The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death both by metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender. In Erotic Utopia, Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence.
The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?
These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted.
The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand?
This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do?
In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.
Tourism is becoming one of the world's most important economic activities. There is hardly a place on earth, no matter how inaccessible, that has not been visited by some traveler seeking adventure, enlightenment, or simply change from the familiar world back home.
In this pathfinding book, David Zurick explores the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry—adventure travel. He raises important questions about what constitutes the travel experience and shows how the modern adventure industry has commercialized the very notion of adventure by packaging it as tours.
Drawing on two decades of personal travel, as well as the writings of others, Zurick unravels the paradox of adventure travel—that the very act of visiting remote places untouched by Western culture introduces that culture and begins irreversible changes. This first in-depth look at adventure travel opens new insights into the physical, philosophical, and spiritual attributes of the travel experience. Written in a lively style, the book is intended for everyone interested in travel and its effects on both travelers and the people and places they visit.
Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their “errant modernism,” avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.
In Error, Nicholas Rescher presents a fresh analysis of the occurrence, causality, and consequences of error in human thought, action, and evaluation. Rescher maintains that error-avoidance and truth-achievement are distinct but equally important factors for rational inquiry, and that error is inherent in the human cognitive process (to err is human). He defines three main categories of error: cognitive (failure to realize truths); practical (failure related to the objective of an action); and axiological (failure in evaluation), and articulates the factors that contribute to each. His discussion also provides a historical perspective on the treatment of error in Greek philosophy, and by later thinkers such as Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, James, Royce, Moore, and Russell.
Error is an important reexamination of the significance of error to the fields of philosophical anthropology, epistemology, ontology, and theology. As Rescher’s study argues, truth and error are inexorably intertwined—one cannot exist without the other. Error is an unavoidable occurrence in the cognitive process—without missteps on the path to truth, truth itself cannot be attained. The risk of error is inherent in the quest for truth.
Peter E. Kane takes a critical look at the development of the present law through a discussion of seventeen landmark libel cases.
One of the many points Kane clarifies is the important distinction between an error and a lie when judging whether someone is guilty of libel. For example, in the series of events that led to Goldwater vs. Ginzburg, Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of fact magazine, compiled and printed in fact a montage of quotes he had collected from psychiatrists about Barry Goldwater. It took five years of legal sparring for the courts to conclude that Ginzburg had deliberately published a malicious and irresponsible document and to rule in favor of Goldwater. Kane closes with a discussion of current thinking on possible libel reform.
Erskine Caldwell - American Writers 78 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This pamphlet series has been hailed by critics, teachers, and librarians as an ideals means of introducing both students and general readers to American writers of all periods. Choice has commented: "For the small library this series offers at small cost introductions by reputable critics o dozens of significant authors, and the larger the library the greater the number of undergraduate students looking for a place to start on some writer." The New York Times Book Review has called the pamphlets "extraordinarily good," pointing out that "they are just long enough (48 pages) to permit a real survey of an author's work and short enough to attract the casual reader, the anxiety-ridden student, and the professor desperate for the straight word on an unfamiliar writer."
Although the northern Illinois chapters of the story of Susan “Sukey” Richardson’s escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad are documented, the part played by southern Illinois in that historic episode has remained obscure. Carol Pirtle changes that with her investigation into the 1843 suit Andrew Borders lodged against William Hayes, charging his neighbor with helping slaves from the Borders estate escape to Galesburg. In conjunction with her probe into the past, Pirtle also discovered the Hayes correspondence.
Pirtle documents Hayes’s involvement in the Illinois Underground Railroad through approximately two hundred letters received by Hayes from the early 1820s until his death in 1849. Many of these letters specifically corroborate his participation in the escape of slaves from the Borders estate. One such letter came from T. A. Jones in 1843: “You Dear Sir are to me an unknown friend, yet I believe you are a friend to the poor down trodden Slave. This is as good an introduction as I want from any man. My brother, our cause is a holy one.” Letters written by Galesburg residents show that several prominent citizens of that community also assisted in the affair, proving that Knox College administrators and trustees were active in the Underground Railroad.
Pirtle also includes excerpts from the trial transcript from the 1844 civil case against Hayes, which was tried in Pinckneyville, Illinois. She researched newspaper accounts of the event, most notably those in the Western Citizen and the Sparta Herald. Records of the Covenanter Presbyterian church of which Hayes was a member provide partial explanations of Hayes’s motives.
Telling the story of Hayes and his involvement with Susan Richardson and the Underground Railroad, Pirtle provides insight into the work of abolitionists in Illinois. Escape Betwixt Two Suns, in fact, is one of the few books to substantiate the legends of the Underground Railroad. She tells the story of a quiet man who made a difference, of a man deserving the accolades of a hero.
In the midst of vast cultural and political shifts in the early twentieth century, politicians and cultural observers variously hailed and decried the rise of the “New Negro.” This phenomenon was most clearly manifest in the United States through the outpouring of Black arts and letters and social commentary known as the Harlem Renaissance. What is less known is how far afield of Harlem that renaissance flourished—how much the New Negro movement was actually just one part of a collective explosion of political protest, cultural expression, and intellectual debate all over the world.
In this volume, the Harlem Renaissance “escapes from New York” into its proper global context. These essays recover the broader New Negro experience as social movements, popular cultures, and public behavior spanned the globe from New York to New Orleans, from Paris to the Philippines and beyond. Escape from New York does not so much map the many sites of this early twentieth-century Black internationalism as it draws attention to how New Negroes and their global allies already lived. Resituating the Harlem Renaissance, the book stresses the need for scholarship to catch up with the historical reality of the New Negro experience. This more comprehensive vision serves as a lens through which to better understand capitalist developments, imperial expansions, and the formation of brave new worlds in the early twentieth century.
Contributors: Anastasia Curwood, Vanderbilt U; Frank A. Guridy, U of Texas at Austin; Claudrena Harold, U of Virginia; Jeannette Eileen Jones, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Andrew W. Kahrl, Marquette U; Shannon King, College of Wooster; Charlie Lester; Thabiti Lewis, Washington State U, Vancouver; Treva Lindsey, U of Missouri–Columbia; David Luis-Brown, Claremont Graduate U; Emily Lutenski, Saint Louis U; Mark Anthony Neal, Duke U; Yuichiro Onishi, U of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Theresa Runstedtler, U at Buffalo (SUNY); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt U; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers U, New Brunswick; Jennifer M. Wilks, U of Texas at Austin; Chad Williams, Brandeis U.
In the early years of World War II, thousands of political refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique in the French Caribbean, en route to what they hoped would be safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer from the colony, the exiles formed influential ties—with one another and with local black dissidents. Escape from Vichy recounts this flight from the refugees’ perspectives, using novels, unpublished diaries, archives, memoirs, artwork, and other materials to explore the unlikely encounters that fueled an anti-fascist artistic and intellectual movement.
The refugees included Spanish Republicans, anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, anti-fascist Italians, Jews from across Europe, and others fleeing violence and repression. They were met with hostility by the Vichy government and rejection by the nations where they hoped to settle. Martinique, however, provided a site propitious for creative ferment, where the revolutionary Victor Serge conversed with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Surrealist André Breton met Negritude thinkers René Ménil and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. As Eric T. Jennings shows, these interactions gave rise to a rich current of thought celebrating blackness and rejecting racism.
What began as expulsion became a kind of rescue, cut short by Washington’s fears that wolves might be posing in sheep’s clothing.
Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.
A harrowing account of Jewish refugees in the Philippines
With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s more than a thousand European Jews sought refuge in the Philippines, joining the small Jewish population of Manila. When the Japanese invaded the islands in 1941, the peaceful existence of the barely settled Jews filled with the kinds of uncertainties and oppression they thought they had left behind.
In this book Frank Ephraim, who fled to Manila with his parents, gathers the testimonies of thirty-six refugees, who describe the difficult journey to Manila, the lives they built there upon their arrival, and the events surrounding the Japanese invasion. Combining these accounts with historical and archival records, Manila newspapers, and U.S. government documents, Ephraim constructs a detailed account of this little-known chapter of world history.
From the moment of a marriage’s heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning’s Escape Velocity asks if it’s possible to exist outside the only universe we’ve ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence.
Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story—an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach "the velocity to be everleaving."
In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.
During the height of the Guatemalan civil war, Tomás Guzaro, a Mayan evangelical pastor, led more than two hundred fellow Mayas out of guerrilla-controlled Ixil territory and into the relative safety of the government army's hands. This exodus was one of the factors that caused the guerrillas to lose their grip on the Ixil, thus hastening the return of peace to the area.
In Escaping the Fire, Guzaro relates the hardships common to most Mayas and the resulting unrest that opened the door to civil war. He details the Guatemalan army's atrocities while also describing the Guerrilla Army of the Poor's rise to power in Ixil country, which resulted in limited religious freedom, murdered church leaders, and threatened congregations. His story climaxes with the harrowing vision that induced him to guide his people out of their war-torn homeland.
Guzaro also provides an intimate look at his spiritual pilgrimage through all three of Guatemala's main religions. The son of a Mayan priest, formerly a leader in the Catholic Church, and finally a convert to Protestantism, Guzaro, in detailing his religious life, offers insight into the widespread shift toward Protestantism in Latin America over the past four decades.
Riveting and highly personal, Escaping the Fire ultimately provides a counterpoint to the usual interpretation of indigenous agency during the Guatemalan civil war by documenting the little-studied experiences of Protestants living in guerrilla-held territory.
Eskimo Essays introduces the reader to important aspects of the ideology and practice of the Yup’ik Eskimos of western Alaska, past and present. The essays point the way toward a fuller recognition of how Yup’ik Eskimos differ from the popular Western image of the Eskimo that was born largely without reference to Yup’ik reality. By describing the reality of Yup’ik life, Eskimo Essays extends our understanding of Esimos in general and Yup’ik Eskimos in particular.
Ann Fienup-Riordan argues that Western observers have simultaneously naturalized Eskimos as paragons of simplicity and virtue and Western imperialism. This process has often ignored Eskimo concepts of society, history, and personhood. An original assumption of similarity to Western society has profoundly affected the current Euro-American view of Eskimo history and action. Non-natives have taken an idealized Western individual, dressed that person up in polar garb, and then assumed they understood the garment’s maker. The result is a presentation of Eskimo society that often tells us more about the meaning we seek in our own. Moreover, modern Eskimos have risen to the challenge and to some extent become what we have made them.
Bridging the gap between informed scholarships and popular concepts, Fienup-Riordan provides a compelling and fresh presentation of Yup’ik life—cosmology, the missionary experience, attitudes toward conservation, Eskimo art, the legal system, warfare, and ceremonies.
The Eskimo Girl and the Englishman is a sequel to the delightful story Once Upon an Eskimo Time, which recounts the remarkable life of Minnie and her Eskimo mother as she comes of age in a traditional village on Alaska’s western coast. Resuming the tale on the day Minnie encounters her first white man, The Eskimo Girl and the Englishman relates the next century of Minnie’s adventurous life—painting a picture of early twentieth-century village life as Minnie and her Englishman marry and find the determination, strength, and courage to live life in the face of tragedy, rapidly changing technology, and unrelenting hardship along the Bering Sea. Accompanied by photographs of early Eskimo village life, the narrative poignantly captures a sense of a long-lost way of life on the Seward Peninsula.
Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned X's and O's into billions of $$$. Vogan's institutional and cultural history focuses on the network since 1998, the year it launched a high-motor effort to craft its brand and grow audiences across media platforms. As he shows, innovative properties like SportsCentury, ESPN The Magazine, and 30 for 30 built the network's cultural caché. This credibility, in turn, propelled ESPN's transformation into an entity that lapped its run-of-the-mill competitors and helped fulfill its self-proclaimed status as the "Worldwide Leader in Sports."
Ambitious and long overdue, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire offers an inside look at how the network changed an industry and reshaped the very way we live as sports fans.
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2009
In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was relocated from far south Texas to a site along the Guadalupe River in Mission Valley, Victoria County. This mission, along with a handful of others in south Texas, was established by the Spaniards in an effort to Christianize and civilize the local Native American tribes in the hopes that they would become loyal Spanish citizens who would protect this new frontier from foreign incursions.
With written historical records scarce for Espíritu Santo, Tamra Walter relies heavily on material culture recovered at this site through a series of recent archaeological investigations to present a compelling portrait of the Franciscan mission system. By examining findings from the entire mission site, including the compound, irrigation system, quarry, and kiln, she focuses on questions that are rarely, if ever, answered through historical records alone: What was daily life at the mission like? What effect did the mission routine have on the traditional lifeways of the mission Indians? How were both the Indians and the colonizers changed by their frontier experiences, and what does this say about the missionization process?
Walter goes beyond simple descriptions of artifacts and mission architecture to address the role these elements played in the lives of the mission residents, demonstrating how archaeology is able to address issues that are not typically addressed by historians. In doing so, she presents an accurate portrait of life in South Texas at this time. This study of Mission Espíritu Santo will serve as a model for research at similar early colonial sites in Texas and elsewhere.
An intensely personal, and philosophical, account of why white America’s racial unconscious is not so unconscious
An Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.
Framed through the experiences of the author’s biracial son, An Essay for Ezra is intensely personal while also powerfully universal. Drawing on the social and political thought of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Grant Farred examines the temptation and the perils of essentialism and the need to discriminate—to engage the black mind as much as the black body. With that dialectic as his starting point, Farred engages the ideas of Jameson, Barthes, Derrida, Adorno, Kant, and other thinkers to derive an ethics of being in our time of social peril. His antiessentialist racial analysis is salient, especially when he deploys Dave Chappelle as a counterpoint to Baldwin—and Chappelle’s brilliant comic philosophic voice jabs at both racial and gender identity.
Standing apart for its willingness to explore terror in all its ambivalence, this theoretical reflection on racism, knowledge, ethics, and being in our neofascist present brings to bear the full weight of philosophical inquiry and popular cultural critique on black life in the United States.
The publication in 1832 of An Essay on Calcareous Manures initiated an era of agricultural reform in the ante-bellum South. By 1850 Edmund Ruffin, seconded by John Taylor of Carolina, had effected a transformation of the economy of the upper South from poverty to agricultural prosperity. The essay's importance is not only regional, for in its four editions it presented Ruffin's theories to farmers who were facing the same problems of soil exhaustion in other parts of America. This small book, with its uncompromisingly descriptive title, is a landmark in the history of soil chemistry in the United States.
Ruffin read widely in the literature, mainly European, of agricultural chemistry, and in the 1820's he experimented with ways to make planting pay on his own tidewater Virginia lands. On the basis of his own research and frustrating experience as a farmer, he maintained that the capacity, of soil for enrichment by plant and animal manure is only relative to the original fertility of the soil. In other words, organic manures can only restore earth to what it was prior to cultivation. If land originally lacked the mineral ingredients essential to fertility, it would yield sparingly as long as the minerals were absent.
Ruffin found that uncultivated land in his part of Virginia lacked calcium carbonate, and that most of this same poor soil contained vegetable acid, the cause of its sterility. His solution was to plow in calcareous manure that is, earth containing calcium carbonate thus neutralizing the acid. When Ruffin first had his slaves dig up marl from one of the beds of fossilized shells that underlie much of coastal Virginia, and directed them to apply it to a test patch of his land, which was then planted with corn, he increased his yield by 40 per cent. This amazingly successful experiment led to others, and became what a contemporary of Ruffin called "the first systematic attempt wherein a plain, practical, unpretending farmer...has undertaken to examine into the real composition of the soils which he possesses and has to cultivate."
A pioneering scholar of Shakespeare and early modern letters provides an overview of work in the field
For more than twenty-five years, Karen Newman has brought her critical acumen to bear on early modern studies. In this collection of her essays on Shakespeare—some acknowledged classics and others never before published—Newman shows how changing theoretical trends have shaped Shakespeare studies, from new historicism and gender studies to critical race studies and globalization.
Central to Newman’s work is social exchange, or the circulation of people and objects. At least two of these essays have had a powerful and lasting impact on Shakespeare studies: “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew” and “‘And wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Three essays appear in print for the first time: an examination of clothing of the poor and the portrayal of the king as a beggar in Richard II; a stinging review of Harold Bloom’s book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; and a rethinking of claims about the globalization of culture and cultural translation.Essaying Shakespeare chronicles Newman’s own critical development to provide a significant map of critical work on Shakespeare.The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay.
From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.
This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.
From humble beginnings, Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence as a leading citizen of Florence, serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence, a post he held for fifteen years. His palace in Borgo Pinti, modeled on classical designs, was emblematic of his achievements as a humanist as well as a public official. Along with his professional writings as chancellor, Scala’s personal treatises, fables, and dialogues—widely read and admired by his contemporaries—were deeply indebted to classical sources. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, whose works he had access to through the Medici libraries, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Perhaps the most significant is the Defense against the Detractors of Florence, a key document in the development of modern republicanism.
This volume presents fresh translations by Renée Neu Watkins of five of the texts based on Latin editions by Alison Brown, who also contributes an introduction to Scala’s life and works.
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