Michael Gochfeld, Paul Hauge, Gordon Johnson,  Alan D. Maccarone, Katherine Parsons, Carolyn Summers, Robert Tucker.

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Before and After Gender
Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life
Marilyn Strathern
HAU, 2016
Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.
             
Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.
 
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Before and Beyond Divergence
The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong
Harvard University Press, 2011

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China?

Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization.

Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.

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Before Auschwitz
Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps
Kim Wünschmann
Harvard University Press, 2015

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.

Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.

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Before, Between, and Beyond
Three Decades of Dance Writing
Sally Banes; Edited and with an introduction by Andrea Harris
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Sally Banes has been a preeminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and Before, Between, Beyond spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on Geroge Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes's detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance between description, context, and opinion, delineating the American artistic scene with remarkable grace. With contextualizing essays by dance scholars Andrea Harris, Joan Acocella, and Lynn Garafola, this is a compelling, insightful indispensable summation of Banes's critical career.
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Before Big Science
The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940
Mary Jo Nye
Harvard University Press, 1996

Today's vast multinational scientific monoliths bear little resemblance to the modest laboratories of the early nineteenth century. Yet early in the nineteenth century--when heat and electricity were still counted among the elements--changes were already under way that would revolutionize chemistry and physics into the "big science" of the late twentieth century, expanding tiny, makeshift laboratories into bustling research institutes and replacing the scientific amateurs and generalist savants of the early Victorian era with the professional specialists of contemporary physical science.

Mary Jo Nye traces the social and intellectual history of the physical sciences from the early 1800s to the beginning of the Second World War, examining the sweeping transformation of scientific institutions and professions during the period and the groundbreaking experiments that fueled that change, from the earliest investigations of molecular chemistry and field dynamics to the revolutionary breakthroughs of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and nuclear science.

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Before Birth
Prenatal Testing for Genetic Disease
Elena Nightingale and Melissa Goodman
Harvard University Press, 1990

Information on prenatal testing abounds, but few books are addressed to prospective parents in need of practical guidance. In this comprehensive and sensitive account, Elena Nightingale and Melissa Goodman offer remarkably clear answers to the set of bewildering questions generated by the concerns of parenthood.

Prospective parents are given the guidance needed to make informed choices about whether or not to undergo testing and, if they elect to do so, how best to use the results. As humans, we are recipients of a rich genetic heritage. Each human cell contains 46 chromosomes with a total of 50,000 to 100,000 genes distributed among them. Such richness carries immense possibilities for error when gene replication occurs; it is therefore not surprising that gene disorders such as Down syndrome, Huntington's disease, and neural tube defects pose a major public health problem. Rapid development of sophisticated new techniques has vastly increased our ability to diagnose genetic disorders during the prenatal period. For example, the amniotic fluid sampled in the middle trimester can be tested for such biochemical abnormalities as Tay-Sachs disease. The advent of more recent techniques, such as sampling the cells of the villi of the chorion (a procedure that can be carried out in the first trimester), employing gene probes, and using ultrasonographic detection, has advanced the diagnosis of genetic disorders faster than most researchers would have thought possible.

Nightingale and Goodman carefully explain the practicalities of this potentially confusing array of prenatal tests: how they are performed, what they reveal, and what their limitations are. The book concludes with a thoughtful consideration of the economic, ethical, and legal issues related to prenatal screening. Although primarily intended to assist prospective parents, this volume is also of interest to health care providers, public health officials, and policymakers who struggle with these difficult decisions.

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Before Brown
Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South
Glenn Feldman
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Details the ferment in civil rights that took place across the South before the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954

This collection refutes the notion that the movement began with the Supreme Court decision, and suggests, rather, that the movement originated in the 1930s and earlier, spurred by the Great Depression and, later, World War II—events that would radically shape the course of politics in the South and the nation into the next century.

This work explores the growth of the movement through its various manifestations—the activities of politicians, civil rights leaders, religious figures, labor unionists, and grass-roots activists—throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the critical leadership roles played by women and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the NAACP and the Communist Party.

Before Brown shows clearly that, as the drive toward racial equality advanced and national political attitudes shifted, the validity of white supremacy came increasingly into question. Institutionalized racism in the South had always offered white citizens material advantages by preserving their economic superiority and making them feel part of a privileged class. When these rewards were threatened by the civil rights movement, a white backlash occurred.

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Before Brown
Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice
By Gary M. Lavergne
University of Texas Press, 2010

Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History, Texas State Historical Association, 2010
Carr P. Collins Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 2011

On February 26, 1946, an African American from Houston applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law. Although he met all of the school's academic qualifications, Heman Marion Sweatt was denied admission because he was black. He challenged the university's decision in court, and the resulting case, Sweatt v. Painter, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Sweatt's favor. The Sweatt case paved the way for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka rulings that finally opened the doors to higher education for all African Americans and desegregated public education in the United States.

In this engrossing, well-researched book, Gary M. Lavergne tells the fascinating story of Heman Sweatt's struggle for justice and how it became a milestone for the civil rights movement. He reveals that Sweatt was a central player in a master plan conceived by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for ending racial segregation in the United States. Lavergne masterfully describes how the NAACP used the Sweatt case to practically invalidate the "separate but equal" doctrine that had undergirded segregated education for decades. He also shows how the Sweatt case advanced the career of Thurgood Marshall, whose advocacy of Sweatt taught him valuable lessons that he used to win the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and ultimately led to his becoming the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

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Before Color Prejudice
The Ancient View of Blacks
Frank M. Snowden
Harvard University Press

In this richly illustrated account of black–white contacts from the Pharaohs to the Caesars, Frank Snowden demonstrates that the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because of their color.

For three thousand years Mediterranean whites intermittently came in contact with African blacks in commerce and war, and left a record of these encounters in art and in written documents. The blacks—most commonly known as Kushites, Ethiopians, or Nubians—were redoubtable warriors and commanded the respect of their white adversaries. The overall view of blacks was highly favorable. In science, philosophy, and religion color was not the basis of theories concerning inferior peoples. And early Christianity saw in the black man a dramatic symbol of its catholic mission.

This book sheds light on the reasons for the absence in antiquity of virulent color prejudice and for the difference in attitudes of whites toward blacks in ancient and modern societies.

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Before Crips
Fussin', Cussin', and Discussin' among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs
John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani
Temple University Press, 2022

This groundbreaking book opens the door on the missing record of South Los Angeles juvenile gangs. It is the result of the unique friendship that developed between John Quicker and Akil Batani-Khalfani, aka Bird, who collaborated to show how structural marginality transformed hang-out street groups of non-White juveniles into gangs, paving the way for the rise of the infamous Crips and Bloods. Before Crips uses a macro historical analysis to sort through political and economic factors to explain the nature of gang creation.

The authors mine a critical archive, using direct interviews with original gang members as well as theory and literature reviews, to contextualize gang life and gang formation. They discuss (and fuss and cuss about) topics ranging from the criminal economy and conceptions of masculinity to racial and gendered politics and views of violence. Their insider/outsider approach not only illuminates gang values and organization, but what they did and why, and how they grew in a backdrop of inequality and police brutality that came to a head with the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

Providing an essential understanding of early South Los Angeles gang life, Before Crips explains what has remained constant, what has changed, and the roots of the violence that continues.

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Before Cultures
The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920
Brad Evans
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910—more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America.

In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings alive not only the regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketchbooks of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; popular magazines such as Century Illustrated Monthly, which published Cushing's articles alongside Henry James's; the debate between Joel Chandler Harris, author/collector of the Uncle Remus folktales, and John Wesley Powell, perhaps the most important American anthropologist of the time; and Du Bois's polemics against the culture concept as it was being developed in the early twentieth century.
Written with clarity and grace, Before Cultures will be of value to students of American literature, history, and anthropology alike.
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Before Disenchantment
Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World
Peter Mason
Reaktion Books, 2009

Imagine barnacle geese—creatures that begin life as leaves on a tree growing above water, but turn into small birds as soon as they fall in. Or the Lamb of Tartary that gestates inside a large gourd-like fruit.  These are just some of the animal and plant hybrids imagined by early modern explorers and artists to describe unfamiliar flora and fauna. 

            In Before Disenchantment, Peter Mason explores how naturalists grappled with the problem of representing exotic plants and animals, turning an analytic eye on the sketches of German adventurer Caspar Schmalkalden, the skilled artistic renderings of Peter Paul Rubens, the observations of Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen, and the antiquarian pursuits of Nicola Fabri de Peiresc, among others.

            Featuring one hundred illustrations of these unusual and captivating creatures—from camel-sheep to races of monopods and red-haired dwarves—Before Disenchantment goes beyond orthodox histories of scientific illustration and champions a sense of wonder often lost in the modern world.

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Before Fidel
The Cuba I Remember
By Francisco José Moreno
University of Texas Press, 2007

Before Fidel Castro seized power, Cuba was an ebullient and chaotic society in a permanent state of turmoil, combining a raucous tropical nature with the evils of arbitrary and corrupt government. Yet this fascinating period in Cuban history has been largely forgotten or misrepresented, even though it set the stage for Castro's dramatic takeover in 1959. To reclaim the Cuba that he knew—and add color and detail to the historical record—distinguished political scientist Francisco José Moreno here offers his recollections of the Cuba in which he came of age personally and politically.

Moreno takes us into the little-known world of privileged, upper-middle-class, white Cubans of the 1930s through the 1950s. His vivid depictions of life in the family and on the streets capture the distinctive rhythms of Cuban society and the dynamics between parents and children, men and women, and people of different races and classes. The heart of the book describes Moreno's political awakening, which culminated during his student years at the University of Havana. Moreno gives a detailed, insider's account of the anti-Batista movement, including the Ortodoxos and the Triple A. He recaptures the idealism and naiveté of the movement, as well as its ultimate ineffectiveness as it fell before the juggernaut of the Castro Revolution. His own disillusionment and wrenching decision to leave Cuba rather than accept a commission in Castro's army poignantly closes the book.

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Before Grenfell
Fire, Safety and Deregulation in Twentieth-Century Britain
Shane Ewen
University of London Press, 2023
An account of the systemic failures that led to the Grenfell tower fire.

The 2017 Grenfell tower fire in London was a “slow disaster,” the product of a long accumulation of faults and errors that resulted from erroneous assumptions and organizational and governmental decision-making. This book offers a critical perspective on the systematic failures that lead to one of the greatest tragedies in Britain in our time.
 
Before Grenfell is a poignant and timely analysis of risk, fire, and safety in postwar Britain. Tracing the evolution of state housing policy in relation to multistory housing since the mid-1950s, the book adds to a burgeoning history of the British experience of fire and safety in high-rises and investigates a latent housing crisis in contemporary Britain against a backdrop of increasingly deregulated urban building development. Drawing on public inquiries, newspaper accounts, and oral histories, Shane Ewen details other avoidable disasters, including the Ronan Point tower block explosion in 1968, the Summerland leisure center fire in 1972, and the Bradford City Football Club fire in 1985. The book closes with a powerful chapter on fire safety campaigners, including survivor groups, who are seeking justice for the victims of fire disasters. Before Grenfell aims to exert pressure on policy-makers to act on the lessons of fatal disasters in order to both prevent future casualties and establish a legacy for those who lost their lives.
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Before Harlem
An Anthology of African American Literature from the Long Nineteenth Century
Ajuan Maria Mance
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today’s readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance.
            As editor Ajuan Mance notes, previous collections have focused mainly on writing that found a significant audience among white readers. Consequently, authors whose work appeared in African American–owned publications for a primarily black audience—such as Solomon G. Brown, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune—have faded from memory. Even figures as celebrated as Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar are today much better known for their “cross-racial” writings than for the larger bodies of work they produced for a mostly African American readership. There has also been a tendency in modern canon making, especially in the genre of autobiography, to stress antebellum writing rather than writings produced after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Similarly, religious writings—despite the centrality of the church in the everyday lives of black readers and the interconnectedness of black spiritual and intellectual life—have not received the emphasis they deserve.
            Filling those critical gaps with a selection of 143 works by 65 writers, Before Harlem presents as never before an in-depth picture of the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century African America and will be a valuable resource for a new generation of readers.
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Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800
Khaled El-Rouayheb
University of Chicago Press, 2005

Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic—visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.

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Before Intimacy
Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England
Daniel Juan Gil
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Before the eighteenth-century rise of the ideology of intimacy, sexuality was defined not by social affiliations but by bodies. In Before Intimacy, Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but rather as “loopholes” in people’s experiences and associations. 

Engaging the poems of Wyatt, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Sonnets, Gil demonstrates how sexuality was conceived as a relationship system inhabited by men and women interchangeably—set apart from the “norm” and not institutionalized in a private or domestic realm. Going beyond the sodomy-as-transgression analytic, he asserts the existence of socially inconsequential sexual bonds while recognizing the pleasurable effects of violating the supposed traditional modes of bonding and ideals of universal humanity and social hierarchy. 

Celebrating the ability of corporeal emotions to interpret connections between people who share nothing in terms of societal structure, Before Intimacy shows how these works of early modern literature provide a discourse of sexuality that strives to understand status differences in erotic contexts and thereby question key assumptions of modernity. 

Daniel Juan Gil is assistant professor of English at TCU.
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Before It All Ends
Breathless Sonnets
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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Before Journalism Schools
How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules
Randall S. Sumpter
University of Missouri Press, 2018
Randall Sumpter questions the dominant notion that reporters entering the field in the late nineteenth century relied on an informal apprenticeship system to learn the rules of journalism. Drawing from the experiences of more than fifty reporters, he argues that cub reporters could and did access multiple sources of instruction, including autobiographies and memoirs of journalists, fiction, guidebooks, and trade magazines. Arguments for “professional journalism” did not resonate with the workaday journalists examined here. These news workers were more concerned with following a personal rather than a professional code of ethics, and implemented their own work rules. Some of those rules governed “delinquent” behavior. While scholars have traced some of the connections between beginning journalists and learning opportunities, Sumpter shows that much more can be discovered, with implications for understanding the development of journalistic professionalism and present-day instances of journalistic behavior.
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Before Kukulkán
Bioarchaeology of Maya Life, Death, and Identity at Classic Period Yaxuná
Vera Tiesler, Andrea Cucina, Travis W. Stanton, and David A. Freidel; Foreword by Traci Ardren
University of Arizona Press, 2017
This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. This period and area have been poorly understood on their own terms, obscured by scholarly focus on the central lowland Maya kingdoms. Before Kukulkán is anchored in three decades of interdisciplinary research at the Classic Maya capital of Yaxuná, located at a contentious crossroads of the northern Maya lowlands.

Using bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, and culturally sensitive mainstream archaeology, the authors create an in-depth regional understanding while also laying out broader ways of learning about the Maya past. Part 1 examines ancient lifeways among the Maya at Yaxuná, while part 2 explores different meanings of dying and cycling at the settlement and beyond: ancestral practices, royal entombment and desecration, and human sacrifice. The authors close with a discussion of the last years of occupation at Yaxuná and the role of Chichén Itzá in the abandonment of this urban center.

Before Kukulkán provides a cohesive synthesis of the evolving roles and collective identities of locals and foreigners at the settlement and their involvement in the region’s trajectory. Theoretically informed and contextualized discussions offer unique glimpses of everyday life and death in the socially fluid Maya city. These findings, in conjunction with other documented series of skeletal remains from this region, provide a nuanced picture of the social and biocultural dynamics that operated successfully for centuries before the arrival of the Itzá.
 
[more]

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Before Lawrence v. Texas
The Making of a Queer Social Movement
Wesley G. Phelps
University of Texas Press, 2022

2024 Carol Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association

The grassroots queer activism and legal challenges that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in favor of gay and lesbian equality.


In 2003 the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws across the country, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects private consensual sex between adults. To some, the decision seemed to come like lightning from above, altering the landscape of America’s sexual politics all at once. In actuality, many years of work and organizing led up to the legal case, and the landmark ruling might never have happened were it not for the passionate struggle of Texans who rejected their state’s discriminatory laws.

Before Lawrence v. Texas tells the story of the long, troubled, and ultimately hopeful road to constitutional change. Wesley G. Phelps describes the achievements, setbacks, and unlikely alliances along the way. Over the course of decades, and at great risk to themselves, gay and lesbian Texans and their supporters launched political campaigns and legal challenges, laying the groundwork for Lawrence. Phelps shares the personal experiences of the people and couples who contributed to the legal strategy that ultimately overturned the state’s discriminatory law. Even when their individual court cases were unsuccessful, justice seekers and activists collectively influenced public opinion by insisting that their voices be heard. Nine Supreme Court justices ruled, but it was grassroots politics that vindicated the ideal of equality under the law.

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Before March Madness
The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball
Kurt Edward Kemper
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own.

Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century—and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along—while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports.

An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.

[more]

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Before Mark Twain
A Sampler of Old, Old Times on the Mississippi
Edited by John Francis McDermott
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

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Before Mickey
The Animated Film 1898-1928
Donald Crafton
University of Chicago Press, 1993
This witty and fascinating study reminds us that there was animation before Disney: about thirty years of creativity and experimentation flourishing in such extraordinary work as Girdie the Dinosaur and Felix the Cat. Before Mickey, the first and only in-depth history of animation from 1898-1928, includes accounts of mechanical ingenuity, marketing and art. Crafton is equally adept at explaining techniques of sketching and camera work, evoking characteristic styles of such pioneering animators as Winsor McCay and Ladislas Starevitch, placing work in its social and economic context, and unraveling the aesthetic impact of specific cartoons.

"Before Mickey's scholarship is quite lively and its descriptions are evocative and often funny. The history of animation coexisted with that of live-action film but has never been given as much attention."—Tim Hunter, New York Times

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Before Nature
Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science
Francesca Rochberg
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it.
 
Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.
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Before Norms
Institutions and Civic Culture
Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The potato famines of the nineteenth century were long attributed to Irish indolence. The Stalinist system was blamed on a Russian proclivity for autocracy. Muslim men have been accused of an inclination to terrorism. Is political behavior really the result of cultural upbringing, or does the vast range of human political action stem more from institutional and structural constraints?
This important new book carefully examines the role of institutions and civic culture in the establishment of political norms. Jackman and Miller methodically refute the Weberian cultural theory of politics and build in its place a persuasive case for the ways in which institutions shape the political behavior of ordinary citizens. Their rigorous examination of grassroots electoral participation reveals no evidence for even a residual effect of cultural values on political behavior, but instead provides consistent support for the institutional view. Before Norms speaks to urgent debates among political scientists and sociologists over the origins of individual political behavior.
Robert W. Jackman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. Ross A. Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University.
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Before Orthodoxy
The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
Shahab Ahmed
Harvard University Press, 2017

One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims today—of all sects—deny that the incident of the Satanic verses took place. But as Shahab Ahmed explains, Muslims did not always hold this view.

Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth—especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah.

Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do—issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.

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Before Pictures
Douglas Crimp
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp’s own formative experiences before “Pictures.”

Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS.

Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.
 
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Before Porn Was Legal
The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse
Elizabeth Heineman
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Struggling to survive in post­–World War II Germany, Beate Uhse (1919–2001)—a former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and young mother—turned to selling goods on the black market. A self-penned guide to the rhythm method found eager buyers and started Uhse on her path to becoming the world’s largest erotica entrepreneur. Battling restrictive legislation, powerful churches, and conservative social mores, she built a mail-order business in the 1950s that sold condoms, sex aids, self-help books, and more. The following decades brought the world’s first erotica shop, the legalization of pornography, the expansion of her business into eastern Germany, and web-based commerce.

Uhse was only one of many erotica entrepreneurs who played a role in the social and sexual revolution accompanying Germany’s transition from Nazism to liberal democracy. Tracing the activities of entrepreneurs, customers, government officials, and citizen-activists, Before Porn Was Legal brings to light the profound social, legal, and cultural changes that attended the growth of the erotica sector. Heineman’s innovative readings of governmental and industry records, oral histories, and the erotica industry’s products uncover the roots of today’s sexual marketplace and reveal the indelible ways in which sexual expression and consumption have become intertwined.

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BEFORE READING
NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS AND THE POLITICS O
PETER J. RABINOWITZ
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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Before Renaissance
Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943
John F. Bauman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Before Renaissance examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh.

Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh.

Over the years a mélange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh’s Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh’s prior planning experience.

John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city’s long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.

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Before Roe
Abortion Policy in the States
Rosemary Nossiff
Temple University Press, 2000
Few issues in contemporary U.S> politics have remained on the public agenda so long and so divisively as abortion policy. The landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Waade, which held that laws prohibiting first trimester abortions were illegal because they violated a woman's right to privacy, still generates heated controversy today, a quarter of a century after it was made. The seeds of that controversy were sown in the seven years immediately preceding Roe, when state legislatures tried to reconcile religious opposition to abortion and individuals' civil liberties.

In this groundbreaking book, Rosemary Nossiff examines the force that shaped abortion policy during those years, and the ways in which states responded to them. To provide in-depth analysis while still looking broadly at the picture, she studies New York, which passed the  most permissive abortion bill in the country, and Pennsylvania, which passed one of the most restrictive. That these two states, which share similar demographic, political, and  economic characteristics, should reach two such different outcomes provides a perfect case study for observing political dynamics at the state level.

Nossiff examines the medical, religious, and legal discourses employed on both sides of the debate, as well as the role played by feminist discourse. She looks at the role of the political parties in the campaigns, as well as such interest groups as the National Council of Catholic Bishops, the Clergy Consultation Service, the National Organization for Women, and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. In addition, she analyzes the strategies used by both sides, as well as partisan and institutionalized developments that facilitated success or failure. Finally, in the Epilogue, she assesses the Roe decision and its aftermath, including an analysis of the pro-life movement in Pennsylvania.

As the author remarks, "Without question people's positions on abortion are shaped by a myriad of social, moral, and economic factors. But ultimately abortion policy is shaped in the political arena. This book examines how one of the most intimate decisions a woman makes, whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, has become one of the most politicized issues in contemporary American politics.
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Before Shaughnessy
Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960
Kelly Ritter
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960, Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students.

Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century.  She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge.

Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students.

 

 

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Before the Ballot
Building Political Support for Library Funding
John Chrastka
American Library Association, 2018

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Before THE BIG BONANZA
Dan De Quille's Early Comstock Accounts
Edited by Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove
University of Missouri Press, 2015
The discovery and mining of the Comstock Lode in Nevada forever changed the mining culture of the American West. Using the pen name Dan De Quille, in 1876 William Wright published The Big Bonanza, the best-known contemporary account of the Comstock Lode mines. Previously, however, in nearly fifty newspaper accounts from 1860 to 1863, De Quille had documented the development of the early Comstock with a frankness, abundance of detail, sense of immediacy, and excitement largely absent from his book. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove have gathered those accounts together in Before The Big Bonanza.
De Quille describes the amazing transformation of the Comstock in less than four years from miscellaneous tent camps and primitive mining sites to an incredible complex of underground shafts and tunnels beneath a group of wealth-producing cities, with modern buildings, state-of-the-art mills, orderly streets, and traffic jams. He captures the vitality of the inhabitants' resolution and resourcefulness as they survive destructive storms and being cut off from supplies and entertainment, and he chronicles the events that kept Nevada and California in the Union. While reporting the prevailing violence of brawling and dueling and anti-Indian prejudice, De Quille at the same time conveys his thoughtful observations on the significance to democracy and civilization of the existence of such license.
This trove of columns, collected from a variety of newspapers, is history in the making and additionally casts new light on the life and rapidly developing art of De Quille, the biographer of the Comstock and one of the most versatile and accomplished authors of the Old West.
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Before the Closet
Same-Sex Love from "Beowulf" to "Angels in America"
Allen J. Frantzen
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Allen J. Frantzen challenges the long accepted view that the early Middle Ages tolerated and even fostered same-sex relations and that intolerance of homosexuality developed only late in the medieval period. Frantzen shows that in early medieval Europe, the Church did not tolerate same-sex acts, in fact it was an age before people recognized the existence—or the possibility—of the "closet."

With its ambitious scope and elegant style, Before the Closet sets same-sex relations in Anglo-Saxon sources in relation to the sexual themes of contemporary opera, dance, and theatre. Frantzen offers a comprehensive analysis of sources from the seventh to the twelfth century and traces Anglo-Saxon same-sex behavior through the age of Chaucer and into the Renaissance.

"Frantzen's marvelous book . . . opens up a world most readers will never have even known was there. It's a difficult topic, but Frantzen's comprehensive, readable and even wryly funny treatment makes this an unexpected pleasure."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Before the Convention
Strategies and Choices in Presidential Nomination Campaigns
John H. Aldrich
University of Chicago Press, 1980

Campaigns to win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are longer, more complex, and more confusing to the observer than the general election itself. The maze of delegate-selection procedures includes state primaries and caucuses as well as the traditional "smoke-filled room." Complicated federal election laws govern campaign financing. Sometimes many candidates enter and drop out of the race, while sometimes a stable two-way contest occurs: the 1976 nomination campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford exemplified each extreme. Is it possible to propose general principles to explain the apparent chaos of our presidential nomination system? Can those principles account for two such starkly different campaigns as occurred in 1976? In Before the Convention, political scientist John H. Aldrich presents a systematic analysis of presidential nomination politics, based on application of rational-choice models to candidate behavior. Aldrich views the candidates as decision makers with limited resources in a highly competitive environment. From this perspective, he seeks to determine why and how candidates choose to run, why some succeed and others fail, and what consequences the nomination process has for the general election and, later, for the President in office.

Aldrich begins with a brief history of the presidential selection process, focusing on the continuing shift of power from political elites to the mass electorate. He then turns to a detailed analysis of the 1976 nomination campaigns. Using data from a variety of sources, Aldrich demonstrates that the very different patterns in these races both conform to the rational-choice model. The analysis includes consideration of numerous questions of strategy. Is there a "momentum" to campaigns? How does a candidate identify and exploit this intangible quality? How do candidates decide where to contend and where not to contend? What is the nature of policy competition among candidates? When does a candidate prefer a "fuzzy" position to a clearly stated one? Other topics include reforms in campaign financing and the expanded and changed role of news coverage.

Before the Convention fills a significant gap in the literature on presidential politics, and therefore should be of particular importance to specialists in this area. It will be ofinterest also to everyone who is concerned with understanding the "rules of the game" for a complicated but vitally important exercise of American democracy.

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Before the Curse
The Chicago Cubs' Glory Years, 1870-1945
Edited by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs' Glory Years, 1870–1945 brings to life the early history of the much beloved and often heartbreaking Chicago Cubs. Originally called the Chicago White Stockings, the team immediately established itself as a powerhouse, winning the newly formed National Base Ball League's inaugural pennant in 1876, repeating the feat in 1880 and 1881, and commanding the league in the decades to come. The legendary days of the Cubs are recaptured here in more than two dozen vintage newspaper accounts and historical essays on the teams and the fans who loved them. The great games, pennant races, and series are all here, including the 1906 World Series between the Cubs and Chicago White Sox. Of course, Before the Curse remembers the hall-of-fame players--Grover Cleveland Alexander, Gabby Hartnett, Roger Hornsby, Dizzy Dean--who delighted Cubs fans with their play on the field and their antics elsewhere.
 
Through stimulating introductions to each article, Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham demonstrate how changes in ownership affected the success of the team, who the teams' major players were both on and off the field, and how regular fans, owners, players, journalists, and Chicagoans of the past talked and wrote about baseball.
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Before the Dissertation
A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2014

“This very readable book is what every graduate student needs as they start a program. I wish my own MA and PhD students, during my 40 years of supervising, could have been demystified by having Casanave's ‘textual mentor' as a companion."

                                                                                        --Merrill Swain, Professor Emerita, OISE, University of Toronto

 “Before the Dissertation is an insightful, relevant, and accessible resource for doctoral students at any stage. Full of reflections and advice not found in other books, it serves as an indispensable guide for students and their supervisors. And the dispelling of myths is a superb idea!”

                                                                                                --Robert Kohls, PhD candidate, University of Toronto

 

Before the Dissertation concerns issues to consider before students start writing, indeed before they commit to a major high-stakes dissertation project, whether qualitative or quantitative or something in between. It is especially relevant for students who wish to do projects that involve a lengthy research period (which can add to stress), and that also involve reading, data collection, and writing in more than one language. From the earliest stages of doctoral work, even before the proposal stage, and during intermediate stages of preparation for a project as well, there are things to think about and discuss with friends, family, and advisers such as: Why do you want to pursue a doctoral degree? Do you fully understand what you are getting into? How will you manage to develop an appropriate topic? What will your role be in your project and what languages will you use with multilingual participants? How might you engage with reading, people, and personal writing at early stages in ways that will contribute to your project's development? How much attention should you pay to quality-of-life issues?

Before the Dissertation speaks to an audience in the social sciences, but in particular to doctoral students who have experience with and interest in international, multilingual, as well as native English speaking students and settings and who wish to investigate topics in (second) language and multicultural-transcultural education. Athough appropriate for use in English-dominant doctoral programs throughout the world, the book will relate more closely to students in the North American educational system than to ones, for example, in the British system. The main audience for this book is thus doctoral students who are first or second/additional users of English, who are interested in pursuing topics in one of the social sciences, including education and multilingual inquiry, and who may just be finishing course work in an English-dominant university and are wondering what might happen next.

                                                                                               

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Before the Echo
Essays on Nature
By Pete Dunne
University of Texas Press, 1995

"The natural world is a lot like a game of musical chairs," observes Pete Dunne. "Everywhere you turn, everywhere you go, there are places where living things sit down, niches that support their specific needs. But just as in musical chairs, there aren't enough places to go around. Our species keeps removing them—forcing other creatures to leave the game."

In these twenty-nine essays, one of America's top nature writers trains his sights on the beauties and the vulnerabilities of the natural world. Writing to infuse others with a sense of the richness and diversity that nature holds, Pete Dunne ranges over topics from the wonder of the year's first snowfall to the lost art of stargazing to the mysterious forces that impel people to hunt—and not to hunt. Running like a thread through all the essays is Dunne's desire to preserve all that is "natural" in nature, to stop our unthinking destruction of wild places and wild creatures before we humans find ourselves with "the last chair, in an empty room" on an impoverished earth.

[more]

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Before the Flood
The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil
Jacob Blanc
Duke University Press, 2019
In Before the Flood Jacob Blanc traces the protest movements of rural Brazilians living in the shadow of the Itaipu dam—the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, local communities facing displacement took a stand against the military officials overseeing the dam's construction, and in the context of an emerging national fight for democracy, they elevated their struggle for land into a referendum on the dictatorship itself. Unlike the broader campaign against military rule, however, the conflict at Itaipu was premised on issues that long predated the official start of dictatorship: access to land, the defense of rural and indigenous livelihoods, and political rights in the countryside. In their efforts against Itaipu and through conflicts among themselves, title-owning farmers, landless peasants, and the Avá-Guarani Indians articulated a rural-based vision for democracy. Through interviews and archival research—including declassified military documents and the first-ever access to the Itaipu Binational Corporation—Before the Flood challenges the primacy of urban-focused narratives and unearths the rural experiences of dictatorship and democracy in Brazil.
[more]

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Before the Grand Opening
Measuring Washington State’s Marijuana Market in the Last Year Before Legalized Commercial Sales
Beau Kilmer
RAND Corporation, 2013
The 2012 passage of Initiative 502 in Washington state removed the prohibition on the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes and required the state to regulate and tax a new marijuana industry. This report uses data from multiple sources to estimate the total weight of marijuana consumed in the state in 2013 to provide decisionmakers with baseline information about the size of the state’s market.
[more]

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Before the Ivy
The Cubs' Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago
Laurent Pernot
University of Illinois Press, 2015
All Cub fans know from heartbreak and curse-toting goats. Fewer know that, prior to moving to the north side in 1916, the team fielded powerhouse nines that regularly claimed the pennant. Before the Ivy offers a grandstand seat to a golden age:

BEHOLD the 1871 team as it plays for the title in nine different borrowed uniforms after losing everything in the Great Chicago Fire

ATTEND West Side Grounds at Polk and Wolcott with its barbershop quartet

MARVEL as superstar Cap Anson hits .399, makes extra cash running a ballpark ice rink, and strikes out as an elected official

WONDER at experiments with square bats and corked balls, the scandal of Sunday games and pre-game booze-ups, the brazen spitters and park dimensions changed to foil Ty Cobb

RAZZ Charles Comiskey as he adopts a Cubs hand-me-down moniker for his team's name

THRILL to the poetic double-play combo of Tinker, Evers, and Chance even as they throw tantrums at umpires and punches at each other

CHEER as Merkle's Boner and the Cubs' ensuing theatrics send the team to the 1908 World Series

Rich with Hall of Fame personalities and oddball stories, Before the Ivy opens a door to Chicago's own field of dreams and serves as every Cub fan's guide to a time when thoughts of "next year" filled rival teams with dread.

[more]

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Before the Law
Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame
Cary Wolfe
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.
 
Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals.
[more]

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Before the Manifesto
The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris
Melissa Lambert Milewski
Utah State University Press, 2007
Mary Lois Walker Morris was a Mormon woman who challenged both American ideas about marriage and the U.S. legal system. Before the Manifesto provides a glimpse into her world as the polygamous wife of a prominent Salt Lake City businessman, during a time of great transition in Utah. This account of her life as a convert, milliner, active community member, mother, and wife begins in England, where her family joined the Mormon church, details her journey across the plains, and describes life in Utah in the 1880s. Her experiences were unusual as, following her first husband's deathbed request, she married his brother, as a plural wife, in the Old Testament tradition of levirate marriage.

Mary Morris's memoir frames her 1879 to 1887 diary with both reflections on earlier years and passages that parallel entries in the day book, giving readers a better understanding of how she retrospectively saw her life. The thoroughly annotated diary offers the daily experience of a woman who kept a largely self-sufficient household, had a wide social network, ran her own business, wrote poetry, and was intellectually curious. The years of "the Raid" (federal prosecution of polygamists) led Mary and Elias Morris to hide their marriage on "the underground," and her to perjury in court during Elias's trial for unlawful cohabitation. The book ends with Mary Lois's arrival at the Salt Lake Depot after three years in exile in Mexico with a polygamist colony.
[more]

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Before the Nation
Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan
Susan L. Burns
Duke University Press, 2003
Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.

Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

[more]

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Before the Revolution
America's Ancient Pasts
Daniel K. Richter
Harvard University Press, 2011

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent—that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present.

Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter’s epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

[more]

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Before the Storm
A Year in the Pribilof Islands, 1941-1942
Fredericka Martin
University of Alaska Press, 2010

From June of 1941 through the following summer, Fredericka Martin lived with her husband, Dr. Samuel Berenberg, on remote St. Paul Island in Alaska. During that time, Martin delved into the complex history of the Unangan people, and Before the Storm draws from her personal accounts of that year and her research to present a fascinating portrait of a time and a people facing radical change. A government-ordered evacuation of all Aleuts from the island in the face of World War II, which Martin recounts in her journal, proved but the first step in a long struggle by native peoples to gain independence, and, as editor Raymond L. Hudson explains, Martin came to play a significant role in the effort.

[more]

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Before the Volcano Erupted
The Ancient Cerén Village in Central America
Edited by Payson Sheets
University of Texas Press, 2002

On an August evening around AD 600, residents of the Cerén village in the Zapotitán Valley of what is now El Salvador were sitting down to their nightly meal when ground tremors and loud steam emissions warned of an impending volcanic eruption. The villagers fled, leaving their town to be buried under five meters of volcanic ash and forgotten until a bulldozer uncovered evidence of the extraordinarily preserved town in 1976. The most intact Precolumbian village in Latin America, Cerén has been called the "Pompeii of the New World."

This book presents complete and detailed reports of the excavations carried out at Cerén since 1978 by a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, ethnographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, botanists, conservators, and others. The book is divided into sections that discuss the physical environment and resources, household structures and economy, special buildings and their uses, artifact analysis, and topical and theoretical issues.

As the authors present and analyze Cerén's houses and their goods, workshops, civic and religious buildings, kitchen gardens, planted fields, and garbage dumps, a new and much clearer picture of how commoners lived during the Maya Classic Period emerges. These findings constitute landmark contributions to the anthropology and archaeology of Central America.

[more]

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Before the Volunteer State
New Thoughts on Early Tennessee, 1540–1800
Kristofer Ray
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Most general studies of Tennessee history begin with the arrival of Anglo-American settlers in the 1760s, with only a brief overview of the state’s “prehistory.” This welcome volume rethinks this narrative by placing Tennessee’s origins firmly in the seventeenth century. In ten thoughtful essays, scholars of trans-Appalachian and early American history address a number of issues that have been touched on only fleetingly within Tennessee historiography, including the dynamic balance of Native American concerns and European imperial interests, the complexity of Revolutionary-era struggles, and the associated challenges of jurisdiction, dominion, and identity formation. Collectively, the volume situates Tennessee more firmly within the context of regional, North American, and Atlantic World developments.
            The essays are divided into two parts—the first focusing on the establishment and geopolitical complexities of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century life in and around the Tennessee River, and the second exploring the effects of the American Revolution in this geopolitical space. Topics in Part One include Indian life in the late Mississippian era, how contact with Europeans forced a process of migration and change, European understanding of Cherokee strength, and the importance of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Shawnees to early Tennessee history. Part Two offers articles about the confusing milieu into which the region was thrown during the Revolution, the central role of kinship networks for both Indians and whites, and the difficulties of identity formation as Euro-Americans expanded their presence on the Tennessee frontier. The work concludes by addressing the issue of myth and memory and how early Tennessee history was overtaken by nineteenth-century historical narratives that continue to serve as the foundation for understanding the state.
            Taken together, these essays provide a gateway through which to reimagine early Tennessee history—a reimagining that demonstrates the significance of the Volunteer State within broader trends in early modern, southern, trans-Appalachian, and Atlantic World history.
 
[more]

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Before Their Time
Mary Stimming
Temple University Press, 1998
Before Their Time is the first work  to present adult children survivors' (defined as eighteen or above at the time of the parent's death) accounts of their loss, grief, and resolution following a parent's suicide. In once section, the book offers the perspectives of sons and daughters on the deaths of mothers; in another, the perspectives of sons and daughters on the  deaths of fathers. In a third section, siblings reflect on the shared loss of their mother.

Each of these survivors faces the  common difficulties associated with losing a loved one by suicide. They also experience difficulties specific to their status as both adult and child. Topics such as the impact of the parent's suicide on adult children's personal and  professional choices, marriages and parenting, sibling and surviving parent relationships are explored with sensitivity and insight. Various coping skills, including humor, are described.

The writers describe feelings of regret and responsibility related to their parent's suicide. They express concern about other family members' vulnerability to suicide. They speak openly about the fears and stresses they face and how they cope with them.

The authors ranged in age from nineteen to thirty-six at the time of the parent's death. Between one and  twenty-five years have passed since that tragedy.

In addition to the first-person narratives, the book includes a resource section with a national listing of  suicide survivor support groups; an overview of existing research on survivors of suicide by John L. McIntosh, past president of the American Association of Suicidology; and  an essay on elderly suicide by David C. Clark, secretary-general, International Association for  Suicide, and  editor-in-chief of Crisis. The book is introduced with a Foreword by Rev. Charles Rubey, founder and director of Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide.
[more]

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Before They Could Vote
American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919
Edited by Sidonie A. Smith and Julia Watson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition—some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman’s story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women’s agency.

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Before They Were Cardinals
Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis
Jon David Cash
University of Missouri Press, 2002

Mark McGwire, Ozzie Smith, Lou Brock. These famous Cardinals are known by baseball fans around the world. But who and what were the predecessors of these modern-day players and their team? In Before They Were Cardinals, Jon David Cash examines the infancy of major-league baseball in St. Louis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His in-depth analysis begins with an exploration of the factors that motivated civic leaders to form the city's first major-league ball club. Cash delves into the economic trade rivalry between Chicago and St. Louis and examines how St. Louis's attempt to compete with Chicago led to the formation of the St. Louis Brown Stockings in 1875. He then explains why, three years later, despite its initial success, St. Louis baseball quickly vanished from the big-league map.

St. Louis baseball was revived with the arrival of German immigrant saloon owner Chris Von der Ahe. Cash explains how Von der Ahe, originally only interested in concession rights, purchased a controlling interest in the Brown Stockings. His riveting account follows the team after Von der Ahe's purchase, from the formation of the American Association, to its merger in 1891 with the rival National League. He chronicles Von der Ahe's monetary downturn, and the club's decline as well, following the merger.

Before They Were Cardinals provides vivid portraits of the ball players and the participants involved in the baseball war between the National League and the American Association. Cash points out significant differences, such as Sunday games and beer sales, between the two Leagues. In addition, excerpts taken from Chicago and St. Louis newspapers make the on-field contests and off-field rivalries come alive. Cash concludes this lively historical narrative with an appendix that traces the issue of race in baseball during this period.

The excesses of modern-day baseball—players jumping contracts or holding out for more money, gambling on games, and drinking to excess; owners stealing players and breaking agreements—were all present in the nineteenth-century sport. Players were seen then, as they are now, as an embodiment of their community. This timely treatment of a fascinating period in St. Louis baseball history will appeal to both baseball aficionados and those who want to understand the history of baseball itself.

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Before Truth
Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom
Jeremy Wilkins
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
It’s frequently said that we live in a “post-truth” age. That obviously can’t be true, but it does name a real problem on our hands. Getting things right is hard, especially if they’re complicated. It takes preparation, diligence, and honesty. Wisdom, according to Thomas Aquinas, is the quality of right judgment. This book is about the problem of becoming wise, the problem “before truth.” It is about that problem particularly as it comes up for religious, philosophical, and theological truth claims. Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom proposes that Bernard Lonergan’s approach to these problems can help us become wise. One of the special problems facing Christian believers today is our awareness of how much our tradition has developed. This development has occurred along a path shot through with contingencies. Theologians have to be able to articulate how and why doctrines, institutions, and practices that have developed—and are still developing—should nevertheless be worthy of our assent and devotion.
[more]

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Before Virtue
Jonathan J. Sanford
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
Jonathan Sanford finds that despite the common origins of contemporary virtue ethics in Anscombe, the literature varies widely not just in its scope but in its basic commitments. What exactly is contemporary virtue ethics? In Before Virtue, Sanford develops strategies for describing contemporary virtue ethics accurately. He then assesses contemporary virtue approaches by the Anscombean dual standard which inspired them: the degree to which they avoid the pitfalls of modern moral philosophy and the extent to which they exemplify a successful recovery of an Aristotelian approach to ethics.
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Before Voltaire
The French Origins of “Newtonian” Mechanics, 1680-1715
J.B. Shank
University of Chicago Press, 2017
We have grown accustomed to the idea that scientific theories are embedded in their place and time. But in the case of the development of mathematical physics in eighteenth-century France, the relationship was extremely close. In Before Voltaire, J.B. Shank shows that although the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687 exerted strong influence, the development of calculus-based physics is better understood as an outcome that grew from French culture in general.
 
Before Voltaire explores how Newton’s ideas made their way not just through the realm of French science, but into the larger world of society and culture of which Principia was an intertwined part. Shank also details a history of the beginnings of calculus-based mathematical physics that integrates it into the larger intellectual currents in France at the time, including the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the emergence of wider audiences for science, and the role of the newly reorganized Royal Academy of Sciences. The resulting book offers an unprecedented cultural history of one the most important and influential elements of Enlightenment science.
 
[more]

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Before Writing, Vol. I
From Counting to Cuneiform
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

A fascinating book on the origins of writing.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

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Before Writing, Vol. II
A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

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The Beforeland
A Novel
Corinna Vallianatos
Acre Books, 2020
In The Beforeland, a boy’s desperate act of rebellion against his grandmother reverberates outward, causing rifts and reckonings in the lives of others: a man fleeing his own troubled family who becomes the grandson’s unwitting accomplice; a poet struggling with the limitations of language and his wife’s distance; the proprietor of a dying motel; and the grandmother herself, who finds love for the first time as she recuperates from her injury. Set in the Mojave Desert and the suburbs of Southern California, this revelatory novel moves swiftly among characters who are caught between the deprivations of the past and the mysteries of the future. With unflinching precision, Vallianatos unearths the vulnerability and volatility at our cores.
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Befriending
The American Samaritans
Monica Dickens
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
This book relates the founding in America, and evaluates the effectiveness of, a branch of the worldwide organization of volunteers known as the Samaritans, committed to the prevention of suicide through the simple means of “listening therapy.” Great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Monica Dickens was best known in England as a novelist; in America, as the founder of the U.S. Samaritans. Today Samaritans are in every large city of the country. Volunteers work twenty-four hours a day, answering telephones or meeting troubled people, to try to give them, in nonjudgmental ways, the help they need to get their lives back in order.
[more]

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The Beggar and the Professor
A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
University of Chicago Press, 1997
From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation

"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."—The Independent

"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."—The New Republic

"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca
[more]

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Beggars and Thieves
Lives of Urban Street Criminals
Mark S. Fleisher
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

As the incidence of violent crime rises in the United States, so does the public demand for a solution. But what will work?
    Mark S. Fleisher has spent years among inmates in jails and prisons and on the streets with thieves, gang members, addicts, and life-long criminals in Seattle and other cities across the country. In Beggars and Thieves, he writes about how and why they become and remain offenders, and about the actual role of jails and prisons in efforts to deter crime and rehabilitate criminals. Fleisher shows, with wrenching firsthand accounts, that parents who are addicts, abusers, and criminals beget irreversibly damaged children who become addicts, abusers, and criminals. Further, Fleisher contends that many well-intentioned educational and vocational training programs are wasted because they are offered too late to help. And, he provides sobering evidence that many youthful and adult offenders find themselves better off in prison—with work to do, medical care, a clean place to sleep, regular meals, and stable social ties—than they are in America’s cities.
    Fleisher calls for anti-crime policies that are bold, practical, and absolutely imperative. He prescribes life terms for violent offenders, but in prisons structured as work communities, where privileges are earned through work in expanded, productive industries that reduce the financial burden of incarceration on the public. But most important, he argues that the only way to prevent street crime, cut prison growth, and reduce the waste of money and human lives is to permanently remove brutalized children from criminal, addicted, and violent parents.

[more]

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Beggar’s Bedlam
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Seagull Books, 2024
A hilarious and absurdist take on the political landscape of West Bengal, India.

Beggar’s Bedlam is a surreal novel that unleashes the chaos of the carnival on the familiar. Part literary descendent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and part a reconstruction of lost Bengali history, Nabarun Bhattacharya’s masterpiece is a jubilant, fizzing wire of subaltern anarchy and insurrection.
 
Marshall Bhodi Sarkar and his lieutenant Sarkhel surreptitiously dig on the banks of the Ganges River looking for crude oil reserves. Instead, they unearth curved daggers, rusty broadswords, and a Portuguese cannon. Bhodi is an occasional military man and the lead sorcerer of the secret black-magic sect named Choktar. He joins forces with the flying Flaperoos—men with a predilection for alcohol and petty vandalism—to declare outright war against the Marxist–Leninist West Bengal government. In a bloodless revolution that is fascinating in its utter implausibility, a motley crew of yet more implausible characters come together in a magic-realist fictional remapping of Calcutta.
[more]

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Begging for It
Alex Dimitrov
Four Way Books, 2013
In his debut collection of poems, Begging for It, Alex Dimitrov leads us through the streets, bridges, and bedrooms of New York City, sometimes as far away as Buenos Aires and Iceland, and as close as our own darkest corners. A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this “American Youth,” as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing—whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, “Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you.”
[more]

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Begin Again
A Biography of John Cage
Kenneth Silverman
Northwestern University Press, 2012

A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. 
 

Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

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Begin Here
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Jacques Barzun
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In this powerful, eloquent, and timely book, Jacques Barzun offers guidance for resolving the crisis in America's schools and colleges. Drawing on a lifetime of distinguished teaching, he issues a clear call to action for improving what goes on in America's classrooms. The result is an extraordinarily fresh, sensible, and practical program for better schools.

"It is difficult to imagine a more pungent, perceptive or eloquent commentary on contemporary American education than this collection of 15 pieces by Jacques Barzun."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Barzun's style is elegant, distinctive, philosophically consistent and much better-humored than that of many contemporary invective-hurlers."—David Alexander, New York Times Book Review
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Beginner's Luck
Dispatches from the Klamath Mountains
Malcolm Terence
Oregon State University Press, 2018

In the late 1960s, Malcolm Terence left his job as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times to look for adventure and may have found more than he bargained for. The era had triggered unprecedented social and political changes in America, tectonic shifts that challenged war and the social order that oppressed people along lines of class, gender, and race. One branch was a back-to-the-land movement, and Terence, who had just traveled for a year managing a rock band, strayed into Black Bear Ranch, a commune just starting in a remote corner of the Klamath Mountains near the California-Oregon border.

Black Bear Ranch still exists, but many of its early residents eventually returned to urban civilization. A few, Terence among them, stayed on in neighboring river towns. Some tried logging, others gold mining, and some tried growing marijuana, all with mixed success. The local mining and timber communities had a checkered opinion of their new hippie neighbors, as did the Native tribes, but it was the kind of place where people helped each other out, even if they didn’t always agree.

When wildfires grew large, Terence and other veterans of the commune joined the fire crews run by the US Forest Service. In between, the Black Bear expats built homesteads, planted gardens, delivered babies, and raised their children. They gradually overcame the skepticism of the locals and joined them in political battles against the use of herbicides in the forest and the Forest Service’s campaign to close all the mining claims. As in the best of organizing efforts, the organizers learned as much as they led.

Beginner’s Luck will appeal to anyone who experienced life on a commune in the 1960s–1970s or who wants to learn about this chapter in modern American history. Terence offers insight into environmental activism and the long history of conflict between resource exploitation and Native American rights without lecturing or pontificating. With wit, humor, and humility, his anecdotal essays chronicle a time and place where disparate people came together to form an unlikely community.

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Beginning at the End
Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry
Robert Stilling
Harvard University Press, 2018

During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art.

In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era.

Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.

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Beginning Hindi
A Complete Course
Joshua H. Pien and Fauzia Farooqui
Georgetown University Press, 2013

Beginning Hindi is designed to help first-year learners acquire the language by using it in real-life situations. The book and its accompanying audio files–available on the Press website–include clear explanations of language structures, engaging activities, and an organizational format that makes it easy to chart student progress.

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The Beginning of History
Value Struggles and Global Capital
Massimo De Angelis
Pluto Press, 2007
Francis Fukuyama may declare the "end of history," and neoliberal capital embraces this belief. However, the diverse struggles for commons and dignity around the planet reveal a different reality: that of the beginning of history. The clash between these two perspectives is the subject matter of this book. This book analyzes the frontline of this struggle. On one side, a social force called capital pursues endless growth and monetary value. On the other side, other social forces strive to rearrange the web of life on their own terms. This book engages with alternative modes of coproduction recently posed by the alter-globalization movement, and it examines what these movements are up against. This passionate account explores groundbreaking new critical political economic theory and its role in bringing about radical social change. This book is a must for all political activists and students of political theory.
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The Beginning of Wisdom
Reading Genesis
Leon R. Kass
University of Chicago Press, 2006
As ardent debates over creationism fill the front pages of newspapers, Genesis has never been more timely. And as Leon R. Kass shows in The Beginning of Wisdom, it’s also timeless.

Examining Genesis in a philosophical light, Kass presents it not as a story of what happened long ago, but as the enduring story of humanity itself. He asserts that the first half of Genesis contains insights about human nature that “rival anything produced by the great philosophers.” Kass here reads these first stories—from Adam and Eve to the tower of Babel—as a mirror for self-discovery that reveals truths about human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, pride, shame, anger, and death. Taking a step further in the second half of his book, Kass explores the struggles in Genesis to launch a new way of life that addresses mankind’s morally ambiguous nature by promoting righteousness and holiness.

Even readers who don’t agree with Kass’s interpretations will find The Beginning of Wisdom acompelling book—a masterful philosophical take on one of the world’s seminal religious texts.

“Extraordinary. . . . Its analyses and hypotheses will leave no reader’s understanding of Genesis unchanged.” —New York Times

“A learned and fluent, delightfully overstuffed stroll through the Gates of Eden. . . . Mix Harold Bloom with Stephen Jay Gould and you’ll get something like Kass. A wonderfully intelligent reading of Genesis.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
“Throughout his book, Kass uses fruitful, fascinating techniques for getting at the heart of Genesis. . . . Innumerable times [he] makes a reader sit back and rethink what has previously been tediously familiar or baffling.”—Washington Post
 
“It is important to state that this is a book not merely rich, but prodigiously rich with insight. Kass is a marvelous reader, sensitive and careful. His interpretations surprise again and again with their cogency and poignancy.”—Jerusalem Post
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Beginning the Quest
Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin
Barry Cooper
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Beginning the Quest by Barry Cooper provides an analysis of the legal and political writings of Eric Voegelin during the 1920s and 1930s. The subject matter of his analyses during this time period was quite distinct from the focus of his concerns thirty years later.

It has often been noted that Voegelin was a pupil of Hans Kelsen, the author of the postwar Austrian constitution and one of the great legal minds of the twentieth century. The significance of the fact that Voegelin began his academic life as a legal scholar has not, however, been emphasized, though his background provides a strong contrast with that of his contemporaries Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Beginning the Quest opens with Voegelin’s efforts, following the trauma of defeat in World War I, at understanding the relation of law and the study of law (Staatslehre) to what he then called “sociohistorical reality.” Much of this writing consisted of methodological analysis and criticism centered chiefly on the status of neo-Kantian philosophy as the basis for what we now call the social sciences. Voegelin wished to push the scientific understanding of sociohistorical reality beyond the scope afforded by German social science.

Cooper discusses Voegelin’s first systematic effort to bring together the principles of philosophical anthropology (including philosophy of history) with his understanding of comparative social science and a theory of law more comprehensive than Kelsen’s. In developing his argument, Voegelin discovered the centrality of what he called “political ideas.”

Cooper also deals with Voegelin’s The Authoritarian State (1936), which argues that Austria was more an administrative unit than a body politic. It was, to say the least, a startling analysis, but one that reappeared in later writings as well, especially in The New Science of Politics.

As a final point, Cooper deals with the concept of “political religions” that Voegelin developed in the 1938 book of that name. Just as the Austrians were groping toward the formation of a body politic, so too were the Germans. Instead of the authoritarian state being the form that the German “political people” attained, it was, as Voegelin showed in his race books, quite different. Voegelin developed the term political religion to describe the animating core of the National Socialist regime. The formation of this concept reveals that Voegelin had moved from a focus on the legal structure of a polity to its spiritual order—in the example of Nazi Germany, an unquestionably “Satanic” order.

Cooper concludes that just as the great crisis of Voegelin’s youth—World War I and its aftermath—led him to question the received premises of the Staatslehre tradition in which he was schooled, so did the crisis resulting in World War II lead him to develop ever-more-comprehensive accounts of the disorder and political convulsions of the day. The “quest” of the title of this study continued until Voegelin’s death.
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Beginning to End the Climate Crisis
A History of Our Future
Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning
Brandeis University Press, 2023
There is no planet B. Activists share how we must inform and organize ourselves to save the future.
 
“Act as though your house is on fire. Because it is.” Following Greta Thunberg, millions of young climate activists have been taking to the streets around the globe as part of the Fridays For Future movement. They demand that we “unite behind the science,” as, for too long, climate scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures, tipping points, and the devastating consequences of extreme weather—but politicians do nothing.
 
So how do you begin to end the climate crisis? Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning begin by telling stories. Neubauer cofounded the youth climate activist group in Germany and has become its most prominent voice. In this book she and Repenning weave in personal accounts of their evolution as climate activists with a thorough analysis of how climate change impacts their generation, and what every one of us can and must do about it. The young and old in the United States and around the world can learn valuable lessons from their European counterparts.
 
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Beginning to See the Light
Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

From the New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock ’n’ roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here Ellen Willis assuredly captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the ’60s and ’70s.

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Beginning Urdu
A Complete Course
Joshua H. Pien and Fauzia Farooqui
Georgetown University Press, 2016

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

Beginning Urdu is a complete first-year textbook designed to help learners acquire the language by actively using it in real-life situations. The book and its accompanying audio files–available on the Press website–contain all that is needed to complete one full year of study, including clear explanations of language structures; useful, fun, and engaging activities; and an organizational format that makes it easy to chart student progress.

FEATURES• Develops all four skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing—through a wide range of tasks and activities, including role plays, games, and short conversations• Beautifully illustrated with full-color, authentic images and written in an accessible style• Introduces the sound system and script of Urdu• Organized around functional themes such as home and family, everyday life, the marketplace, personal responsibilities, and travel• Features straightforward grammatical explanations and topically organized vocabulary lists for each of the 34 chapters• Integrates cultural information within the thematic units and also presents culture through aphorisms, poetry, and photographs• Provides an activity set for each unit along with review activities, including tips for increasing fluency and sets of questions to help personalize learning• Contains Urdu–English and English–Urdu glossaries • Includes three appendices—Urdu numbers, additional grammatical structures for moving to advanced levels of proficiency, and a suggested syllabus Beginning Urdu covers approximately 150 contact hours and is designed to bring learners to the ACTFL proficiency level of mid- to high-intermediate in all four skills. The book also serves as a valuable resource for independent learners.

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Beginning with Plato
Poems
Joseph Warren Beach
University of Minnesota Press, 1944

Beginning with Plato was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

These selected poems of Joseph Warren Beach range in time from the present year to the age of Pericles; in place from California to Shangri-La, from Paris to the Middle West; in theme from current political issues to the timeless problems of Greek philosophy; in mood from tender love to trenchant satire. In these fifty-odd poems is a rich variety—Anthony Eden and Cordell Hull, the French capital in the summer preceding the first World War, the skylines of the American West, the skylines of Minneapolis, soldier and swan maiden, and the inner life of man wherever lived. Mr. Beach can tell home truths without bitterness, and handle nostalgic emotion without sentimentality.

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The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy
Selections from the Rig Veda, Atharva Veda, Upanisads, and Mahabharata, Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction, notes, and glossarial index
Franklin Edgerton
Harvard University Press

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The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815
Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov
Harvard University Press, 1975

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The Beginnings of Social Understanding
Judy Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1988

When does our acknowledgment of the social contract really begin? When do young children first display an understanding of their social world? When and why do they begin to grasp that other people have feelings and thoughts like their own, yet different? In this pathbreaking work Judy Dunn explores several aspects of the early process of social discovery: children's recognition of the feelings of others, their ability to interpret and anticipate the behavior and relationships of others, and their comprehension of the prohibitions and accepted practices of their world.

Dunn's work brings into focus an apparent paradox in our current view of the very young child's social understanding. Whereas research on infancy reveals that babies are born with a predisposition to learn about other people, and appear sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others, experimental studies suggest that children of three, four, and five years of age have difficulty gauging the feelings, intentions, and perceptions of others. Why should this social intelligence--which might be expected to be high on the developmental agenda--proceed so slowly? Is the social understanding of young children really so limited? Dunn pursues answers to these questions through close observation of children in their homes, in the complex social world of the family; her findings suggest a sophistication that has not yet been appreciated or documented.

The Beginnings of Social Understanding draws upon observations and analyses from three longitudinal studies of children during the transition from infancy to childhood, examining children's disputes, jokes, play, their questions and narratives about others. The book demonstrates children's increasing subtlety as members of a cultural world, and argues that emotional relationships and family discourse play crucial roles in the development of this understanding. Dunn breaks through traditional notions of child development as she sets forth a refreshingly original perspective from which to view the social potential of children.

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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This landmark book represents the first attempt in two decades to survey the science of the ancient world, the first attempt in four decades to write a comprehensive history of medieval science, and the first attempt ever to present a full, unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. In The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics.

Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text.

Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the general educated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.
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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, Second Edition
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
When it was first published in 1992, The Beginnings of Western Science was lauded as the first successful attempt ever to present a unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. Chronicling the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy to late-Medieval scholasticism, David C. Lindberg surveyed all the most important themes in the history of science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. In addition, he offered an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe.
            The Beginnings of Western Science was, and remains, a landmark in the history of science, shaping the way students and scholars understand these critically formative periods of scientific development. It reemerges here in a second edition that includes revisions on nearly every page, as well as several sections that have been completely rewritten. For example, the section on Islamic science has been thoroughly retooled to reveal the magnitude and sophistication of medieval Muslim scientific achievement. And the book now reflects a sharper awareness of the importance of Mesopotamian science for the development of Greek astronomy. In all, the second edition of The Beginnings of Western Science captures the current state of our understanding of more than two millennia of science and promises to continue to inspire both students and general readers.
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Behavior Difficulties of Children as Perceived and Judged by Parents, Teachers, and Children Themselves
William Griffiths
University of Minnesota Press, 1952

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The Behavior of Communicating
An Ethological Approach
W. John Smith
Harvard University Press, 1977

In this book, W. John Smith enlarges ethology's perspective on communication and takes it in new directions. Traditionally, ethological analysis has focused on the motivational states of displaying animals: What makes the bird sing, the cat lash its tail, the bee dance? The Behavior of Communicating emphasizes messages. It seeks to answer questions about the information shared by animals through their displays: What information is made available to a bird by its neighbor's song, to a cat by its opponent's gesture, to a bee by its hivemate's dancing? What information is extracted from sources contextual to these displays? How are the responses to displays adaptive for recipients and senders? What evolutionary processes and constraints underlie observed patterns of animal communication?

Smith's approach is deeply rooted in the ethological tradition of naturalistic observations. Detailed analysis of observed displays and display repertoires illuminates the theoretical discussion that forms the core of the book. A taxonomy and interpretative analysis of messages made available through formalized display behavior are also developed. Smith shows that virtually all subhuman animal displays may be interpreted as transmitting messages about the communicator--not the environment--and, more specifically, that messages indicate the kinds of behavior the displaying animal may choose to perform. The most widespread behavioral messages are surprisingly general, even banal, in character; yet they make public information that is not readily available from other sources and that would otherwise be essentially private to the communicator. Taken along with information from sources contextual to the displays, the messages made available may permit responses that are markedly specific. By taking advantage of contextual specificity, a species expands the capacity of its display behavior to be functional in numerous and diverse circumstances.

After developing the concept of messages and discussing their forms, the responses made to them, and the functions engendered, Smith turns to the evolution of display behavior--the ways in which acts become specialized for communication and the nature of the evolutionary constraints affecting the ultimate forms of displays. He revises the traditional ethological concept of displays, and in a final chapter develops the further concept of formalized interactions. Here he extends the discussion to formal patterns of behavior that, unlike displays, are beyond the capabilities of individual performers. Human nonverbal communication, which is considered from time to time throughout the book, provides the richest examples of communication flexibly structured at this level of complexity.

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The Behavior of Federal Judges
A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice
Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 2012

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

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The Behavior of Texas Birds
By Kent Rylander
University of Texas Press, 2002

Whether it's the sudden, plunging dives of Brown Pelicans, the singing and aerial displays of Northern Mockingbirds, or the communal nesting of Purple Martins, innate and learned behaviors are some of the most fascinating things to observe in Texas birds. Even casual birdwatchers eventually ask, "why do they do that?" while serious birders and ornithologists seek to understand all the behaviors involved in feeding, flying, mating, and rearing young. But until now, it has been hard to find this information in one handy source.

In this comprehensive, yet easy-to-use book, Kent Rylander distills data from many sources to provide an authoritative guide to the behavior of Texas birds. He begins by explaining the principles of animal behavior and illustrating how they can be applied to interpreting bird behaviors in the field. The majority of the book is devoted to accounts of more than 400 species of birds that are most likely to be encountered by Texas birdwatchers. Each account describes such behaviors as feeding, courtship, parenting, and other behaviors that are significant for that species. References to interesting and important articles from scientific journals are incorporated in the species accounts where appropriate, and line drawings illustrate some of the behaviors described.

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The Behavior of the Earth
Continental and Seafloor Mobility
Claude Allègre
Harvard University Press, 1988

Well over a century after Darwin gave biology its unifying theory of evolution, the earth sciences experienced a similar revolution and the theory of plate tectonics took hold. Plate tectonics posed the idea that the earth's crust is divided into a number of large, thin plates always in motion relative to one another. In The Behavior of the Earth, world-renowned earth scientist Claude Allègre sets forth the exciting events in this contemporary revolution from its first stirrings in the nineteenth-century and Alfred Wegener's original model of continental drift (1912) through the development of its full potential in modern plate-tectonic theory.

Few scientific theories have been so all-encompassing, and none has surpassed plate tectonics in explaining such a wide variety of geological phenomena, from the origins of mountain building to the formation of the ocean floor. As it integrated our knowledge of the earth's surface with the investigation of its interior, plate tectonics fused two previously autonomous strains of scientific inquiry. Continental mobility changed for all time our view of the earth from a static globe to an evolving, living planet, and allowed us to see that changes in the earth's surface are but exterior manifestations of a dynamic interplay of forces within the crust and the mantle.Allègre casts his lucid exposition of this scientific theory within the historical context of its struggle for acceptance. As he introduces us to the huge cast of personalities and researchers who contributed to the theory, he illuminates the complex role that the scientific community plays in the proliferation and acceptance of new ideas. Allègre is as insightful in discussing the human motivation for scientific endeavor as he is skillful in presenting the science that results from this effort. Richly illustrated and including a glossary, this book offers the reader rare access both to the central theory of plate tectonics and to the constellation of problems and possibilities that preoccupy earth scientists today.

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