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Elementary Japanese
Serge Elisséeff
Harvard University Press
This new textbook is not a revision of the author's Elementary Japanese for University Students, but is an almost entirely new compilation. The 770 Chinese characters and 1750 words of the vocabulary present a basic vocabulary which is necessary regardless of the specialized field of Japanese the student will eventually study. The book is divided into 75 carefully graded reading lessons, with five lessons near the end devoted to "classical" grammar as it is used in newspaper and official documents. The grammar notes, which are very full, serve as a fairly thorough survey of colloquial grammar and a simple but practical introduction to "classical" grammar. There are detailed indexes to the grammar notes and vocabulary. Writing charts help the student to learn to write both kana and characters. Thirty-six series of conversation pattern sentences are the starting point and backbone of conversational instruction. For classes in which the emphasis is entirely on conversation, there is a Romanized transcription of the Japanese texts, which can be secured either in place of or in addition to the usual character and kana texts.
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Elizabeth I
Translations, 1544-1589
Janel Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2008
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.

Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources.

The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule.
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Elizabeth I
Translations, 1592-1598
Janel Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2009
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.
            Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources. 
            The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule. 
 
 
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The Great Lakes Adventures with Auntie M
Maite Elizondo
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

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The Future is Mestizo
Life Where Culture Meet, Revised Edition
Virgilio Elizondo
University Press of Colorado, 2000
Twelve years after it was first published, The Future is Mestizo is now updated and revised with a new foreword, introduction, and epilogue. This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.
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City and Regime in the American Republic
Stephen L. Elkin
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Stephen L. Elkin deftly combines the empirical and normative strands of political science to make a powerfully original statement about what cities are, can, and should be. Rejecting the idea that two goals of city politics—equality and efficiency—are opposed to one another, Elkin argues that a commercial republic could achieve both. He then takes the unusual step of addressing how the political institutions of the city can help to form the kind of citizenry such a republic needs.

The present workings of American urban political institutions are, Elkin maintains, characterized by a close relationship between politicians and businessmen, a relationship that promotes neither political equality nor effective social problem-solving. Elkin pays particular attention to the issue of land-use in his analysis of these failures of popular control in traditional city politics. Urban political institutions, however, are not just instruments for the dispensing of valued outcomes or devices for social problem-solving—they help to form the citizenry. Our present institutions largely define citizens as interest group adversaries and do little to encourage them to focus on the commercial public interest of the city. Elkin concludes by proposing new institutional arrangements that would be better able to harness the self-interested behavior of individuals for the common good of a commercial republic.
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Reconstructing the Commercial Republic
Constitutional Design after Madison
Stephen L. Elkin
University of Chicago Press, 2006
James Madison is the thinker most responsible for laying the groundwork of the American commercial republic. But he did not anticipate that the propertied class on which he relied would become extraordinarily politically powerful at the same time as its interests narrowed. This and other flaws, argues Stephen L. Elkin, have undermined the delicately balanced system he constructed. In Reconstructing the Commercial Republic, Elkin critiques the Madisonian system, revealing which of its aspects have withstood the test of time and which have not. 

The deficiencies Elkin points out provide the starting point for his own constitutional theory of the republic—a theory that, unlike Madison’s, lays out a substantive conception of the public interest that emphasizes the power of institutions to shape our political, economic, and civic lives. Elkin argues that his theory should guide us toward building a commercial republic that is rooted in a politics of the public interest and the self-interest of the middle class. He then recommends specific reforms to create this kind of republic, asserting that Americans today can still have the lives a commercial republic is intended to promote: lives with real opportunities for economic prosperity, republican political self-government, and individual liberty.
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A New Constitutionalism
Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society
Stephen L. Elkin
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In The New Constitutionalism, seven distinguished scholars develop an innovative perspective on the power of institutions to shape politics and political life.

Believing that constitutionalism needs to go beyond the classical goal of limiting the arbitrary exercise of political power, the contributors argue that it should—and can—be designed to achieve economic efficiency, informed democratic control, and other valued political ends. More broadly, they believe that political and social theory needs to turn away from the negativism of critical theory to consider how a good society should be "constituted" and to direct the work of designing institutions that can constitute a "good polity," in both the economic and civic senses.

Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan begin with an overview of constitutionalist theory and a discussion of the new constitutionalism within the broader intellectual and historical context of political and social thought. Charles Anderson, James Ceaser, and the editors then offer different interpretations of the central issues regarding institutional design in a constitutionalist social science, consider various ways of performing the task, and discuss the inadequacy of recent political science to the job it ought to be doing. The book concludes with essays by Ted Lowi, Cass Sunstein and Edwin Haefele which apply these themes to the American regime.
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Ties That Stress
The New Family Imbalance
David Elkind
Harvard University Press, 1994
What has happened to the American family in the last few decades? And what are these changes doing to our children? David Elkind, renowned child psychologist and author of The Hurried Child, has devoted his career to these urgent questions. This eloquent book puts together all the puzzling facts and conflicting accounts to show us as never before what the American family has become.
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Visual Cultures
James Elkins
Intellect Books, 2010

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, featuring authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland, and Slovenia.

Focusing on the national instead of the global, distinguished art critic James Elkins offers a critique of general histories of visuality, such as those of Martin Jay or Jean Baudrillard, as well as a critique of local histories of visuality, as in Third Text and other postcolonial studies. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also explores questions of national identity and the many issues Elkins raises suggest a wealth of promising avenues for future research.

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Why Art Cannot Be Taught
A Handbook for Art Students
James Elkins
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In this smart survival guide for students and teachers--the only book of its kind--James Elkins examines the "curious endeavor to teach the unteachable" that is generally known as college-level art instruction. This singular project is organized around a series of conflicting claims about art: "Art can be taught, but nobody knows quite how."
 
"Art can be taught, but it seems as if it can't be since so few students become outstanding artists."
 
"Art cannot be taught, but it can be fostered or helped along."
 
"Art cannot be taught or even nourished, but it is possible to teach right up to the beginnings of art so that students are ready to make art the moment they graduate."
 
"Great art cannot be taught, but more run-of-the-mill art can be."
 
Elkins traces the development (or invention) of the modern art school and considers how issues such as the question of core curriculum and  the intellectual isolation of art schools affect the teaching and learning of art. He also addresses the phenomenon of art critiques as a microcosm for teaching art as a whole and dissects real-life critiques, highlighting presuppositions and dynamics that make them confusing and suggesting ways to make them more helpful.
 
Elkins's no-nonsense approach clears away the assumptions about art instruction that are not borne out by classroom practice. For example, he notes that despite much talk about instilling visual acuity and teaching technique, in practice neither teachers nor students behave as if those were their principal goals. He addresses the absurdity of pretending that  sexual issues are absent from life-drawing classes and questions the practice of holding up great masters and masterpieces as models for students capable of producing only mediocre art. He also discusses types of art--including art that takes time to complete and art that isn't serious--that cannot be learned in studio art classes.
Why Art Cannot Be Taught is a response to Elkins's observation that "we know very little about what we do" in the art classroom. His incisive commentary illuminates the experience of learning art for those involved in it, while opening an intriguing window for those outside the discipline.
 
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Slavery
A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life
Stanley M. Elkins
University of Chicago Press, 1987
This third edition of Stanley M. Elkin's classic study offers two new chapters by the author. The first, "Slavery and Ideology," considers the discussion and criticism occasioned by this controversial work. Elkins amplifies his original purpose in writing the book and takes into consideration the substantial body of critical commentary. He also attempts a prediction on the course of future research and discussion.
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Indenture Aesthetics
Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness
Jordache A Ellapen
Duke University Press, 2025

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The Sacred Cosmos
Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Twelfth Century School of Chartres
Peter Ellard
University of Scranton Press, 2007

The School of Chartres was a bold intellectual movement of the twelfth century that introduced the World Soul and the Chartrian cosmology to Christendom. In his controversial book, The Sacred Cosmos, theologian Peter Ellard analyzes the most radical aspects of Chartrian thought and traces their relation to classical and late-antique philosophers such as Boethius and Plato. In addition, Ellard investigates the Cathedral of Chartres as an important proof and example of Chartrian theology in this essential volume for anyone interested in the intersection of spirituality and philosophy.

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The Continental Model
Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century in English Translation
Scott Elledge
University of Minnesota Press, 1960

The Continental Model was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The pervasive influence of seventeenth-century French criticism upon eighteenth-century English criticism makes it important for students of English and comparative literature to be familiar with the most important of the French works. Professors Elledge and Schier bring together here, in translation, some of the best examples of the French essays. They have chosen particularly works that are not otherwise available in translation.

Some of the translations are by contemporaries of the period. These are of works by d'Aubignac, Saint-Evremond, Huet, Rapin, Le Bossu, Bouhours, La Bruyere, and Fontenelle. Other selections have been translated by Professor Schier, and these include works of Chapelain, Sarasin, Scudery, Corneille, Bouhours, and Fontenelle.

The editors provide brief and pertinent comment on each writer and his place in literary history. They have also annotated the essays in order to save time for the reader who encounters references to other literatures not immediately clear to him. The volume as a whole provides a comprehensive and balanced selection of critical texts which were known to, used by, and significant in their influence upon writers such as Dryden, Dennis, Addison, Swift, Pope, and others.

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Darwin and the General Reader
The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872
Alvar Ellegård
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Drawing on his investigation of over one hundred mid-Victorian British newspapers and periodicals, Alvar Ellegård describes and analyzes the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution during the first dozen years after the publication of the Origin of Species. Although Darwin's book caused an immediate stir in literary and scientific periodicals, the popular press largely ignored it. Only after the work's implications for theology and the nature of man became evident did general publications feel compelled to react; each social group responded according to his own political and religious prejudices. Ellegård charts the impact of this revolution in science, maintaining that although the idea of evolution was generally accepted, Darwin's primary contribution, the theory of natural selection, was either ignored or rejected among the public.
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China’s Naval Operations in the South China Sea
Evaluating Legal, Strategic and Military Factors
Bruce Elleman
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book provides a history of the South China Sea conflict and lays out the stakes for each of the bordering states and China’s interaction with them – namely, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia; it also examines the U.S. government’s role in the region. China’s Naval Operations in the South China Sea is highly topical; it examines the evolving perception of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) of the South China Sea (SCS), and Beijing’s accompanying maritime strategy to claim the islands and waters, particularly in the context of the strategies of the neighbouring stake-holding nations. In addition to long-standing territorial disputes over the islands and waters of the SCS, China and the other littoral states — Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia — have growing and often mutually exclusive interests in the offshore energy reserves and fishing grounds. Many other countries outside of the region worry about the protection of sea lines of communication for military and commercial traffic, oil tankers in particular. These differences have been expressed in the increasing frequency and intensity of maritime incidents, involving both naval and civilian vessels, sometimes working in coordination against naval or civilian targets. Each chapter on the littoral states closely examines that state’s territorial claims to the islands and waters of the SCS, its primary economic and military interests in these areas, its views on the sovereignty disputes over the entire SCS, its strategy to achieve its objectives, and its views on the U.S. involvement in any and all of these issues.
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Sharing America’s Neighborhoods
The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration
Ingrid Gould Ellen
Harvard University Press, 2000

The first part of this book presents a fresh and encouraging report on the state of racial integration in America's neighborhoods. It shows that while the majority are indeed racially segregated, a substantial and growing number are integrated, and remain so for years.

Still, many integrated neighborhoods do unravel quickly, and the second part of the book explores the root causes. Instead of panic and "white flight" causing the rapid breakdown of racially integrated neighborhoods, the author argues, contemporary racial change is driven primarily by the decision of white households not to move into integrated neighborhoods when they are moving for reasons unrelated to race. Such "white avoidance" is largely based on the assumptions that integrated neighborhoods quickly become all black and that the quality of life in them declines as a result.

The author concludes that while this explanation may be less troubling than the more common focus on racial hatred and white flight, there is still a good case for modest government intervention to promote the stability of racially integrated neighborhoods. The final chapter offers some guidelines for policymakers to follow in crafting effective policies.

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How to House the Homeless
Ingrid Gould Ellen
Russell Sage Foundation, 2010
How to House the Homeless, editors Ingrid Gould Ellen and Brendan O'Flaherty propose that the answers entail rethinking how housing markets operate and developing more efficient interventions in existing service programs. The book critically reassesses where we are now, analyzes the most promising policies and programs going forward, and offers a new agenda for future research. How to House the Homeless makes clear the inextricable link between homelessness and housing policy. Contributor Jill Khadduri reviews the current residential services system and housing subsidy programs. For the chronically homeless, she argues, a combination of assisted housing approaches can reach the greatest number of people and, specifically, an expanded Housing Choice Voucher system structured by location, income, and housing type can more efficiently reach people at-risk of becoming homeless and reduce time spent homeless. Robert Rosenheck examines the options available to homeless people with mental health problems and reviews the cost-effectiveness of five service models: system integration, supported housing, clinical case management, benefits outreach, and supported employment. He finds that only programs that subsidize housing make a noticeable dent in homelessness, and that no one program shows significant benefits in multiple domains of life. Contributor Sam Tsemberis assesses the development and cost-effectiveness of the Housing First program, which serves mentally ill homeless people in more than four hundred cities. He asserts that the program's high housing retention rate and general effectiveness make it a viable candidate for replication across the country. Steven Raphael makes the case for a strong link between homelessness and local housing market regulations—which affect housing affordability—and shows that the problem is more prevalent in markets with stricter zoning laws. Finally, Brendan O'Flaherty bridges the theoretical gap between the worlds of public health and housing research, evaluating the pros and cons of subsidized housing programs and the economics at work in the rental housing market and home ownership. Ultimately, he suggests, the most viable strategies will serve as safety nets—"social insurance"—to reach people who are homeless now and to prevent homelessness in the future. It is crucial that the links between effective policy and the whole cycle of homelessness—life conditions, service systems, and housing markets—be made clear now. With a keen eye on the big picture of housing policy, How to House the Homeless shows what works and what doesn't in reducing the numbers of homeless and reaching those most at risk.
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Mule South to Tractor South
Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South
George B. Ellenberg
University of Alabama Press, 2013
The adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor

The author describes the adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor. After describing the surprising slowness of southern farmers to realize the superiority of the mule over the horse for agricultural labor, Ellenberg strives to capture the symbiosis that emerged between animal and man to illuminate why and how the mule became a standard feature in Southern folk culture.
 
Having been slow to adopt the mule, southern farmers were then reluctant to set it aside in favor of the tractor. Ellenberg describes the transformation as the tractor gradually displaced the mule and the role of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in this process.
 
The work not only becomes a survey of the development of southern agriculture as revealed through an examination of this premier work animal but also follows the emergence of the animal as a cultural icon, as it figures in southern literature, folklore, and music.
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Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy
David Ellenson
University of Alabama Press, 1990

The story of modern Orthodox Judaism is usually told only from the perspective of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Ellenson’s work, a thorough examination of the life and work of one of Hirsch’s contemporaries, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, reveals another important contributor to the creation of a modern Jewish Orthodoxy during the late 1800s. like Hirsch, Hildesheirmer felt the need to continue certain traditions while at the same time introducing certain innovations to meet the demands of a modern society. This original study of an Orthodox rabbinic leader shows how Hildesheirmer’s flexible and pragmatic approach to these problems continues to be relevant to modern Judaism. The way in which this book draws upon response literature for its comprehension of Hildesheimer makes it a distinctive work in modern Jewish historiography and sociology.

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We Dream Together
Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom
Anne Eller
Duke University Press, 2016
In We Dream Together Anne Eller breaks with dominant narratives of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti by tracing the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865. Eller moves beyond the small body of writing by Dominican elites that often narrates Dominican nationhood to craft inclusive, popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance was anchored in a rich and complex political culture. Haitians and Dominicans fostered a common commitment to Caribbean freedom, the abolition of slavery, and popular democracy, often well beyond the reach of the state. By showing how the island's political roots are deeply entwined, and by contextualizing this history within the wider Atlantic world, Eller demonstrates the centrality of Dominican anticolonial struggles for understanding independence and emancipation throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. 
 
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Inventing American Tradition
From the Mayflower to Cinco de Mayo
Jack David Eller
Reaktion Books, 2018
What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? How did a British drinking song become the US national anthem? And what makes Superman so darned American? Every tradition, even the noblest and most cherished, has a history, none more so than in the United States—a nation born with relative indifference, if not hostility, to the past. Most Americans would be surprised to learn just how recent (and controversial) the origins of their traditions are, as well as how those origins are often related to such divisive forces as the trauma of the Civil War or fears for American identity stemming from immigration and socialism.

In pithy, entertaining chapters, Inventing American Tradition explores a set of beloved traditions spanning political symbols, holidays, lifestyles, and fictional characters—everything from the anthem to the American flag, blue jeans, and Mickey Mouse. Shedding light on the individuals who created these traditions and their motivations for promoting them, Jack David Eller reveals the murky, conflicted, confused, and contradictory history of emblems and institutions we very often take to be the bedrock of America. What emerges from this sideways take on our most celebrated Americanisms is the realization that all traditions are invented by particular people at particular times for particular reasons, and that the process of “traditioning” is forever ongoing—especially in the land of the free.
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Becoming Ray Bradbury
Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years.

Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for the genre pulps and mainstream magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction. Eller also elucidates the complex creative motivations that yielded Fahrenheit 451.

Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.

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Bradbury Beyond Apollo
Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Celebrated storyteller, cultural commentator, friend of astronauts, prophet of the Space Age—by the end of the 1960s, Ray Bradbury had attained a level of fame and success rarely achieved by authors, let alone authors of science fiction and fantasy. He had also embarked on a phase of his career that found him exploring new creative outlets while reinterpreting his classic tales for generations of new fans.

Drawing on numerous interviews with Bradbury and privileged access to personal papers and private collections, Jonathan R. Eller examines the often-overlooked second half of Bradbury's working life. As Bradbury's dreams took him into a wider range of nonfiction writing and public lectures, the diminishing time that remained for creative pursuits went toward Hollywood productions like the award-winning series Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury developed the Spaceship Earth narration at Disney's EPCOT Center; appeared everywhere from public television to NASA events to comic conventions; published poetry; and mined past triumphs for stage productions that enjoyed mixed success. Distracted from storytelling as he became more famous, Bradbury nonetheless published innovative experiments in autobiography masked as detective novels, the well-received fantasy The Halloween Tree and the masterful time travel story "The Toynbee Convector." Yet his embrace of celebrity was often at odds with his passion for writing, and the resulting tension continuously pulled at his sense of self.

The revelatory conclusion to the acclaimed three-part biography, Bradbury Beyond Apollo tells the story of an inexhaustible creative force seeking new frontiers.

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Ray Bradbury Unbound
Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan R. Eller continues the story begun in his acclaimed Becoming Ray Bradbury, following the beloved author's evolution from a short story master to a multi-media creative force and outspoken visionary.

At the height of his powers as a poetic prose stylist, Bradbury shifted his creative attention to film and television, where new successes gave him an enduring platform as a compelling cultural commentator. His passionate advocacy validated the U.S. space program's mission, extending his pivotal role as a chronicler of human values in an age of technological wonders.

Informed by many years of interviews with Bradbury as well as an unprecedented access to personal papers and private collections, Ray Bradbury Unbound provides the definitive portrait of how a legendary American author helped shape his times.

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Miners Millhands Mountaineers
Industrialization Appalachian South
Ronald D. Eller
University of Tennessee Press, 1982

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Planet Hunters
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Lucas Ellerbroek
Reaktion Books, 2017
Astronomers are on the verge of answering one of our most profound questions: are we alone in the universe? The ability to detect life in remote solar systems is at last within sight, and its discovery—even if only in microbial form—would revolutionize our self-image. Planet Hunters is the rollicking tale of the search for extraterrestrial life and the history of an academic discipline.

Astronomer Lucas Ellerbroek takes readers on a fantastic voyage through space, time, history, and even to the future as he describes the field of exoplanet research, from the early ideas of sixteenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno to the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995 to the invention of the Kepler Space Telescope. We join him on his travels as he meets with leading scientists in the field, including Michel Mayor, who discovered the first exoplanet, and Bill Borucki, principal investigator for NASA’s Kepler mission. Taken together, the experiences, passion, and perseverance of the scientists featured here make the book an exciting and compelling read.

Presenting cutting-edge research in a dynamic and accessible way, Planet Hunters is a refreshing look into a field where new discoveries come every week and paradigms shift every year.
 
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Embroidering the Scarlet A
Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film
Janet Mason Ellerby
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet LetterThe Sound and the FuryThe Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.
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Mole
Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
Reaktion Books, 2020
Though moles are rarely seen, they live in close proximity to humans around the world. Gardeners and farmers go to great lengths to remove molehills from their fields and gardens; mole-catching has been a profession for the past two millennia. Moles are also close to our imagination, appearing in myths, fairy tales, and comic books as either wealthy, undesirable grooms or seekers of enlightenment. In Mole, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff examines moles in nature as well as their representation throughout history and across cultures. Balancing evolution and ecology with photographs and artworks, Ellerhoff provides a veritable mountain of new insight into this exceedingly private mammal.
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Helping People Help Themselves
From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance
David Ellerman
University of Michigan Press, 2006

David Ellerman relates a deep theoretical groundwork for a philosophy of development, while offering a descriptive, practical suggestion of how goals of development can be better set and met. Beginning with the assertion that development assistance agencies are inherently structured to provide help that is ultimately unhelpful by overriding or undercutting the capacity of people to help themselves, David Ellerman argues that the best strategy for development is a drastic reduction in development assistance. The locus of initiative can then shift from the would-be helpers to the doers (recipients) of development. Ellerman presents various methods for shifting initiative that are indirect, enabling and autonomy-respecting. Eight representative figures in the fields of education, community organization, economic development, psychotherapy and management theory including: Albert Hirschman, Paulo Freire, John Dewey, and Søren Kierkegaard demonstrate how the major themes of assisting autonomy among people are essentially the same.

David Ellerman is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Economics Department at the University of California at Riverside.

[more]

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Fiction, Fact and Future
The Essence of EU Democracy
James Elles
Haus Publishing, 2019
Since its inception, the European Union has developed to become an open and transparent system which is democratically accountable to more than five hundred million European citizens. James Elles explains how the EU functions, emphasizing the emerging role of the European Parliament in the process. Elles reviews the history of Britain’s relationship with the EU and illustrates how a reluctance to consult the British people on multiple Treaty changes led to a lack of understanding about Brussels. Looking to the future, Elles assesses the global long-term trends that lie ahead to 2030 and underlines that closer European cooperation, for example on environmental and digital policies, will help them to be more easily resolved. As the next decade unfurls, the EU with President Macron at the forefront of the debate will progress and the European Parliament will continue to develop as a platform for the voice of the European people. From the disinterest of political leaders to the ambitions of emerging nations, Fiction, Fact and Future is not only a guide to why Britain failed to make the most of its EU membership, but also an optimistic message to a younger generation to help shape their future in the 21st century.
 
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Order without Law
How Neighbors Settle Disputes
Robert C. Ellickson
Harvard University Press, 1994

In Order without Law, Robert Ellickson shows that law is far less important than is generally thought. He demonstrates that people largely govern themselves by means of informal rules—social norms—that develop without the aid of a state or other central coordinator. Integrating the latest scholarship in law, economics, sociology, game theory, and anthropology, Ellickson investigates the uncharted world within which order is successfully achieved without law.

The springboard for Ellickson’s theory of norms is his close investigation of a variety of disputes arising from the damage created by escaped cattle in Shasta County, California. In “The Problem of Social Cost”—the most frequently cited article on law—economist Ronald H. Coase depicts farmers and ranchers as bargaining in the shadow of the law while resolving cattle-trespass disputes. Ellickson’s field study of this problem refutes many of the behavioral assumptions that underlie Coase’s vision, and will add realism to future efforts to apply economic analysis to law.

Drawing examples from a wide variety of social contexts, including whaling grounds, photocopying centers, and landlord–tenant relations, Ellickson explores the interaction between informal and legal rules and the usual domains in which these competing systems are employed. Order without Law firmly grounds its analysis in real-world events, while building a broad theory of how people cooperate to mutual advantage.

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Good Urbanism
Six Steps to Creating Prosperous Places
nan Ellin
Island Press, 2012
We all have a natural nesting instinct—we know what makes a good place. And a consensus has developed among urban planners and designers about the essential components of healthy, prosperous communities. So why aren’t these ideals being put into practice?

In Good Urbanism, Nan Ellin identifies the obstacles to creating thriving environments, and presents a six-step process to overcome them: prospect, polish, propose, prototype, promote, present. She argues that we need to reach beyond conventional planning to cultivate good ideas and leverage the resources to realize them.

Ellin illustrates the process with ten exemplary projects, from Envision Utah to Open Space Seattle. Each case study shows how to pair vision with practicality, drawing on our best natural instincts and new planning tools. 

For planners, urban designers, community developers, and students of these fields, Ellin’s innovative approach offers an inspired, yet concrete path to building good places.
[more]

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The Megachurch and the Mainline
Remaking Religious Tradition in the Twenty-first Century
Stephen Ellingson
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Religious traditions provide the stories and rituals that define the core values of church members. Yet modern life in America can make those customs seem undesirable, even impractical. As a result, many congregations refashion church traditions so they may remain powerful and salient. How do these transformations occur? How do clergy and worshipers negotiate which aspects should be preserved or discarded?

Focusing on the innovations of several mainline Protestant churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, Stephen Ellingson’s The Megachurch and the Mainline provides new understandings of the transformation of spiritual traditions. For Ellingson, these particular congregations typify a new type of Lutheranism—one which combines the evangelical approaches that are embodied in the growing legion of megachurches with American society’s emphasis on pragmatism and consumerism. Here Ellingson provides vivid descriptions of congregations as they sacrifice hymns in favor of rock music and scrap traditional white robes and stoles for Hawaiian shirts, while also making readers aware of the long history of similar attempts to Americanize the Lutheran tradition.

This is an important examination of a religion in flux—one that speaks to the growing popularity of evangelicalism in America.

[more]

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To Care for Creation
The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement
Stephen Ellingson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Controversial megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll proclaimed from a conference stage in 2013, “I know who made the environment and he’s coming back and going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV.” The comment, which Driscoll later explained away as a joke, highlights what has been a long history of religious anti-environmentalism. Given how firmly entrenched this sentiment has been, surprising inroads have been made by a new movement with few financial resources, which is deeply committed to promoting green religious traditions and creating a new environmental ethic.

To Care for Creation chronicles this movement and explains how it has emerged despite institutional and cultural barriers, as well as the hurdles posed by logic and practices that set religious environmental organizations apart from the secular movement. Ellingson takes a deep dive into the ways entrepreneurial activists tap into and improvise on a variety of theological, ethical, and symbolic traditions in order to issue a compelling call to arms that mobilizes religious audiences. Drawing on interviews with the leaders of more than sixty of these organizations, Ellingson deftly illustrates how activists borrow and rework resources from various traditions to create new meanings for religion, nature, and the religious person’s duty to the natural world.
[more]

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Living with Coyotes
Managing Predators Humanely Using Food Aversion Conditioning
Stuart R. Ellins
University of Texas Press, 2005

The coyote may well be North America's most adaptable large predator. While humans have depleted or eliminated most other native predators, the coyote has defied all attempts to exterminate it, simultaneously expanding its range from coast to coast and from wilderness to urban areas. As a result, coyotes are becoming the focus of increasing controversy and emotion for people across the continent— from livestock growers who would like to eradicate coyotes to conservationists who would protect them at any cost.

In this thoughtful, well-argued, and timely book, Stuart Ellins makes the case that lethal methods of coyote management do not work and that people need to adopt a more humane way of coexisting with coyotes. Interweaving scientific data about coyote behavior and natural history with decades of field experience, he shows how endlessly adaptive coyotes are and how attempts to kill them off have only strengthened the species through natural selection. He then explains the process of taste aversion conditioning—which he has successfully employed—to stop coyotes from killing domestic livestock and pets. Writing frankly as an advocate of this effective and humane method of controlling coyotes, he asks, "Why are we mired in the use of archaic, inefficient, unsophisticated, and barbaric methods of wildlife management in this age of reason and high technology? This question must be addressed while there is still a wildlife to manage."

[more]

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Talking Back
Senior Scholars and Their Colleagues Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Studies
Norbert Elliot
Utah State University Press, 2020

In Talking Back, a veritable Who’s Who of writing studies scholars deliberate on intellectual traditions, current practices, and important directions for the future. In response, junior and mid-career scholars reflect on each chapter with thoughtful and measured moves forward into the contemporary environment of research, teaching, and service. Each of the prestigious chapter authors in the volume has three common traits: a sense of responsibility for advancing the profession, a passion for programs of research dedicated to advancing opportunities for others, and a reflective sense of their work accompanied by humility for their contributions. As a documentary, Talking Back is the first history of writing studies in autobiography.
 

Contributors: Jo Allen, Ann N. Amicucci, Akua Duku Anokye, Paige Davis Arrington, Doug Baldwin, John C. Brereton, Judy Buchanan, Hugh Burns, Leasa Burton, Ellen C. Carillo, William Condon, Dylan B. Dryer, Michelle F. Eble, Jennifer Enoch, Joan Feinberg, Patricia Friedrich, Cinthia Gannett, Eli Goldblatt, Shenika Hankerson, Janis Haswell, Richard Haswell, Eric Heltzel, Douglas Hesse, Bruce Horner, Alice S. Horning, Asao B. Inoue, Ruth Ray Karpen, Suzanne Lane, Min-Zhan Lu, Donald McQuade, Elisabeth L. Miller, Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Sean Molloy, Les Perelman, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Stacey Pigg, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Jessica Restaino, J. Michael Rifenburg, Eliana Schonberg, Geneva Smitherman, Richard Sterling, Katherine E. Tirabassi, Devon Tomasulo, Martha A. Townsend, Mike Truong, Victor Villanueva, Edward M. White, Anne Elrod Whitney, Kathleen Blake Yancey

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Making the Cut
How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives
Anthony Elliott
Reaktion Books, 2008
From London to New York, Madrid to Melbourne, Singapore to Tehran, the demand for cosmetic surgery is soaring. Botox injections, collagen fillers, breast implants, microdermabrasion, mini face-lifts: extreme reinvention is all the rage. For better or worse, ours is the era of cosmetic surgical culture.
 
In this captivating book, which draws upon research conducted in Europe, America and Australasia, social commentator Anthony Elliott investigates the rise and rise of cosmetic surgery, lucidly reviewing recent developments in celebrity culture and the consumer industries, which many argue are responsible for the popularity of cosmetic and surgical forms of extreme reinvention. Yet it is not just cultural forces advancing the makeover industries: Elliott shows that cosmetic surgical culture has become increasingly global in our own time as a result of major institutional changes dominating public life in Western societies. He provocatively argues that personal vulnerabilities have reached the point where people turn to surgical culture in an effort to reinvent themselves and improve their life prospects
 
Making the Cut paints a disturbing social portrait of a global culture held in thrall to immediacy, where cosmetic surgical enhancements of the body are fundamental to new forms of self-design and self-improvement.
 
[more]

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Psychoanalytic Theory
An Introduction
Anthony Elliott
Duke University Press, 2002
Anthony Elliott presents a comprehensive introduction to psychoanalytic theory and its applications in the social sciences and humanities in this new and fully revised second edition of Psychoanalytic Theory. Elliott provides lucid interpretations of key psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, and Zizek. This revised edition has much new material, including a survey of psychoanalytic approaches to race and postcolonialism from Fanon to Homi Bhabha, as well as a look at the reframing of sexuality studies by such feminist theorists as Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.

The book follows major themes, highlighting the similarities and differences among influential thinkers and schools of thought. At the same time, Psychoanalytic Theory is structured so that the chapters can be read in any order. Each one includes an introductory overview and summary, as well as biographical and historical material for each theorist discussed. This book is an essential starting point for any exploration of the contribution of psychoanalysis to contemporary theory.

[more]

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Equipping The Saints
Barbara Elliott
Templeton Press, 2004

 

For any individual donor or foundation giving money to a faith-based organization, this guide is indispensable. Equipping the Saints offers sage advice on recognizing the qualities of good leaders, effective programs, and the methods of evaluating outcomes. Based on hundreds of interviews with donors and civic leaders, this guide provides a candid look at the unique strengths and weaknesses of these groups. Equipping the Saints is packed with useful tools like a donor's interest inventory, a checklist for making a site visit, tips on reading nonprofit financial statements, and hands-on recommendations for making grants that are both effective and prudent.

"An excellent guide for philanthropists seeking to unleash the power of faith in healing troubled souls and transforming troubled neighborhoods." —Adam Meyerson, president, Philanthropy Roundtable

"Most donors quickly learn how all that glitters is not gold. Some go on to learn how all that is gold does not glitter. In this book Barbara Elliott provides the lessons in discernment and the tools for evaluation that donors need. Take advantage of her understanding by making it your own." —Marvin Olasky, ditor of World magazine, author of Compassionate Conservatism and The Tragedy of American Compassion

"Any donor with even a hint of interest in exploring investments in the work of faith-based organizations (FBOs) needs this book. It is packed with practical information about how to understand and assess FBOs. Its numerous examples of real-life donors making real-life differences through partnerships with faith-inspired community healers ought to stimulate much creative brainstorming among philanthropists." —Dr. Amy L. Sherman, senior fellow and director, Faith in Communities Initiative of the Foundation for American Renewal

"From the perspective of a local foundation giving to faith-based ministries, we have found Barbara Elliott's work to be inspiring, practical and instructive to us as we think through our priorities and principles for funding decisions…I have extraordinary respect for Barbara's scope of understanding, ability to communicate with passion and reason, and her deep understanding of a very complex field. She gives all of us—ministries and funders—genuine hope and invaluable insight." —Fred Smith, president, The Gathering

 

[more]

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Street Saints
Renewing American Cities
Barbara J. Elliott
Templeton Press, 2006

Based on eight years of hands-on experience and more than 300 interviews, Street Saints is both a book of motivational stories about unsung heroes and a sociological study of the "faith factor," documenting faith-based programs that are treating social maladies in America. This book takes readers on a tour of communities and institutions in America where faith-based initiatives are making a difference. It offers inspiration, role models, and guidelines for people who would like to give back to their own communities.

[more]

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Tennis Science
How Player and Racket Work Together
Bruce Elliott
University of Chicago Press, 2015
If you have watched a Grand Slam tennis tournament in the past decade, you are probably aware that the game is dominated by just a few international powerhouses. At the conclusion of each tournament, it is likely that you will see Serena Williams atop the women’s podium and a member of the Big Four—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray—hoisting the trophy for the men. And while there is not a lot of variety in the outcome of these matches, the game of tennis itself has changed drastically over the decades, as developments in technology and conditioning regimens, among other factors, have altered the style of play. Underpinning many of these developments is science, and this book explains the scientific wonders that take the ball from racket to racket and back again.
           
Each chapter explores a different facet of the game—learning, technique, game analysis, the mental edge, physical development, nutrition for performance and recovery, staying healthy, and equipment—and is organized around a series of questions. How do we learn the ins and outs of hitting the ball in and not out? What are the main technological developments and software programs that can be used to assist in performance and notational analysis in tennis? What role does sports psychology play in developing a tennis player? What is the role of fluid replacement for the recreational, junior, and professional player? What rule changes have been made with respect to the racket, ball, and ball-court interaction to maintain the integrity of the game in the face of technological change? Each question is examined with the aid of explanatory diagrams and illustrations, and the book can be used to search for particular topics, or read straight through for a comprehensive overview of how player and equipment work together.
         
Whether you prefer the grass courts of Wimbledon, the clay courts of the French Open, or the hard courts of the US and Australian Opens, Tennis Science is a must-have for anyone interested in the science behind a winning game.
[more]

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The Cost of Courage
The Journey of an American Congressman
Carl Elliott
University of Alabama Press, 2001

This deeply moving story chronicles the tenacity and vision that carried Carl Elliott from the hills of northwest Alabama to eight distinguished terms in the United States House of Representatives.

Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Carl Elliott worked his way through The University of Alabama during the Great Depression and was elected to Congress in 1948. With a no-nonsense philosophy of fairness and equal opportunity, he established himself as one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives during the 1950s. He was a progressive Democrat and he fought hard for the dirt farmers and coal miners he grew up with and who sent him to Congress.

In an era when racial segregationists dominated southern politics, Elliott worked with many of the important political leaders of the 20th century, including Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy and powerful House Speaker Sam Rayburn. He was instrumental in passing the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which continues to provide college loans to more than 20 million Americans. But his brave stand against racism and George Wallace in the 1966 Alabama gubernatorial race ruined him professionally (he never returned to elected office) and financially (he cashed in his congressional pension to help fund the campaign). Even as a destitute invalid in his old age, however, Elliott kept his dignity and integrity intact.

The life story of Carl Elliott is full of humor and wry wisdom and explains how he made his way across a stage as big as America, influencing its politics and future, and then emerged, belatedly, as an unsung hero of the fight for civil rights and equality.

[more]

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Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers
Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics
Carl Elliott
Duke University Press, 2001
Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of philosophy. Their aim is not to examine Wittgenstein’s personal moral convictions but rather to explore how a deep engagement with his work can illuminate some of the problems that medicine and biological science present.
As Elliott explains in his introduction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy runs against the grain of most contemporary bioethics scholarship, which all too often ignores the context in which moral problems are situated and pays little attention to narrative, ethnography, and clinical case studies in rendering bioethical judgments. Such anonymous, impersonal, rule-writing directives in which health care workers are advised how to behave is what this volume intends to counteract. Instead, contributors stress the value of focusing on the concrete particulars of moral problems and write in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should be useful. Specific topics include the concept of “good dying,” the nature of clinical decision making, the treatment of neurologically damaged patients, the moral treatment of animals, and the challenges of moral particularism.
Inspired by a philosopher who deplored “professional philosophy,” this work brings some startling insights and clarifications to contemporary ethical problems posed by the realities of modern medicine.

Contributors. Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy

[more]

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The Last Physician
Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine
Carl Elliott
Duke University Press, 1999
Walker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. Trained as a doctor at Columbia University, he contracted tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital and spent the next three years recovering, primarily in TB sanitoriums. This collection of essays explores not only Percy’s connections to medicine but also the underappreciated impact his art has had—and can have—on medicine itself.
The contributors—physicians, philosophers, and literary critics—examine the relevance of Percy’s work to current dilemmas in medical education and health policy. They reflect upon the role doctors and patients play in his novels, his family legacy of depression, how his medical background influenced his writing style, and his philosophy of psychiatry. They contemplate the private ways in which Percy’s work affected their own lives and analyze the author’s tendency to contrast the medical-scientific worldview with a more spiritual one. Assessing Percy’s stature as an author and elucidating the many ways that reading and writing can combine with diagnosing and treating to offer an antidote to despair, they ask what it means to be a doctor, a writer, and a seeker of cures and truths—not just for the body but for the malaise and diseased spirituality of modern times.
This collection will appeal to lovers of literature as well as medical professionals—indeed, anyone concerned with medical ethics and the human side of doctoring.

Contributors. Robert Coles, Brock Eide, Carl Elliott, John D. Lantos, Ross McElwee, Richard Martinez, Martha Montello, David Schiedermayer, Jay Tolson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman

[more]

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Blue in Green
Chiyuma Elliott
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Poems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster.
 
Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange. 
 
The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.
 
[more]

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Art and Trousers
Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art
David Elliott
National University of Singapore Press, 2021
An illustrated collection of essays on modern and contemporary Asian art by a key figure of the international contemporary art world.

An illustrated collection of more than thirty essays and 640 color images, Art and Trousers moves deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers. This book presents a panoramic view of modern and contemporary Asian art, varying its focus on the impacts of invention, tradition, exchange, colonization, politics, social development, and gender. David Elliott spotlights the practice of many leading global artists of the early twenty-first century, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Rashid Rana, Bharti Kher, Makoto Aida, Chatchai Puipia, and Yeesookyung, among many others. Art and Trousers offers insight into the development of a key curatorial practice for our times, and it will be an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand contemporary art and the way it operates across borders.
[more]

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Naked Fieldnotes
A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing
Denielle Elliott
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Creative and diverse approaches to ethnographic knowledge production and writing

 

Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is analyzed within the social sciences. Naked Fieldnotes, a unique compendium of actual fieldnotes from contemporary ethnographic researchers from various modalities and research traditions, unpacks how this research works, its challenges and its possibilities.

 

The volume pairs fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, drawings, photographs, soundscapes, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are composed and shaped by research experiences. These essays unlock the experience of conducting qualitative research in the social sciences, providing clear examples of the benefits and difficulties of ethnographic research and how it differs from other forms of writing such as reporting and travelogue. By granting access to these personal archives, Naked Fieldnotes unsettles taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and gives scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork. 

 

Contributors: Courtney Addison, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria U of Wellington; Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Brandeis U; Sareeta Amrute, U of Washington; Barbara Andersen, Massey U Auckland, New Zealand; Adia Benton, Northwestern U; Letizia Bonanno, U of Kent; Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, U of Victoria; Michael Cepek, U of Texas at San Antonio; Michelle Charette, York U; Tomás Criado, Humboldt-U of Berlin; John Dale, George Mason U; Elsa Fan, Webster U; Kelly Fayard, U of Denver; Michele Friedner, U of Chicago; Susan Frohlick, U of British Columbia, Okanagan, Syilx Territory; Angela Garcia, Stanford U; Danielle Gendron, U of British Columbia; Mascha Gugganig,  Technical U Munich; Natalia Gutkowski, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; T. S. Harvey, Vanderbilt U;  Saida Hodžić, Cornell U; K. G. Hutchins, Oberlin College; Basit Kareem Iqbal, McMaster U; Emma Kowal, Deakin U in Melbourne; Mathangi Krishnamurthy, IIT Madras; Shyam Kunwar; Margaret MacDonald, York U in Toronto; Stephanie McCallum, U Nacional de San Martín and U de San Andrés, Argentina; Diana Ojeda, Cider, U de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; Valerie Olson, U of California, Irvine; Patrick Mbullo Owuor, Northwestern U; Stacy Leigh Pigg, Fraser U; Jason Pine, Purchase College, State U of New York; Chiara Pussetti, U of Lisbon; Tom Rice, U of Exeter; Leslie A. Robertson, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Yana Stainova, McMaster U; Richard Vokes, U of Western Australia; Russell Westhaver, Saint Mary’s U in Nova Scotia; Paul White, U of Nevada, Reno.

[more]

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A Better Way to Zone
Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities
Donald L. Elliott
Island Press, 2008
Nearly all large American cities rely on zoning to regulate land use. According to Donald L. Elliott, however, zoning often discourages the very development that bigger cities need and want. In fact, Elliott thinks that zoning has become so complex that it is often dysfunctional and in desperate need of an overhaul. A Better Way to Zone explains precisely what has gone wrong and how it can be fixed.
 
A Better Way to Zone explores the constitutional and legal framework of zoning, its evolution over the course of the twentieth century, the reasons behind major reform efforts of the past, and the adverse impacts of most current city zoning systems. To unravel what has gone wrong, Elliott identifies several assumptions behind early zoning that no longer hold true, four new land use drivers that have emerged since zoning began, and basic elements of good urban governance that are violated by prevailing forms of zoning. With insight and clarity, Elliott then identifies ten sound principles for change that would avoid these mistakes, produce more livable cities, and make zoning simpler to understand and use. He also proposes five practical steps to get started on the road to zoning reform.
 
While recent discussion of zoning has focused on how cities should look, A Better Way to Zone does not follow that trend. Although New Urbanist tools, form-based zoning, and the SmartCode are making headlines both within and outside the planning profession, Elliott believes that each has limitations as a general approach to big city zoning. While all three trends include innovations that the profession badly needs, they are sometimes misapplied to situations where they do not work well. In contrast, A Better Way to Zone provides a vision of the future of zoning that is not tied to a particular picture of how cities should look, but is instead based on how cities should operate.
[more]

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Transported to Botany Bay
Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict
Dorice Williams Elliott
Ohio University Press, 2019

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined.

Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

[more]

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Dyan Elliott
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
What if Satan were to disguise himself as an angel of light? What if he even appeared as Christ? Schoolmen in late medieval Paris were obsessed with that question--and A Hole in the Heavens explores the alarming consequences of this obsession. It soon becomes impossible to tell the difference between saints and impostors, conversion and demonic possession, heresy and the true faith. Even the wisest and holiest may be deceived. A struggling student, a pair of prostitutes, and a beautiful priest's daughter are among those caught up in the chaos. Based on meticulous research, Dyan Elliott's first novel is an absorbing and ultimately chilling exercise in the discernment of spirits.
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Ends in Sight
Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson
Gregory Elliott
Pluto Press, 2008
Following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, scholars across the political spectrum tackled the world-historical significance of the end of communism. This book addresses the balance-sheets of modern political history offered by three writers---Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson---comparing them with the future projected by Marx in The Communist Manifesto.



Gregory Elliott argues that Marx is central to all three accounts and that, along with the Manifesto, they form a quartet of analyses of the results and prospects of capitalism and socialism, which are of enduring significance for the Left.



Senses of an Ending provides a readable survey of key historical and political thinkers that will appeal to anyone interested in modern political thought.

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Hobsbawm
History and Politics
Gregory Elliott
Pluto Press, 2010

Historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age. His panoramic studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stretching from the French Revolution to the fall of Soviet communism, have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. At the same time, his writings on labour movements and socialist politics have occupied a central place in left-wing debates. Despite this, no extended study of Hobsbawm's work has yet been attempted Gregory Elliott fills this gap in exemplary fashion.

Elliott analyses both the scholarly record of Hobsbawm and the intellectual and political journey that his life represents. In doing so, he seeks to situate Hobsbawm's thought within the context of a generalised crisis of confidence on the Left after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rich in content and written in Elliott's authoritative and highly readable style, this book is a must for anyone with an interest in Hobsbawm and the crisis of the Left.

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Philadelphia
Finding the Hidden City
Joseph E. B. Elliott
Temple University Press, 2017

Philadelphia possesses an exceptionally large number of places that have almost disappeared—from workshops and factories to sporting clubs and societies, synagogues, churches, theaters, and railroad lines. In Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, urban observers Nathaniel Popkin and Peter Woodall uncover the contemporary essence of one of America’s oldest cities. Working with accomplished architectural photographer Joseph Elliott, they explore secret places in familiar locations, such as the Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street, the Divine Lorraine Hotel, Reading Railroad, Disston Saw Works in Tacony, and mysterious parts of City Hall.

Much of the real Philadelphia is concealed behind facades. Philadelphia artfully reveals its urban secrets. Rather than a nostalgic elegy to loss and urban decline, Philadelphia exposes the city’s vivid layers and living ruins. The authors connect Philadelphia’s idiosyncratic history, culture, and people to develop an alternative theory of American urbanism, and place the city in American urban history. The journey here is as much visual as it is literary; Joseph Elliott’s sumptuous photographs reveal the city's elemental beauty.

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Beyond Ridiculous
Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York
Kenneth Elliott
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Beyond Ridiculous tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo, a downtown band of actors formed in 1984 by director Kenneth Elliott and playwright and drag legend Charles Busch. They launched Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Limbo Lounge, a raffish club in the fringes of the East Village, but it would later become the longest-running non-musical in off-Broadway history. From 1984 to 1991, Busch starred in eight Limbo productions, always in outrageously fabulous drag.

In Beyond Ridiculous, Elliott narrates in first-person the company’s Cinderella tale of fun, heartbreak, and dishy drama. At the center of the book is a young Charles Busch, an unforgettable personality fighting to be seen, be heard, and express his unique style as a writer-performer in plays such as Psycho Beach Party and The Lady in Question. The tragedy of AIDS among treasured friends in the company, the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ theatre during the reign of President Ronald Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist make the book a bittersweet and joyous ride.
[more]

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Democracy for Busy People
Kevin J. Elliott
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Advances an alternative approach to democratic reform that focuses on building institutions that empower people who have little time for politics.
 
How do we make democracy more equal? Although in theory, all citizens in a democracy have the right to participate in politics, time-consuming forms of participation often advantage some groups over others. Where some citizens may have time to wait in long lines to vote, to volunteer for a campaign, to attend community board meetings, or to stay up to date on national, state, and local news, other citizens struggle to do the same. Since not all people have the time or inclination to devote substantial energy to politics, certain forms of participation exacerbate existing inequalities.
 
Democracy for Busy People takes up the very real challenge of how to build a democracy that empowers people with limited time for politics. While many plans for democratic renewal emphasize demanding forms of political participation and daunting ideals of democratic citizenship, political theorist Kevin J. Elliott proposes a fundamentally different approach. He focuses instead on making democratic citizenship undemanding so that even busy people can be politically included. This approach emphasizes the core institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties, against deliberative reforms and sortition. Timely and action-focused, Democracy for Busy People is necessary reading.
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Culture Concept
Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism
Michael A. Elliott
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Examines the prehistory of the American struggle to address cultural difference. "Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings-folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies-that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference-American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works-which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference-is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come. Michael A. Elliott is assistant professor of English at Emory University.
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Custerology
The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer
Michael A. Elliott
University of Chicago Press, 2007
On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its 400 men, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed.

It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way.  Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present.
 
“[Elliott] is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians . . . to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 . . . to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
“By ‘Custerology,’ Elliott means the historical interpretation and commemoration of Custer and the Indian Wars in which he fought not only by those who honor Custer but by those who celebrate the Native American resistance that defeated him. The purpose of this book is to show how Custer and the Little Bighorn can be and have been commemorated for such contradictory purposes.”—Library Journal
 
“Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott's book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”—Larry McMurtry
[more]

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The British Arboretum
Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Paul A. Elliott
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
This study explores the science and culture of nineteenth-century British arboretums, or tree collections. The development of arboretums was fostered by a variety of factors, each of which is explored in detail: global trade and exploration, the popularity of collecting, the significance to the British economy and society, developments in Enlightenment science, changes in landscape gardening aesthetics and agricultural and horticultural improvement.

Arboretums were idealized as microcosms of nature, miniature encapsulations of the globe and as living museums. This book critically examines different kinds of arboretum in order to understand the changing practical, scientific, aesthetic and pedagogical principles that underpinned their design, display and the way in which they were viewed. It is the first study of its kind and fills a gap in the literature on Victorian science and culture.
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Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom
Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely
Russell R. Elliott
University of Nevada Press, 1966
Twenty years after the decline of the magnificent Comstock Lode, Nevada’s prosperity and population had diminished to such a degree that some popular articles questioned whether to deprive Nevada of her statehood. Then in the spring of 1900, a miner discovered silver in south-central Nevada. This casual find precipitated a spectacular latter-day mining boom that, among other things, helped to restore prosperity.
With its wealth of little-known historical data, Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom chronicles the classic pattern of gold and silver rushes and emphasizes the differences between Nevada's two boom periods, pointing to the stability of the second bonanza. The author also details the entrance of radical labor into the new camps and the violent strikes that followed at Goldfield, McGill, and Tonopah. This labor strife had a significant impact on Nevada mining for many years.  
The first in-depth study of Nevada’s latter-day boom period, this informative book gives balance to the history of mining in Nevada. Foreword by Jerome Edwards.
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John C. Brown of Tennessee
Rebel, Redeemer, and Railroader
Sam D. Elliott
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

John Calvin Brown was a Confederate general, Tennessee politician, railroad executive, and lawyer, and yet he is little known to today’s Americans. He left behind few personal papers and died relatively young despite his remarkably productive life, leaving his voice silent while historical debate raged over events in which he was a significant player.

John C. Brown of Tennessee is the first full-scale biography of this understudied figure. Author Sam Davis Elliott’s comprehensive research reveals how Brown rose to the rank of general in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. A five-time wounded veteran of nearly every one of the army’s battles from Fort Donelson to Franklin, Brown played a unique utility role as a division commander in the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. There is a substantial likelihood he was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan after the war, but more well-established is his role as leader in the anti-Brownlow movement that sought to end Radical Reconstruction in Tennessee. He was selected president of the 1870 constitutional convention, which helped lead to his election as governor later that year. After his tumultuous time as governor seeking to resolve economic conflicts that began before the Civil War, he became a railroad executive and industrialist. He had a significant role in the struggle between rival financiers for control of the southern route to the Pacific, and was in the front lines of management on behalf of the Texas and Pacific Railroad during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. His wide-ranging and successful career reflects not only the attributes of Brown’s character, but provides insight into many key events of nineteenth-century America.

John C. Brown of Tennessee fills not only a biographical but a historiographical gap in the literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Tennessee and the post-Confederate South.

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John C. Brown of Tennessee
Rebel, Redeemer, and Railroader
Sam D. Elliott
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

John Calvin Brown was a Confederate general, Tennessee politician, railroad executive, and lawyer, and yet he is little known to today’s Americans. He left behind few personal papers and died relatively young despite his remarkably productive life, leaving his voice silent while historical debate raged over events in which he was a significant player.

John C. Brown of Tennessee is the first full-scale biography of this understudied figure. Author Sam Davis Elliott’s comprehensive research reveals how Brown rose to the rank of general in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. A five-time wounded veteran of nearly every one of the army’s battles from Fort Donelson to Franklin, Brown played a unique utility role as a division commander in the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. There is a substantial likelihood he was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan after the war, but more well-established is his role as leader in the anti-Brownlow movement that sought to end Radical Reconstruction in Tennessee. He was selected president of the 1870 constitutional convention, which helped lead to his election as governor later that year. After his tumultuous time as governor seeking to resolve economic conflicts that began before the Civil War, he became a railroad executive and industrialist. He had a significant role in the struggle between rival financiers for control of the southern route to the Pacific, and was in the front lines of management on behalf of the Texas and Pacific Railroad during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. His wide-ranging and successful career reflects not only the attributes of Brown’s character, but provides insight into many key events of nineteenth-century America.

John C. Brown of Tennessee fills not only a biographical but a historiographical gap in the literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Tennessee and the post-Confederate South.

[more]

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Ideology, Culture, and Translation
Scott S. Elliott
SBL Press, 2012
Translation is a fundamental aspect of biblical scholarship and an ever-present reality in a global context. Scholars interested in more than linguistically oriented translation problems of a traditional nature often struggle to find an interdisciplinary venue in which to share their work. These essays, by means of critical engagement with the translation, translation practices, and translation history of texts relevant to the study of Bible and ancient and modern Christianity, explore theoretical dimensions and contemporary implications of translations and translation practice. The contributors are George Aichele, Roland Boer, Virginia Burrus, Alan Cadwallader, K. Jason Coker, John Eipper, Scott S. Elliott, Raj Nadella, Flemming A. J. Nielsen, Christina Petterson, Naomi Seidman, Jaqueline du Toit, Esteban Voth, and Matt Waggoner.
[more]

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Restoring Tropical Forests
A Practical Guide
Stephen Elliott
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2013
Tropical and subtropical forests cover a relatively small portion of the earth’s surface, but they’re home to over half of the animal and plant species on earth. Since these forests are rapidly disappearing, there is no room for error in restoration activities and decisions. Restoring Tropical Forests is a practical guide based on proven techniques that will enable readers to make the right decisions toward saving these valuable lands.

The book is based on the innovative techniques developed at Chiang Mai University’s Forest Restoration Research Unit, Thailand. It takes a threepart approach, first looking at effective general concepts of tropical forest dynamics and regeneration, then at specific proven restoration techniques, and finally at how to use research methods to refine and adapt the techniques to local ecological and socioeconomic conditions. In addition, illustrations and case studies of successful applications help to make this a global, user-friendly guide. Whether for developing new techniques or improving old ones, Restoring Tropical Forests is a valuable tool for effective, ecologically sound change.
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Restoring Tropical Forests
A Practical Guide (French Edition)
Stephen Elliott
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2014
Tropical and subtropical forests cover a relatively small portion of the earth’s surface, but they’re home to over half of the animal and plant species on earth. Since these forests are rapidly disappearing, there is no room for error in restoration activities and decisions. Restoring Tropical Forests is a practical guide based on proven techniques that will enable readers to make the right decisions toward saving these valuable lands. 

The book is based on the innovative techniques developed at Chiang Mai University’s Forest Restoration Research Unit, Thailand. It takes a threepart approach, first looking at effective general concepts of tropical forest dynamics and regeneration, then at specific proven restoration techniques, and finally at how to use research methods to refine and adapt the techniques to local ecological and socioeconomic conditions. In addition, illustrations and case studies of successful applications help to make this a global, user-friendly guide. Whether for developing new techniques or improving old ones, Restoring Tropical Forests is a valuable tool for effective, ecologically sound change.
[more]

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Restoring Tropical Forests
A Practical Guide (Spanish Edition)
Stephen Elliott
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2014
Tropical and subtropical forests cover a relatively small portion of the earth’s surface, but they’re home to over half of the animal and plant species on earth. Since these forests are rapidly disappearing, there is no room for error in restoration activities and decisions. Restoring Tropical Forests is a practical guide based on proven techniques that will enable readers to make the right decisions toward saving these valuable lands. 

The book is based on the innovative techniques developed at Chiang Mai University’s Forest Restoration Research Unit, Thailand. It takes a threepart approach, first looking at effective general concepts of tropical forest dynamics and regeneration, then at specific proven restoration techniques, and finally at how to use research methods to refine and adapt the techniques to local ecological and socioeconomic conditions. In addition, illustrations and case studies of successful applications help to make this a global, user-friendly guide. Whether for developing new techniques or improving old ones, Restoring Tropical Forests is a valuable tool for effective, ecologically sound change. 
[more]

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Export Controls in Transition
Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects
Steven Elliott
Duke University Press, 1992
Like many cold war artifacts, the West’s export control policies and institutions are being reevaluated after the tumult in the communist world at the end of the 1980s. Policymakers and scholars are being forced to reexamine the premises of export control policy and the very concept of export controls as a tool of national security and foreign policy. This volume brings together expert scholars and government officials who provide contrasting perspectives and address the prospects for export controls.
The contributors discuss the role and function of export control policies from a variety of perspectives—security, commerce, diplomacy, the European region, and that of the newly industrialized countries. Among the topics covered are the problems the United States and the Western export regime will face in the 1990s in light of changing international political alliances and dependencies, in defining strategic exports, in enforcing export controls, and the role of the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls.

Contributors. Sumner Benson, Beverly Crawford, Richard t. Cupitt, Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, Paul Freedenberg, Martin J. Hillenbrand, Hanns-Dieter Jacobsen, Bruce W. Jentleson, Kevin J. Lasher, William J. Long, Janne Haaland Matlary, Jere W. Morehead, Henry R. Nau, Han S. Park, Kevin F. F. Quigley, Alen B. Sherr, Christine Westbrook

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The Rise of Guardian Democracy
The Supreme Court's Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845-1969
Ward E. Y. Elliott
Harvard University Press, 1974

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The Cry of the Senses
Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics
Ren Ellis Neyra
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations—across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral—while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.
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Letras y Limpias
Decolonial Medicine and Holistic Healing in Mexican American Literature
Amanda V. Ellis
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the figure of the curandera within Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by leading Mexican American authors, including Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Ellis explores the curandera in relationship to decoloniality, bioethics, and the topic of healing while recognizing the limitations and spiritual shortcomings of Western medicine. Ellis argues that our contemporary western health-care system does not know how to fully grapple with illnesses that patients face. Ellis reads the curandera’s perennial representation as an ongoing example of decolonial love useful for deconstructing narrow definitions of health and personhood, and for grappling with the effects of neoliberalism and colonialism on the health-care industry.

Letras y Limpias draws from Chicana feminist theory to assert the importance of the mindbodyspirit connection. Ellis conveys theoretical insights about the continual reimagining of the figure of the curandera as a watermark across Mexican American literary texts. This literary figure points to the oppressive forces that create susto and reminds us that healing work requires specific attention to colonialism, its legacy, and an intentional choice to carry forward the traditional practices rooted in curanderismo passed on from prior generations. By turning toward the figure of the curandera, readers are better poised to challenge prevailing ideas about health, and imagine ways to confront the ongoing problems that coloniality creates. Letras y Limpias shows how the figure of the curandera offers us ways to heal that have nothing to do with copays or medical professionals refusing care, and everything to do with honoring the beauty and complexity of any, every, and all humans.

 
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The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin
Anita J. Ellis
Ohio University Press, 2003

In 1877 the thirty-year-old artist Mary Louise McLaughlin wrote China Painting, the first manual on the subject in the United States written by a woman for women. Extremely successful, it is now accepted as the book that launched the china painting movement in America.

When in 1898 McLaughlin decided to produce porcelain, the most difficult of ceramics, she showed the determination and exactitude that were her trademarks. Already renowned as a ceramicist, she became the first to produce studio porcelain in America and the first to discover the technique for decorating under the glaze. Her work was welcomed with enthusiasm in New York and Paris.

Despite the enormous influence of Mary Louise McLaughlin on the history of American ceramics, Anita Ellis’s The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is the first definitive study dedicated to her accomplishments.

Anita Ellis depicts the many challenges McLaughlin encountered in pursuit of her ultimately successful career. Not the least of these was her rivalry with the formidable Maria Longworth Nichols, fellow Cincinnatian and founder of the Rookwood Pottery Company. Another was that of being a woman in the arts: her primary goal had been to paint portraits on canvas, but Victorian society did not afford opportunities in what was considered a male sphere.

Replete with historic photos and color illustrations of many of McLaughlin’s works, The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is a tribute to a woman artist who rose to one of the most esteemed positions in her field.

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Carolyn Ellis
Temple University Press

When Carolyn Ellis, a graduate student, and Gene Weinstein, her Professor, fell in love, he was experiencing the first stages of emphysema. As he became increasingly disabled and immobile, these two intensely connected partners fought to maintain their love and to live a meaningful life. They learned to negotiate their daily lives in a way that enabled each of them to feel sufficiently autonomous—him not always like a patient and her not always like a caretaker. Writing as a sociologist, Ellis protrays their life together as a way to understand the complexities of romance, of living with a progressive illness, and, in the final negotiation and reversal of positions, of coping with the loss of a loved one.

This rare memoir full of often raw details and emotions becomes an intimate conversation about the intricacies of feeling and relating in a relationship. What Ellis calls experimental ethnography is a finely crafted, forthright, and daring story framed by the author's reflections on writing about and analyzing one's own life. Casting off the safe distance of most social science inquiry, she surrenders the private shroud of a complex relationship to bring sociology closer to literature.

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Final Negotiations
A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness
Carolyn Ellis
Temple University Press, 2018
In this revised and expanded edition of Final Negotiations—a personal account of caring for her partner, Gene Weinstein, and then coping with losing him to chronic emphysema— Ellis reflects back on her experiences as a caregiver, focusing on identity, vulnerability, emotions, and the aging process of an engaged academic. Now, decades later, she reconsiders who she was then, and how she has continued to be affected both by these events and by writing about them. She contemplates how she might act, think, and feel if she were going through the caregiving process again, now.

Taking an autoethnographic perspective, Ellis focuses on her feeling and thinking self in relationships, narrating particular lived experiences that offer a gateway into understanding interpersonal and cultural life. In her new epilogue, “From New Endings to New Beginnings,” Ellis describes her changed identity and how Final Negotiations informs her life and her understanding of how she and her current partner grow older together. She hopes her book provides companionship and comfort to readers who also will suffer loss in their lives.
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Putting Inequality in Context
Class, Public Opinion, and Representation in the United States
Christopher Ellis
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Rising income inequality is highlighted as one of the largest challenges facing the United States, affecting civic participation and political representation. Although the wealthy often can and do exert more political influence, this is not always the case. To fix political inequality, it is important to understand exactly how class divisions manifest themselves in political outcomes, and what factors serve to enhance, or depress, inequalities in political voice.

Christopher Ellis argues citizens’—and legislators’—views of class politics are driven by lived experience in particular communities. While some experience is formally political, on an informal basis citizens learn a great deal about their position in the broader socioeconomic spectrum and the social norms governing how class intersects with day-to-day life. These factors are important for policymakers, since most legislators do not represent “the public” at large, but specific constituencies.

Focusing on U.S. congressional districts as the contextual unit of interest, Ellis argues individuals’ political behavior cannot be separated from their environment, and shows how income’s role in political processes is affected by the contexts in which citizens and legislators interact. Political inequality exists in the aggregate, but it does not exist everywhere. It is, rather, a function of specific arrangements that depress the political influence of the poor. Identifying and understanding these factors is a crucial step in thinking about what reforms might be especially helpful in enhancing equality of political voice.


 
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Byron
David Ellis
Reaktion Books, 2023
A fresh, concise account of the Romantic poet Lord Byron’s flamboyant life and work.
 
In this book, David Ellis traces Lord Byron’s life from rented lodgings in Aberdeen and the crumbling splendors of Newstead Abbey to his final grand tour of Asia. Describing his exile from England as well as his subsequent travels in Italy and Greece, Ellis shows just how completely Byron’s experiences colored both his serious and comic writings, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Corsair. This is a fresh, concise, and clear-eyed account of the flamboyant poet’s life and work.
 
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Every Day A Holiday
A storyteller's memoir
Elizabeth Ellis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2014
“Elizabeth Ellis’s words jump off the page and into the secret part of your heart where you keep treasured memories and sacred feelings. She sings to you of her life and the lives of others with whom she intersects. Compassionate and thought provoking, an Appalachian/Texan with a whole-world point of view with a little rabble rousing thrown in, Elizabeth Ellis is a true master of the written and spoken word.”
 
                --Robin Bady, Storyteller, Arts Educator, Brooklyn, New York
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From Plot to Narrative
Elizabeth Ellis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012

Each of the twelve chapters represents a rung on the ladder of dynamic narrative development.  Beginning with the most basic plot outline, Ellis leads readers through exercises and discussions of elements that build a story into a memorable reading or listening experience.  The chapters include many topics of interest to all writers, regardless of medium, but some will speak most potently to those writing either fiction or personal narrative. Chapters include Characterization, Point of View, Emotion, Context, Imagery, and Connection [with the reader].  Herself a leading professional storyteller, Ellis also includes a chapter especially for those who plan to craft stories for oral performance.

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Prepare to Scare
How to tell scary stories
Elizabeth Ellis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2021
Prepare to Scareis a handbook edited by Circle of Excellence storyteller, Elizabeth Ellis, with contributions by the A-list of scary story writers and tellers on the American Storytelling Festival Circuit. It is a handbook for adults who tell stories to children or other adults in a variety of settings: storytelling events, schools, aftercare programs, camps, and homes.
 
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Coaching Copyright
Erin L. Ellis
American Library Association, 2019

From researching to remixing, library users need your guidance on a wide range of copyright topics. The way to move beyond “yes, you can” or “no, you can’t” is to become a copyright coach. In this collection librarian and attorney Smith teams up with information literacy expert Ellis to offer a framework for coaching copyright, empowering users to take a practical approach to specific situations. Complete with in-depth case studies, this collection provides valuable information rooted in pragmatic techniques, including

  • in-depth discussion of the five questions that will help you clarify any copyright situation;
  • storytelling techniques to enliven copyright presentations, plus ways to use music or YouTube to hook students into copyright topics;
  • three coaching scenarios that tie into ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and bring real-world applications to your library instruction;
  • how-to guidance on leading mock negotiations over real journal publishing agreements;
  • a 90-minute lesson plan on author rights for writers in a student journal;
  • tips for teaching instructional designers how to apply copyright and fair use principles to course management systems; and
  • an LIS copyright course assessment model.

This resource will help you become a copyright coach by showing you how to discern the most important issues in a situation, determine which questions you need to ask, and give a response that is targeted to the specific need.

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Brit Wits
A History of British Rock Humor
Iain Ellis
Intellect Books, 2012

The Sex Pistols. David Bowie. Pink Floyd. Rebel rockers and provokers of the public, vivid in our memories as much for their subversion of the mainstream as for their signature sounds. Yet what very few people realize is that a substantive part of the weaponry used by these rockers and their contemporaries was humor: outrageous onstage antics, coded cultural references, and clever lyrical constructs were all critical to expressions of youth rebellion that could still slip past the powers that be.

Focusing on key subversive rock humorists, Brit Wits shows how and why humor has been such a powerful catalyst and expressive force in these artists’ work. Distinguishing rock humorists from rockers who are merely sometimes humorous, Iain Ellis trains his attention on those whose music and persona exude defiance—beginning with the Beatles, the Kinks, and Pink Floyd; and continuing through the Smiths, the Slits, and even the Spice Girls—to investigate the nature of rock humor and the ways in which these groups have used it to attack prevailing social structures. Politics and issues of gender, class, and race are all laid open to ridicule, as is the music industry itself—epitomized by the Sex Pistols’s scathing “EMI.” And although lyrics are foregrounded, Ellis demonstrates that a guitar solo, dissident dance move, or antisocial hairstyle may in context be every bit as subversive and humorous as a song.
At once an action-packed look at some of the most notorious rebels of British rock history and a celebration of an underexplored area of humor, Brit Wits compiles essays and critical profiles that look at one of the most effective—and entertaining—means of anti-establishment expression for half a century.
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Jack C Ellis
Southern Illinois University Press

More than any other person, Jack C. Ellis notes, John Grierson, a Scot, was responsible for the documentary film as it has developed in English-speaking countries.

While in the United States in the 1920s, Grierson first applied the term documentary to Robert Flaherty's Moana. In 1927, Grierson returned to Britain, where he was hired to promote the marketing of products of the British Empire. The first practical application of Grierson’s theory of documentary film was Drifters, a 1929 short feature about herring fishing in the North Sea. That success led Grierson to establish the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (later the General Post Office Film Unit).

In 1939, Grierson moved to Canada, leaving behind a legacy of some sixty British filmmakers who spread his ideas and techniques to other countries. In Canada, he progressed beyond national concerns to global problems. The National Film Board of Canada stands as the largest and most impressive monument to Grierson's concepts and actions in regard to the use of film by governments in communicating with citizens.

            

Ellis examines Grierson's accomplishments in detail, probing the complexities of Grierson's motivations and personality. His subject, a true titan in the world of documentary film, was the first filmmaker to use public and private institutional sponsorship—not the box office—to pay for his films. He also employed nontraditional distribution techniques, going outside the movie theaters to reach audiences in schools and factories, union halls, and church basements. Essentially, Grierson created documentary film and established an audience for it.

            

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Silent Witnesses
Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States
Jacqueline Ellis
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Through detailed analyses of documentary photography and radical literature, Silent Witnesses explores how working-class identity has been repressed and manipulated to fit the expectations of liberal politicians, radical authors, Marxist historians, feminist academics, and contemporary cultural theorists.

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The Poem, the Garden, and the World
Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan England
Jim Ellis
Northwestern University Press, 2023

How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature
 
How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.

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John M. Ellis
University of Chicago Press

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American Catholicism
John Tracy Ellis
University of Chicago Press, 1969
The Catholic Church remains one of the oldest institutions of Western civilization. It continues to withstand attack from without and defection from within. In his revision of American Catholicism, Monsignor Ellis has added a new chapter on the history of the Church since 1956. Here he deals with developments in Catholic education, with the changing relations of the Church to its own members and to society in general, and especially with arguments for and against the ecumenical movement brought about by Vatican Council II.

The author gives an updated historical account of the part played by Catholics in both the American Revolution and the Civil War, and of the difficulties within the Church that came with the clash of national interests among Irish, French, and Germans in the nineteenth century. He regards immigration as the key to the increasingly important role of American Catholicism in the nation after 1820. For contemporary America, the author counts among the signs of the mature Church an increase in Church membership, the presence of nine Americans in the College of Cardinals in May, 1967, and the expansion of American effort in Catholic missions throughout the world.
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CONTESTED CASTLE
GOTHIC NOVELS AND THE SUBVERSION OF DOME
Kate Ellis
University of Illinois Press, 1989
The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.
 
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Rousseau’s Socratic Aemilian Myths
A Literary Collation of “Emile” and the “Social Contract”
MADELINE B. ELLIS
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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First Light
Encountering Edward Said and the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic in the New Diaspora
Marc H. Ellis
Bridwell Press, 2023

Encountering Edward Said on Yom Kippur: Reflections on the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is a fascinating and controversial collection of journals and meditations on the plight and possibility of the prophetic witness in the modern world.  In these pages, the Jewish theologian, Marc H. Ellis, explores the prophetic through his encounters with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, as a way of thinking through the stakes of contemporary Jewish history. His unexpected encounter with Said on Yom Kippur provides a fascinating window to explore the dangers and possibilities of present-day Jewish life and its future. Ellis applies Said’s idea of late-style to the Jewish prophetic – what Ellis names the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic – to mean the reappearance and coming home of the Jewish prophetic as it undergoes its own deconstruction and re-emergence. At turns deeply personal and creatively theoretical, Ellis doesn’t shy away from the forbidden terrains of self questioning and progressive posturing, even with people and movements he identifies with. The result is a sensitive and provocative exploration filled with questions and responses rather than definitive answers.


 
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Empire of Tea
The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World
Markman Ellis
Reaktion Books, 2015
Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity.

This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.
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North Carolina English, 1861-1865
A Guide and Glossary
Michael E. Ellis
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
In North Carolina English, 1861–1865, Michael E. Ellis offers an Oxford English Dictionary–like take on regional language based on more than two thousand letters and diaries composed by North Carolinians during the Civil War. These documents are part of a larger project, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL), aimed at locating, photographing, and transcribing letters written during the period from all parts of the country. With little formal education, the correspondents were men and women who wrote “by ear,” often reproducing their spoken language through unconventional spellings and grammatical forms, as well as regional or archaic words and usages.
    The core of the book is an alphabetically arranged glossary of words and expressions characteristic of mid–nineteenth century North Carolina, each containing excerpts from the letters themselves to illustrate meaning and usage. While the majority of the writers were Confederate soldiers and their family members, the collection also includes letters from slaves, former slaves, and African Americans from North Carolina serving in the Union Army. The soldiers’ letters rarely contain details about battles, except to list the names of relatives or neighbors among the killed or wounded. After a battle, a soldier might simply write, “the Like of ded men an horses I never saw before” or “we hav lost a heep of men and kild a heep of yankeys.” As Joel Howard of Lincoln County wrote home in June 1863, “I have bin in the ware and Saw the ware and heard tell of the ware till I have got tired of it. if I Could get clear of this ware I neve[r] want to Read of A nother.”
    Food is perhaps the most common topic, followed by illness. Numerous terms relate to farming, clothing, religion, and the effects of the war itself, as well as entries for expressions that have long since disappeared from American English: in the gants, on the goose, and up the spout.
    In addition to the glossary, Ellis offers an extensive overview of North Carolina English of the period, delves into the social background of the letter writers, and provides invaluable guidance to the ways in which Civil War letters should be read. A unique window into a largely neglected corner of our extraordinarily rich and regionally distinct language, this volume will prove an indispensable reference for scholars and students seeking to reconstruct the world of the common Civil War soldier.
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Territories of the Soul
Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora
Nadia Ellis
Duke University Press, 2015
Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere. Ellis locates these phenomena in the works of C.L.R. James, the testy encounter between George Lamming and James Baldwin at the 1956 Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris, the elusiveness of the queer diasporic subject in Andrew Salkey's novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, and the trope of spirit possession in Nathaniel Mackey's writing and Burning Spear's reggae. Ellis' use of queer and affect theory shows how geographies claim diasporic subjects in ways that nationalist or masculinist tropes can never fully capture. Diaspora, Ellis concludes, is best understood as a mode of feeling and belonging, one fundamentally shaped by the experience of loss.
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Just Results
Ethical Foundations for Policy Analysis
Ralph D. Ellis
Georgetown University Press, 1998

In Just Results, Ralph E. Ellis provides an authoritative solution to one of the major problems in the field of public policy. Until now, analysts and planners have had no practical or accurate means of incorporating qualitative social concerns into the traditional quantitative formulas used in policymaking. By introducing a justice factor—a quantitative measure for social values—Ellis opens the door for more balanced policy decisions.

Using concrete, real-world examples, Ellis shows how policy analysts can better account for the use value—or practical measurable utility—of universally agreed-upon social benefits such as life, health, safety, and environmental preservation when making cost-benefit analyses. In this way, policymakers, and by extension, society as a whole, can avoid making unjust tradeoffs between important social values and comparatively frivolous economic benefits.

Drawing on philosophical works on justice from Kant through John Rawls, this book is informed by a theoretical defense of distributive justice that emphasizes diminishing marginal utility, thus favoring the poor. Just Results is a stimulating and highly applicable book that will be of great interest to philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts and planners.

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Stories and Stone
Writing the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland
Reuben Ellis
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep . . . For many, such historic places evoke images of stone ruins, cliff dwellings, pot shards, and petroglyphs. For others, they recall ancestry. Remnants of the American Southwest's ancestral Puebloan peoples (sometimes known as Anasazi) have mystified and tantalized explorers, settlers, archaeologists, artists, and other visitors for centuries. And for a select group of writers, these ancient inhabitants have been a profound source of inspiration.

Collected here are more than fifty selections from a striking body of literature about the prehistoric Southwest: essays, stories, travelers' reports, and poems spanning more than four centuries of visitation. They include timeless writings such as John Wesley Powell's The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries and Frank Hamilton Cushing's "Life at Zuni," plus contemporary classics ranging from Colin Fletcher's The Man Who Walked Through Time to Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian to Edward Abbey's "The Great American Desert." Reuben Ellis's introduction brings contemporary insight and continuity to the collection, and a section on "reading in place" invites readers to experience these great works amidst the landscapes that inspired them. For anyone who loves to roam ancient lands steeped in mystery, Stories and Stone is an incomparable companion that will enhance their enjoyment.
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Richard Ellis
University of Massachusetts Press
Americans today expect their president to speak directly to them on the issues of the day—to address their concerns, to ask for their support, even to feel their pain. Yet, as the essays in this volume make clear, this was not always the case. During the early years of the republic, such behavior would have been deemed beneath the president's office, undignified at best, demagogic at worst. How, then, did the practice of "speaking to the people" evolve from the icy reserve of George Washington to the effusive empathy of Bill Clinton? This book explores how the "rhetorical presidency" became a central feature of American politics. Beginning with a fresh look at the framing of the Constitution, the essays examine the role of rhetoric in a variety of nineteenth-century presidencies, as well as in the crucial turn-of-the-century presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Viewed against this historical backdrop, the "modern" presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors appear less a break with the past than a culmination of developments in popular leadership and rhetorical practice that began more than a century before.
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The Empty Ocean
Richard Ellis
Island Press, 2003

In The Empty Ocean, acclaimed author and artist Richard Ellis tells the story of our continued plunder of life in the sea and weighs the chances for its recovery. Through fascinating portraits of a wide array of creatures, he introduces us to the many forms of sea life that humans have fished, hunted, and collected over the centuries, from charismatic whales and dolphins to the lowly menhaden, from sea turtles to cod, tuna, and coral.

Rich in history, anecdote, and surprising fact, Richard Ellis’s descriptions bring to life the natural history of the various species, the threats they face, and the losses they have suffered. Killing has occurred on a truly stunning scale, with extinction all too often the result, leaving a once-teeming ocean greatly depleted. But the author also finds instances of hope and resilience, of species that have begun to make remarkable comebacks when given the opportunity.

Written with passion and grace, and illustrated with Richard Ellis’s own drawings, The Empty Ocean brings to a wide audience a compelling view of the damage we have caused to life in the sea and what we can do about it. "

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Swordfish
A Biography of the Ocean Gladiator
Richard Ellis
University of Chicago Press, 2013
A perfect fish in the evolutionary sense, the broadbill swordfish derives its name from its distinctive bill—much longer and wider than the bill of any other billfish—which is flattened into the sword we all recognize. And though the majesty and allure of this warrior fish has commanded much attention—from adventurous sportfishers eager to land one to ravenous diners eager to taste one—no one has yet been bold enough to truly take on the swordfish as a biographer. Who better to do so than Richard Ellis, a master of marine natural history? Swordfish: A Biography of the Ocean Gladiator is his masterly ode to this mighty fighter.

The swordfish, whose scientific name means “gladiator,” can take on anyone and anything, including ships, boats, sharks, submarines, divers, and whales, and in this book Ellis regales us with tales of its vitality and strength. Ellis makes it easy to understand why it has inspired so many to take up the challenge of epic sportfishing battles as well as the longline fishing expeditions recounted by writers such as Linda Greenlaw and Sebastian Junger. Ellis shows us how the bill is used for defense—contrary to popular opinion it is not used to spear prey, but to slash and debilitate, like a skillful saber fencer. Swordfish, he explains, hunt at the surface as well as thousands of feet down in the depths, and like tuna and some sharks, have an unusual circulatory system that gives them a significant advantage over their prey, no matter the depth in which they hunt. Their adaptability enables them to swim in waters the world over—tropical, temperate, and sometimes cold—and the largest ever caught on rod and reel was landed in Chile in 1953, weighing in at 1,182 pounds (and this heavyweight fighter, like all the largest swordfish, was a female).

Ellis’s detailed and fascinating, fact-filled biography takes us behind the swordfish’s huge, cornflower-blue eyes and provides a complete history of the fish from prehistoric fossils to its present-day endangerment, as our taste for swordfish has had a drastic effect on their population the world over. Throughout, the book is graced with many of Ellis’s own drawings and paintings, which capture the allure of the fish and bring its splendor and power to life for armchair fishermen and landlocked readers alike.

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Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn
The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine
Richard Ellis
Island Press, 2005

In parts of Korea and China, moon bears, black but for the crescent-shaped patch of white on their chests, are captured in the wild and brought to "bear farms" where they are imprisoned in squeeze cages, and a steel catheter is inserted into their gall bladders. The dripping bile is collected as a cure for ailments ranging from an upset stomach to skin burns. The bear may live as long as fifteen years in this state. Rhinos are being illegally poached for their horns, as are tigers for their bones, thought to improve virility. Booming economies and growing wealth in parts of Asia are increasing demand for these precious medicinals. Already endangered species are being sacrificed for temporary treatments for nausea and erectile dysfunction.

Richard Ellis, one of the world's foremost experts in wildlife extinction, brings his alarm to the pages of Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn, in the hope that through an exposure of this drug trade, something can be done to save the animals most direly threatened. Trade in animal parts for traditional Chinese medicine is a leading cause of species endangerment in Asia, and poaching is increasing at an alarming rate. Most of traditional Chinese medicine relies on herbs and other plants, and is not a cause for concern. Ellis illuminates those aspects of traditional medicine, but as wildlife habitats are shrinking for the hunted large species, the situation is becoming ever more critical.

One hundred years ago, there were probably 100,000 tigers in India, South China, Sumatra, Bali, Java, and the Russian Far East. The South Chinese, Caspian, Balinese, and Javan species are extinct. There are now fewer than 5,000 tigers in all of India, and the numbers are dropping fast. There are five species of rhinoceros--three in Asia and two in Africa--and all have been hunted to near extinction so their horns can be ground into powder, not for aphrodisiacs, as commonly thought, but for ailments ranging from arthritis to depression. In 1930, there were 80,000 black rhinos in Africa. Now there are fewer than 2,500.

Tigers, bears, and rhinos are not the only animals pursued for the sake of alleviating human ills--the list includes musk deer, sharks, saiga antelope, seahorses, porcupines, monkeys, beavers, and sea lions--but the dwindling numbers of those rare species call us to attention. Ellis tells us what has been done successfully, and contemplates what can and must be done to save these animals or, sadly, our children will witness the extinction of tigers, rhinos, and moon bears in their lifetime.

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Beyond Borders
The Selected Essays of Mary Austin
Rueben J Ellis
Southern Illinois University Press

Seventeen essays by Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934), author of the western classic The Land of Little Rain (1903), demonstrate her wide-ranging interests and equally varied writing styles.

Although she was born in Carlinville, Illinois, and graduated from Blackburn College, Mary Austin spent most of her writing career in California, New York, and finally Sante Fe, New Mexico. A well-known, popular, and prolific writer, Austin published thirty-three books and three plays and was closely associated with many important literary figures of her time, including H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jack London, and Willa Cather. Still best known today for her nature writing and southwestern cultural studies, Austin has been increasingly recognized for her work on feminist themes, including the play The Arrow Maker, the nonfiction The Young Woman Citizen, and the novels A Woman of Genius and No. 26 Jayne Street. What has been perhaps an overemphasis on Austin’s nature writing has, since her death, eclipsed the fact that Austin was known during her lifetime as a colorful, eccentric, and controversial person whose direct and outspoken opinions engaged a wide variety of topics.

Beyond Borders demonstrates that variety. In addition to her monographs, Austin also published her short fiction and essays in periodicals. In fact, like many a writer earning a living from her work, Austin wrote prolifically for the magazine market, producing during her career over two hundred individual pieces published in over sixty periodicals. Although a collection of her short fiction appeared in 1987, Austin’s nonfiction periodical work has remained uncollected until now.

In support of Austin’s essays, Reuben J. Ellis provides an introduction that establishes a biographical and historical context for Austin’s work. In addition, each Austin essay is prefaced by brief introductory remarks by the editor. A selected bibliography of Austin’s essays is also included. 

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Season of Rains
Africa in the World
Stephen Ellis
University of Chicago Press, 2012
 Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed states. This engaging, accessible book by one of the world’s foremost researchers on Africa captures the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social foundations that make Africa what it is today.
Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to fail nor destined to succeed. As he assesses the challenges of African sovereignties, Ellis is not under the illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet, he sees great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones alone has helped to overcome previous gaps in infrastructure, African retail markets are becoming integrated, and banking is expanding. Businesses from China and emerging powers from the West are investing more than ever before in the still land-rich region, and globalization is offering possibilities of enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in charting the future of their continent.
This highly readable survey of the continent today offers an indispensable guide to how money, power, and development are shaping Africa’s future.
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