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Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China
Min-chih Chou
University of Michigan Press, 1984
Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China sets out to analyze the life and thought of Hu Shih as a key to understanding China in his lifetime. The study focuses on the inner tensions and dimensions of Hu's life and attempts to reconstruct the intellectual and emotional dilemmas that his life encompassed. By describing Hu's pessimism and alienation aroused by an age of chaos, the study reveals what is meant to be a transitional figure in twentieth-century China. By extension, the book is a study of the tragedy of a Chinese cosmopolitan intellectual who could find no satisfying role in the life of his own turbulent nation.
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Precision Community Health
Four Innovations for Well-being
Bechara Choucair
Island Press, 2020
When Bechara Choucair was a young doctor, he learned an important lesson: treating a patient for hypothermia does little good if she has to spend the next night out in the freezing cold. As health commissioner of Chicago, he was determined to address the societal causes of disease and focus the city’s resources on its most vulnerable populations. That targeted approach has led to dramatic successes, such as lowering rates of smoking, teen pregnancy, breast cancer mortalities, and other serious ills.

In Precision Community Health, Choucair shows how those successes can be replicated and expanded around the country. The key is to use advanced technologies to identify which populations are most at risk for specific health threats and avert crises before they begin. Big data makes precision community health possible. But in our increasingly complex world, we also need new strategies for developing effective coalitions, media campaigns, and policies. This book showcases four innovations that move public health departments away from simply dispensing medical care and toward supporting communities to achieve true well-being.

The approach Choucair pioneered in Chicago requires broadening our thinking about what constitutes public health. It is not simply about access to a doctor, but access to decent housing, jobs, parks, food, and social support. It also means acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all strategy may exacerbate inequities. By focusing on those most in need, we create an agenda that is simultaneously more impactful and more achievable. The result is a wholesale change in the way public health is practiced and in the well-being of all our communities. 
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American Examples
New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two
Samah Choudhury
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from SoulCycle to Mark Twain
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two, is the second in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this dynamic academic project, nine scholars with diverse topics and methodologies vividly reimagine the meaning of all three words in the phrase “American religious history.” The essays use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students beyond the subfield of American religious history.

Cody Musselman uses a Weberian analysis to explore questions of identity, authority, and authenticity in the world of SoulCycle while Zachary T. Smith finds commonality between the rhetoric and practices of scholarship and mixed martial arts. Erik Kline provides a new perspective on the psychedelic mysticism of the 1960s, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford takes stock of the cultural power of parody in Mark Twain’s last work of fiction. Christopher Cannon Jones examines the reciprocal relationship between religious texts and cultural contexts by comparing early Mormon missions to Hawai‘i and Jamaica and Lindsey Jackson explores what debates over circumcision can tell us about gender stereotypes and motherhood. Dana Lloyd uses the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association as a case study in order to consider how Indigenous religion and sovereignty have been understood and adjudicated in the American legal system. Matt Sheedy studies the identity categories of “atheist” and “ex-Muslim” and Brad Stoddard uses ethnographic fieldwork to evaluate the role of religious pluralism in regulating and policing correctional institutions. Editors Samah Choudhury and Prea Persaud provide an introduction that reconsiders the trajectory of the American Examples project in light of the siege on the US Capitol in January 2021 and the continuing COVID pandemic.

Visit
americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on upcoming workshop dates and future projects.

CONTRIBUTORS
Michael J. Altman / Samah Choudhury / Lindsey Jackson / Christopher Cannon Jones /  / Erik Kline / Dana Lloyd / Cody Musselman / Prea Persaud / Matt Sheedy / Zachary T. Smith / Brad Stoddard / Brook Wilensky-Lanford

 
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Textile Orientalisms
Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture
Suchitra Choudhury
Ohio University Press, 2023

The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire.

During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories.

Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies.

The book’s distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury’s work points to a new direction in critical studies.

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Activists and the Surveillance State
Learning from Repression
Aziz Choudry
Pluto Press, 2018
In this age of unchecked emphasis on national security, even liberal democracies seem prone to forgetting the histories of political policing and surveillance undergirding what we think of as our safety. Challenging this social amnesia, Aziz Choudry asks: What can we learn about the power of the state from the very people targeted by its security operations?

Drawing on the knowledge of activists and academics from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Chile, Activists and the Surveillance State delves into the harassment, infiltration, and disruption that has colored state responses to those deemed threats to national security. The book shows that, ultimately, movements can learn from their own repression, developing a critical and complex understanding of the nature of states and capital today that can crucially inform the struggles of tomorrow.
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Just Work?
Migrant Workers' Struggle Today
Aziz Choudry
Pluto Press, 2015
 As the struggle against neoliberalism becomes ever more global, Just Work will be the definitive book on the growing social and political power of one its major forces: migrant labor. From trade unions in South Africa to resistance in oppressive Gulf states, migrating forest workers in the Czech Republic, and illegal workers’ organizations in Hong Kong, Just Work brings together a wealth of lived experiences and frontline struggles for the first time. Highlighting developments in the wake of austerity and attacks on traditional forms of labor organizing, the contributors show how workers are finding new and innovative ways of resisting. The result is both a rich analysis of where the movement stands today and a reminder of the potentially explosive power of migrant workers in the years to come.
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The University and Social Justice
Struggles Across the Globe
Aziz Choudry
Pluto Press, 2020
Higher education has long been contested terrain. From student movements to staff unions, the fight for accessible, critical and quality public education has turned university campuses globally into sites of struggle.

Whether calling for the decommodification or the decolonization of education, many of these struggles have attempted to draw on (and in turn, resonate with) longer histories of popular resistance, broader social movements and radical visions of a fairer world. In this critical collection, Aziz Choudry, Salim Vally and a host of international contributors bring grounded, analytical accounts of diverse struggles relating to higher education into conversation with each other.

Featuring contributions written by students and staff members on the frontline of struggles from 12 different countries, including Canada, Chile, France, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Occupied Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, the UK and the USA, the book asks what can be learned from these movements' strategies, demands and visions.
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Limbo Beirut
Hilal Chouman
University of Texas Press, 2016

In Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut, a gay artist, a struggling novelist, a pregnant woman, a disabled engineering student, a former militia member, and a medical intern all take turns narrating the violent events of May 2008, when Hezbollah militants and Sunni fighters clashed in the streets of Beirut. For most of these young men and women, the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) is but a vague recollection, but the brutality of May 2008 serves to reawaken forgotten memories and stir up fears of a revival of sectarian violence. Yet despite these fears, the violence these characters witness helps them to break free from the mundane details of their lives and look at the world anew.

The multiple narrative voices and the dozens of pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany the text allow Chouman to achieve a mesmerizing cinematic quality with this novel that is unique in modern Arabic fiction. Not only will readers appreciate the meaningful exploration of the effects of violence on the psyche, but they will also enjoy discovering how the lives of these characters—almost all of whom are strangers to one another—intersect in surprising ways.

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The Making Sense of Things
George Choundas
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize

A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.

The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.

Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.
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Opium
Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
Harvard University Press, 2010

Known to the Greeks as opos or opion, as afiun in Persian and Arabic, and fuyung in Chinese, opium is at once a palliative and a poison. Its exotic origins, its literary associations, and the properties that are, often erroneously, attributed to it have ensured an ongoing air of mystery.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy reveals the long and fascinating history of a powerful and addictive drug and explores the changing fortunes of the modern-day illicit opium trade, especially in the remote regions of Asia. He answers key questions: Why have anti-drug policies failed despite four decades of increasing effort? And what are the shortcomings and limitations of forced eradication, alternative development, "silver bullets," and other quick fixes? In answering these questions, Chouvy draws upon geography, anthropology, politics, and development studies. He shows that the history of opium production is unexpectedly linked to the history of Afghanistan.

A compelling account of a narcotic as old as humanity, Opium offers powerful insights into the complex politics and economics of the poppy in the world today.

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Muscle Works
Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity
Broderick D.V. Chow
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Men’s fitness as a performancefrom nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today
 
This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.
 
Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.
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Unsettling Sexuality
Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
Jeremy Chow
University of Delaware Press, 2025
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century challenges the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging criticisms in Middle-Eastern and Asian studies, Black studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the collected authors perform intersectional queer readings, reimagine queer historiographic methods, and spearhead new citational models that can invigorate the field. Contributors read with and against diverse European, transatlantic, and global archives to explore mutually informative frameworks of gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, ability, and class. In charting multidirectional queer horizons, this collection locates new prospective desires and intimacies in the literature, culture, and media of the period to imagine new directions and simultaneously unsettle eighteenth-century studies.
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Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities
Jeremy Chow
Bucknell University Press, 2023
This groundbreaking new volume unites eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, showcasing how these fields can vibrantly benefit one another. In eleven chapters that engage a variety of eighteenth-century texts, contributors explore timely themes and topics such as climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, indigeneity and decoloniality, and green utopianism. Additionally, each chapter reflects on pedagogical concerns, asking: How do we teach eighteenth-century environmental humanities? With particular attention to the voices of early-career scholars who bring cutting-edge perspectives, these essays highlight vital and innovative trends that can enrich both disciplines, making them essential for classroom use.
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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia
Kai-wing Chow
University of Michigan Press, 2001
A cutting-edge collection exploring identity-making in East Asia
This is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural politics of nationalism and national identities in modern East Asia. Combining theoretical insights with empirical research, it explores the cultural dimensions of nationhood and identity-making in China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The essays address issues ranging from the complex relations between popular culture and national consciousness to the representation of ethnic/racial identity and gendered discourse on nationalism. The cutting-edge research on the diverse forms of cultural preacceptance and the various ways in which this participates in the construction and projection of national and ethnic identities in East Asia illuminates several understudied issues in Asian studies, including the ambiguity of Hong Kong identity during World War II and the intricate politics of the post-war Taiwanese trial of collaboration.
Addressing a wide range of theoretical and historical issues regarding cultural dimensions of nationalism and national identities all over East Asia, these essays draw insights from such recent theories as cultural studies, postcolonial theories, and archival-researched cultural anthropology. The book will be important reading for students of Asian studies as well as for serious readers interested in issues of nationalism and culture.
Kai-wing Chow is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Kevin Doak is Associate Professor of History. Poshek Fu is Associate Professor of History and Cinema Studies. All three teach at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture
Rey Chow
Duke University Press, 2012
How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?

These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?
Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

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Woman and Chinese Modernity
The Politics of Reading between West and East
Rey Chow
University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Examines the relationship of “woman” to issues of non-western culture.

Examines the relationship of "woman" to issues of non-Western culture: ethnic spectatorship, popular literature, the construction of literary history, and the revolutionary production and emotional reception of national literature.

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The Age of the World Target
Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work
Rey Chow
Duke University Press, 2006
Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature—fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality—the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age—in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.
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Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory
Reimagining a Field
Rey Chow
Duke University Press, 2000
These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself. The wide range of topics addressed by this international group of scholars includes twentieth-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism; as well as the geographies of migration and diaspora.

One of the volume’s provocative suggestions is that the old model of area studies—an offshoot of U.S. Cold War strategy that found its anchorage in higher education—is no longer feasible for the diverse and multifaceted experiences that are articulated under the rubric of “Chineseness.” As Rey Chow argues in her introduction, the notion of a monolithic Chineseness bound ultimately to mainland China is, in itself, highly problematic because it recognizes neither the material realities of ethnic minorities within China nor those of populations in places such as Tibet, Taiwan, and post–British Hong Kong. Above all, this book demonstrates that, as the terms of a chauvinistic sinocentrism become obsolete, the critical use of theory—particularly by younger China scholars whose enthusiasm for critical theory coincides with changes in China’s political economy in recent years—will enable the emergence of fresh connections and insights that may have been at odds with previous interpretive convention.
Originally published as a special issue of the journal boundary 2, this collection includes two new essays and an afterword by Paul Bové that places its arguments in the context of contemporary cultural politics. It will have far-reaching implications for the study of modern China and will be of interest to scholars of theory and culture in general.

Contributors. Stanley K. Abe, Ien Ang, Chris Berry, Paul Bové, Sung-cheng Yvonne Chang, Rey Chow, Dorothy Ko, Charles Laughlin, Leung Ping-kwan, Kwai-cheung Lo, Christopher Lupke, David Der-wei Wang, Michelle Yeh

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The Sense of Sound, Volume 22
Rey Chow
Duke University Press
Sound has given rise to many rich theoretical reflections, but when compared to the study of images, the study of sound continues to be marginalized. How is the “sense” of sound constituted and elaborated linguistically, textually, technologically, phenomenologically, and geologically, as well as acoustically? How is sound grasped as an object? Considering sound both within and beyond the scope of the human senses, contributors from literature, film, music, philosophy, anthropology, media and communication, and science and technology studies address topics that range from Descartes’s resonant subject to the gendering of hearing physiology in the nineteenth century, Cold War politics and the opera Nixon in China, sounds from the Mediterranean, the poetics of signal processing, and the acousmatic voice in the age of MP3s. In the interpretive challenges posed by voice, noise, antinoise, whispering, near inaudibility, and silence and in the frequent noncoincidence of emission and reception, sound confronts us with what might be called its inhuman qualities—its irreducibility to meaning, to communication, to information, and even to recognition and identification.

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author of The Age of the World Target and Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, both published by Duke University Press.

James A. Steintrager is Professor and Chair of English at the University of California, Irvine.

Contributors: Caroline Bassett, Eugenie Brinkema, Iain Chambers, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, Mladen Dolar, Veit Erlmann, Evan Johnson, Christopher Lee, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, Dominic Pettman, Tara Rodgers, Nicholas Seaver, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne,

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The May Fourth Movement
Intellectual Revolution in Modern China
Tse-tsung Chow
Harvard University Press
All observers agree that the movement named for the students’ mass demonstration of May 4, 1919, is a turning point in China’s history; yet its precise significance is disputed. The Chinese Communists see it as the beginning of a popular movement that brought them to power thirty years later. The heart of the movement, as carefully described in Tse-tsung Chow’s volume, involved, in the first instance, the criticism by China’s young intelligentsia of traditional thought and institutions. It involved a search for new solutions in terms of Western democracy and science. The movement, which roughly covers the years 1917–1921, was intensified to new heights by the student strikes of 1919 against the decisions on China reached at Versailles and against the Chinese government’s policy toward Japan. The ideas and tendencies that arose out of the movement have determined the subsequent course of Chinese history. Without an understanding of this movement, recent Chinese history remains a closed book.
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The May Fourth Movement
Intellectual Revolution in Modern China
Tse-tsung Chow
Harvard University Press

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Research Guide to the May Fourth Movement
Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, 1915-1924
Tse-tsung Chow
Harvard University Press

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Sonic Multiplicities
Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image
Yiu Fai Chow
Intellect Books, 2013
Through the lens of popular music in and from Hong Kong, Sonic Multiplicities examines the material, ideological, and geopolitical implications of music production and consumption. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet draw on rich empirical research and industry experience to trace the worldwide flow of popular culture and the people who produce and consume it. In doing so, the authors make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political and social roles such circulation plays in today’s world—and in a city under cultural threat in a country whose prominence is on the rise. Just as important, they clear a new path for the study of popular music.
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Computer Vision and Recognition Systems Using Machine and Deep Learning Approaches
Fundamentals, technologies and applications
Chiranji Lal Chowdhary
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers obtain, store, interpret and understand digital images or videos using artificial intelligence based on neural networks, machine learning and deep learning methodologies. They are used in countless applications such as image retrieval and classification, driving and transport monitoring, medical diagnostics and aerial monitoring.
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Ethical Encounters
Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh
Elora Halim Chowdhury
Temple University Press, 2022

Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity. 

By examining contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency. Chowdhury analyzes Bangladeshi feminist films including Meherjaan, and Itihaash Konna (Daughters of History), as well as socially-engaged films by activist-filmmakers including Jonmo Shathi (Born Together), and Shadhinota (A Certain Liberation), to show how war films of Bangladesh can generate possibilities for gender justice. 

Chowdhury argues that justice-driven films are critical to understanding and negotiating the layered meanings and consequences of catastrophic human suffering yet at the same time they hint at subjectivities and identities that are not reducible to the politics of suffering. Rather, they are key to creating an alternative and disruptive archive of feminist knowledge—a sensitive witnessing, responsible spectatorship, and just responsibility across time, and space. 

Drawing on Black and transnational feminist critiques, Chowdhury explores questions around women’s place, social roles, and modes of participation in war as well as the visual language through which they become legible as victims/subjects of violence and agents of the nation. Ethical Encounters illuminates the possibilities of film as a site to articulate an ethics that acknowledges a founding violence of the birth of a nation, recuperates it even if in fragments, and imagines differently the irreconcilable relationship between humanity, liberty, and justice.




 

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Dissident Friendships
Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
Elora Chowdhury
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Often perceived as unbridgeable, the boundaries that divide humanity from itself--whether national, gender, racial, political, or imperial--are rearticulated through friendship. Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose edit a collection of essays that express the different ways women forge hospitality in deference to or defiance of the structures meant to keep them apart. Emerging out of postcolonial theory, the works discuss instances when the authors have negotiated friendship's complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain; offer fresh perspectives on feminists' invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation; reflect on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity; and unpack the details of transnational dissident friendships. Contributors: Lori E. Amy, Azza Basarudin, Himika Bhattacharya, Kabita Chakma, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Laurie R. Cohen, Esha Niyogi De, Eglantina Gjermeni, Glen Hill, Alka Kurian, Meredith Madden, Angie Mejia, Chandra T. Mohanty, A. Wendy Nastasi, Nicole Nguyen, Liz Philipose, Anya Stanger, Shreerekha Subramanian, and Yuanfang Dai.
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City of Men
Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport
Romit Chowdhury
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.
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Microgrids and Active Distribution Networks
S. Chowdhury
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
A companion to Embedded Generation (IET, 2000), this book is a timely publication for an evolving industry. Renewable energy, ancillary services and deregulation of the power industry are changing electricity delivery networks. Microgrids, smartgrids and active distribution networks require a sound understanding of the basic concepts, generation technologies, impacts, operation, control and management, economic viability and market participation involved in grid integration. Practicing engineers in utilities and industry, researchers and students will appreciate this lucid description of the technologies that will enable future electricity systems.
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The Modern Self in the Labyrinth
Politics and the Entrapment Imagination
Eyal Chowers
Harvard University Press, 2004

This book explores the distinct historical-political imagination of the self in the twentieth century and advances two arguments. First, it suggests that we should read the history of modern political philosophy afresh in light of a theme that emerges in the late eighteenth century: the rift between self and social institutions. Second, it argues that this rift was reformulated in the twentieth century in a manner that contrasts with the optimism of nineteenth-century thinkers regarding its resolution. It proposes a new political imagination of the twentieth century found in the works of Weber, Freud, and Foucault, and characterizes it as one of "entrapment."

Eyal Chowers shows how thinkers working within diverse theoretical frameworks and fields nevertheless converge in depicting a self that has lost its capacity to control or transform social institutions. He argues that Weber, Freud, and Foucault helped shape the distinctive thought and culture of the past century by portraying a dehumanized and distorted self marked by sameness. This new political imagination proposes coping with modernity through the recovery, integration, and assertion of the self, rather than by mastering and refashioning collective institutions.

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Meaningful Technologies
How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live
Eric Chown
Lever Press, 2022

As smartphones mediate more of our activities, they are changing our relationship with meaning. To a teenager, for example a “conversation” is just as likely to refer to an exchange of text messages as it is a face-to-face discussion. Meanwhile, Facebook has redefined what friendship means, Snapchat what a memory means, etc. The kinds of changes smartphones bring are happening at rapid pace: TikTok reached a billion users in just over three years, whereas it took the telephone 75 years to reach a tenth of that number of people. Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live by Eric Chown and Fernando Nascimento offers systematic reconsideration of the ways in which digital technologies impact our lives both individually and collectively. 

Metaphors aren’t just a clever way to describe technology, they are also changing the way we think. When we click on a picture of a shopping cart it connects a complex set of technologies to represent a simple idea that we’re all familiar with. A heart icon under a photo is understood as an easy way to express appreciation. We aren’t required to understand how technology works, just how we interact with it. The ambiguity of metaphors, and the complexity of technology can also hide important realities about what is being described. “The cloud,” for example, actually consists of very real data centers, which consume huge amounts of natural resources to keep running. Meanwhile, pressing that heart icon on a photo is a signal to the artificial intelligences running in your app that you want to see more things like that photo and that it should adjust what it knows about you accordingly.
 
There is a constant feedback loop between us and the digital technologies we use. We are constantly using them and they are changing us through their usage. Meaningful Technologies focuses on this loop from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and cognitive science. Through the former, the authors examine meaning and how it changes over time. Through the latter, they gain understanding of how this feedback loop impacts individuals, especially in terms of learning and attention. Chown and Nascimento argue that, on the one hand, apps have a kind of agency never before possible in a technology, but also that, armed with a critical framework for examining such apps, we can regain some of our own agency. This book will appeal to scholars of digital media digital and computational studies, and those interested in issues related to ethical impacts of digital technologies.
 

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Empire of Care
Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History
Catherine Ceniza Choy
Duke University Press, 2003
In western countries, including the United States, foreign-trained nurses constitute a crucial labor supply. Far and away the largest number of these nurses come from the Philippines. Why is it that a developing nation with a comparatively greater need for trained medical professionals sends so many of its nurses to work in wealthier countries? Catherine Ceniza Choy engages this question through an examination of the unique relationship between the professionalization of nursing and the twentieth-century migration of Filipinos to the United States. The first book-length study of the history of Filipino nurses in the United States, Empire of Care brings to the fore the complicated connections among nursing, American colonialism, and the racialization of Filipinos.

Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.

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Ecologies of Comparison
An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong
Timothy Choy
Duke University Press, 2011
A rich ethnography of ecopolitics in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, as the region shifted to Chinese sovereignty, Ecologies of Comparison describes how ecological concepts of uniqueness and scale resonated among environmentalists, including those seeking to preserve a species of white dolphin, to protect an aging fishing village from redevelopment, and to legitimize air quality as an object of political and medical concern. During his research, Tim Choy became increasingly interested in the power of the notion of specificity. While documenting the expert and lay production of Hong Kong’s biological, cultural, and political specificities, he began comparing the logics and narrative forms that made different types of specificity—such as species, culture, locality, and state autonomy—possible and meaningful. He came to understand these logics and forms as “ecologies of comparison,” conceptual practices through which an event or form of life comes to matter in environmentalist and other political terms. Choy’s ethnography is about environmentalism, Hong Kong, and the ways that we think about environmentalism in Hong Kong and other places. It is also about how politics, freedom, culture, expertise, and other concepts figure in comparison-based knowledge practices.
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The Siege of Strasbourg
Rachel Chrastil
Harvard University Press, 2014

When war broke out between France and Prussia in the summer of 1870, one of the first targets of the invading German armies was Strasbourg. From August 15 to September 27, Prussian forces bombarded this border city, killing hundreds of citizens, wounding thousands more, and destroying many historic buildings and landmarks. For six terror-filled weeks, “the city at the crossroads” became the epicenter of a new kind of warfare whose indiscriminate violence shocked contemporaries and led to debates over the wartime protection of civilians.

The Siege of Strasbourg recovers the forgotten history of this crisis and the experiences of civilians who survived it. Rachel Chrastil shows that many of the defining features of “total war,” usually thought to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, characterized the siege. Deploying a modern tactic that traumatized city-dwellers, the Germans purposefully shelled nonmilitary targets. But an unintended consequence was that outsiders were prompted to act. Intervention by the Swiss on behalf of Strasbourg’s beleaguered citizens was a transformative moment: the first example of wartime international humanitarian aid intended for civilians.

Weaving firsthand accounts of suffering and resilience through her narrative, Chrastil examines the myriad ethical questions surrounding what is “legal” in war and what rights civilians trapped in a war zone possess. The implications of the siege of Strasbourg far exceed their local context, to inform the dilemmas that haunt our own age—in which collateral damage and humanitarian intervention have become a crucial part of our strategic vocabulary.

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

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Crab
Cynthia Chris
Reaktion Books, 2021
What is a crab? What significance do crabs play in the world? In Crab, Cynthia Chris reveals that these charming creatures are social by nature, creative problem-solvers, and invaluable members of the environments in which they live. Their formidable physical forms, their hard-to-harvest and quick-to-spoil flesh, and their sassy demeanor have inspired artists and writers from Vincent van Gogh to Jean-Paul Sartre. Chris sketches vivid portraits of these animals, tracing the history of the crab through its ancient fossil record to its essential role in protecting its own habitats from the threat of climate change.
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Cuckoo
Cynthia Chris
Reaktion Books, 2024
An entertaining and wide-ranging romp through the cultural history of a peculiar bird.
 
The cuckoo is peculiar for inspiring such divergent ideas: a symbol of foolishness to both Aristophanes and Cocoa Puffs, a reliable harbinger of spring and the hours of a cuckoo clock, and the source of innumerable innuendos inspired by a habit of laying eggs in others’ nests. In this short, entertaining book, Cynthia Chris explores both the natural and cultural history of the cuckoo as well as the many stories told throughout the centuries about this fascinating bird.
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The Indecent Screen
Regulating Television in the Twenty-First Century
Cynthia Chris
Rutgers University Press, 2019
The Indecent Screen explores clashes over indecency in broadcast television among U.S.-based media advocates, television professionals, the Federal Communications Commission, and TV audiences. Cynthia Chris focuses on the decency debates during an approximately twenty-year period since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which in many ways restructured the media environment. Simultaneously, ever increasing channel capacity, new forms of distribution, and time-shifting (in the form of streaming and on-demand viewing options) radically changed how, when, and what we watch. But instead of these innovations quelling concerns that TV networks were too often transmitting indecent material that was accessible to children, complaints about indecency skyrocketed soon after the turn of the century. Chris demonstrates that these clashes are significant battles over the role of family, the role of government, and the value of free speech in our lives, arguing that an uncensored media is so imperative to the public good that we can, and must, endure the occasional indecent screen. 
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Watching Wildlife
Cynthia Chris
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammalsSo let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.—Bloodhound GangIt has never been easier for Americans to observe wild and exotic animals from the comfort and safety of their couches. Several cable channels—Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel—provide around-the-clock wildlife programming while the traditional networks regularly broadcast animal documentaries, late-night appearances by zoologists and their animal charges, and sensationalistic specials about animals attacking hapless humans. Though the ubiquity of animals on television is new, the genre of the wildlife documentary is as old as cinema itself.In Watching Wildlife, Cynthia Chris traces the history of the wildlife genre from its origins in precinematic, colonial visual culture to its contemporary status as flagship programming on global television and explores evolving beliefs about, and attitudes toward, animal subjects. Nature programming and films are consistently presented as real and unmediated reflections of nature. But in Chris's analysis of specific shows (Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and cable television's Crocodile Hunter) and film and television history (the colonial cinema, the launch of Animal Planet), she points out how—particularly in the genre's preoccupation with mating and the favoritism bestowed on certain species—documentary images of animals are and always have been about prevailing ideologies about human gender, sexuality, and race.Ultimately, Chris's sweeping and cogent account of the wildlife documentary incorporates this frequently overlooked genre into broader debates about media globalization, human-animal relations, and popular scientific discourse.Cynthia Chris is assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.
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1001 Most Asked Questions American West
Harry E. Chrisman
Ohio University Press, 1982
During his more than 40 years of newspaper and magazine work, Harry Chrisman has been answering questions about the American West — both the standard and the oddball queries, such as "What is the most fantastic bear story you ever heard?"

Chrisman first encountered many of these questions in his monthly column "Roundup Time," which appeared in The West, a national monthly magazine.

Concentrating on the puzzlers, Chrisman has gathered in his illustrated volume over one thousand of the most frequently asked questions about the American West. Readers will find chapters devoted to the people of the West (cowboys, Indians, lawmen, outlaws, and gunfighters), chapters on the Western lifestyle (culture, pioneer life, folklore, and business and commerce), as well as chapters on the land (geography and geology, and towns and territories).

Here, then, is an entertaining volume to which readers can turn for information and recreation and which will remain a constant source for the younger generations who wish to learn of their forefathers and of the many problems they encountered and resolved during the settlement of the Great American West.
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Victorian and Modern Poetics
Carol T. Christ
University of Chicago Press, 1984

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Competing Memories
The Legacy of Arkansas's Civil War
Mark Christ
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2016

Between 2011 and 2015, Arkansas commemorated the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War with re-enactments, lectures, placement of historical markers, and a wide variety of other events that were collectively attended by more than 375,000 people. While the sesquicentennial commemoration highlighted the Civil War events that occurred in the state and honored the people who experienced the war in Arkansas, the question of the war’s significance to modern Arkansas remained.

Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War collects the proceedings of the final seminar sponsored by the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, which sought to define the lasting impact that the nation’s deadliest conflict had on the state by bringing together some of the state’s leading historians.

In these essays, Thomas A. DeBlack explores the post-war lives of both Union and Confederate soldiers who played prominent roles in Civil War Arkansas. Cherisse Jones-Branch delves into the lives of black Arkansans during the war and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne discusses the many ways the Civil War affected the state’s economic development, while Kelly Houston Jones investigates the Civil War’s impact on Arkansas women. Mary Jane Warde examines the devastating effects of the Civil War on Native Americans in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Elliott West scrutinizes Civil War Arkansas from a continental perspective, and Carl Moneyhon considers the evolution of how we remember the Civil War.

Together, the essays in Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War provide a compelling account of how America’s bloodiest war continues to affect Arkansas and its people today.
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Rugged and Sublime
The Civil War in Arkansas
Mark Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 1994

When one thinks of the American Civil War, such names as Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville come immediately to mind. Few recall the battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater.

Rugged and Sublime goes a long way toward filling regrettable blanks in our memory of Arkansas’s role in Civil War. It explore the major clashes and locales of the war, including the state secession convention, seizure of the Little Rock Arsenal, the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the Pea Ridge campaign, Marmaduke’s invasion of Missouri, the Battle of Helena, and the fall of Little Rock, as well as other actions. Rounding out this new and very readable account are studies of the devolution of Arkansas society when bands of guerillas and jayhawkers menaced the state, the surrender of the Confederate armies, and an assessment of losses.

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The Die Is Cast
Arkansas Goes to War, 1861
Mark K. Christ
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2010
Five writers examine the political and social forces in Arkansas that led to secession and transformed farmers, clerks, and shopkeepers into soldiers. Retired longtime Arkansas State University professor Michael Dougan delves into the 1861 Arkansas Secession Convention and the delegates’ internal divisions on whether to leave the Union. Lisa Tendrich Frank, who teaches at Florida Atlantic University, discusses the role Southern women played in moving the state toward secession. Carl Moneyhon of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock looks at the factors that led peaceful civilians to join the army. Thomas A. DeBlack of Arkansas Tech University tells of the thousands of Arkansans who chose not to follow the Confederate banner in 1861, and William Garret Piston of Missouri State University chronicles the first combat experience of the green Arkansas troops at Wilson’s Creek.
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Getting Used to Being Shot At
Mark K. Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2002
This collection of letters bears witness to the Civil War of the common soldiers and junior officers of the Army of Tennessee. Brothers Alex and Tom Spence described to their family in detail not only the many battles in which they served, but the hardship of campaigning (they marched literally thousands of miles), the pride of serving in battle-proven units, and the pain of losing comrades to bullets and disease. The Spences were a wealthy family who owned land, slaves, and the main hotel in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. With their successful careers and extensive property, they were among Clark County's most prominent families when the shadow of secession fell across Arkansas. Four years later, Arkansas would be ravaged by war, and Tom and Alex Spence would lie in soldiers' graves, far from home. Mark Christ has assembled their powerful letters from a collection in the Old State House Museum, weaving in other letters from their extended family and friends, brief but thorough introductions to each chapter, and evocative photographs. The story moves chronologically from the outset of war to the final letter from Alex's grieving fiancée.
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"This Day We Marched Again"
A Union Soldier's Account of War in Arkansas and the Trans-Mississippi
Mark K. Christ
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2014
A testament to the valor and determination of a common soldier On September 17, 1861, twenty-two-year-old Jacob Haas enlisted in the Sheboygan Tigers, a company of German immigrants that became Company A of the Ninth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment. Over the next three years, Haas and his comrades marched thousands of miles and saw service in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and the Indian Territory, including pitched battles at Newtonia, Missouri, and Jenkins’ Ferry, Arkansas. Haas describes the war from the perspective of a private soldier and an immigrant as he marches through scorching summers and brutally cold winters to fight in some of the most savage combat in the west. His diary shows us an extraordinary story of the valor and determination of a volunteer soldier. Though his health was ruined by war, Haas voiced no regrets for the price he paid to fight for his adopted country.
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The War at Home
Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I
Mark K. Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
The War at Home brings together some of the state’s leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.
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I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over
First-Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly
Mark K. Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
I Do Wish this Cruel War Was Over collects diaries, letters, and memoirs excerpted from their original publication in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly to offer a first-hand, ground-level view of the war's horrors, its mundane hardships, its pitched battles and languid stretches, even its moments of frivolity. Readers will find varying degrees of commitment and different motivations among soldiers on both sides, along with the perspective of civilians. In many cases, these documents address aspects of the war that would become objects of scholarly and popular fascination only years after their initial appearance: the guerrilla conflict that became the "real war" west of the Mississippi; the "hard war" waged against civilians long before William Tecumseh Sherman set foot in Georgia; the work of women in maintaining households in the absence of men; and the complexities of emancipation, which saw African Americans winning freedom and sometimes losing it all over again. Altogether, these first-person accounts provide an immediacy and a visceral understanding of what it meant to survive the Civil War in Arkansas.
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Sentinels of History
Reflections on Arkansas Properties on the National Register of Historic Places
Mark Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Sentinels of History was conceived of as a way to mark the turn of the millennium by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. This generously illustrated book contains thirty-nine essays, each of which showcases an important Arkansas site and is written by a noted authority. Also included is a location map for these sites and a full appendix providing location information, county by county, for the more than two thousand surviving properties in Arkansas (as of June 1999) that appear on the National Register. The essays are as wide-ranging as Roger Kennedy's placement of the Toltec Mounds at the time of Charlemagne, Donald Harington's sensitive look at the "bigeminal" architecture of the Wolf dogtrot cabin, and Neil Compton's egalitarian tribute to the Boxley Valley Historic District on the Buffalo National River. At least one current color photo of the site and one historic image are included with each essay. In addition, illustrations of the locations or structures listed in the appendix are scattered throughout sections. In all, Sentinels of History serves as a lavish inventory of historic properties in Arkansas at the end of the twentieth century.
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Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations
Essays in Honor of Alberto P. Calderon
Michael Christ
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Alberto P. Calderón (1920-1998) was one of this century's leading mathematical analysts. His contributions, characterized by great originality and depth, have changed the way researchers approach and think about everything from harmonic analysis to partial differential equations and from signal processing to tomography. In addition, he helped define the "Chicago school" of analysis, which remains influential to this day.

In 1996, more than 300 mathematicians from around the world gathered in Chicago for a conference on harmonic analysis and partial differential equations held in Calderón's honor. This volume originated in papers given there and presents timely syntheses of several major fields of mathematics as well as original research articles contributed by some of the finest scholars working in these areas. An important addition to the literature, this book is essential reading for researchers in these and other related fields.
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Death Foretold
Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care
Nicholas A. Christakis
University of Chicago Press, 2000
This groundbreaking book explains prognosis from the perspective of doctors, examining why physicians are reluctant to predict the future, how doctors use prognosis, the symbolism it contains, and the emotional difficulties it involves. Drawing on his experiences as a doctor and sociologist, Nicholas Christakis interviewed scores of physicians and searched dozens of medical textbooks and medical school curricula for discussions of prognosis in an attempt to get to the core of this nebulous medical issue that, despite its importance, is only partially understood and rarely discussed.

"Highly recommended for everyone from patients wrestling with their personal prognosis to any medical practitioner touched by this bioethical dilemma."—Library Journal, starred review

"[T]he first full general discussion of prognosis ever written. . . . [A] manifesto for a form of prognosis that's equal parts prediction-an assessment of likely outcomes based on statistical averages-and prophecy, an intuition of what lies ahead."—Jeff Sharlet, Chicago Reader

"[S]ophisticated, extraordinarily well supported, and compelling. . . . [Christakis] argues forcefully that the profession must take responsibility for the current widespread avoidance of prognosis and change the present culture. This prophet is one whose advice we would do well to heed."—James Tulsky, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine
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Thus Ruled Emir Abbas
Selected Casese from the Records of the Emir of Kano's Judicial Council
Allen Christelow
Michigan State University Press, 1994

Thus Ruled Emir Abbas is an important new research tool that reveals much about daily life in Kano, the wealthiest and most populous emirate of the African Sokoto Caliphate. It contains a selection of Kano Judicial Council documents, as well as their English translations, that deal with matters such as land disputes, tax collection disputes, and theft. These documents are invaluable resources that reveal much about Kano social, economic, and political life before the region came under the influence of colonial institutions, law, and language. This selection of records for more than 415 cases, along with their translations, will become essential reading for those interested in Nigeria’s past and will certainly become a standard work in the field of Nigerian history and anthropology.

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Plants of the World
Maarten J. M. Christenhusz
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2017
Plants of the World is the first book to systematically explore every vascular plant family on earth—more than four hundred and fifty of them—organized in a modern phylogenetic order. Detailed entries for each family include descriptions, distribution, evolutionary relationships, and fascinating information on economic uses of plants and etymology of their names. All entries are also copiously illustrated in full color with more than 2,500 stunning photographs. A collaboration among three celebrated botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Plants of the World is authoritative, comprehensive, and beautiful. Covering everything from ferns to angiosperms, it will be an essential resource for practicing botanists, horticulturists, and nascent green thumbs alike.
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Plants of the World
An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants
Maarten J. M. Christenhusz
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Plants of the World is the first book to systematically explore every vascular plant family on earth—more than four hundred and fifty of them—organized in a modern phylogenetic order. Detailed entries for each family include descriptions, distribution, evolutionary relationships, and fascinating information on economic uses of plants and etymology of their names. All entries are also copiously illustrated in full color with more than 2,500 stunning photographs. A collaboration among three celebrated botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Plants of the World is authoritative, comprehensive, and beautiful. Covering everything from ferns to angiosperms, it will be an essential resource for practicing botanists, horticulturists, and nascent green thumbs alike.
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Edible Mushrooms
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1981

Edible Mushrooms was first published in 1981. 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.

The choicest varieties of mushrooms cannot be cultivated or commercially grown but are available in abundance to those who take the trouble to find them. With this book in hand, anyone can, with confidence, gather and enjoy delicious wild mushrooms without fear of the poisonous varieties.

Edible Mushrooms,a new edition of the 1943 classic guide, Common Edible Mushrooms,describes in detail more than 60 of the most abundant and most easily recognized species. Photographs, many in color, show each species in its natural habitat for easy identification. Clyde M. Christensen warns against the poisonous varieties and advises amateur mushroom hunters to become thoroughly familiar with the most common edible mushrooms and to avoid all others.

This edition contains new full-color photographs, and new material on how mushrooms grow and how to identify and collect them. Christensen has updated the classification to bring scientific names into agreement with internationally approved nomenclature but retains the older technical names in parentheses for easy comparison with other guides. An enlarged section of recipes provides good ideas for making the most of a mushroom harvest.

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The Molds and Man
An Introduction to the Fungi
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

The Molds and Man was first published in 1965. 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.

This highly readable volume on a little-known but important subject has been widely used as a text and reference book by the student as well as the interested layman.

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Molds, Mushrooms, and Mycotoxins
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Molds, Mushrooms, and Mycotoxins was first published in 1975. 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.

As Professor Christensen has made evident in his earlier books, including The Molds and Man,fungi are significantly interesting in their life-styles and in the many ways in which they affect man. Here he continues his exploration of the lives of the fungi and their relation to man, focusing on the harmful or dangerous effects which certain molds, mushrooms, and other fungi can have on human beings.

The first several chapters deal with fungi that are toxic in one way or another: either the fungi themselves are toxic when consumed, as with poisonous mushrooms and ergot, or the fungi secrete toxic compounds that diffuse into the substance on which they grow, making that substance toxic when eaten. He discusses hallucinogenic as well as poisonous mushrooms and provides extensive information about mycotoxins in human and animal foods, which are recently discovered health hazards.

Other chapters deal with fungus spores, which are a major cause of respiratory allergies, and with fungi which are predators or parasites of insects and nematodes. A chapter is devoted to fungus infections of man and animals, which at times constitute a serious public health problem. Another chapter discusses the nature, cause, and prevention of wood decay in trees and buildings. In a final chapter the author discusses some aspects of organic evolution in general as a background for presenting theories and facts on the evolution of fungi. He summarizes some of the ways in which fungi enter into our lives and economy, and looks to the role of fungi in the future.

The illustrations, in both black and white and color, show some of the fungi and processes that are discussed.

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Grain Storage
The Role of Fungi in Quality Loss
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

Grain Storage was first published in 1969. 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.

The deterioration or spoilage of stored grain is a problem of serious dimension, both from the standpoint of the financial balance sheet of those engaged in commercial grain enterprises and as a formidable factor in the worldwide fight against hunger. In this useful book the authors present practical information, in non-technical language, about the causes and methods of preventing the deterioration of stored grains and seeds.

The emphasis is on the role of fungi but material also is included on problems with insects, mites, and rodents in connection with grain storage. The fungi are of prime importance since not until recently have they been recognized as a major cause of loss of quality in grains and seeds. Even today many of those who deal with grains, from warehouses to management personnel, fail to realize that fungi may play a decisive role in their operations.

The book will be of special interest and value to grain merchants and processors, grain elevator managers and operators, grain inspectors, agronomists and agricultural economists concerned with crop production, and many others in agricultural or food processing fields.

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Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds was first published in 1986. 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.

Storage molds are a major cause of quality loss in grains and seeds held in farm bins and tanks, in commercial elevators and warehouses, and in barge and ship transport. The damage done by these storage molds is at first invisible, but later shows up as caking, mustiness, total spoilage of part or all of the grain, and heating - sometimes to the temperature of ignition. The authors, both of whom have had extensive first-hand field and laboratory experience with these grain storage fungi and the problems they cause, summarize in readable and readily understandable form the basic principles and specific practices to be followed in order to minimize such losses.

Chapters are devoted to grain grades and quality; storage fungi; conditions that promote or prevent loss in quality; spoilage in barge and ship transport; mycotoxins (toxic compounds produced by fungi growing in grains and feeds) and mycotoxicoses (the diseases caused in animals that consume such toxic products); insects, mites, and storage fungi, quality control; and identification of storage fungi as an aid in evaluation of grain condition and storability.

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Ethical Considerations in Educating Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing
Kathee Mangan Christensen
Gallaudet University Press, 2011

The education of deaf or hard of hearing children has become as complex as the varying needs of each individual child. Teachers face classrooms filled with students who are culturally Deaf, hard of hearing, or post-lingually deaf; they might use American Sign Language, cochlear implants, hearing aids/FM systems, speech, Signed English, sign-supported speech, contact signing, nonverbal communication, or some combination of methods. Educators who decide what tools are best for these children are making far-reaching ethical decisions in each case. This collection features ten chapters that work as constructive conversations to make the diverse needs of these deaf students the primary focus.

     The initial essays establish fundamental points of ethical decision-making and emphasize that every situation should be examined not with regard for what is “right or wrong,” but for what is “useful.” Absolute objectivity is unattainable due to social influences, while “common knowledge” is ruled out in favor of “common awareness.” Other chapters deal with the reality of interpreting through the professional’s eyes, of how they are assessed, participate, and are valued in the total educational process, including mainstream environments. The various settings of education for deaf children are profiled, from residential schools to life in three cultures for deaf Latino students, to self-contained high school programs. Ethical Considerations in Educating Deaf Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing offers an invaluable set of guidelines for administrators and educators of children with hearing loss in virtually every environment in a postmodern world.


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Teaching About Place
Learning From The Land
Laird Christensen
University of Nevada Press, 2008
The sixteen essays in this anthology describe the practice of teaching about place, with the goal of inspiring educators as well as other readers to discover the value of close investigation of their own places. The contributors discuss places from the desert river canyons of the American West, to the bayous of Texas, to wildlife refuges on the Atlantic Coast, to New England’s forests and river, and back to the wildland-urban interface in suburban Southern California.  These essays reveal broader lessons about the possibilities and limitations that come with teaching about place and inhabiting our own places outside the classroom. Contributors include: Ann Zwinger, Bradley John Monsma, SueEllen Campbell, Terrell Dixon, and John Elder.
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Dictionary of Missouri Biography
Lawrence O. Christensen
University of Missouri Press, 1999

In the making for almost a decade, the Dictionary of Missouri Biography is the most important reference work on Missouri biography to be published in the last half century. Written by nearly three hundred talented authors from around the country and edited by four of the leading authorities on Missouri history, this monumental work contains biographies of more than seven hundred individuals who have in some way made a contribution to the course of state and national history.

Covering all periods as well as all regions of the state, this remarkable volume illustrates the state's cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. Although the men and women chosen for inclusion in this book came from many walks of life, all of them were either born in Missouri or through their lives touched the state in a significant way. Many of the people will be instantly recognizable, but others will be less well known. Each of them, however, achieved notoriety in some area of activity—politics, business, agriculture, the arts, entertainment, sports, education, military service, diplomacy, social reform, civic improvements, science, or religion.

Providing information on and insight into the lives, careers, personalities, and eras of all of the subjects, the book clearly presents the achievements of the featured individuals, as well as the richness of the state's heritage. Brief bibliographies after each entry direct the reader toward further research on a given subject.

Written in an easy-to-read and accessible style, the Dictionary of Missouri Biography will be an indispensable reference. Scholars, researchers, and the general reader will turn to this guide repeatedly to discover useful and reliable information about noteworthy Missourians. Every library, every school, every historian, and every Missouri family will want this important new work.

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A History of Missouri (V4)
Volume IV, 1875 to 1919
Lawrence O. Christensen
University of Missouri Press, 2004

Drawing on original research in primary sources, this comprehensive study covers such topics as the Constitution of 1875, the impact of railroad expansion, the 1904 World's Fair, the Populist and Progressive movements, and World War I. It also deals with less familiar topics, such as the state's use of convict labor to save taxpayers money, the emergence of women's clubs, the arrival of moving pictures, and the terrible conditions under which coal miners worked and lived.

Research on the weekly newspapers of such towns as Edina, Bethany, Boonville, Mount Vernon, and Kennett provides a comparative regional and rural perspective on events that took place around the turn of the century, giving the reader a unique glimpse of what small-town life was like. The rapid growth of Missouri's cities is also discussed in detail. St. Louis's development as one of the nation's leading cities is fully recorded, as is the rise of smaller towns such as St. Joseph, Joplin, Springfield, and Sedalia. Kansas City's City Beautiful Movement and the rise of the Pendergast Machine are also treated.

Significant attention is given to World War I. The authors document Missourians' reliance on voluntarism to support the war effort, and they also explain how government officials mobilized the citizens of the state to support the war, especially Missourians of German ancestry. The book fully details the experiences of African Americans and women who lived in Missouri during the period.

This extensive and balanced coverage of Missouri as it moved into the twentieth century will be the authoritative volume on the subject for decades to come. Anyone with an interest in Missouri history will treasure this informative new resource.

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The Teabo Manuscript
Maya Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatán
Mark Z. Christensen
University of Texas Press, 2016

Winner, LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, 2017

Among the surviving documents from the colonial period in Mexico are rare Maya-authored manuscript compilations of Christian texts, translated and adapted into the Maya language and worldview, which were used to evangelize the local population. The Morely Manuscript is well known to scholars, and now The Teabo Manuscript introduces an additional example of what Mark Z. Christensen terms a Maya Christian copybook. Recently discovered in the archives of Brigham Young University, the Teabo Manuscript represents a Yucatecan Maya recounting of various aspects of Christian doctrine, including the creation of the world, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the genealogy of Christ.

The Teabo Manuscript presents the first English translation and analysis of this late colonial Maya-language document, a facsimile and transcription of which are also included in the book. Working through the manuscript section by section, Christensen makes a strong case for its native authorship, as well as its connections with other European and Maya religious texts, including the Morely Manuscript and the Books of Chilam Balam. He uses the Teabo Manuscript as a platform to explore various topics, such as the evangelization of the Maya, their literary compositions, and the aspects of Christianity that they deemed important enough to write about and preserve. This pioneering research offers important new insights into how the Maya negotiated their precontact intellectual traditions within a Spanish and Catholic colonial world.

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Return to Ixil
Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town
Mark Z. Christensen
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Return to Ixil is an examination of over 100 colonial-era Maya wills from the Yucatec town of Ixil, presented together and studied fully for the first time. These testaments make up the most significant corpus of Maya-language documents from the colonial period. Offering an unprecedented picture of material and spiritual life in Ixil from 1738 to 1779, they are rare and rich sources for the study of Maya culture and history.
 
Supplemented with additional archival research, the wills provide new and detailed descriptions of various aspects of life in eighteenth-century Ixil. In each chapter, authors Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall examine a different dimension of Ixil’s colonial history, including the role of notaries, Maya participation in a coastal militia, economy and modes of production, religious life and records, and the structures and patterns of familial relationships. These details offer insight into the complex network of societies in colonial Yucatan, colonial Mesoamerica, and colonial Latin America.
 
Including an appendix presenting the original Maya texts as well as translations by Christensen and Restall, Return to Ixil not only analyzes the largest body of substantive wills in any Mayan language known today but also provides a rare closeup view of the inner workings of a colonial Maya town and the communal and familial affairs that made up a large part of the Maya colonial experience. It will be of great interest to Mayanists as well as to students and scholars of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and social history.
 
The publication of this book is supported in part byBrigham Young University and Penn State University.
 
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Native Wills from the Colonial Americas
Dead Giveaways in a New World
Mark Z. Christensen
University of Utah Press, 2015

Native Wills from the Colonial Americas showcases new testamentary sources from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It provides readers with translations and analyses of wills written in Spanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya, K’iche’ Maya, Mixtec, and Wampanoag.

Divided into three thematic sections, the book provides insights and details that further our understanding of indigenous life in the Americas under colonial rule. Part One employs testaments to highlight the women of Native America and the ways their lives frequently challenged prescribed gender roles and statuses. Part Two uses testaments to illustrate the strategies of the elite in both negotiating and maintaining their power in a colonial, Spanish world. Part Three contributes to our understanding of the individual and collective nature of death by extracting from wills the importance of conversion, kinship, and societal ties in the colonial Americas. Capturing individual voices during dramatic periods of change, the documents presented here help us understand how cultures both adapt and persist. 


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Charles Olson
Call Him Ishmael
Paul Christensen
University of Texas Press, 1979

Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work.

Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts.

Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism.

A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity.

This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael.

Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.

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Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World
A Critical Anthology
Peter H. Christensen
Intellect Books, 2018
Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft, and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s.
The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs, and more.
This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape, and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally.
 
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Sagwitch
Shoshone Chieftan, Mormon Elder 1822-1887
Scott Christensen
Utah State University Press, 1999

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Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis
Thomas Christensen
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
 
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Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community
The Altarpiece of Santiago Atitlán
Allen J. Christenson
University of Texas Press, 2001
A study of a major piece of modern Mayan religious art.
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The Burden of the Ancients
Maya Ceremonies of World Renewal from the Pre-columbian Period to the Present
Allen J. Christenson
University of Texas Press, 2016

In Maya theology, everything from humans and crops to gods and the world itself passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Traditional Maya believe that human beings perpetuate this cycle through ritual offerings and ceremonies that have the power to rebirth the world at critical points during the calendar year. The most elaborate ceremonies take place during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the days preceding Easter on the Christian calendar, during which traditionalist Maya replicate many of the most important world-renewing rituals that their ancient ancestors practiced at the end of the calendar year in anticipation of the New Year’s rites.

Marshaling a wealth of evidence from Pre-Columbian texts, early colonial Spanish writings, and decades of fieldwork with present-day Maya, The Burden of the Ancients presents a masterfully detailed account of world-renewing ceremonies that spans the Pre-Columbian era through the crisis of the Conquest period and the subsequent colonial occupation all the way to the present. Allen J. Christenson focuses on Santiago Atitlán, a Tz’utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, and offers the first systematic analysis of how the Maya preserved important elements of their ancient world renewal ceremonies by adopting similar elements of Roman Catholic observances and infusing them with traditional Maya meanings. His extensive description of Holy Week in Santiago Atitlán demonstrates that the community’s contemporary ritual practices and mythic stories bear a remarkable resemblance to similar cultural entities from its Pre-Columbian past.

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The Title of Totonicapán
Allen J. Christenson
University Press of Colorado, 2022
This work is the first English translation of the complete text of the Title of Totonicapán, one of the most important documents composed by the K’iche’ Maya in the highlands of Guatemala, second only to the Popol Vuh. The original document was completed in 1554, only a few decades after the Spanish Conquest of the K’iche’ people in 1524. This volume contains a wholly new translation from the original K’iche’ Maya text, based on the oldest known manuscript copy, rediscovered by Robert Carmack in 1973.
 
The Title of Totonicapán is a land title written by surviving members of the K’iche’ Maya nobility, a branch of the Maya that dominated the highlands of western Guatemala prior to the Spanish invasion in 1524, and it was duly signed by the ruling lords of all three major K’iche’ lineages—the Kaweqib’, the Nijayib’, and the Ajaw K’iche’s. Titles of this kind were relatively common for Maya communities in the Guatemalan highlands in the first century after the Spanish Conquest as a means of asserting land rights and privileges for its leaders. Like the Popol Vuh, the Title of Totonicapán is written in the elevated court language of the early Colonial period and eloquently describes the mythic origins and history of the K’iche’ people. For the most part, the Title of Totonicapán agrees with the Popol Vuh’s version of K’iche’ history and cosmology, providing a complementary account that attests traditions that must have been widely known and understood. But in many instances the Totonicapán document is richer in detail and departs from the Popol Vuh’s more cursory description of history, genealogy, and political organization. In other instances, it contradicts assertions made by the authors of the Popol Vuh, perhaps a reflection of internal dissent and jealousy between rival lineages within the K’iche’ hierarchy. It also contains significant passages of cosmology and history that do not appear in any other highland Maya text.
 
This volume makes a comprehensive and updated edition of the Title of Totonicapán accessible to scholars and students in history, anthropology, archaeology, and religious studies in Latin America, as well as those interested in Indigenous literature and Native American/Indigenous studies more broadly. It is also a stand-alone work of Indigenous literature that provides additional K’iche’ perspectives, enhancing the reading of other colonial Maya sources.
 
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Economic Redevelopment in Bituminous Coal
The Special Case of Technological Advance in United States Coal Mines, 1930-1960
C. L. Christenson
Harvard University Press

The coal industry has undergone a basic revision since World War II—the present picture differs strikingly from the accepted one. Here for the first time the change is studied in detail. This volume defines the relation between changes in coal consumption and the great technological progress in coal mining during recent years. C. L. Christenson begins by inquiring into the uses of coal as part of the supporting base for modern industrial civilization and the relative position of United States reserves as a portion of world supplies. He next examines the specific variations of the reserves which determine the ownership structure of the bituminous coal industry in the United States as well as the 1940–60 product market shift.

Against this background the author reviews the advance of technology, particularly the striking development from 1950–60, and finally he discusses the relation between this development and miners' employment and wages. Christenson surveys the results of investigation of the records of over 3,000 mines in five states, material from the Bureau of Employment Security, and the annual reports of the United Mine Workers of America Welfare Fund from 1950–60.

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The Myth of the Imperial Presidency
How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive
Dino P. Christenson
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Throughout American history, presidents have shown a startling power to act independently of Congress and the courts. On their own initiative, presidents have taken the country to war, abolished slavery, shielded undocumented immigrants from deportation, declared a national emergency at the border, and more, leading many to decry the rise of an imperial presidency. But given the steep barriers that usually prevent Congress and the courts from formally checking unilateral power, what stops presidents from going it alone even more aggressively?  The answer, Dino P. Christenson and Douglas L. Kriner argue, lies in the power of public opinion.

With robust empirical data and compelling case studies, the authors reveal the extent to which domestic public opinion limits executive might. Presidents are emboldened to pursue their own agendas when they enjoy strong public support, and constrained when they don’t, since unilateral action risks inciting political pushback, jeopardizing future initiatives, and further eroding their political capital. Although few Americans instinctively recoil against unilateralism, Congress and the courts can sway the public’s view via their criticism of unilateral policies. Thus, other branches can still check the executive branch through political means. As long as presidents are concerned with public opinion, Christenson and Kriner contend that fears of an imperial presidency are overblown.
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Keep On Fighting
The Life and Civil Rights Legacy of Marian A. Spencer
Dorothy H. Christenson
Ohio University Press, 2015

Marian Alexander Spencer was born in 1920 in the Ohio River town of Gallipolis, Ohio, one year after the “Red Summer” of 1919 that saw an upsurge in race riots and lynchings. Following the example of her grandfather, an ex-slave and community leader, Marian joined the NAACP at thirteen and grew up to achieve not only a number of civic leadership firsts in her adopted home city of Cincinnati, but a legacy of lasting civil rights victories.

Of these, the best known is the desegregation of Cincinnati’s Coney Island amusement park. She also fought to desegregate Cincinnati schools and to stop the introduction of observers in black voting precincts in Ohio. Her campaign to raise awareness of industrial toxic-waste practices in minority neighborhoods was later adapted into national Superfund legislation.

In 2012, Marian’s friend and colleague Dot Christenson sat down with her to record her memories. The resulting biography not only gives us the life story of remarkable leader but encapsulates many of the twentieth century’s greatest struggles and advances. Spencer’s story will prove inspirational and instructive to citizens and students alike.

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The Brannan Plan
Farm Politics and Policy
Reo Christenson
University of Michigan Press, 1959
"Prosperous farmers," says Harry Truman, "make for a prosperous nation, and when farmers are in trouble, the nation is in trouble." The Brannan Plan—a bid for a prosperous nation—was the boldest, most far-reaching agricultural program in recent American history. Farm policy is the cornerstone of our economy. Brannan's program to stabilize farm income not by price supports, but by direct federal payments to farmers, was the most hotly disputed proposal for dealing with the farm problem in our time. When it was first put forward in 1949, the Brannan Plan provoked vitriolic political battle, a first-class row in Congress, and a raging national debate. Reo M. Christenson's book is an appraisal of the Brannan Plan, its economic and political consequences, and its potential value. He examines past farm policy, the power of the farm organizations, and the partisan passions that destroyed the Plan. More broadly, he analyzes the roles of Congress, federal agencies, and political parties in making farm policy, and their responsibilities to the farmer and to the country at large. Despite the defeat of the Plan in 1950, proposals much like that of Secretary Brannan crop up in Congress and elsewhere with a persistence that pays tribute to the hardiness of his vision. In sum, Christenson says, "it seems a safe bet that the direct payment-free market system has more of a future than a past on the American farm legislative scene."
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Book Reports
A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading
Robert Christgau
Duke University Press, 2019
In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.
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Grown Up All Wrong
75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno
Robert Christgau
Harvard University Press, 2000

Two generations of American music lovers have grown up listening with Robert Christgau, attuned to his inimitable blend of judgment, acuity, passion, erudition, wit, and caveat emptor. His writings, collected here, constitute a virtual encyclopedia of popular music over the past fifty years. Whether honoring the originators of rock and roll, celebrating established artists, or spreading the word about newer ones, the book is pure enjoyment, a pleasure that takes its cues from the sounds it chronicles.

A critical compendium of points of interest in American popular music and its far-flung diaspora, this book ranges from the 1950s singer-songwriter tradition through hip-hop, alternative, and beyond. With unfailing style and grace, Christgau negotiates the straits of great music and thorny politics, as in the cases of Public Enemy, blackface artist Emmett Miller, KRS-One, the Beastie Boys, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He illuminates legends from pop music and the beginnings of rock and roll—George Gershwin, Nat King Cole, B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley—and looks at the subtle transition to just plain “rock” in the music of Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and others. He praises the endless vitality of Al Green, George Clinton, and Neil Young. And from the Rolling Stones to Sonic Youth to Nirvana, from Bette Midler to Michael Jackson to DJ Shadow, he shows how money calls the tune in careers that aren’t necessarily compromised by their intercourse with commerce.

Rock and punk and hip-hop, pop and world beat: this is the music of the second half of the twentieth century, skillfully framed in the work of a writer whose reach, insight, and perfect pitch make him one of the major cultural critics of our time.

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Is It Still Good to Ya?
Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
Robert Christgau
Duke University Press, 2018
Is It Still Good to Ya? sums up the career of longtime Village Voice stalwart Robert Christgau, who for half a century has been America's most widely respected rock critic, honoring a music he argues is only more enduring because it's sometimes simple or silly. While compiling historical overviews going back to Dionysus and the gramophone along with artist analyses that range from Louis Armstrong to M.I.A., this definitive collection also explores pop's African roots, response to 9/11, and evolution from the teen music of the '50s to an art form compelled to confront mortality as its heroes pass on. A final section combines searching obituaries of David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen with awed farewells to Bob Marley and Ornette Coleman.
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Divided Island
Faction and Unity on Saint Pierre
William A. Christian Jr.
Harvard University Press

A small group of islands off the coast of Newfoundland—Saint Pierre, Île aux Marins, and Miquelon-Langlade—comprises France’s last territorial possession in North America. Most of the population lives on the island of Saint Pierre in the town of the same name, which is the archipelago’s only real harbor. During the last two centuries, various issues have placed the inhabitants of Saint Pierre in opposing groups, but no question divided them so precisely along latent social and economic lines as did the choice required of them in 1940–1941. The nature of the Free French–Vichy confrontation touched Saint Pierre society at its most vulnerable point.

Students of France will find that the story of Saint Pierre is in many ways the story of twentieth-century France in microcosm. But this fascinating account also provides a case study in the ideological repercussions of social and economic change. Using a combination of anthropological fieldwork and historical research, William Christian examines the social ideas, social conflicts, and economy of the island from 1900 to the present. He shows that the Pétainist–Gaullist division was a culminating step in a trend that had been going on since the beginning of the century, the direct result of economic decline, rising aspirations, and the substitution of government welfare for a system of private aid and credit. The division is analyzed in terms of social structure in conjunction with essential differences in the world views of the two parties. The author illustrates the stages in the evolution of personal and group quarrels and develops the concept of an “information set,” a social unit defined by the communication and sharing of private information.

In the conclusion of this lively social history, Christian discusses the role of the idea of the “community as a family” and its decline in Saint Pierre during the last sixty years.

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New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
Barbara Christian
University of Illinois Press, 2007
A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.
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Beside the Bard
Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns
George S. Christian
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of “Britishness.” Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, literati or autodidacts, poets such as Alexander Wilson, Carolina Olyphant, Robert Tannahill, and John Lapraik, among others, adamantly refuse to imagine a single nation, British or otherwise, instead preferring an open, polyvocal field, on which they can stage new national and personal formations and fight new revolutions. In this sense, “Scotland” is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 
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Family System
Jack Christian
University Press of Colorado, 2012
Winner of the 2012 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Elizabeth Willis

"Family System is one of the most specific and clarifying books of poetry I’ve ever read. It is filled with choices—made, to be made, not made—handled with a poetic understanding that what seems arbitrary will be inevitable when said with the right words while singing the right songs. This is a stand-out first book, introducing a first-rate original talent, doing powerful work, making quintessentially lyrical choices. Don’t miss this book.”
—Dara Wier
 
“It seems that Jack Christian’s brain is able to produce tiny lucid creatures, have them run and sprinkle over a map of an unknown world with joy, speed and delight. Even stranger, he’s somehow the spiritual offspring of very different ancestors: Pascal’s Esprit de Geometrie and Scandinavian mythology. ‘I was eulogizing a squirrel in a shoebox.’ Brilliant.”
—Tomaž Šalamun
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Objects in Air
Artworks and Their Outside around 1900
Margareta Ingrid Christian
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.

Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
 
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The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader
Shawn Anthony Christian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a "reading folk." Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it.

In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of "good literature" both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era.
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Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake
Dounia Bunis Christiani
Northwestern University Press, 1965
In Scandinavian Elements of “Finnegans Wake,” Dounia Bunis Christiani addresses herself to an enormous task: examining the significance of Scandinavian history, literature, and languages for the composition of James Joyce’s masterwork. Whereas critical studies of Joyce tend to fall into two categories—those exploring the philosophical grounding of his works and those providing close textual readings—the significance of Christiani’s work lies in her deep historical and cultural analysis.
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Ethical Communication
Moral Stances in Human Dialogue
Clifford G. Christians
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Proponents of professional ethics recognize the importance of theory but also know that the field of ethics is best understood through real-world applications. This book introduces students and practitioners to important ethical concepts through the lives of major thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, John Stuart Mill to the Dalai Lama.
Some two dozen contributors approach media ethics from five perspectives—altruistic, egoistic, autonomous, legalist, and communitarian—and use real people as examples to convey ethical concepts as something more than mere abstractions. Readers see how Confucius represents group loyalty; Gandhi, nonviolent action; Mother Teresa, the spirit of sacrifice. Each profile provides biographical material, the individual’s basic ethical position and contribution, and insight into how his or her moral teachings can help the modern communicator. The roster of thinkers is gender inclusive, ethnically diverse, and spans a broad range of time and geography to challenge the misperception that moral theory is dominated by Western males.
These profiles challenge us not to give up on moral thinking in our day but to take seriously the abundance of good ideas in ethics that the human race provides. They speak to real-life struggles by applying to such trials the lasting quality of foundational thought. Many of the root values to which they appeal are cross-cultural, even universal.
Exemplifying these five ethical perspectives through more than two dozen mentors provides today’s communicators with a solid grounding of key ideas for improving discussion and attaining social progress in their lives and work. These profiles convey the diversity of means to personal and social betterment through worthwhile ideas that truly make ethics come alive.
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Normative Theories of the Media
Journalism in Democratic Societies
Clifford G Christians
University of Illinois Press, 2008
In this book, five leading scholars of media and communication take on the difficult but important task of explicating the role of journalism in democratic societies. Using Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm's classic Four Theories of the Press as their point of departure, the authors explore the philosophical underpinnings and the political realities that inform a normative approach to questions about the relationship between journalism and democracy, investigating not just what journalism is but what it ought to be. The authors identify four distinct yet overlapping roles for the media: the monitorial role of a vigilant informer collecting and publishing information of potential interest to the public; the facilitative role that not only reports on but also seeks to support and strengthen civil society; the radical role that challenges authority and voices support for reform; and the collaborative role that creates partnerships between journalists and centers of power in society, notably the state, to advance mutually acceptable interests. Demonstrating the value of a reconsideration of media roles, Normative Theories of the Media provides a sturdy foundation for subsequent discussions of the changing media landscape and what it portends for democratic ideals.
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Madison Chefs
Stories of Food, Farms, and People
Lindsay Christians
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Why do Salvatore’s tomato pies have the sauce on the top? Where did chef Tami Lax learn to identify mushrooms in the woods? How did Morris develop its signature ramen?
 
Farm-to-table is a cliché, but its roots among the farmers and chefs of south-central Wisconsin are deep, vibrant, and resilient. From brats and burgers to bibimbap, Madison’s food scene looks substantially different than it did just a decade ago. Though the city has always been ahead of the locavore movement, a restaurant boom in the 2010s radically changed the dining landscape. Even when individual eateries close or chefs move on, their ideas, connections, and creativity have lasting power. Much larger cities have been unable to match the culinary variety, innovation, and depth of talent found in Wisconsin’s state capital.
 
Lindsay Christians’s in-depth look at nine creative, intense, and dedicated chefs captures the reason why Madison’s food culture remains a gem in America’s Upper Midwest. This beautifully illustrated book will leave you salivating—or making reservations.
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Forbidden
Receiving Pope Francis's Condemnation of Nuclear Weapons
Drew Christiansen
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Moral theologians, defense analysts, conflict scholars, and nuclear experts imagine a world free from nuclear weapons

At a 2017 Vatican conference, Pope Francis condemned nuclear weapons. This volume, issued after the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, presents essays from moral theologians, defense analysts, conflict transformation scholars, and nuclear arms control experts, with testimonies from witnesses. It is a companion volume to A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament (Georgetown University Press, 2020).

Chapters from the perspectives of missile personnel and the military chain of command, industrialists and legislators, and citizen activists show how we might achieve a nuclear-free world. Key to this transition is the important role of public education and the mobilization of lay movements to raise awareness and effect change. This essential collection prepares military professionals, policymakers, everyday citizens, and the pastoral workers who guide them, to make decisions that will lead us to disarmament.

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A World Free from Nuclear Weapons
The Vatican Conference on Disarmament
Drew Christiansen
Georgetown University Press, 2023

On November 10, 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff in the nuclear era to take a complete stand against nuclear weapons, even as a form of deterrence. At a Vatican conference of leaders in the field of disarmament, he made it clear that the possession of the bomb itself was immoral. A World Free from Nuclear Weapons presents the pope’s address and original testimony from Nobel Peace Prize laureates, religious leaders, diplomats, and civil society activists.

These luminaries, which include the pope and a Hiroshima survivor, make the moral case against possessing, manufacturing, and deploying nuclear arms. Drew Christiansen, a member of the Holy See delegation to the 2017 United Nations conference that negotiated the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, helps readers to understand this conference in its historical context.

A World Free from Nuclear Weapons is a critical companion for scholars of modern Catholicism, moral theology, and peace studies, as well as policymakers working on effective disarmament. It shows how the Church’s revised position presents an opportunity for global leaders to connect disarmament to larger movements for peace, pointing toward future action.

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Channeling the Past
Politicizing History in Postwar America
Erik Christiansen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
After the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II, Americans looked to the nation’s more distant past for lessons to inform its uncertain future. By applying recent and emerging techniques in mass communication—including radio and television programs and commercial book clubs—American elites working in media, commerce, and government used history to confer authority on their respective messages.
    With insight and wit, Erik Christiansen uncovers in Channeling the Past the ways that powerful corporations rewrote history to strengthen the postwar corporate state, while progressives, communists, and other leftists vied to make their own versions of the past more popular. Christiansen looks closely at several notable initiatives—CBS’s flashback You Are There program; the Smithsonian Museum of American History, constructed in the late 1950s; the Cavalcade of America program sponsored by the Du Pont Company; the History Book Club; and the Freedom Train, a museum on rails that traveled the country from 1947 to 1949 exhibiting historic documents and flags, including original copies of the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta.
    It is often said that history is written by the victors, but Christiansen offers a more nuanced perspective: history is constantly remade to suit the objectives of those with the resources to do it. He provides dramatic evidence of sophisticated calculations that influenced both public opinion and historical memory, and shows that Americans’ relationships with the past changed as a result.
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Reflections
My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds
John B. Christiansen
Gallaudet University Press, 2010

Hard of hearing since early childhood, John Christiansen spent the first 30 years of his life trying to fit in to a hearing world that did little to accommodate his communication needs. Although he excelled in academics, Christiansen found social situations stressful at every level, until he obtained a position as a professor of sociology at Gallaudet University. There he learned sign language and joined a new community. Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds grew out of his personal experiences inhabiting these two worlds.

As a sociologist, Christiansen could identify the toll that trying to communicate with hearing people took on his psyche, the classic looking-glass self in action: I am what I think you think I am. He saw that people with hearing loss frequently blame themselves for social awkwardness and gaffs, even though the responsibility for clear communication should be shared. Still, after living in the hearing world for most of his life, he opted to undergo a cochlear implantation to try to improve interaction with his hearing friends, wife, and children.

His description of adjusting to his cochlear implant brings fresh reality to the implant process. As he puts it, he was not a superstar. After ten years, though, he feels positive enough about his experience to endorse it. As a denouement to his affecting memoir, he describes the disruptive 2006 protest at Gallaudet over the choice of a new president from his vantage point as a member of the search committee. Reflections stands as a remarkable account of one person’s navigation through the intricacies of two different and occasionally opposing worlds.

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Deaf President Now!
The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University
John B. Christiansen
Gallaudet University Press, 1995

Deaf President Now! reveals the groundswell leading up to the history-making week in 1988 when the students at Gallaudet University seized the campus and closed it down until their demands were met. To research this probing study, the authors interviewed in-depth more than 50 of the principal players.

This telling book reveals the critical role played by a little-known group called the "Ducks," a tight-knit band of six alumni determined to see a deaf president at Gallaudet. Deaf President Now! details how they urged the student leaders to ultimate success, including an analysis of the reasons for their achievement in light of the failure of many other student movements. This fascinating study also scrutinizes the lasting effects of this remarkable episode in "the civil rights movement of the deaf." Deaf President Now! tells the full story of the insurrection at Gallaudet University, an exciting study of how deaf people won social change for themselves and all disabled people everywhere through a peaceful revolution.

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Cochlear Implants in Children
Ethics and Choices
John B. Christiansen
Gallaudet University Press, 2002

Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and Choices addresses every facet of the ongoing controversy about implanting cochlear hearing devices in children as young as 12 months old and in some cases, younger. Authors John B. Christiansen and Irene W. Leigh and contributors Jay Lucker and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer analyzed the sensitive issues connected with the procedure by reviewing 439 responses to a survey of parents with children who have cochlear implants. They followed up with interviews of the parents of children who have had a year's experience using their implants, and also the children themselves. Their findings shape the core of this useful and telling study.

       Cochlear Implants begins with a history of their development and an explanation of how implants convert sound into electric impulses that stimulate the brain. The second section focuses on pediatric implants, starting with the ways parents coped with the discovery that their child was deaf. Parents share how they learned about cochlear implants and how they chose an implant center. They also detail their children's experiences with the implants after surgery, and their progress with language acquisition and in school.

       The final part treats the controversy associated with cochlear implants, particularly the reaction of the Deaf community and the ethics of implanting young children without their consent. Cochlear Implants concludes with sage observations and recommendations for parents and professionals that complete it as the essential book on the pros and cons of this burgeoning technology.

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Orchestrating Public Opinion
How Music Persuades in Television Political Ads for US Presidential Campaigns, 1952-2016
Paul Christiansen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.
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An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants
Paul Christiansen
University of Iowa Press, 1999

Iowa is the only state completely within the tallgrass prairie formation. Thanks to rich soil, adequate rainfall, and warm summer temperatures, hundreds of species combine to produce a diverse and colorful and ever-changing landscape. Using text and maps by Paul Christiansen and newly created drawings by Mark Müller, this first comprehensive guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species.

Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit, and habitat. The time of flowering and fruiting is given for the central part of Iowa. Where several species are closely related, a common member of the group is fully described, and the other species are compared with the first. Each species is paired with a distribution map. The superbly detailed illustrations, all of which were drawn specifically for this handbook, capture the general shape of each plant as well as its characteristic features. A guide to family identification, information about extant and restored prairies in Iowa, and a glossary are also included.

Farmers who settled Iowa in the 1800s viewed the great green sea of grasses and wildflowers as a challenge to be replaced with cropfields and pastures. Today we realize that the prairie is an addictive, restorative, aesthetically satisfying place for study and recreation. An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants is designed to enable those who want to go beyond the most common plants to identify all native species and to learn more about their distribution, structure, and natural history.

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Consensual Policy-making in the Nordic World
Peter Munk Christiansen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
This book examines the model developed in the Scandinavian countries for handling labor market relations between employers and employees—a model that has secured flexible and well-functioning labor market relations with comparatively high remuneration in case of sickness or unemployment. Consensual—and comparatively efficient—policies have likewise been pursued in agricultural, industrial, environmental policies, and in many policies related to public services.

The preconditions for these policies are strong civil societies, that is, strong capacities for collective mobilization and collective action among groups, relatively strong unitary states, and high levels of generalized trust. The institutional apparatus of these consensual policies has been labeled corporatism. Scandinavian corporatism has implied consent to a norm of affected interests. Groups that are supposedly affected by state policies have access to the processes leading up to political decision-making and are involved in the implementation of policies. This access often has public commissions or committees charged with preparing political decisions and delivering advice, as well as policy implementation committees.

Corporatist and consensual policymaking come at a price. The exchange between interest groups (in pursuit of policy influence) and state actors (in pursuit of information and political support from groups) tends to be time-consuming and confined to solutions that are accepted by all actors. Corporatist policies are consequently not very conducive to more radical reforms. After the heyday of corporatist policymaking in the 1970s, all the Scandinavian countries have loosened their corporatist structures to pave the way for reforms.
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Folktales of Norway
Reidar Christiansen
University of Chicago Press, 1964
Often lacking the clear episodic structure of folktales about talking animals and magic objects, legends grow from retellings of personal experiences. Christiansen isolated some seventy-seven legend types, and many of these are represented here in absorbing stories of St. Olaf, hidden treasures, witches, and spirits of the air, water, and earth. The ugly, massively strong, but slow-witted trolls are familiar to English-speaking readers. Less well-known, but the subject of an enormous number of legends, are the more manlike yet sinister "huldre-folk" who live in houses and try to woo human girls. These tales reflect the wildness of Norway, its mountains, forests, lakes, and sea, and the stalwart character of its sparse population.

"The translation is excellent, retaining the traditional Norwegian style . . . the tales themselves will also appeal to the interested layman."—Library Journal

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A Theater of Our Own
A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago
Richard Christiansen
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Book Award for Superior Achievement

A Theater of Our Own is a fascinating, fast-paced, and fact-filled chronicle of Chicago's legendary theater scene by the long-time chief critic for the Chicago Tribune. Who produced the first stage adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1902-nearly forty years before the movie classic? What entertainment juggernaut began in a converted Chinese laundry on Wells Street in 1959? Where did Louis (Studs) Terkel make his stage debut? When did the original production of "Grease" open at Kingston Mines Theater? Richard Christiansen, former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune, answers these and many more questions about the rich role of the theater in Chicago, from its earliest days in 1837 to its present state as a diverse community of artists with international stature.

In A Theater of Our Own, he draws upon his exclusive interviews, insights, and memories gathered over a period of more than forty years of reviewing the arts. This history and memoir traces the evolution of the Chicago theater scene from small theaters to major institutions such as the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Goodman Theater, and The Second City. Along the way, Richard Christiansen relates his behind-the-scenes conversations with some of Chicago's most acclaimed writers, directors, and actors--David Mamet, Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Harold Ramis, Gary Sinise, and Joe Mantegna--all a part of Chicago's theater renaissance from the 1970s onward. To this day, Chicago remains a city known for its imaginative, innovative, and influential theaters and artists. A Theater of Our Own, a valuable contribution to the history of theater, is a book written for anyone who enjoys the theater and its people as well as the story of Chicago.
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