Over the past thirty years, oral history has found increasing favor among social scientists and humanists, with scholars “rediscovering” the oral interview as a valuable method for obtaining information about the daily realities and historical consciousness of people, their histories, and their culture. One primary issue is the question of how the communicative performances of the interviewer and narrator jointly influence the interview. Using methods of conversation/discourse analysis, the author describes the collaborative processes that enable interviewers and narrators to interact successfully in the interview context.
Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong public opinion backlash—a sharply negative and enduring opinion change—against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly questions backlash as an explanation for opposition to LGBT rights. Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights argues that what appears to be public opinion backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite-led mobilization—a strategy used by anti-gay elites, primarily white evangelicals, seeking to prevent the full incorporation of LGBT Americans in the polity in order to achieve political objectives and increase political power. This book defines and tests the theory of Mass Opinion Backlash and develops and tests the theory of Elite-Led Mobilization by employing a series of online and natural experiments, surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Obergefell v. Hodges and United States v. Windsor, and President Obama’s position change on gay marriage. To evaluate these theories, the authors employ extensive survey, voting behavior, and campaign finance data, and examine the history of the LGBT movement and its opposition by religious conservatives, from the Lavender Scare to the campaign against Trans Rights in the defeat of Houston’s 2015 HERO ordinance. Their evidence shows that opposition to LGBT rights is a top-down process incited by anti-gay elites rather than a bottom-up reaction described by public opinion backlash.
This book is a detailed comparative analysis of development politics in four urban regions of Latin America, two in Mexico and two in Colombia. John Walton has based his studies on the assumption that the problems of economic growth are essentially political, that is, are problems of choice, decision-making, and the exercise of power. His fundamental purpose has been to discover how elites of different kinds are more and less successful in the promotion of economic development, which he defines as a process in the organization of a society leading not only to higher levels of efficient output but also to a more equitable distribution of benefits.
At the time, the four cities compared were the second- and third-largest metropolitan areas in each country, Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico, Medellín and Cali in Colombia. This selection allows the author to pair, across countries, cases of early and large-scale industrialization (Monterrey and Medellín) with cases of more recent industrial growth in agricultural-commercial centers (Guadalajara and Cali). Walton presents historical introductions to each of the regions and integrates these with original fieldwork and interviews with more than three hundred members of the political and economic elites.
The findings are extensive, but in general they demonstrate that where political and economic power is more broadly distributed, where elites are more open and accessible, and where organizational life is more active and coordinated, regions tend to develop qualitatively as well as quantitatively, showing increases both in productivity and in such benefits as public services, housing, education, and a more balanced distribution of income. If these characteristics are absent, regions may be industrialized but do not provide a broad sharing of the benefits. Walton places a good deal of emphasis on the role of foreign investments, demonstrating that the more penetrated regions are also the less developed.
Finally, the results of these studies are used to evaluate and advance theories of underdevelopment and particularly of economic dependency.
What equality means in three modern democracies, both to leaders of important groups and to challengers of the status quo, is the subject of this wide-ranging canvass of perceptions and policy. It is based on extensive questionnaire data gathered from leaders in various segments of society in each countrybusiness, labor unions, farm organizations, political parties, the media-as well as from groups that are seeking greater equalityfeminists, black leaders in the United States, leaders of the Burakumin in Japan. The authors describe the extent to which the same meanings of equality exist, both within and across nations, and locate the areas of consensus and conflict over equality. No other book has compared data of this sort for these purposes.
The authors address several major substantive and theoretical issues: the role of values in relation to egalitarian outcomes; the comparison of values and perceptions about equality in economics (income equality) and politics (equality of influence); and the difference among the nations in the ways political institutions affect the incorporation of new demands for equality into the policymaking process. They pay particular attention to how policy is set on issues of gender equality.
This book will be controversial, for some see no room in the understanding of political economy for the analysis of values. It will be consulted by a general audience interested in politics and culture as well as by social scientists. Elites and the Idea of Equality is an informative sequel to Equality in America by Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren (Harvard University Press), which considers similar topics in a national context.
Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa examines the ways that accountability offers an effective interpretive lens to the social, cultural, and institutional struggles of both the elites and ordinary citizens in Africa. Each chapter investigates questions of power, its public deliberation, and its negotiation in Africa by studying elites through the framework of accountability. The book enters conversations about political subjectivity and agency, especially from ongoing struggles around identities and belonging, as well as representation and legitimacy. Who speaks to whom? And on whose behalf do they speak? The contributors to this volume offer careful analyses of how such concerns are embedded in wider forms of cultural, social, and institutional discussions about transparency, collective responsibility, community, and public decision-making processes. These concerns affect prospects for democratic oversight, as well as questions of alienation, exclusivity, privilege and democratic deficit. The book situates our understanding of the emergence, meaning, and conceptual relevance of elite accountability, to study political practices in Africa. It then juxtaposes this contextualization of accountability in relation to the practices of African elites. Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa offers fresh, dynamic, and multifarious accounts of elites and their practices of accountability and locally plausible self-legitimation, as well as illuminating accounts of contemporary African elites in relation to their socially and historicallysituated outcomes of contingency, composition, negotiation, and compromise.
The interactions between the elites and the lower classes of Latin America are explored from the divergent perspectives of three eminent historians in this volume. The result is a counterbalance of viewpoints on the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, and the Europeanized and the traditional of Latin America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
E. Bradford Burns advances the view that two cultures were in conflict in nineteenth-century Latin America: that of the modernizing, European-oriented elite, and that of the “common folk” of mixed racial background who lived close to the earth. Thomas E. Skidmore discusses the emerging field of labor history in twentieth-century Latin America, suggesting that the historical roots of today’s exacerbated tensions lie in the secular struggle of army against workers that he describes. In the introduction, Richard Graham takes issue with both authors on certain basic premises and points out implications of their essays for the understanding of North American as well as Latin American history.
A Financial Times and Scientific American Best Book of the Year.
A story of alchemy in Bohemian Paris, where two scientific outcasts discovered a fundamental distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals that inaugurated an enduring scientific mystery.
For centuries, scientists believed that living matter possessed a special quality—a spirit or essence—that differentiated it from nonliving matter. But by the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that the building blocks of one were identical to the building blocks of the other. Elixir tells the story of two young chemists who were not convinced, and how their work rewrote the boundary between life and nonlife.
In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent were working in Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux, drawing on alchemical traditions that equated a plant’s vitality with its aroma. In their spare time they hunted the vital force that promised to reveal the secret to life itself. Their ideas, roundly condemned by established chemists, led to the discovery of structural differences between naturally occurring molecules and their synthetic counterparts, even when the molecules were chemically identical.
Scientists still can’t explain this anomaly, but it may point to critical insights concerning the origins of life on Earth. Rich in sparks and smells, brimming with eccentric characters, experimental daring, and the romance of the Bohemian salon, Elixir is a fascinating cultural and scientific history.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified." In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress, Linda M. Lewis studies Browning's religion as poetry, her poetry as religion. The book interprets Browning's literary life as an arduous spiritual quest—the successive stages being a rejection of Promethean pride for Christ-like humility, affirmation of the gospels of suffering and of work, internalization of the doctrine of Apocalypse, and ascent to divine love and truth.
Lewis follows this religious crusade from the poet's childhood to her posthumous Last Poems--including such topics as her Bible reading, her introduction to the Greek church fathers and the English Protestant reformers, the theological debates in which she participated, her quarrel with the theology of Paradise Lost, and her scandalous involvement in mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. Using insights from contemporary feminist thought, Lewis argues that Browning's religious assumptions and insights range from the conventional to the iconoclastic and that women's spirituality is, for Browning as well as for other Victorian women writers, separate from orthodox patriarchy. Lewis demonstrates that Browning's political and social ideology--often labeled inconsistent and illogical—really makes sense in light of this spiritual quest, which leads her to confront her God "face to face."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress examines not only Browning's most admired works, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but also her large body of political works and her important early poems—The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile. This intertextual book compares Browning's ideology to that of feminists such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale; influential conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle; and those most esteemed of Victorian poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.
Concluding with an examination of religion as a central focus of Victorian women poets, Lewis clarifies the ways in which Browning differs from Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow, and Mary Howitt. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress maintains that Browning's peculiar face-to-face struggle with the patristic and poetic tradition—as well as with God—sets her work apart.
In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.
An annotated selection of unpublished letters by Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister.
Retrieved from seven different libraries, this corpus of letters was preserved by the Manning family chiefly for their value as records of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work; but they ironically also illuminate the life and mind of a fascinating correspondent and citizen of New England with incisive views and commentaries on her contemporaries, her role as a woman writer, Boston and Salem literary culture, and family life in mid-19th-century America.
This book illuminates Elizabeth's early life; the trauma caused for sister and brother by the death of their father; her and her brother's education; and the tensions the two children experienced when they moved in with their mother's family, the welthier Mannings, instead of the poorer though socially more venerable Hawthornes, following their father's death. The letters portray Elizabeth's constrained relationship with Nathaniel's wife Sofia Peabody and counter Sophia's portrayal of her sister-in-law as a recluse, oddity, and "queer scribbler."
These 118 letters also reveal Elizabeth Hawthorne's tremendous gifts as a thinker, correspondent, and essayist, her interest in astronomy, a lifelong drive toward self-edification in many fields, and her extraordinary relationship with Nathaniel. As a sibling and a fellow author, they were sometimes lovingly codependent and sometimes competitive. Finally, her writing reveals the larger worlds of politics, war, the literary landscape, class, family life, and the freedoms and constraints of a woman's role, all by a heretofore understudied figure.
This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three notable Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. In elegant prose it traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of nineteenth-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers. Yet Peabody has also been one of the most scandalously neglected and caricatured female intellectuals in American history.
Bruce Ronda has recaptured Peabody from anecdotal history and even blue-stocking portrayals in film--most recently by Jessica Tandy in Henry James's The Bostonians. Peabody was a reformer devoted to education in the broadest, and yet most practical, senses. She saw the classroom as mediating between the needs of the individual and the claims of society. She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the famous Dial and other imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.
A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land until the frontier was opened for ranching, Ella and Tom Bird typified the Old West ideals of self-sufficiency and generosity, with a hesitancy to complain about the hard life in the late 1800s.
Yet, in one important way, Ella Dumont was unsuited for life on the frontier. Endowed with an instinctive desire and ability to carve and sculpt, she was largely prevented from pursuing her talents by the responsibilities of marriage and frontier life and later, widowhood with two small children. Even though her second marriage, to Auguste Dumont, made life more comfortable, the realities of her existence still prevented the fulfillment of her artistic longings.
Ella Bird Dumont’s memoir is rich with details of the frontier era in Texas, when Indian depredations were still a danger for isolated settlers, where animals ranged close enough to provide dinner and a new pair of gloves, and where sheer existence depended on skill, luck, and the kindness of strangers. The vividness and poignancy of her life, coupled with the wealth of historical material in the editor’s exhaustive notes, make this Texas pioneer’s autobiography a very special book.
Ellen Glasgow - American Writers 33 was first published in 1964. 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.
For many years Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow has been regarded as a classic American regional novelist. But Glasgow is far more than a Southern writer, as Linda Wagner demonstrates in this fascinating reassessment of her work.
A Virginia lady, Glasgow began to write at a time when the highest praise for a literary woman was to be mistaken for a male writer. In her early fiction, published at the turn of the century, all attention is focused on male protagonists; the strong female characters who do appear early in these novels gradually fade into the background.
But Ellen Glasgow grew to become a woman who, born to be protected from the very life she wanted to chronicle, moved “beyond convention” to live her life on her own terms. And as her own self-image changed, the perspective of her novels became more feminine, the female characters moved to center stage, and their philosophies became central to her themes. Glasgow’s best novels, then—Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, and the romantic trilogy that includes The Sheltered Life—came late in her life, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists.
Glasgow’s increased self-assurance as writer and woman led to a far greater awareness of craft. Her style became more highly imaged, more suggestive, as though she wished to widen the range of resources available to move her readers. She became a writer both popular and respected. Her novels appeared as selections of the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one became a best seller. At the same time she was chosen as one of the few female members of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1942 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life.
In this timely addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Pamela Scully takes us from the 1938 birth of Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson through the Ebola epidemic of 2014–15. Charting her childhood and adolescence, the book covers Sirleaf’s relationship with her indigenous grandmother and urban parents, her early marriage, her years studying in the United States, and her career in international development and finance, where she developed her skill as a technocrat. The later chapters cover her years in and out of formal Liberian politics, her support for women’s rights, and the Ebola outbreak.
Sirleaf’s story speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is an astute examination of the life of a pioneering feminist politician.
Ellen Wilkinson was a key radical figure in the 20th century British socialist and feminist movement, a woman of passionate energy who was involved in most of the major struggles of her time.
Born in October 1891 into a working-class textile family, Wilkinson was involved in women’s suffrage, helped found the British Communist Party, led the Labour Party’s anti-fascist campaign, headed the iconic Jarrow Crusade and was the first female Minister of Education.
In this lively and engaging biography, Paula Bartley charts the political life of this extraordinary campaigner who went from street agitator to government minister whilst keeping her principles intact.
“Solomon’s fascinating and sweeping history of the legal fight over mandatory school prayers is compelling, judicious, and elegantly written. Fabulous!”
—David Rudenstine, Dean, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
“Stephen Solomon’s Ellery’s Protest provides a brilliant analysis of a major Supreme Court decision that redefined the relationship between church and state almost a half century ago. This study goes well beyond simply offering a gripping account of the course of litigation that brought before the Justices the contentious issue of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, though the thoroughness of that account would merit careful reading by itself. Especially impressive is the author’s deep probing of hitherto neglected sources, and invaluable primary material including extensive direct contact with the plaintiff, the ‘Ellery’ of the book’s title. Finally, and perhaps most impressive, is Solomon’s careful placement of the issue and the case in a far broader context that is as critical to national life and policy today as it was four and a half decades ago when the high Court first tackled these questions.”
—Robert O’Neil, Professor of Law, University of Virginia
Great legal decisions often result from the heroic actions of average citizens. Ellery’s Protest is the story of how one student’s objection to mandatory school prayer and Bible reading led to one of the most controversial court cases of the twentieth century—and a decision that still reverberates in the battle over the role of religion in public life.
Abington School District v. Schempp began its journey through the nation’s courts in 1956, when sixteen-year-old Ellery Schempp protested his public school’s compulsory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. Ejected from class for his actions, Schempp sued the school district. The Supreme Court’s decision in his favor was one of the most important rulings on religious freedom in our nation’s history. It prompted a conservative backlash that continues to this day, in the skirmishes over school prayer, the teaching of creationism and intelligent design, and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “under God.”
Author Stephen D. Solomon tells the fascinating personal and legal drama of the Schempp case: the family’s struggle against the ugly reactions of neighbors, and the impassioned courtroom clashes as brilliant lawyers on both sides argued about the meaning of religious freedom. But Schempp was not the only case challenging religious exercises in the schools at the time, and Ellery’s Protest describes the race to the Supreme Court among the attorneys for four such cases, including one involving the colorful atheist Madalyn Murray.
Solomon also explores the political, cultural, and religious roots of the controversy. Contrary to popular belief, liberal justices did not kick God out of the public schools. Bitter conflict over school Bible reading had long divided Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Eventually, it was the American people themselves who removed most religious exercises from public education as a more religiously diverse nation chose tolerance over sectarianism. Ellery’s Protest offers a vivid account of the case that embodied this change, and a reminder that conservative justices of the 1950s and 60s not only signed on to the Schempp decision, but strongly endorsed the separation of church and state.
The story of the African American contributions to the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s through the 1940s.
During the early decades of the twentieth century symphonic jazz involved an expansive family of music that emulated, paralleled, and intersected the jazz tradition. Though now largely forgotten, symphonic jazz was both a popular music---arranging tradition and a repertory of hybrid concert works, both of which reveled in the mildly irreverent interbreeding of white and black and high and low music. While the roots of symphonic jazz can be traced to certain black ragtime orchestras of the teens, the idiom came to maturation in the music of 1920s white dance bands.
Through a close examination of the music of Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, Ellington Uptown uncovers compositions that have usually fallen in the cracks between concert music, jazz, and popular music. It also places the concert works of these two iconic figures in context through an investigation both of related compositions by black and white peers and of symphonic jazz---style arrangements from a diverse number of early sound films, Broadway musicals, Harlem nightclub floor shows, and select interwar radio programs.
Both Ellington and Johnson were part of a close-knit community of several generations of Harlem musicians. Older figures like Will Marion Cook, Will Vodery, W. C. Handy, and James Reese Europe were the generation of black musicians that initially broke New York entertainment's racial barriers in the first two decades of the century. By the 1920s, Cook, Vodery, and Handy had become mentors to Harlem's younger musicians. This generational connection is a key for understanding Johnson’s and Ellington's ambitions to use the success of Harlem's white-oriented entertainment trade as a springboard for establishing a black concert music tradition based on Harlem jazz and popular music.
John Howland is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University and the cofounder and current editor-in-chief of the journal Jazz Perspectives. This work has been supported through several prestigious awards, including the Lloyd Hibberd Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society.
Expansive and essential, Elliott Carter Speaks opens up the artist's teaching and introspection to new contemporary perspectives on his thought and art.
Please note that the order and arrangement of materials in this book differs from that of Elliott Carter’s original lectures.
Rand notes that portrayals of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon for immigrants tend to suppress the Statue’s connections to people brought to this country by force. She examines what happened to migrants at Ellis Island whose bodies did not match the gender suggested by the clothing they wore. In light of contemporary ideas about safety and security, she examines the “Decide an Immigrant’s Fate” program, which has visitors to Ellis Island act as a 1910 board of inspectors hearing the appeal of an immigrant about to be excluded from the country. Rand is a witty, insightful, and open-minded tour guide, able to synthesize numerous diverse ideas—about tourism, immigration history, sexuality, race, ethnicity, commodity culture, and global capitalism—and to candidly convey her delight in her Ellis Island snow globe. And pen. And lighter. And back scratcher. And golf ball. And glittery pink key chain.
"A magisterially written, well-researched, informative, and entertaining biography of a woman who helped throw open the doors to broader participation and power for women in the Republican Party and American politics."
---Dave Dempsey, author of William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate
"Elly Peterson will be a text to which historians and researchers turn for insight into the yin and yang of mainstream politics in the mid-century."
---Patricia Sullivan, past president, Journalism and Women Symposium
"This lively portrait of a leading woman in the Republican Party between 1952 and 1982 also charts the party's shift to the right after 1964, revealingly viewed through the eyes of liberal Republican women. Intensively researched with ethnographic attention to the subtleties of political culture, Fitzgerald's book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Republican Party changed during the turbulent decades after 1960 and how women and women's issues shaped those changes."
---Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, State University of New York, Binghamton
"Sara Fitzgerald tells Peterson's story in this superb and timely biography. It carries a message that deserves the widest audience as the nation struggles to find needed consensus on critical issues amid poisonous political partisanship that has made it increasingly difficult for public officials to bridge their differences. I hope that every American reads it."
---Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson, from the Foreword
"To understand the quest for equal rights in America you really need to meet those women who were active at the time of transition. In this gripping biography we meet one woman who entered a male dominated world and triumphed."
---Francis X. Blouin Jr., Director, Bentley Historical Library
"Sara Fitzgerald's writing is as intelligent as it is entertaining."
---Best-selling novelist Diane Chamberlain
Elly Peterson was one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.
Elly Peterson's story is a missing chapter in the political history of Michigan, as well as the United States. This new biography, written by Sara Fitzgerald (a Michigan native and former Washington Post editor), finally gives full credit to one of the first female political leaders in this country.
When Peterson resigned in 1970 as assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote that "her abilities would have earned her the national chairmanship, were it not for the unwritten sex barrier both parties have erected around that job."
Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.
Contributors. Jane Collins, Cathy N. Davidson, Virginia R. Dominguez, Mark Edmundson, Gerald Graff, Richard Inglis, Aldona Jonaitis, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Catherine Lutz, Nancy K. Miller, Linda Orr, Andrew Ross, Henry M. Sayre, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick
Eloquent Science evolved from a workshop aimed at offering atmospheric science students formal guidance in communications, tailored for their eventual scientific careers. Drawing on advice from over twenty books and hundreds of other sources, this volume presents informative and often humorous tips for writing scientific journal articles, while also providing a peek behind the curtain into the operations of editorial boards and publishers of major journals. The volume focuses on writing, reviewing, and speaking and is aimed at the domain of the student or scientist at the start of her career. The volume offers tips on poster presentations, media communication, and advice for non-native speakers of English, as well as appendices on proper punctuation usage and commonly misunderstood meteorological concepts. A further reading section at the end of each chapter suggests additional sources for the interested reader, and sidebars written by experts in the field offer diverse viewpoints on reference topics.
A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us
Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses.
Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric––metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche––and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences.
Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.
As World War I dragged on into 1915, German armies along the Western Front settled into stalemate with entrenched British and French forces. But in the East the picture was quite different. The Kaiser’s army routed the Russians, took possession of Polish territory, and attempted to create a Polish satellite state. Elusive Alliance delves into Germany’s three-year occupation of Poland and explains why its ambitious attempt at nation-building failed.
Dubbed the Imperial Government-General of Warsaw, Germany’s occupation regime was headed by veteran Prussian commander Hans Hartwig von Beseler. In his vision for Central Europe, Poland would become Germany’s permanent ally, culturally and politically autonomous but bound to the Fatherland in foreign policy matters. To win Polish support, Beseler spearheaded the creation of new institutions including a Polish-language university in Warsaw, reformed the school system, and established democratically elected municipal governments. For Beseler and other German strategists, a secure Poland was essential to ensuring Central Europe against a threatening tide of nationalism and revolution.
But as Jesse Kauffman shows, Beseler underestimated the resistance to his policies and the growing hostility to occupation as Germany plundered Polish resources to fuel its war effort. By 1918, with the war over, Poles achieved independence. Yet it would not be long before they faced a second, far more brutal German occupation at the hands of the Nazis.
In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades.
Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.
When Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, Czechs embraced democracy, which they saw as particularly suited to their national interests. Politicians enthusiastically supported a constitution that proclaimed all citizens, women as well as men, legally equal. But they soon found themselves split over how to implement this pledge. Some believed democracy required extensive egalitarian legislation. Others contended that any commitment to equality had to bow before other social interests, such as preserving the traditional family.
On the eve of World War II, Czech leaders jettisoned the young republic for an “authoritarian democracy” that firmly placed their nation, and not the individual citizen, at the center of politics. In 1948, they turned to a Communist-led “people's democracy,” which also devalued individual rights.
By examining specific policy issues, including marriage and family law, civil service regulations, citizenship law, and abortion statutes, Elusive Equality demonstrates the relationship between Czechs' ideas about gender roles and their attitudes toward democracy. Gradually, many Czechs became convinced that protecting a traditionally gendered family ideal was more important to their national survival than adhering to constitutionally prescribed standards of equal citizenship. Through extensive original research, Melissa Feinberg assembles a compelling account of how early Czech progress in women's rights, tied to democratic reforms, eventually lost momentum in the face of political transformations and the separation of state and domestic issues. Moreover, Feinberg presents a prism through which our understanding of twentieth-century democracy is deepened, and a cautionary tale for all those who want to make democratic governments work.
At the heart of Elusive Histories is a long-neglected story of the clandestine journeys of Mozambican migrant laborers and their families to Rhodesia. Drawing from oral histories, court records, archives, newspapers, and popular magazines, the authors chronicle Mozambican migration, work experiences, and settlement in Rhodesia. Thousands of men, women, and children traveled long distances, often on foot, to reach Rhodesia. Starting with a trickle of workers seeking to avoid chibharo, a Mozambican agricultural forced-labor system, the number of migrants peaked in the 1950s. In 1958, the Rhodesian government passed legislation to bar new Mozambican migrants from entering large cities, redirecting them toward agriculture and mining. When Black Rhodesian laborers began to complain about losing jobs to Mozambicans, the restrictions became an outright ban to prevent further migrants from entering the country. Contrary to previous assumptions, Mozambican labor in Rhodesia was not contract labor derived from bilateral negotiations between the Mozambican colonial and Rhodesian governments. In fact, many Mozambicans who came to work and live in Rhodesia arrived as illegal migrants. The book also demystifies the widely held notion that all foreign migrant workers in Rhodesia who spoke Nyanja were Nyasalanders. Because Nyanja is widely spoken at the confluence of Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique, many Mozambicans who came to work in Rhodesia were fluent. Despite the national, racial, and cultural differences and the discrimination in job placement, promotion, and housing, Mozambican migrant laborers creatively adapted and made Rhodesia home for the duration of their lives.
As a Somali working since high school in the United Arab Emirates, Osman considers himself “blessed” to be in a Muslim country, though citizenship, with the security it offers, remains elusive. For Ardo, smuggled out of Somalia to join her husband in South Africa, insecurities are of a more immediate, physical kind, and her economic prospects and legal status are more uncertain. Adam, in the United States—a destination often imagined as an earthly Eden, or jannah, by so many of his compatriots—now sees heaven in a return to Somalia.
The stories of these three people are among the many that emerge from mass migration triggered by the political turmoil and civil war plaguing Somalia since 1988. And they are among the diverse collection presented in eloquent detail in Elusive Jannah, a remarkable portrait of the very different experiences of Somali migrants in the UAE, South Africa, and the United States. Somalis in the UAE, a relatively closed Muslim nation, are a minority within a large South Asian population of labor migrants. In South Africa, they are part of a highly racialized and segregated postapartheid society. In the United States they find themselves in a welfare state with its own racial, socioeconomic, and political tensions. A comparison of Somali settlements in these three locations clearly reveals the importance of immigration policies in the migrant experience.
Cawo M. Abdi’s nuanced analysis demonstrates that a full understanding of successful migration and integration must go beyond legal, economic, and physical security to encompass a sense of religious, cultural, and social belonging. Her timely book underscores the sociopolitical forces shaping the Somali diaspora, as well as the roles of the nation-state, the war on terror, and globalization in both constraining and enabling their search for citizenship and security.
Characters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship. Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster.
Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight’s Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds.
Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights. Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.
Conceiving indigenous rights as cultural rights, Engle argues, has largely displaced or deferred many of the economic and political issues that initially motivated much indigenous advocacy. She contends that by asserting static, essentialized notions of indigenous culture, indigenous rights advocates have often made concessions that threaten to exclude many claimants, force others into norms of cultural cohesion, and limit indigenous economic, political, and territorial autonomy.
Engle explores one use of the right to culture outside the context of indigenous rights, through a discussion of a 1993 Colombian law granting collective land title to certain Afro-descendant communities. Following the aspirations for and disappointments in this law, Engle cautions advocates for marginalized communities against learning the wrong lessons from the recent struggles of indigenous peoples at the international level.
The 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution is a subject of inexhaustible historical interest, but the plight of millions of Chinese who fled China during this tumultuous period has been largely forgotten. Elusive Refuge recovers the history of China’s twentieth-century refugees. Focusing on humanitarian efforts to find new homes for Chinese displaced by civil strife, Laura Madokoro points out a constellation of factors—entrenched bigotry in countries originally settled by white Europeans, the spread of human rights ideals, and the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War—which coalesced to shape domestic and international refugee policies that still hold sway today.
Although the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were home to sizeable Asian communities, Chinese migrants were a perpetual target of legislation designed to exclude them. In the wake of the 1949 Revolution, government officials and the broader public of these countries questioned whether Chinese refugees were true victims of persecution or opportunistic economic migrants undeserving of entry. It fell to NGOs such as the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches to publicize the quandary of the vast community of Chinese who had become stranded in Hong Kong.
These humanitarian organizations achieved some key victories in convincing Western governments to admit Chinese refugees. Anticommunist sentiment also played a role in easing restrictions. But only the plight of Southeast Asians fleeing the Vietnam War finally convinced the United States and other countries to adopt a policy of granting permanent residence to significant numbers of refugees from Asia.
Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and space aliens like the Transformers share a surprising connection along with James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Rocky Balboa. These beloved icons played active roles in movie and television projects set in the state of Nevada. Long time state film commissioner and movie reviewer Holabird explores the blending of icons and Nevada, along with her personal experiences of watching movies, talking with famous people, and showing off a diverse range of stunning and iconic locations like Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Area 51.
Holabird shows how Nevada’s flash, flair, and fostering of the forbidden provided magic for singers, sexpots, and strange creatures from other worlds. She also gives readers an insider’s look into moviemaking in Nevada by drawing on her extensive experience as a film commissioner. This is a unique take on film history and culture, and Holabird explores eighteen film genres populated by one-of-a-kind characters with ties to Nevada. Along with being a film history of the state of Nevada written by a consummate insider, the book is a fun mixture of research, personal experiences, and analysis about how Nevada became the location of choice for a broad spectrum of well-known films and characters.
When the U.S. Army drafted Elvis Presley in 1958, it quickly set about transforming the King of Rock and Roll from a rebellious teen idol into a clean-cut GI. Trading in his gold-trimmed jacket for standard-issue fatigues, Elvis became a model soldier in an army facing the unprecedented challenge of building a fighting force for the Atomic Age.
In an era that threatened Soviet-American thermonuclear annihilation, the army declared it could limit atomic warfare to the battlefield. It not only adopted a radically new way of fighting but also revamped its equipment, organization, concepts, and training practices. From massive garrisons in Germany and Korea to nuclear tests to portable atomic weapons, the army reinvented itself. Its revolution in warfare required an equal revolution in personnel: the new army needed young officers and soldiers who were highly motivated, well trained, and technologically adept. Drafting Elvis demonstrated that even this icon of youth culture was not too cool to wear the army’s uniform.
The army of the 1950s was America’s most racially and economically egalitarian institution, providing millions with education, technical skills, athletics, and other opportunities. With the cooperation of both the army and the media, military service became a common theme in television, music, and movies, and part of this generation’s identity. Brian Linn traces the origins, evolution, and ultimate failure of the army’s attempt to transform itself for atomic warfare, revealing not only the army’s vital role in creating Cold War America but also the experiences of its forgotten soldiers.
This translation focuses on publications by Donald E. Knuth, one of the world’s leading computer programmers, that were addressed primarily to a general audience rather than to specialists. These fifteen papers discuss the history of computer science from ancient Babylon to modern times and survey the field of computer science and the nature of algorithms.
"This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to—anybody at all—because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging."
In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with "female trouble" in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships.
Emancipating Lincoln seeks a new approach to the Emancipation Proclamation, a foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These seventeen hundred words are Lincoln’s most important piece of writing, responsible both for his being hailed as the Great Emancipator and for his being pilloried by those who consider his once-radical effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted.
Harold Holzer, an award-winning Lincoln scholar, invites us to examine the impact of Lincoln’s momentous announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time. Using neglected original sources, Holzer uncovers Lincoln’s very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his “greatest act” in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration across the past century and a half, as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln’s endeavor.
Holzer shows the faults in applying our own standards to Lincoln’s efforts, but also demonstrates how Lincoln’s obfuscations made it nearly impossible to discern his true motives. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, this concise volume is a vivid depiction of the painfully slow march of all Americans—white and black, leaders and constituents—toward freedom.
A radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition
Emancipating Pragmatism is a radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. It traces Emerson's philosophical legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse.
Emerson’s pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic thought that aspires toward democracy cannot ignore and must reckon with its racial roots. Magee looks at the ties between pragmatism and African-American culture as they manifest themselves in key texts and movements, such as William Carlos Williams’s poetry; Ralph Ellison’s discourse in Invisible Man and Juneteenth and his essays on jazz; the poetic works of Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O'Hara; as well as the “new jazz” being forged at clubs like The Five Spot in New York.
Ultimately, Magee calls into question traditional maps of pragmatist lineage and ties pragmatism to the avant-garde American tradition.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press