logo for Ohio University Press
D. H. Lawrence
An Unprofessional Study
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 1964

In 1932, two years after D. H. Lawrence’s death, a young woman wrote a book about him and presented it to a Paris publisher. She recorded the event in her diary: “It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within oneself. He gave it to his assistant to revise.” The woman was Anaïs Nin.

Nin examined Lawrence’s poetry, novels, essays, and travel writing. She analyzed and explained the more important philosophical concepts contained in his writings, particularly the themes of love, death, and religion, as well as his attention to primitivism and to women. But what Anaïs Nin brought to the explication of Lawrence’s writing was an understanding of the fusion of imaginative, intuitive, and intellectual elements from which he drew his characters, themes, imagery and symbolism.

[more]

front cover of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
Fifty Years on Film
Louis K. Greiff
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Between 1949 and 1999, the life and works of D. H. Lawrence inspired ten feature films: nine based on works of fiction and one based on biography. In D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film, Louis K. Greiff examines these films as adaptations, as cultural or historical documents, and as independent works of art.

Significantly, the films were not spread evenly throughout the decades but appeared in three clusters. The first group, or the “black and white,” appeared between 1949 and 1960. With the exception of Marc Allegret’s L’Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955), all celebrate the British common man as a midcentury hero and promote an unmistakable yet never strident postwar ethos that is Marxist in spirit.

The second cluster occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These films show Lawrence’s values as similar to the cultural values of the time—nonconformity, neobohemianism, sexual rebellion, war protest, and the celebration of youth. In his discussion of the third group Greiff explains why, in an un-Lawrentian decade like the 1980s, there was a revival of Lawrence’s works on film.

Greiff also deals with the contributions made by directors Ken Russell and Christopher Miles, both of whom directed Lawrence films of the latter two clusters. He shows how Russell and, to a lesser extent, Miles were responsible for bringing mass audiences in touch with the works of Lawrence.

Greiff’s final and most important goal is to interpret and evaluate the Lawrence films. He looks first at the film as a visual representation of its text, then as an original act of creation and object of art.

           

[more]

front cover of D H LAWRENCE
D H LAWRENCE
SELF AND SEXUALITY
JAMES C. COWAN
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

D. H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality is a psychoanalytic study of D. H. Lawrence’s life and writings. James Cowan relies most notably the methods of Heinz Kohut, psychoanalytic “self psychology,” and employs as well the object relation theories of D. W. Winnicott and others. This work also examines sexual issues in Lawrence’s work from a literary and critical perspective, employing authoritative medical and psychoanalytic sources in human sexuality. Lawrence’s work, which was early read in traditional Freudian terms, has only recently been considered from other psychoanalytic perspectives. In this self psychological study, Cowan provides a new and path-breaking analysis of Lawrence.

Turning to several problematic issues of sexuality in Lawrence, the author first discusses a number of Lawrence’s sexual fallacies, and personal and cultural issues. Cowan also considers contrasting idealized and negative presentations of Mellors and Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the theme of the “loss of desire” sequence of poems in Pansies.

[more]

front cover of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
The Croydon Years
By Helen Corke, introduction by Warren Roberts
University of Texas Press, 1965

Croydon, England, was the setting of the famous three-way friendship of D. H. Lawrence, Jessie Chambers, and Helen Corke, all of whom made literary records of their association, and all of whom appeared as characters in Lawrence novels. Perhaps the most objective of these records were Helen Corke’s, which became difficult to acquire. Their scarcity and their continuing usefulness were the stimulus for publication of this volume, which contains in four statements Helen Corke’s “major comment on Lawrence the man and Lawrence the artist.”

The “Portrait of D. H. Lawrence, 1909–1910,” a section from Corke’s unpublished autobiography, gives the reader glimpses into the earliest stages of the Lawrence-Corke friendship, when Lawrence worked to bring meaning back into Corke’s life after she had suffered a tragic loss. The “Portrait” tells of conversations before a log fire, German lessons, the reading of poetry, and sessions over Lawrence’s manuscript “Nethermere,” which the publishers renamed The White Peacock. In “Portrait,” Corke tells of working with Lawrence on revising the proofs of this book, of Lawrence’s encouragement of her own literary efforts, of their wandering together in the Kentish hill country, and of her first meeting with Jessie Chambers.

“Lawrence’s ‘Princess’” continues the narrative of the triple friendship, carrying it to its sad ending, but with the focus on Jessie Chambers. Perceptively and sympathetically written, it throws a clarifying light on the psychology of Lawrence and presents with literary charm another human being—Jessie, the Miriam of Sons and Lovers.

In combined narrative-critique method, Corke, in the essay “Concerning The White Peacock,” relates Lawrence’s problems in writing this novel and gives an analysis of its literary quality.

Lawrence and Apocalypse is cast in the form of a “deferred conversation” in which Lawrence and Corke discuss his philosophical ideas as presented in his Apocalypse. Although the book was written to present Lawrence’s ideas, its significance reposes equally in Corke’s reaction to his thought. As a succinct statement of Lawrence’s teachings about the nature of humanity, it has unique value.

[more]

front cover of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
The Failure and the Triumph of Art
Eliseo Vivas
Northwestern University Press, 1960
In D. H. Lawrence, Eliseo Vivas examines the aesthetic triumphs and failures of Lawrence’s major works through a literary device that he coins “the constitutive symbol.” Understanding how Lawrence uses the constitutive symbol provides new insight into his world views. Vivas covers a wide range of Lawrence's work, including Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.  Vivas was one of the first scholars to use psychological criticism to read Lawrence’s works; Vivas's and his particularly fresh reading of Lawrence’s novels continue to make this a significant literary-critical study.
[more]

front cover of D. Michael Quinn
D. Michael Quinn
Mormon Historian
Gary Topping
Signature Books, 2022
D. Michael Quinn (1944–2021) was one of Mormonism’s greatest historians, though his books have profound relevance to Utah and western history as well. After completing his doctorate in history at Yale University in three years, he taught at Brigham Young University from 1976 to 1988. His treatment of difficult themes in Mormon history drew controversy, which led to resignation from his academic position and to his eventual excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His large, elaborately documented books, such as his three volumes on the Mormon hierarchy and his Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, set a new standard for Mormon historical scholarship.
[more]

front cover of D.A. Pennebaker
D.A. Pennebaker
Keith Beattie
University of Illinois Press, 2011
This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career spanning decades, Pennebaker's many projects have included avant-garde experiments (Daybreak Express), ground-breaking television documentaries (Primary), celebrity films (Dont Look Back), concert films (Monterey Pop), and innovative fusions of documentary and fiction (Maidstone).
 
Exploring the concept of "performing the real," Keith Beattie interprets Pennebaker's films as performances in which the act of filming is in itself a performative transgression of the norms of purely observational documentary. He examines the ways in which Pennebaker's presentation of unscripted everyday performances is informed by connections between documentary filmmaking and other experimental movements such as the New American Cinema. Through his collaborations with such various artists as Richard Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Luc Godard, Pennebaker has continually reworked and redefined the forms of documentary filmmaking. This book also includes a recent interview with the director and a full filmography.
[more]

front cover of The Dacha Husband
The Dacha Husband
A Novel
Ivan Shcheglov
Northwestern University Press, 2009
In addition to offering fresh editions of well-known works, Northwestern World Classics will also reintroduce to a new generation "lost classics," such as Ivan Shcheglov’s 1896 The Dacha Husband (Dachnyi muzh). Despite being considered the most interesting writer of the late 1800s by no less a writer than his onetime collaborator Anton Chekhov, Ivan Shcheglov is largely forgotten in the West. In the able hands of Michael Katz, acclaimed translator of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, Shcheglov’s strikingly modern style and biting satire come alive for today’s readers.

The Dacha Husband (a term created by Shcheglov) satirizes a type of man who came to prominence in the later part of the nineteenth century in Russia; he was typically upper middle class, was married to a materialistic woman, and commuted to work in St. Petersburg during the summer while his wife and children vacationed at the family’s dacha in Pavlovsk.

Among the novel’s highlights is a "Convention of Dacha Husbands," in which a "small group of insulted and injured husbands gathered together, in secret from their wives, . . . for a general discussion of contemporary marital misfortunes and a search for some means to protect their human rights." The convention is unexpectedly interrupted by the wives, who arrive to retrieve their rebellious spouses. A coda informs the reader that at least one of the proposals offered during the meeting survived: the construction of a "shelter for the care of deserted husbands."
[more]

front cover of Dada and Photomontage across Borders, Volume 36
Dada and Photomontage across Borders, Volume 36
David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach, eds.
Duke University Press
This special issue of New German Critique explores the art of Dada and photomontage in transnational contexts. Dadaism, an art movement cultivated during World War I, questioned traditional aesthetics and eventually led to the formation of surrealism. Focusing on Dada’s achievements in building a network of artists in Europe and America, this issue examines photomontage as an integral part of the movement, as well as its relationship to mass media, photography, propaganda, constructivism, and left-wing politics in the Soviet Union and western Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.

The central figure of the issue is John Heartfield, a Dadaist who influenced much of the art world in Europe after World War I. The collection investigates Heartfield’s lesser-known early work with cinema in the service of the German High Command. Believing that photographic cinema was akin to war propaganda, Heartfield rejected live-action war footage in favor of American cinematic animation to promote an honest discussion about the horror and realities of war. One essay explores Heartfield’s photomontages while turning to film theory as a way of interpreting the politics of his work, demonstrating how his photomontages retain the organic and traditional nature of photography even as they produce cognitive dissonance and satire. Another essay on Heartfield’s role in Soviet discussions of the 1930s offers fascinating insights based on new archival research. The issue also looks at the relationship between Heartfield and the illustrated German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung and how that magazine influenced photomontage across Europe.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
The Dada Cyborg
Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin
Matthew Biro
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

logo for Harvard University Press
The Dada Painters and Poets
An Anthology, Second Edition
Robert Motherwell
Harvard University Press, 1989

The Dada Painters and Poets offers the authentic answer to the question “What is Dada?” This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with the collaboration of some of the major Dada figures: Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst among others. Here in their own words and art, the principals of the movement create a composite picture of Dada—its convictions, antics, and spirit.

First published in 1951, this treasure trove remains, as Jack D. Flam states in his foreword to the second edition, “the most comprehensive and important anthology of Dada writings in any language, and a fascinating and very readable book.” It contains every major text on the Dada movement, including retrospective studies, personal memoirs, and prime examples. The illustrations range from photos of participants, in characteristic Dadaist attitudes, to facsimiles of their productions.

[more]

front cover of The DADA Reader
The DADA Reader
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Dawn Ades
University of Chicago Press, 2006
The revolutionary Dada movement, though short-lived, produced a vast amount of creative work in both art and literature during the years that followed World War I. Rejecting all social and artistic conventions, Dadaists went to the extremes of provocative behavior, creating “anti-art” pieces that ridiculed and questioned the very nature of creative endeavor. To understand their movement’s heady mix of anarchy and nihilism—combined with a lethal dash of humor—it’s essential to engage with the artists’ most important writings and manifestos. And that is is precisely where this reader comes in. 

Bringing together key Dada texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, this volume immerses readers in some of the most famous (and infamous) periodicals of the time, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Francis Picabia’s 391 to Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz. Published in Europe and the United States between 1916 and 1932, these journals constituted the movement’s lifeblood, communicating the desires and aspirations of the artists involved. In addition to providing the first representative selection of these texts, The Dada Reader also includes excerpts from many lesser-known American and Eastern European journals. 

Compiled with both students and general readers in mind, this volume is necessary reading for anyone interested in one of the most dynamic and influential movements of the twentieth century.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Daddy's Girl
Young Girls and Popular Culture
Valerie Walkerdine
Harvard University Press, 1997

When she's itty bitty and blond, wearing ribbons and curls and an aura of money, she's adorable and vulnerable, the tiny, innocent heart of our culture. But when the little girl comes from the working class, she's something else. Just what, and why so little is said about it, are the questions Valerie Walkerdine asks in Daddy's Girl, a book about how we see young girls, how they see themselves, and how popular culture mediates the view.

Walkerdine's study looks at little girls on television and in the movies, in advertisements and popular songs. In figures from Annie to Shirley Temple in any number of her plucky poor girl roles, she shows us little orphans saddled with the task of representing the self-sufficient working class on the one hand and the loveable object of middle class charity on the other. The real working class girl, whose fantasies feed on a strange mix of these images and the rest of what popular culture offers, with all its glamorized sex and violence, is also the object of Walkerdine's attention. Reflecting on her own working class roots and taking us into the homes and the confidence of working class girls today as they watch television and movies and listen to popular songs, she gives us a sense, at once troubling and poignant, of the portrayal and manipulation of little girls as a canny part of the production of civilized femininity.

At the center of this work is the issue of how girl children are taught to think of themselves and how their depiction puts them in their place. This concern leads Walkerdine to questions about television and parental control, about Freud's seduction theory and the origins of fantasy, about the political and erotic meaning of the ubiquitous gaze our culture trains on the little girl, and about academics' approach to the subject.

[more]

front cover of Daddy’s Money
Daddy’s Money
A Memoir of Farm and Family
Jo McDougall
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the twentieth century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered account of the day-to-day of rice growing on the farm that her father inherited. In that setting she discovers a rich "universe of words" in the Great Depression, comes of age during World War II, and finds her way alongside "that whole quirky, compelling cast of characters" that comprised her kin. In this conflicted, ironic, southern-but-universal account of betrayal, heartbreak, loss, and joy, "the vagaries and the grace" of the land join forces with the power of money as family bonds are both forged and dissolved. Deeply felt, unsentimental, and often humorous,Daddy's Money presents McDougall's life and the lives of her relatives in the way that all our lives are eventually framed-as stories. "When all else is lost," the author maintains, "the stories remain."
[more]

logo for University of Manitoba Press
Dadibaajim
Returning Home through Narrative
Helen Olsen Agger
University of Manitoba Press, 2021

front cover of The Dadly Virtues
The Dadly Virtues
Adventures from the Worst Job You'll Ever Love
Jonathan V. Last
Templeton Press, 2015
From the all-star cast who brought you The Seven Deadly Virtues comes a book with a look at the good life… or the crazy-stressful-overwhelmed life… of a father.

The Dadly Virtues is a tongue-in-cheek collection of encouragement and guidance for any stage of fatherhood, from pacifying babies to prepping for senior prom, from cutting the cord to getting the first, “Best Grandpa” t-shirt. P.J. O’Rourke sets the stage with the chapter, “What Do Men Get from Fatherhood? Besides What They Put In …” and then is followed by:
•Matthew Continetti’s, “Newborn Terror: The Moment You Realize that ‘Bundle of Joy’ Is a Euphemism for Something Very Different.”
•Stephen F. Hayes’ “Siblings: The Best Gift You’ll Ever Give Your Kids.”
•Jonah Goldberg’s “Get Your Kid a Dog: The Moral Case for Pets.”
•Tucker Carlson’s “In Praise of Adventure: How to Fill a Child’s Life with Excitement and Danger (without Getting Them Killed).”
•Michael Graham’s, “Dating: Enjoy the Movie and Please Keep the Impregnation to a Minimum.”
•Christopher Caldwell’s “College: It’s Not as Bad as You Think; It’s Worse.”
•Andrew Ferguson’s “Emerging Adults and Empty Nesters: Just When You Had Fatherhood All Figured Out.”
•Toby Young’s “The Dark Side: Bad Parenting and the Things We Think, but Do Not Say.”
•Joseph Epstein’s “Thanks, Grandpa: Grandfatherhood and the Spirit of the Age.”
•And more.

Father-to-be, two-time-dad, or granddad, each essay will make you laugh and, at the same time, reinforce your commitment to the virtuous—the dadly—life.
[more]

front cover of Dads, Kids, and Fitness
Dads, Kids, and Fitness
A Father's Guide to Family Health
Marsiglio, William
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Now more than ever, American dads act as hands-on caregivers who are devoted to keeping themselves and their families healthy. Yet, men are also disproportionately likely to neglect their own health care, diets, and exercise routines—bad habits that they risk passing on to their children. 
 
In Dads, Kids, and Fitness, William Marsiglio challenges dads to become more health-conscious in how they live and raise their children. His conclusions are drawn not only from his revealing interviews with a diverse sample of dads and pediatric healthcare professionals, but also from his own unique personal experiences—as a teenage father who, thirty-one years later, became a later-life dad to a second son. Marsiglio’s research highlights the value of treating dads as central players in what he calls the social health matrix, which can serve both healthy children and those with special needs. He also outlines how schools, healthcare facilities, religious groups, and other organizations can help dads make a positive imprint on their families’ health, fitness, and well-being.  
 
Anchored in compelling life stories of joy, tragedy, and resilience, Dads, Kids, and Fitness extends and deepens public conversation about health at a pivotal historical moment. Its progressive message breathes new life into discussions about fathering, manhood, and health.
 
[more]

front cover of Daemons Are Forever
Daemons Are Forever
Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium
David Gordon White
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the “outer dæmons” that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place at the heart of the discipline of the history of religions.
[more]

front cover of Daguerreotypes and Other Essays
Daguerreotypes and Other Essays
Isak Dinesen
University of Chicago Press, 1979
"Isak Dinesen . . . had an original approach to life that permeated all her work. She loved storytelling, with the result that most of her essays are quasi-narratives, which proceed not from major to minor premise but from one anecdote to another as the way of making concrete whatever idea she is considering. Her work is a delight and at times a marvel."—The New Yorker

"Through these daguerreotypes we begin to understand other periods, the renunciations of World War I, the purpose of houses and mansions, of ritual ceremonials, such as tatooing. We are given a fresh and vivid view of the women's movement . . . which urges that what our 'small society' needs beyond human beings who have demonstrated what they can do, is people who are. 'Indeed, our own time,' she wrote in 1953, 'can be said to need a revision from doing to being.' She demonstrated it in her own work and craft, with courage and with dignity. This collection is as real as a gallery of old daguerreotypes, moving and unfaded. The work, as Hannah Arendt says, of a wise woman."—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"These essays . . . have the flavor of good conversation: humorous, easy, personal but not oppressive, the distillation of reading, thought, and experience. Their subjects are of surprisingly current interest. We need make no concessions to the past, need not set our watches back to 'historical.' Isak Dinesen was not a faddish thinker. . . . 'In history it is always the human element that has a chance for eternal life,' Dinesen remarks, and she gives these essays their chance."—Penelope Mesic, Chicago
[more]

front cover of Daguerreotypes
Daguerreotypes
Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects
Lisa Saltzman
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In the digital age, photography confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. While technology has allowed amateurs and experts alike to create high-quality photographs in the blink of an eye, new electronic formats have severed the original photochemical link between image and subject. At the same time, recent cinematic photography has stretched the concept of photography and raised questions about its truth value as a documentary medium. Despite this situation, photography remains a stubbornly substantive form of evidence: referenced by artists, filmmakers, and writers as a powerful emblem of truth, photography has found its home in other media at precisely the moment of its own material demise.

By examining this idea of photography as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, Daguerreotypes demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an otherwise unstable sense of self. Lisa Saltzman argues that in many modern works, the photograph asserts itself as a guarantor of identity, whether genuine or fabricated. From Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—we find traces of photography’s “fugitive subjects” throughout contemporary culture. Ultimately, Daguerreotypes reveals how the photograph, at once personal memento and material witness, has inspired a range of modern artistic and critical practices.
[more]

front cover of Dahlia's Iris
Dahlia's Iris
Secret Autobiography and Fiction
Leslie Scalapino
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Detectives are investigating the death of Dahlia Winter's husband and also looking into the mysterious deaths of young boys who are imported for labor in a future-time San Francisco. Citing the plots of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner as proof that our sense of inner and outer is tied to rebellion and slavery, the novel appears at first to be a detail of these films all at once, like a colonization of them from the inside. But almost immediately the plot assumes its own life. Based on a conception of the Tibetan written form called Secret Autobiography--which is not the chronological events or actions of a life, but an individual's seeing outside any frames--the novel makes a time-space in which sensation, actions, and thought-memory are occurring alongside our present-day space.
[more]

front cover of Dahomean Narrative
Dahomean Narrative
A Cross-Cultural Analysis
Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits
Northwestern University Press, 1998
This new edition brings back into print one of the classics in scholarly analysis and translation, written by one of the luminaries of American cultural anthropology. Melville Herskovits and his wife and collaborator Frances spent over twenty years studying the social networks, religion, music, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the site of their major African work, is in the country now known as Benin.

Published as a companion piece to Northwestern University Press's West African Folktales, Dahomean Narrative provides the basic texts of material collected in the field, and shows how they were collected, analyzed, and theorized in the anthropological and folklore disciplinary traditions of Herskovits's day. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.
[more]

front cover of DAI (enough)
DAI (enough)
A Play
Iris Bahr
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Set in a Tel Aviv café in the moments before a suicide bomber enters, Iris Bahr’s 2008 Lucille Lortel Award–winning DAI (enough) courageously speaks to tragic current events. Bahr plays eleven different characters who span the ideological and class spectrum of Israeli society, including a Zionist kibbutznik, an evangelical from America funding an Armageddon fantasy, a West Bank settler, a snooty expat living in Long Island, and a Palestinian professor trying to keep her son from taking the path of extremism. Thanks to the emotional depth and honesty with which Bahr endows these characters and their individual stories, a complex portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerges. Alternately very funny and tragic, DAI (enough) is a brave attempt to humanize the headlines.

[more]

front cover of The Daily Charles Dickens
The Daily Charles Dickens
A Year of Quotes
Charles Dickens
University of Chicago Press, 2018
A charming memento of the Victorian era’s literary colossus, The Daily Charles Dickens is a literary almanac for the ages. Tenderly and irreverently anthologized by Dickens scholar James R. Kincaid, this collection mines the British author’s beloved novels and Christmas stories as well as his lesser-known sketches and letters for “an around-the-calendar set of jolts, soothings, blandishments, and soarings.”

A bedside companion to dip into year round, this book introduces each month with a longer seasonal quote, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. Hopping gleefully from Esther Summerson’s abandonment by her mother in Bleak House to a meditation on the difficult posture of letter-writing in The Pickwick Papers, this anthology displays the wide range of Dickens’s stylistic virtuosity—his humor and his deep tragic sense, his ear for repetition, and his genius at all sorts of voices. Even the devotee will find between these pages a mix of old friends and strangers—from Oliver Twist and Ebenezer Scrooge to the likes of Lord Coodle, Sir Thomas Doodle, Mrs. Todgers, and Edwin Drood—as well as a delightful assortment of the some of the novelist’s most famous, peculiar, witty, and incisive passages, tailored to fit the season. To give one particularly apt example: David Copperfield blunders, in a letter of apology to Agnes Wickfield, “I began one note, in a six-syllable line, ‘Oh, do not remember’—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity.”

Never Pecksniffian or Gradgrindish, this daily dose of Dickens crystallizes the novelist’s agile humor and his reformist zeal alike. This is a book to accompany you through the best of times and the worst of times.
 
[more]

front cover of Daily Giving Service
Daily Giving Service
A History of the Diocesan Girls’ School
Moira M. W. Chan-Yeung
Hong Kong University Press, 2022
A history of a Hong Kong girls’ school that illustrates the city’s dynamic development through the first-hand and archival accounts of its alumni.

The Diocesan Girls’ School is one of Hong Kong’s oldest girls’ schools, founded during British rule in 1860. As an alumna of the school’s Class of 1955, Professor Moira Chan-Yeung traces the history of her alma mater from its establishment through its development over the last 150 years in Daily Giving Service. Having grown alongside Hong Kong as it expanded from a small city to a global metropolitan center,  Diocesan has become one of the most prominent girl’s schools in the city and serves a significant role in the history of education and growth in the region. With contributions from other alumni, this book recounts various aspects of school life throughout different eras, illustrating the connection between the socioeconomic development of Hong Kong and this cornerstone of regional education.
[more]

front cover of The Daily Henry David Thoreau
The Daily Henry David Thoreau
A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season
Henry David Thoreau
University of Chicago Press, 2020
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each.”
 
Modernity rules our lives by clock and calendar, dividing the stream of time into units and coordinating every passing moment with the universal globe. Henry David Thoreau subverted both clock and calendar, using them not to regulate time’s passing but to open up and explore its presence. This little volume thus embodies, in small compass, Thoreau’s own ambition to “live in season”—to turn with the living sundial of the world, and, by attuning ourselves to nature, to heal our modern sense of discontinuity with our surroundings.
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with awe that from flowers alone, Thoreau could tell the calendar date within two days; children remembered long into adulthood how Thoreau showed them white waterlilies awakening not by the face of a clock but at the first touch of the sun. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.”
 
Drawn from the full range of Thoreau’s journals and published writings, and arranged according to season, The Daily Henry David Thoreau allows us to discover the endless variation and surprise to be found in the repetitions of mundane cycles. Thoreau saw in the kernel of each day an earth enchanted, one he honed into sentences tuned with an artist’s eye and a musician’s ear. Thoreau’s world lives on in his writing so that we, too, may discover, even in a fallen world, a beauty worth defending.
[more]

front cover of The Daily Henry James
The Daily Henry James
A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master
Henry James
University of Chicago Press, 2016
A strange and delightful memento of one of the most lasting literary voices of all time, The Daily Henry James is a little book from a great mind. First published with James’s approval in 1911 as the ultimate token of fandom—a limited edition quote-of-the-day collection titled The Henry James Year Book—this new edition is a gift across time, arriving as we mark the centenary of his death. Drawing on the Master’s novels, essays, reviews, plays, criticism, and travelogues, The Daily Henry James offers a series of impressions (for if not of impressions, of what was James fond?) to carry us through the year.

From the deepest longings of Isabel Archer to James’s insights in The Art of Fiction, longer seasonal quotes introduce each month, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. To take but one example: Isabel, in a quote from The Portrait of a Lady for September 30, muses, “She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.” Featuring a new foreword by James biographer Michael Gorra as well as the original introductions by James and his good friend William Dean Howells, this long-forgotten perennial calendar will be an essential bibelot for James’s most ardent devotees and newest converts alike, a treasure to be cherished daily, across all seasons, for years, for ages to come.
[more]

front cover of The Daily Jane Austen
The Daily Jane Austen
A Year of Quotes
Jane Austen
University of Chicago Press, 2019
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is eminently, delightfully, and delectably quotable. This truth goes far beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice, which has muscled out many other excellent sentences. So many gems of wit and wisdom from her novels deserve to be better known, from Northanger Abbey on its lovable, naive heroine—“if adventures will not befal a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad”—to Persuasion’s moving lines of love from its regret-filled hero: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late.”
 
Devoney Looser, a.k.a. Stone Cold Jane Austen, has drawn 378 genuine, Austen-authored passages from across the canon, resulting in an anthology that is compulsively readable and repeatable. Whether you approach the collection on a one-a-day model or in a satisfying binge read, you will emerge wiser about Austen, if not about life. The Daily Jane Austen will amuse and inspire skeptical beginners, Janeite experts, and every reader in between by showcasing some of the greatest sentences ever crafted in the history of fiction.
[more]

front cover of Daily Labors
Daily Labors
Marketing Identity and Bodies on a New York City Street Corner
Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky
Temple University Press, 2019

On street corners throughout the country, men stand or sit together patiently while they wait for someone looking to hire un buen trabajador (a good worker). These day laborers are visible symbols of the changing nature of work—and the demographics of workers—in the United States. 

Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky spent nearly three years visiting with African American men and Latino immigrant men who looked for work as day laborers at a Brooklyn street intersection. Her fascinating ethnography, Daily Labors, considers these immigrants and citizens as active participants in their social and economic life. They not only work for wages but also labor daily to institute change, create knowledge, and contribute new meanings to shape their social world. 

Daily Labors reveals how ideologies about race, gender, nation, and legal status operate on the corner and the vulnerabilities, discrimination, and exploitation workers face in this labor market. Pinedo-Turnovsky shows how workers market themselves to conform to employers’ preconceptions of a “good worker” and how this performance paradoxically leads to a more precarious workplace experience. Ultimately, she sheds light on belonging, community, and what a “good day laborer” for these workers really is.

[more]

front cover of Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan
Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan
William Wayne Farris
University of Michigan Press, 2009
For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700–1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan’s overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years.
The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves.
Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150–1600).
[more]

front cover of Daily Life in Biblical Times
Daily Life in Biblical Times
Oded Borowski
SBL Press, 2003
While the history of Israel during the period from ca. 1200 to 586 B.C.E. has been in the forefront of biblical research, little attention has been given to questions of daily life. Where did the Israelites live? What did people do for a living? What did they eat and what affected their health? How did the family function? These and similar questions form the basis for this book. The book introduces different aspects of daily life. It describes the natural setting and the people who occupied the land. It deals with the economy, both rural and urban, emphasizing the main sources of livelihood such as agriculture, herding, and trade. These topics are discussed in relation to the family in particular and the social structure in general. Other topics include urban society, the bureaucracy and the military. Beyond material culture, the book delves into daily and seasonal cultural, social and religious activities, art, music, and the place of writing in Israelite society. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, and written with nontechnical language, the book will be especially helpful for undergraduates, seminarians, pastors, rabbis, and other interested nonspecialist readers as well as graduate students and faculty in Hebrew Bible.
[more]

front cover of Daily Life in Johnson's London
Daily Life in Johnson's London
Richard B. Schwartz
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983
"Rich in facts and anecdotes, this is the perfect introduction to 18th-century London and a wonderful companion for readers of Johnson and Boswell. . . . Schwartz starts with the sights, sound, and smells of the metropolis—a city of steeples, chimneys, coal smoke, and intolerable street noise—and surveys in succession Work and Money, Pastimes and Pleasures, Daily Routines and Domestic Life, Travel and Transportation, and Health and Hygiene and concludes with a gallery of street 'Londoners,' an independent and assertive lot, notably insolent to foreigners, especially those in French clothes."—Washington Post Book World

"Outstanding. . . . The author packs a remarkable quantity of detail into a small space, even including a discussion of price and wage figures that will be intelligible to Americans [today]. . . . His prose is lucid, graceful, lively. Generously illustrated, the book also includes an extensive bibliography."—Choice

"An excellent source for English Literature and history students studying this period or Samuel Johnson."—Booklist
[more]

front cover of Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages
Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages
A.H. de Oliviera Marques; Translated by S.S. Wyatt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1971
Past studies of medieval Portugal have focused on such specific themes as political or administrative history and voyages of discovery. Oliveira Marques, however, has captured the vast spectrum of Portuguese daily life from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries The whole of medieval society is depicted, both on a national scale and, more important, society as it affected the individual in his everyday activities. Oliveira Marques gives us an engaging and original social history which examines customary meals, dress, homes, work, spiritual life, even ideas about courtship and love. Medieval Portuguese culture and education, amusements and funeral customs are all a part of this portrait.
[more]

front cover of The Daily Lives of the Anglo-Saxons
The Daily Lives of the Anglo-Saxons
Carole Biggam
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017
Essays in Anglo-Saxon Studies v.8 (Glasgow, 2015).

Insights into the lives of any group of historical people are provided by three main types of evidence: their language, their literature and their material culture. The contributors to this volume draw on all three types of evidence in order to present new research into the lives of the Anglo-Saxons. The particular focus is on daily life – the ordinary rather than the extraordinary, the normal rather than the exceptional. Rather than attempting an overview, the essays address individual scenarios in greater depth, but with an emphasis on shared experience.

The following scholars have contributed essays to this collection:

Martha Bayless
University of Oregon

Carole P. Biggam
University of Glasgow

Paul Cavill
University of Nottingham

Amy W. Clark
University of California, Berkeley

James Graham-Campbell
University College London

Antonina Harbus
Macquarie University, Sydney

Carole Hough
University of Glasgow

Daria Izdebska
Liverpool Hope University

Karen Louise Jolly
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Alexandra Lester-Makin
University of Manchester

Elisabeth Okasha
University College, Cork

Phyllis Portnoy
University of Manitoba

Jane Roberts
University of London
[more]

front cover of Daily Living in the Twelfth Century
Daily Living in the Twelfth Century
Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1962
“This useful reference work is a model of compact scholarship.  Its modest format encloses a wealth of information.  .  .  .  Holmes shows an easy familiarity with the vast major and minor source materials centering upon 1150–1200.”—Speculum
[more]

front cover of Daily Observations
Daily Observations
Thoreau on the Days of the Year
Steve Grant
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today.Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.
[more]

front cover of Daily Planet
Daily Planet
A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat
Patricia Aufderheide
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

front cover of The Daily Sherlock Holmes
The Daily Sherlock Holmes
A Year of Quotes from the Case-Book of the World’s Greatest Detective
Arthur Conan Doyle
University of Chicago Press, 2019
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.

At that first sight of Watson, Sherlock Holmes made brilliant deductions. But even he couldn’t know that their meeting was inaugurating a friendship that would make himself and the good Doctor cultural icons, as popular as ever more than a century after their 1887 debut. Through four novels and fifty-six stories, Arthur Conan Doyle led the pair through dramatic adventures that continue to thrill readers today, offering an unmatched combination of skillful plotting, period detail, humor, and distinctive characters. For a Holmes fan, there are few pleasures comparable to returning to his richly imagined world—the gaslit streets of Victorian London, the companionable clutter of 221B Baker Street, the reliable fuddlement (and nerves of steel) of Watson, the perverse genius of Holmes himself.

It’s all there in The Daily Sherlock Holmes, the perfect bedside companion for fans of the world’s only consulting detective. Within these pages readers will find a quotation for every day of the year, drawn from across the Conan Doyle canon. Beloved characters and familiar lines recall favorite stories and scenes, while other passages remind us that Conan Doyle had a way with description and a ready wit. Moriarty and Mycroft, Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson; the Hound, the Red-Headed League, the Speckled Band, and the dread Reichenbach Falls—it’s all here, anchored, of course, in that unforgettable duo of Holmes and Watson. No book published this year will bring a Holmes fan more pleasure. Come, readers. The game is afoot.
[more]

front cover of The Daily Thomas Paine
The Daily Thomas Paine
A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age
Thomas Paine
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Thomas Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist, and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine famously said, “try men’s souls.” Whatever your politics, if you’re seeking to understand the political world we live in, where better to look than Paine?

​The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year’s worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure. Editor Edward G. Gray argues that we are living in a moment that Thomas Paine might recognize—or perhaps more precisely, a moment desperate for someone whose rhetoric can ignite a large-scale social and political transformation. Paine was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic aperçu, and this book offers a sleek and approachable sampler of some of the sharpest bits from his oeuvre. As Paine himself says in the entry for January 20: “The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflexion.” The Daily Thomas Paine should prove equally incendiary and inspirational for contemporary readers with an eye for politics, even those who prefer the tweet to the pamphlet.
 
[more]

front cover of Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread
Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Crescent Dragonwagon
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
For nearly two decades, Dairy Hollow House—a country inn and restaurant tucked into the Ozark Mountain resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas—welcomed guests from all over the world. Praised by the New York Times, Southern Living, Bon Appetit, and Good Morning America alike, the much-loved inn offered sparklingly fresh, innovative “nouveau’zarks” cuisine—respectful contemporary interpretations of local traditional cooking infused with seasonal ingredients. Although the famed inn is now closed, you can still enjoy the satisfying and life-affirming dishes by the James Beard Award–winning writer/restaurateur Crescent Dragonwagon in this thirtieth-anniversary edition of Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread, a story rich cookbook as gutsy and distinctive as a steaming bowl of Gumbo Zeb.
[more]

front cover of Dairy Queens
Dairy Queens
The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette
Meredith Martin
Harvard University Press, 2011

In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, Meredith Martin tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden structures—most famously the faux-rustic, white marble dairy built for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles—have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. Martin challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and hermitages, pleasure dairies were crucial arenas for elite women to exercise and experiment with identity and power.

Opening with Catherine de’ Medici’s lavish dairy at Fontainebleau (c. 1560), Martin’s book explores how French queens and noblewomen used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers. Pleasure dairies also provided women with a site to promote good health, by spending time in salubrious gardens and consuming fresh milk. Illustrated with a dazzling array of images and photographs, Dairy Queens sheds new light on architecture, self, and society in the ancien régime.

[more]

front cover of Dairylandia
Dairylandia
Dispatches from a State of Mind
Steve Hannah
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Years ago, Steve Hannah’s chance detour through the Midwest cut short a planned cross-country trip. He found himself in Wisconsin, a distinctly different place from the east coast where he was born and raised. Charmingly beautiful and full of welcoming people, America’s dairyland would soon become his home.
Dairylandia recounts Steve Hannah’s burgeoning love for his adopted state through the writings of his long-lived column, “State of Mind.” He profiles the lives of the seemingly ordinary, yet quite (and quietly) extraordinary folks he met and befriended on his travels. From Norwegian farmers to rattlesnake hunters to a woman who kept her favorite dead bird in the freezer, Hannah was charmed and fascinated by practically everyone he met. These captivating vignettes are by turns humorous, tragic, and remarkable—and remind us of our shared humanity.
 
[more]

front cover of Daisy Turner's Kin
Daisy Turner's Kin
An African American Family Saga
Jane C. Beck
University of Illinois Press, 2015
A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life.
 
In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory.

Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.
[more]

front cover of Dakota in Exile
Dakota in Exile
The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War
Linda M. Clemmons
University of Iowa Press, 2019
Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a preacher, Hopkins’s allegiance was often questioned by many of his fellow Dakota as well. Without a doubt, being a convert—and a favorite of the missionaries—had its privileges. Hopkins learned to read and write in an anglicized form of Dakota, and when facing legal allegations, he and several high-ranking missionaries wrote impassioned letters in his defense. Ultimately, he was among the 300-some Dakota spared from hanging by President Lincoln, imprisoned instead at Camp Kearney in Davenport, Iowa, for several years. His wife, Sarah, and their children, meanwhile, were forced onto the barren Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory with the rest of the Dakota women, children, and elderly. In both places, the Dakota were treated as novelties, displayed for curious residents like zoo animals.

Historian Linda Clemmons examines the surviving letters from Robert and Sarah; other Dakota language sources; and letters from missionaries, newspaper accounts, and federal documents. She blends both the personal and the historical to complicate our understanding of the development of the Midwest, while also serving as a testament to the resilience of the Dakota and other indigenous peoples who have lived in this region from time immemorial.
[more]

front cover of Dakotah
Dakotah
The Return of the Future
By Charles Bowden; foreword by Terry Tempest Williams
University of Texas Press, 2019

“On a bend, I will see it, a piece of ground off to the side. I will know the feel of this place: the leaves stir slowly on the trees, dry air smells like dust, birds dart and the trails are made by beasts living free.”

When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the lives of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

[more]

front cover of The Dalai Lama at MIT
The Dalai Lama at MIT
Anne Harrington
Harvard University Press, 2008

Their meeting captured headlines; the waiting list for tickets was nearly 2000 names long. If you were unable to attend, this book will take you there. Including both the papers given at the conference, and the animated discussion and debate that followed, The Dalai Lama at MIT reveals scientists and monks reaching across a cultural divide, to share insights, studies, and enduring questions.

Is there any substance to monks’ claims that meditation can provide astonishing memories for words and images? Is there any neuroscientific evidence that meditation will help you pay attention, think better, control and even eliminate negative emotions? Are Buddhists right to make compassion a fundamental human emotion, and Western scientists wrong to have neglected it?

The Dalai Lama at MIT shows scientists finding startling support for some Buddhist claims, Buddhists eager to participate in neuroscientific experiments, as well as misunderstandings and laughter. Those in white coats and those in orange robes agree that joining forces could bring new light to the study of human minds.

[more]

front cover of D'Albuquerque's Children
D'Albuquerque's Children
Performing Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement
Margaret Sarkissian
University of Chicago Press, 2000
When the Portuguese seafarer Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the bustling port of Malacca in 1511, he effectively gained control of the entire South China Sea spice trade. Although their dominance lasted only 130 years, the Portuguese legacy lies at the heart of a burgeoning tourist attraction on the outskirts of the city, in which performers who believe they are the descendants of swashbuckling Portuguese conquerors encapsulate their "history" in a cultural stage show.

Using historical and ethnographic data, Margaret Sarkissian reveals that this music and dance draws on an eclectic array of influences that span the Portuguese diaspora (one song conjures up images of Lucille Ball impersonating Carmen Miranda on "I Love Lucy"). Ironically, she shows, what began as a literate tradition in the 1950s has now become an oral one so deeply rooted in Settlement life that the younger generation, like the tourists, now see it as an unbroken heritage stretching back almost 500 years. A fascinating case of "orientalism in reverse," D'Albuquerque's Children illuminates the creative ways in which one community has adapted to life in a postcolonial world.
[more]

front cover of Dale L. Morgan
Dale L. Morgan
Mormon and Western Histories in Transition
Richard L. Saunders
University of Utah Press, 2023

This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent Western historian of the fur trade, historic trails, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan committed his life to tracking down sources and interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with methodological shifts in the historical profession, the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history, and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.
 
Morgan’s body of work and commitment to serious scholarship signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Leonard Arrington, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.

[more]

front cover of The Daley Show
The Daley Show
Inside the Transformative Reign of Chicago's Richard M. Daley
Forrest Claypool; Foreword by David Axelrod
University of Illinois Press, 2024
“You have to have passion. You have to have honesty in office. You have to love the people.” Those words summed up the outlook, if not always the actions, of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Elected to govern a city roiled by racial and economic crises, Daley adroitly wielded the tools of power in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics. Under his rule, Chicago rebuilt a dying downtown, becoming a cultural and tourism mecca punctuated by construction of the iconic Millenium Park. To drive growth, he engineered a massive expansion of O’Hare Airport. To correct a historical injustice, he razed the city’s notorious public housing high rises as part of a sweeping plan to transform the lives of the city’s poorest residents. Yet corruption and graft, City Hall’s role in calamities like the 1995 heat wave, and Daley’s inaction in the face of evidence of police torture, tarnished his many accomplishments.

A two-time Daley chief-of-staff, Forrest Claypool draws on his long career in local government to examine the lasting successes, ongoing dramas, and disastrous failures that defined Daley’s twenty-two years in City Hall. Throughout, Claypool uses Daley’s career to illustrate how effectual political leadership relies on an adept and unapologetic use of power--and how wielding that power without challenge inevitably pulls government toward corruption.

A warts-and-all account of a pivotal figure in Chicago history, The Daley Show tells the story of how Richard M. Daley became the quintessential big city mayor.

[more]

front cover of Dalit Studies
Dalit Studies
Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions.
 

Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

[more]

front cover of The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest
The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest
Inupiaq Narratives of Northwest Alaska
Wanni Anderson
University of Alaska Press, 2023
The rich storytelling tradition of the Inupiat of Alaska is showcased in this remarkable collection of over eighty stories. Meticulously compiled from six villages in Northwest Alaska between 1966 and 1987, the stories are presented as part of a living tradition, complete with biographies, photos, and introductory remarks by Native storytellers. Each story provides insight into the Iñupiaq worldview, human-animal relationships, and the organization of family life.

The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest includes a new version of the Qayaq cycle, one of the best-known legends from the region, as well as stories such as “The Fast Runner.” A major contribution to the Native literature of Alaska, this collection includes two introductory essays by Wanni W. Anderson that provide historical background and a foundation for understanding gender, age, and regional differences and the narrative context of storytelling. Stories include The Girl Who Had No Wish to Marry by Willie Goodwin, Sr., The Goose Maiden by Nora Norton, The Last War with the Indians by Wesley Woods, The Orphan with No Clothes by Emma Skin, The Qayaq Cycle by Nora Norton, and Raven Who Brought Back the Land by Robert Cleveland (selected Iñupiaq Storyteller by the Inupiat of Northwest Alaska).

Additional storytellers include John Brown, Leslie Burnett, Flora Cleveland, Lois Cleveland, Maude Cleveland, Kitty Foster, Sarah Goode, Minnie Gray, Beatrice Mouse, Nellie Russell, and Andrew Skin.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
The Dallas Myth
The Making and Unmaking of an American City
Harvey J. Graff
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
The ninth largest city in the United States, Dallas is exceptional among American cities for the claims of its elites and boosters that it is a "city with no limits" and a "city with no history." Home to the Dallas Cowboys, self-styled as "America's Team," setting for the television series that glamorized its values of self-invention and success, and site of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dallas looms disproportionately large in the American imagination. Yet it lacks an identity of its own.

In The Dallas Myth, Harvey J. Graff presents a novel interpretation of a city that has proudly declared its freedom from the past. He scrutinizes the city's origin myth and its governance ideology, known as the "Dallas Way," looking at how these elements have shaped Dallas and served to limit democratic participation and exacerbate inequality. Advancing beyond a traditional historical perspective, Graff proposes an original, integrative understanding of the city's urban fabric and offers an explicit critique of the reactionary political foundations of modern Dallas: its tolerance for right-wing political violence, the endemic racism and xenophobia, and a planning model that privileges growth and monumental architecture at the expense of the environment and social justice.

Revealing the power of myths that have defined the city for so long, Graff presents a new interpretation of Dallas that both deepens our understanding of America's urban landscape and enables its residents to envision a more equitable, humane, and democratic future for all.
[more]

logo for University of North Texas Press
The Dallas Story
The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II
Terrance Furgerson
University of North Texas Press, 2023

front cover of Dallas
Dallas
The Making of a Modern City
By Patricia Evridge Hill
University of Texas Press, 1996

From the ruthless deals of the Ewing clan on TV's "Dallas" to the impeccable customer service of Neiman-Marcus, doing business has long been the hallmark of Dallas. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Dallas business leaders amassed unprecedented political power and civic influence, which remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s.

In this innovative history, Patricia Evridge Hill explores the building of Dallas in the years before business interests rose to such prominence (1880 to 1940) and discovers that many groups contributed to the development of the modern city. In particular, she looks at the activities of organized labor, women's groups, racial minorities, Populist and socialist radicals, and progressive reformers—all of whom competed and compromised with local business leaders in the decades before the Great Depression.

This research challenges the popular view that business interests have always run Dallas and offers a historically accurate picture of the city's development. The legacy of pluralism that Hill uncovers shows that Dallas can accommodate dissent and conflict as it moves toward a more inclusive public life. Dallas will be fascinating and important reading for all Texans, as well as for all students of urban development.

[more]

front cover of Dam
Dam
Trevor Turpin
Reaktion Books, 2008

Rivers are one of nature’s most vital energy sources, and their power can be efficiently harnessed through the construction of dams. But now dams have become a controversial engine in the race toward technological advancement, so much so that the World Commission on Dams convened in 1998 to debate the issue. Are dams a help to society or an agent of environmental destruction? Trevor Turpin explores the answers to that question here in his comprehensive historical chronicle.

Among the most amazing feats of human engineering, a dam can sustain societies in a multitude of ways, as 40,000 of them around the world provide such things as electricity, water for farms and cities, and canals for boat navigation. Turpin traces their development, design, and consequences from the Industrial Revolution to now, examining edifices in China, Las Vegas, and places in between. The often contentious debate between environmentalists, architects, and engineers, Dam shows, is a complex one that pits the benefits of dams against the long-term ecological health of nations.

Neither a polemic against dams nor a defense of their proliferation, Dam offers a judicious and in-depth account of this cornerstone of our modern age.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Dam Politics
Restoring America's Rivers
William R. Lowry
Georgetown University Press, 2003

The politics of building dams and levees and other structures are just part of the policies determining how American rivers are managed or mismanaged. America's well-being depends upon the health of those rivers and important decisions go beyond just dam-building or dam removal. American rivers are suffering from poor water quality, altered flows, and diminished natural habitat. Current efforts by policymakers to change the ways American rivers are managed range from the removal of dams to the simulation of seasonal flows to the restoration of habitat, all with varying degrees of success.

Efforts to restore American rivers are clearly delineated by William Lowry in Dam Politics as he looks at how public policy and rivers interact, examines the physical differences in rivers that affect policies, and analyzes the political differences among the groups that use them. He argues that we are indeed moving into an era of restoration (defined in part as removing dams but also as restoring the water quality, seasonal flows, and natural habitat that existed before structural changes to the rivers), and seeks to understand the political circumstances that affect the degree of restoration.

Lowry presents case studies of eight river restoration efforts, including dam removals on the Neuse and Kennebec rivers, simulation of seasonal flows on the Colorado river, and the failed attempt to restore salmon runs on the Snake river. He develops a typology of four different kinds of possible change—dependent on the parties involved and the physical complexity of the river—and then examines the cases using natural historical material along with dozens of interviews with key policymakers. Policy approaches such as conjunctive water management, adaptive management, alternative licensing processes, and water marketing are presented as possible ways of using our rivers more wisely.

Dam Politics provides a useful and systematic account of how American waterways are managed and how current policies are changing. American rivers are literally the lifeblood of our nation. Lowry has written a lively and accessible book that makes it clear as a mountain stream that it matters deeply how those rivers are managed.

[more]

front cover of Damaged Goods?
Damaged Goods?
Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Adina Nack
Temple University Press, 2008

How do women living with genital herpes and/or HPV (human papilloma virus) infections see themselves as sexual beings, and what choices do they make about sexual health issues? Adina Nack, a medical sociologist who specializes in sexual health and social psychology, conducted in-depth interviews with 43 women about their identities and sexuality in regards to chronic illness. The result is a fascinating book about an issue that affects over 15 million Americans, but is all too little discussed.

Damaged Goods adds to our knowledge of how women are affected by living with chronic STDs and reveals the stages of their sexual- self transformation. From the anxiety of being diagnosed with an STD to issues of blame and shame, Nack-herself diagnosed with a cervical HPV infection-shows why these women feeling that they are "damaged goods," question future relationships, marriage, and their ability to have healthy children.

[more]

front cover of Damaged Parents
Damaged Parents
An Anatomy of Child Neglect
Norman A. Polansky, Mary Ann Chalmers, Elizabeth Werthan Buttenwieser, and David P. Williams
University of Chicago Press, 1981
"Most of us are unaware of child neglect even when we are witnessing it. . . . Neglect is a matter of things undone, of inaction compounded by indifference. Since it goes on at home, it is a very private sin. . . . It is little wonder that most of the public is unaware of poor child caring. Its ignorance is even greater as to how widespread the problem is. But this is not a blissful ignorance. The public may not want to attend to child neglect, but it lives with the distortions of human personality that are left in its wake."—from chapter 1 of Damaged Parents

"Norman Polansky and his colleagues have produced a truly remarkable book. . . . One of the consequences of [the] relative invisibility of child neglect is that we also know less about it. But this book will help to correct that for it contains reports of findings from two systematic efforts to define, measure, classify, and understand child neglect."—Thomas M. Young, Social Service Review
[more]

front cover of Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth
Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth
An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology
Andrew Gluck
University of Scranton Press, 2007
The question of the relationship between mind and body as posed by Descartes, Spinoza, and others remains a fundamental debate for philosophers. In Damasio’s Error and Descartes’ Truth, Andrew Gluck constructs a pluralistic response to the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio. Gluck critiques the neutral monistic assertions found in Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza from a philosophical perspective, advocating an adaptive theory—physical monism in the natural sciences, dualism in the social sciences, and neutral monism in aesthetics. Gluck’s work is a significant and refreshing take on a historical debate.
[more]

front cover of The Dame
The Dame
An Alan Grofield Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.

Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. . The Dame finds Grofield in Puerto Rico protecting a rich, demanding woman in her isolated jungle villa, and reluctantly assuming the role of detective. A rare Westlake take on a whodunit, The Dame features a cast of colorful characters and a suspenseful—and memorable—climax.

With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, this novel is an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.

[more]

front cover of Dameronia
Dameronia
The Life and Music of Tadd Dameron
Paul Combs
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Dameronia is the first authoritative biography of Tadd Dameron, an important and widely influential figure in jazz history as one of the most significant composers and arrangers of jazz, swing, bebop, and big band. He arranged for names like Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, and Dizzy Gillespie and played with Bull Moose Jackson and Benny Golson. This book sets out to clarify Dameron's place in the development of jazz in the post–World War II era. It also attempts to shed light on the tragedy of his retreat from the center of jazz activity in the 1950s. By tracing Dameron's career, one finds that until 1958, when he was incarcerated for drug related offenses, he was at the forefront of developments in jazz, sometimes anticipating trends that would not develop fully for several years. Dameron was also an important influence on several high-profile musicians, including Miles Davis, Benny Golson, and Frank Foster. Dameron was a very private man, and while in some aspects of his life he will probably remain an enigma, this book manages to give an intimate portrait of his life at a couple of key stages: the height of his career in 1949 and the brief but productive period between his release from prison and his death.

[more]

front cover of Dames in the Driver's Seat
Dames in the Driver's Seat
Rereading Film Noir
By Jans B. Wager
University of Texas Press, 2005

With its focus on dangerous, determined femmes fatales, hardboiled detectives, and crimes that almost-but-never-quite succeed, film noir has long been popular with moviegoers and film critics alike. Film noir was a staple of classical Hollywood filmmaking during the years 1941-1958 and has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1990s. Dames in the Driver's Seat offers new views of both classical-era and contemporary noirs through the lenses of gender, class, and race. Jans Wager analyzes how changes in film noir's representation of women's and men's roles, class status, and racial identities mirror changes in a culture that is now often referred to as postmodern and postfeminist.

Following introductory chapters that establish the theoretical basis of her arguments, Wager engages in close readings of the classic noirs The Killers, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly and the contemporary noirs L. A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo, and Jackie Brown. Wager divides recent films into retro-noirs (made in the present, but set in the 1940s and 1950s) and neo-noirs (made and set in the present but referring to classic noir narratively or stylistically). Going beyond previous studies of noir, her perceptive readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.

[more]

logo for University of Manitoba Press
Dammed
The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory
Brittany Luby
University of Manitoba Press, 2020

front cover of Damming Grand Canyon
Damming Grand Canyon
The 1923 USGS Colorado River Expedition
Diane E Boyer and Robert H. Webb
Utah State University Press, 2007

In 1923, America paid close attention, via special radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and cover stories in popular magazines, as a government party descended the Colorado to survey Grand Canyon. Fifty years after John Wesley Powell's journey, the canyon still had an aura of mystery and extreme danger. At one point, the party was thought lost in a flood.

Something important besides adventure was going on. Led by Claude Birdseye and including colorful characters such as early river-runner Emery Kolb, popular writer Lewis Freeman, and hydraulic engineer Eugene La Rue, the expedition not only made the first accurate survey of the river gorge but sought to decide the canyon's fate. The primary goal was to determine the best places to dam the Grand. With Boulder Dam not yet built, the USGS, especially La Rue, contested with the Bureau of Reclamation over how best to develop the Colorado River. The survey party played a major role in what was known and thought about Grand Canyon.

The authors weave a narrative from the party's firsthand accounts and frame it with a thorough history of water politics and development and the Colorado River. The recommended dams were not built, but the survey both provided base data that stood the test of time and helped define Grand Canyon in the popular imagination.

[more]

front cover of Damming the Gila
Damming the Gila
The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900–1942
David H. DeJong
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Unraveling a complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering, Damming the Gila continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle for the restoration of its water rights.

This volume continues to chronicle the history of water rights and activities on the Gila River Indian Reservation. Centered on the San Carlos Irrigation Project and Coolidge Dam, it details the history and development of the project, including the Gila Decree and the Winters Doctrine. Embedded in the narrative is the underlying tension between tribal growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation and upstream users. Told in seven chapters, the story underscores the idea that the Gila River Indian Community believed the San Carlos Irrigation Project was first and foremost for their benefit and how the project and the Gila Decree fell short of restoring their water and agricultural economy.

Damming the Gila is the third in a trio of important documentary works, beginning with DeJong’s Stealing the Gila and followed by Diverting the Gila. It continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community’s fight to regain access to their water.
[more]

front cover of Damn Near White
Damn Near White
An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success
Carolyn Marie Wilkins
University of Missouri Press, 2010

Carolyn Wilkins grew up defending her racial identity. Because of her light complexion and wavy hair, she spent years struggling to convince others that she was black. Her family’s prominence set Carolyn’s experiences even further apart from those of the average African American. Her father and uncle were well-known lawyers who had graduated from Harvard Law School. Another uncle had been a child prodigy and protégé of Albert Einstein. And her grandfather had been America's first black assistant secretary of labor.

Carolyn's parents insisted she follow the color-conscious rituals of Chicago's elite black bourgeoisie—experiences Carolyn recalls as some of the most miserable of her entire life. Only in the company of her mischievous Aunt Marjory, a woman who refused to let the conventions of “proper” black society limit her, does Carolyn feel a true connection to her family's African American heritage.

When Aunt Marjory passes away, Carolyn inherits ten bulging scrapbooks filled with family history and memories. What she finds in these photo albums inspires her to discover the truth about her ancestors—a quest that will eventually involve years of research, thousands of miles of travel, and much soul-searching.

Carolyn learns that her great-grandfather John Bird Wilkins was born into slavery and went on to become a teacher, inventor, newspaperman, renegade Baptist minister, and a bigamist who abandoned five children. And when she discovers that her grandfather J. Ernest Wilkins may have been forced to resign from his labor department post by members of the Eisenhower administration, Carolyn must confront the bittersweet fruits of her family's generations-long quest for status and approval.

Damn Near White is an insider’s portrait of an unusual American family. Readers will be drawn into Carolyn’s journey as she struggles to redefine herself in light of the long-buried secrets she uncovers. Tackling issues of class, color, and caste, Wilkins reflects on the changes of African American life in U.S. history through her dedicated search to discover her family’s powerful story.

[more]

front cover of Damn the Old Tinderbox!
Damn the Old Tinderbox!
Milwaukee’s Palace of the West and the Fire that Defined an Era
Matthew J. Prigge
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
In the dead of an unassuming January night in 1883, Milwaukee’s Newhall House hotel was set on fire. Two hours later, the building—once among the tallest in the nation—lay in ruins and over seventy people were dead. It was a tragedy that brought global notice to Milwaukee, with daring escapes and rescues and heart-wrenching tales of victims burned to death or killed as they leapt from the burning building. From the great horror emerged an even greater string of mysteries: Who had set the fire and who was to blame for the staggering loss of life? The Newhall’s hard-luck barkeeper? A gentleman arsonist? What of the many other unexplained fires at the hotel? Had the Newhall’s management neglected fire safety to boost their profits? 
 
Damn the Old Tinderbox! is the gripping tale of one of the Gilded Age’s forgotten calamities, a fire that remains among the deadliest unsolved arsons in American history, and a significant chapter in both the history of Milwaukee and the Midwest. 

 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Damnation of Theron Ware
Harold Frederic
Harvard University Press
This Faustian tale of the spiritual disintegration of a young minister, written in the 1890s, deals subtly and powerfully with the impact of science on innocence and the collective despair that marked the transition into the modern age. In its realism, The Damnation of Theron Ware foreshadows Howells; in its conscious imagery it prefigures Norris, Crane, Henry James, and the "symbolic realism" of the twentieth century. Its author, Harold Frederic, internationally famous as London correspondent for the New York Times, wrote the novel two years before his death.
[more]

front cover of Damned for Their Difference
Damned for Their Difference
The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled
Jan Branson
Gallaudet University Press, 2002

Until the recent recognition of Deaf culture and the legitimacy of signed languages, majority societies around the world have classified Deaf people as “disabled,” a term that separates all persons so designated from the mainstream in a disparaging way. Damned for Their Difference offers a well-founded explanation of how this discrimination came to be through a discursive exploration of the cultural, social, and historical contexts of these attitudes and behavior toward deaf people, especially in Great Britain.

       Authors Jan Branson and Don Miller examine the orientation toward and treatment of deaf people as it developed from the 17th century through the 20th century. Their wide-ranging study explores the varied constructions of the definition of “disabled,” a term whose meaning hinges upon constant negotiation between parties, ensuring that no finite meaning is ever established. Damned for Their Difference provides a sociological understanding of disabling practices in a way that has never been seen before.

[more]

front cover of A Damned Iowa  Greyhound
A Damned Iowa Greyhound
The Civil War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton
Donald C. Elder, III
University of Iowa Press, 1998

William Henry Harrison Clayton was one of nearly 75,000 soldiers from Iowa to join the Union ranks during the Civil War. Possessing a high school education and superior penmanship, Clayton served as a company clerk in the 19th Infantry, witnessing battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater. His diary and his correspondence with his family in Van Buren County form a unique narrative of the day-to-day soldier life as well as an eyewitness account of critical battles and a prisoner-of-war camp.

Clayton participated in the siege of Vicksburg and took part in operations against Mobile, but his writings are unique for the descriptions he gives of lesser-known but pivotal battles of the Civil War in the West. Fighting in the Battle of Prairie Grove, the 19th Infantry sustained the highest casualties of any federal regiment on the field. Clayton survived that battle with only minor injuries, but he was later captured at the Battle of Stirling's Plantation and served a period of ten months in captivity at Camp Ford, Texas.

Clayton's writing reveals the complicated sympathies and prejudices prevalent among Union soldiers and civilians of that period in the country's history. He observes with great sadness the brutal effects of war on the South, sympathizing with the plight of refugees and lamenting the destruction of property. He excoriates draft evaders and Copperheads back home, conveying the intra-sectional acrimony wrought by civil war. Finally, his racist views toward blacks demonstrate a common but ironic attitude among Union soldiers whose efforts helped lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

[more]

front cover of Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
Allen F. Isaacman
Ohio University Press, 2013
Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River, built in the early 1970s during the final years of Portuguese rule, was the last major infrastructure project constructed in Africa during the turbulent era of decolonization. Engineers and hydrologists praised the dam for its technical complexity and the skills required to construct what was then the world’s fifth-largest mega-dam. Portuguese colonial officials cited benefits they expected from the dam—from expansion of irrigated farming and European settlement, to improved transportation throughout the Zambezi River Valley, to reduced flooding in this area of unpredictable rainfall. “The project, however, actually resulted in cascading layers of human displacement, violence, and environmental destruction. Its electricity benefited few Mozambicans, even after the former guerrillas of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) came to power; instead, it fed industrialization in apartheid South Africa.” (Richard Roberts) This in-depth study of the region examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam’s shadow.
[more]

front cover of The Damsel
The Damsel
An Alan Grofield Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.

Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. The Damsel begins directly after the Parker novel The Handle. Following a wounded Grofield and his damsel on a scenic, action-packed road trip from Mexico City to Acapulco, The Damsel is full of wit, adrenaline, and political intrigue.
 
With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, these novels are an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.
[more]

front cover of Damselflies of Texas
Damselflies of Texas
A Field Guide
By John C. Abbott
University of Texas Press, 2011

On any warm summer day, you can easily observe damselflies around a vegetated pond or the rocks along the banks of a stream. Like the more familiar dragonfly, damselflies are among the most remarkably distinctive insects in their appearance and biology, and they have become one of the most popular creatures sought by avocational naturalists.

Damselflies of Texas is the first field guide dedicated specifically to the species found in Texas. It covers 77 of the 138 species of damselflies known in North America, making it a very useful guide for the entire United States. Each species account includes:

  • illustrations of as many forms (male, female, juvenile, mature, and color morphs) as possible
  • common and scientific names, with pronunciation
  • distribution map
  • key features
  • identifying characteristics
  • discussion of similar species
  • status in Texas
  • habitat, seasonality, and general comments

In addition to photographing damselflies in the wild, the author and illustrator have developed a new process for illustrating each species by scanning preserved specimens and digitally painting them. The resulting illustrations show detail that is not visible in photographs. The book also contains chapters on damselfly anatomy, life history, conservation, names, and photography, as well as a list of species that may eventually be discovered in Texas, state and global conservation rankings, seasonality of all species in chronological order, and additional resources and publications on the identification of damselflies.

[more]

front cover of Damsels and Divas
Damsels and Divas
European Stardom in Silent Hollywood
Agata Frymus
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Best Early Career Research Monograph, Monash University Malaysia

Damsels and Divas investigates the meanings of Europeanness in Hollywood during the 1920s by charting professional trajectories of three movie stars: Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal. It combines the investigation of American fan magazines with the analysis of studio documents, and the examination of the narratives of their films, to develop a thorough understanding of the ways in which Negri, Bánky and Goudal were understood within the realm of their contemporary American culture. This discussion places their star personae in the context of whiteness, femininity and Americanization. Every age has its heroines, and they reveal a lot about prevailing attitudes towards women in their respective eras. In the United States, where the stories of rags-to-riches were especially potent, stars could offer models of successful cultural integration.
[more]

front cover of Dan De Quille
Dan De Quille
Dwayne Kling
University of Nevada Press, 1990

front cover of The Dana Guide to Brain Health
The Dana Guide to Brain Health
A Practical Family Reference from Medical Experts
Edited by Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.; M. Flint Beal, M.D.; and, David J. Kupfer, M.D.
Dana Press, 2006

A child crashes to the ground from the monkey bars head-first. A high school student prepares for months to take the SAT. A grandmother slowly slips away from her family through the deadly progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Whether we realize it or not, the importance of brain health to our daily lives goes far beyond just being able to walk and talk. The Dana Guide to Brain Health offers the first comprehensive home medical reference book on the brain, providing an unparalleled, authoritative guide to improving the fitness of our brains and, ultimately, enriching our lives.


With contributions from over one hundred of the most prominent scientists and clinicians in the United States, The Dana Guide to Brain Health is an extensive and wholly accessible manual on the workings of the human brain. This richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of facts and advice, on simple yet effective ways to take care of our brains; the intimate connection between brain health and body health; brain development from the prenatal period through adulthood; and how we learn, remember, and imagine.

The brain is far too important to be excluded any longer from our daily health concerns. The Dana Guide to Brain Health remedies this oversight with a clearly written, definitive map to our brains that reveals how we can take care of them in order to sustain a long and rich life.

[more]

front cover of Dance
Dance
A Creative Art Experience
Margaret N. H'Doubler; with a new essay by Mary Alice Brennan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1959
A landmark book in dance education is now back in print, its message as valid today as it was more than fifty years ago
[more]

front cover of Dance a Little Longer
Dance a Little Longer
The Third Novel in a Trilogy
Jane Roberts Wood
University of North Texas Press, 2000

front cover of Dance across Texas
Dance across Texas
By Betty Casey
University of Texas Press, 1985

Generations of Texans have believed that “to dance is to live.” At rustic “play parties” and elegant cotillions, in tiny family dance halls and expansive urban honky-tonks, from historic beginnings to next Saturday night, Texans have waltzed, polkaed, schottisched, and shuffled their way across the state.

In Dance across Texas, internationally known dance instructor and writer Betty Casey takes an informal look at the history of Texas dancing and, in clear diagrams, photos, and detailed instructions, tells “how to” do more than twenty Texas dances.

Previously, little had been recorded about the history of dancing on the frontier. Journal and diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings preserve enticing, if sketchy, descriptions of the types of dances that were popular. Casey uses a variety of sources, including interviews and previously unpublished historical materials, such as dance cards, invitations, and photographs, to give us a delightful look at the social context of dance. The importance of dance to early Texans is documented through colorful descriptions of clothing worn to the dances, of the various locations where dances were held, ranging from a formal hall to a wagon sheet spread on the ground, and of the hardships endured to get to a dance.

Also included in the historical section of Dance across Texas are notes on the “morality” of dance, the influence of country music on modern dance forms, and the popularity of such Texas dance halls and clubs as Crider’s and Gilley’s.

The instruction section of the book diagrams twenty-two Texas dances, including standard waltzes and two-steps as well as the Cotton-Eyed Joe, Put Your Little Foot, Herr Schmidt, the Western Schottische, and such “whistle’” or mixer dances as Paul Jones, Popcorn, and Snowball. Clear and detailed directions for each dance, along with suggested musical selections, accompany the diagrams and photos. Dance and physical education teachers and students will find this section invaluable, and aspiring urban cowboys can follow the easy-to-read diagrammed footsteps to a satisfying spin around the honky-tonk floor. Anyone interested in dance or in the history of social customs in Texas will find much to enjoy in this refreshing and often amusing look at a Texas “national” pastime.

[more]

front cover of Dance and American Art
Dance and American Art
A Long Embrace
Sharyn R. Udall
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others.
    As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form.
    Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dance and Authoritarianism
These Boots are Made for Dancing
Anthony Shay
Intellect Books, 2021
Everyone who watched the opening ceremony of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. Public performance and festival at such scale are familiar to us in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and contemporary North Korea, but this new book addresses lesser-known examples—in Spain, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia, and Uzbekistan—and explores the various political regimes that ruled them. 

Using dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and gendered phenomena, Anthony Shay shows us how dance and mass movement have served as important political tools throughout history and across a variety of authoritarian regimes. Dance and Authoritarianism is a significant and original contribution to the scholarship at the intersection of dance, ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, and history.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dance and Ethics
Moving Towards a More Humane Dance Culture
Naomi M. Jackson
Intellect Books, 2022
An introductory study of ethical issues applied to the history and field of Western theatrical dance. 

This work examines ethics and the changing values in the world of dance, especially as faced by young dancers entering the profession. Since the 1960s, scholars and practitioners from the fields of dance education, somatics, and the realms of postmodern dance and ballet have increasingly believed that attitudes and practices involving psychological, physical, and sexual mistreatment of students and dancers must be challenged. 

Dance and Ethics examines key ethical issues related to the dance field, primarily within the United States, and how those directly impact different aspects of the lives of dance artists throughout their careers. The issues discussed include the basic ethical choices facing a dance artist in terms of whether to care about ethics or separate art from morality; ethical issues involved in student–teacher and dancer–choreographer relationships; how ethical concerns relate to the creation and reception of choreographic work; ethical aspects of the critical assessment of dance and dancers; and ethical issues related to presenting systems and institutional infrastructures within the dance field.
[more]

front cover of Dance and the Hollywood Latina
Dance and the Hollywood Latina
Race, Sex, and Stardom
Ovalle, Priscilla P
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Dance and the Hollywood Latina asks why every Latina star in Hollywood history, from Dolores Del Rio in the 1920s to Jennifer Lopez in the 2000s, began as a dancer or danced onscreen. While cinematic depictions of women and minorities have seemingly improved, a century of representing brown women as natural dancers has popularized the notion that Latinas are inherently passionate and promiscuous. Yet some Latina actresses became stars by embracing and manipulating these stereotypical fantasies.

Introducing the concepts of "inbetween-ness" and "racial mobility" to further illuminate how racialized sexuality and the dancing female body operate in film, Priscilla Peña Ovalle focuses on the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez. Dance and the Hollywood Latina helps readers better understand how the United States grapples with race, gender, and sexuality through dancing bodies on screen.
[more]

front cover of Dance And The Lived Body
Dance And The Lived Body
Sondra Horton Fraleigh
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.
[more]

front cover of Dance and the Nation
Dance and the Nation
Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka
Susan A. Reed
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Around the globe, dances that originate in village, temple, and court rituals have been adapted and transformed to carry secular meanings and serve new national purposes. In stage performances, dance competitions, and festivals worldwide, dance has become an emblem of ethnicity and an index of national identity. But what are the “backstage” stories of those dances chosen to bear such meanings, and what have been the consequences for their communities of origin? In Dance and the Nation, Susan A. Reed brings to light the complexities of aesthetic politics in a multi-faceted exploration and analysis of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka.
    As the national dance of Sri Lanka, Kandyan dance is identified with the majority Sinhala ethnic group and heavily supported by the state. Derived from the kohomba kankariya—an elaborate village ritual performed by men of the hereditary drummer caste—the dance was adopted by the state as a symbol of traditional Sinhala culture in the post-independence period. When state officials introduced the dance into the school curriculum, it was opened to individuals of all castes, and high-caste women have emerged as prominent teachers and performers. Reed’s evocative account traces the history and consequences of this transition from ritual to stage, situating the dance in relation to postcolonial nationalism and ethnic politics and emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the hereditary dancers and of women performers.
    Although Kandyan dance is related to other south Asian dance forms, it is unique, distinguished by an elegant, energetic style, and lively displays of acrobatics and agility. The companion DVD includes unparalleled footage of this vibrant dance in ritual, stage, and training contexts, and features the most esteemed performers of the Kandyan region.

Special Citation book award, Society for Dance History Scholars

Winner, Outstanding Publication Award, Congress on Research in Dance

[more]

front cover of Dance and the Specific Image
Dance and the Specific Image
Improvisation
Daniel Nagrin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
After an extraordinary career in dance - as a performer, choreographer, and teacher - Daniel Nagrin has now written an extraordinary book.  In it he explores the roots of his aesthetic philosophy, influenced by Stanislavski, Helen Tamiris, Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, and his work on and off Broadway as an actor and dancer.

Dance and the Specific Image includes over one hundred improvisational structures that Nagrin created with his new company, the Workgroup, and has taught in dance classes and workshops all over the United States.  Designed primarily for dancers, many can be adapted for actors and even musicians.

In the 1960s, at a time when many modern dancers were working with movement as abstraction, Nagrin turned instead toward movement as metaphor.  His passionate belief that dance must speak of people led him to found the Workgroup, a small company of dancers who, in the early 1970s, devoted themselves to the practice and performance of improvisation.

Nagrin invites the reader into the mind of a dancer totally absorbed in his art, one who writes with wisdom and authority about what it means to be an artist.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Dance, Disability and Law
InVisible Difference
Edited by Sarah Whatley, Charlotte Waelde, Shawn Harmon, Abbe Brown, Karen Wood, and Hetty Blades
Intellect Books, 2018
This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance, disability, and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines, it considers the question of how we value, validate, and speak about diversity in performance practice, with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom.  Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation, including those related to policy, arts funding, dance criticism, and audience reception.
[more]

front cover of Dance Floor Democracy
Dance Floor Democracy
The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen
Sherrie Tucker
Duke University Press, 2014
Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque—bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes—is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.
[more]

front cover of Dance for Me When I Die
Dance for Me When I Die
Cristian Alarcón
Duke University Press, 2019
On the morning of February 6, 1999, Buenos Aires police officers shot and killed seventeen-year-old Víctor Manuel Vital, better known as Frente, while he was unarmed, hiding under a table, and trying to surrender. Widely known and respected throughout Buenos Aires's shantytowns for his success as a thief, commitment to a code of honor, and generosity to his community, Frente became a Robin Hood--style legend who, in death, was believed to have the power to make bullets swerve and save gang members from shrapnel. In Dance for Me When I Die—first published in Argentina in 2004 and appearing here in English for the first time—Cristian Alarcón tells the story and legacy of Frente's life and death in the context of the everyday experiences of love and survival, murder and addiction, and crime and courage of those living in the slums. Drawing on interviews with Frente's friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, as well as with local thieves and drug dealers, and having immersed himself in Frente's neighborhood for eighteen months, Alarcón captures the world of the urban poor in all of its complexity and humanity.
[more]

front cover of Dance Improvisations
Dance Improvisations
Joyce Morgenroth
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987

Dance Improvisations is a book for teachers of dance and acting, choreographers, directors, and dance therapists.  Systematically offering a complete range of ways to explore dance, it can be used as a syllabus or as a reference for groups of all ages and all levels of experience.

The first chapter in Dance Improvisations introduces ways for a group to practice working together and for the dancers to gain an effective awareness of each other.  These preliminaries are followed by a body of improvisational problems, organized into three main areas: Space, Time, and Movement Invention.  Each area is presented as a series of topics.  Each topic progresses from individual exploration to more formally structured group improvisations, with emphasis on learning to work as a group toward common structural goals.

This book is the first in its field to go beyond the pursuit of physical inventiveness to nurture the development of structural intuition.  Joyce Morgenroth has succeeded in presenting improvisation in a way that is rational and methodical as well as inventive and personal - in the conviction that improvisation at its best is comprised of both form and fancy.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees
Karl von Frisch and Thomas D. Seeley
Harvard University Press, 1993
Until his death in 1982, Karl von Frisch was the world's most renowned authority on bees. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees is his masterwork--the culmination of more than fifty years of research. Now available for the first time in paperback, it describes in non-technical language what he discovered in a lifetime of study about honeybees--their methods of orientation, their sensory faculties, and their remarkable ability to communicate with one another. Thomas Seeley's new foreword traces the revolutionary effects of von Frisch's work, not just for the study of bees, but for all subsequent research in animal behavior. This new paperback edition also includes an "Appreciation" of von Frisch by the distinguished biologist Martin Lindauer, who was Frisch's protégé and later his colleague and friend.
[more]

front cover of The Dance of Freedom
The Dance of Freedom
Texas African Americans during Reconstruction
By Barry Crouch
University of Texas Press, 2007

This anthology brings together the late Barry A. Crouch's most important articles on the African American experience in Texas during Reconstruction. Grouped topically, the essays explore what freedom meant to the newly emancipated, how white Texans reacted to the freed slaves, and how Freedmen's Bureau agents and African American politicians worked to improve the lot of ordinary African American Texans. The volume also contains Crouch's seminal review of Reconstruction historiography, "Unmanacling Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective." The introductory pieces by Arnoldo De Leon and Larry Madaras recapitulate Barry Crouch's scholarly career and pay tribute to his stature in the field of Reconstruction history.

[more]

front cover of Dance of Life
Dance of Life
The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-apartheid South Africa
Gail Fincham
Ohio University Press, 2012

In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.

[more]

front cover of The Dance of Politics
The Dance of Politics
Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi
Lisa Gilman
Temple University Press, 2011

Election campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters. However, as Lisa Gilman explains, “praise performing” is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system.

Although political performances by women are not unique to Malawi, the case in Malawi is complicated by the fact that until 1994 all Malawianwomen were required to perform on behalf of the long-reigning political party and its self-declared “President for Life,” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda+. This is the first book to examine the present-day situation, where issues of gender, economics and politics collide in surprising ways. Along with its solid grounding in the relevant literature, The Dance of Politics draws strength from Gilman’s first-hand observations and her interviews with a range of participants in the political process, from dancers to politicians.

[more]

front cover of The Dance of the Comedians
The Dance of the Comedians
The People, the President, and the Performance of Political Standup Comedy in America
Peter M. Robinson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
Why did Barack Obama court Jon Stewart and trade jokes with Stephen Colbert during the campaign of 2008? Why did Sarah Palin forgo the opportunity to earn votes on the Sunday morning political talk shows but embrace the chance to get laughs on Saturday Night Live? The Dance of the Comedians examines the history behind these questions—the merry, mocking, and highly contested anarchies of standup political comedy that have locked humorists, presidents, and their fellow Americans in an improvisational three-way "dance" since the early years of the American republic.

Peter M. Robinson shows how the performance of political humor developed as a celebration of democracy and an expression of political power, protest, and commercial profit. He places special significance on the middle half of the twentieth century, when presidents and comedians alike—from Calvin Coolidge to Ronald Reagan, from Will Rogers to Saturday Night Live's "Not Ready for Prime Time Players"—developed modern understandings of the power of laughter to affect popular opinion and political agendas, only to find the American audience increasingly willing and able to get in on the act. These years put the long-standing traditions of presidential deference profoundly in play as all three parties to American political humor—the people, the presidents, and the comedy professionals—negotiated their way between reverence for the office of the presidency and ridicule of its occupants.

Although the focus is on humor, The Dance of the Comedians illuminates the process by which Americans have come to recognize that the performance of political comedy has serious and profound consequences for those on all sides of the punch line.
[more]

front cover of The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion
The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion
Akram Musallam
Seagull Books, 2021
An experimental novel that explores the complexity of Palestinian identity through extended metaphor and dark humor.

On a plastic chair in a parking lot in Ramallah sits a young man writing a novel, reflecting on his life: working in a dance club on the Israeli side of the border, scratching his father’s amputated leg, dreaming nightly of a haunting scorpion, witnessing the powerful aura of his mountain-lodging aunt. His work in progress is a meditation on absence, loss, and emptiness. He poses deep questions: What does it mean to exist? How can you confirm the existence of a place, a person, a limb? How do we engage with what is no longer there? Absurd at times, raw at others, The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion explores Palestinian identity through Akram Musallam’s extended metaphors in the hope of transcending the loss of territory and erasure of history.
[more]

front cover of Dance of the Dialectic
Dance of the Dialectic
STEPS IN MARX'S METHOD
Bertell Ollman
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.
 
Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.
 
In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.
 
Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so. 
 
[more]

front cover of Dance of the Dolphin
Dance of the Dolphin
Transformation and Disenchantment in the Amazonian Imagination
Candace Slater
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In folktales told throughout much of the Brazilian Amazon, dolphins take human form, attend raucous dances and festivals, seduce men and women, and carry them away to a city beneath the river. They are encantados, or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins—accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits, and with shiny black shoes—reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and thus domination; greedy and lascivious outsiders, they are increasingly symbolic of a distinctly Amazonian culture politically, socially, economically, and environmentally under seige.

Candace Slater examines these stories in Dance of the Dolphin, both as folk narratives and as representations of culture and conflict in Amazonia. Her engaging study discusses the tales from the viewpoints of genre, performance, and gender, but centers on them as responses to the great changes sweeping the Amazon today. According to Slater, these surprisingly widespread tales reflect Amazonians' own mixed reactions to the ongoing destruction of the rainforest and the resulting transformations in the social as well as physical landscape. Offering an informed view of Brazilian culture, this book crosses the boundaries of folklore, literature, anthropology, and Latin American studies. It is one of the very few studies to offer an overview of the changes taking place in Amazonia through the eyes of ordinary people.

"This book is a rich collection of stories about the transformation of dolphins in the city of enchantment. . . . The joy in this book is not just its vibrant analysis and careful relating of tradition and lore, but also its uncanny accurateness in capturing the very essence of Amazonia."-Darrell Posey, Journal of Latin American Studies
"Slater's fluid prose reads like a novel for those interested in Amazonian culture and folklore, while her integrated approach makes this a must read for those interested in innovative methodology."-Lisa Gabbert, Western Folklore

[more]

front cover of Dance of the Furies
Dance of the Furies
Europe and the Outbreak of World War I
Michael S. Neiberg
Harvard University Press, 2011

The common explanation for the outbreak of World War I depicts Europe as a minefield of nationalism, needing only the slightest pressure to set off an explosion of passion that would rip the continent apart. But in a crucial reexamination of the outbreak of violence, Michael S. Neiberg shows that ordinary Europeans, unlike their political and military leaders, neither wanted nor expected war during the fateful summer of 1914. By training his eye on the ways that people outside the halls of power reacted to the rapid onset and escalation of the fighting, Neiberg dispels the notion that Europeans were rabid nationalists intent on mass slaughter. He reveals instead a complex set of allegiances that cut across national boundaries.

Neiberg marshals letters, diaries, and memoirs of ordinary citizens across Europe to show that the onset of war was experienced as a sudden, unexpected event. As they watched a minor diplomatic crisis erupt into a continental bloodbath, they expressed shock, revulsion, and fear. But when bargains between belligerent governments began to crumble under the weight of conflict, public disillusionment soon followed. Yet it was only after the fighting acquired its own horrible momentum that national hatreds emerged under the pressure of mutually escalating threats, wartime atrocities, and intense government propaganda.

Dance of the Furies gives voice to a generation who found themselves compelled to participate in a ghastly, protracted orgy of violence they never imagined would come to pass.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dance of the Furies
Europe and the Outbreak of World War I
Michael S. Neiberg
Harvard University Press

The common explanation for the outbreak of World War I depicts Europe as a minefield of nationalism, needing only the slightest pressure to set off an explosion of passion that would rip the continent apart. But in a crucial reexamination of the outbreak of violence, Michael S. Neiberg shows that ordinary Europeans, unlike their political and military leaders, neither wanted nor expected war during the fateful summer of 1914. By training his eye on the ways that people outside the halls of power reacted to the rapid onset and escalation of the fighting, Neiberg dispels the notion that Europeans were rabid nationalists intent on mass slaughter. He reveals instead a complex set of allegiances that cut across national boundaries.

Neiberg marshals letters, diaries, and memoirs of ordinary citizens across Europe to show that the onset of war was experienced as a sudden, unexpected event. As they watched a minor diplomatic crisis erupt into a continental bloodbath, they expressed shock, revulsion, and fear. But when bargains between belligerent governments began to crumble under the weight of conflict, public disillusionment soon followed. Yet it was only after the fighting acquired its own horrible momentum that national hatreds emerged under the pressure of mutually escalating threats, wartime atrocities, and intense government propaganda.

Dance of the Furies gives voice to a generation who found themselves compelled to participate in a ghastly, protracted orgy of violence they never imagined would come to pass.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter