A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman's childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman's lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.
This book analyses the causes of armed conflicts in Southern Africa during the Cold War. It examines the influence of the various external forces in the region during this period and their relationship to local movements and governments.
The book focuses on states experiencing violent internal conflict and foreign intervention, that is Angola, Mozambique, Namibia , South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The author provides an unique history of the key part that the Soviet Union played in these developments. Spanning 30 years, the book explores how each country struggled for genuine independence against colonialism and apartheid and their place in the wider conflicts encompassed by the Cold War.
Kraig discusses the many brands, including Hebrew National, Pearl, Sabrett, and Vienna Beef, and the regional variations that go along with them—like kosher-style New York dogs loaded with mustard and sauerkraut, New England dogs with Boston Baked Beans, and fully-loaded Chicago style hotdogs, complete with mustard, onion, relish, sport peppers, a dill pickle spear, a dash of celery salt, and tomato slices (but never, ever ketchup). Hot Dog covers the other international sausages, like bologna and bockwurst, as well, and explores some of the apocryphal tales of the hotdog in history—like the origin of its name and whether Queen Elizabeth II was truly served hotdogs on a visit to the White House.
Packed with tasty facts and recipes, Hot Dog reveals the rich history and passionate opinions about this seemingly ordinary food.
Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles “Chuck” Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh
Hertsgaard has spent the last two decades reporting on climate change for media outlets including The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation, where he is the environment correspondent. His lecture focused on political movements and how environmental advocates can provoke change in public attitudes and on Capitol Hill. Hertsgaard sees 2011’s Occupy movement as a sign of real hope and discussed what climate activists can learn from Occupy’s tactics.
This E-ssential is an edited version of Hertsgaard’s talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion.
Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American “hot” music influenced American culture—particularly literature—in early twentieth century America. Steven C. Tracy provides a history of the fusion of African and European elements that formed African American “hot” music, and considers how terms like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature.
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature begins by highlighting instances in which American writers, including Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein, use African American culture and music in their work, and then characterizes the social context of the Jazz Age, discussing how African American music reflected the wild abandon of the time. Tracy focuses on how a variety of schools of early twentieth century writers, from modernists to members of the Harlem Renaissance to dramatists and more, used their connections with “hot” music to give their own work meaning.
Tracy’s extensive and detailed understanding of how African American “hot” music operates has produced a fresh and original perspective on its influence on mainstream American literature and culture. An experienced blues musician himself, Tracy draws on his performance background to offer an added dimension to his analysis. Where another blues scholar might only analyze blues language, Tracy shows how the language is actually performed.
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is the first book to offer such a refreshingly broad interdisciplinary vision of the influence of African American “hot” music on American literature. It is an essential addition to the library of serious scholars of American and African American literature and culture and blues aficionados alike.
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits offers a far-reaching look at how masculinity and femininity have been represented in American superhero comics, from the Golden and Silver Ages to the Modern Age. Scholar Esther De Dauw contrasts the bulletproof and musclebound phallic bodies of classic male heroes like Superman, Captain America, and Iron Man with the figures of female counterparts like Wonder Woman and Supergirl, who are drawn as superhumanly flexible and plastic. It also examines the genre’s ambivalent treatment of LGBTQ representation, from the presentation of gay male heroes Wiccan and Hulkling as a model minority couple to the troubling association of Batwoman’s lesbianism with monstrosity. Finally, it explores the intersection between gender and race through case studies of heroes like Luke Cage, Storm, and Ms. Marvel.
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits is a fascinating and thought-provoking consideration of what superhero comics teach us about identity, embodiment, and sexuality.
Freud, inventor of "dream work," turns a blind eye upon the dreams that were the starting point of his predecessor Descartes's famous methode, the one man's obsession with originality mirroring the other's fear of plagiarism. The Holocaust poet Paul Celan, whose sense of identity and place resided in his work, is devastated by a charge of plagiarism. Colette's husband Willy outdoes himself, and his "lazy" wife as well, with his enactment of literary seriousness. Walter Benjamin's early interpreters, notably Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, insidiously undermine the originality of his project . In each of these cases, Meltzer shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betrays the larger fraud of the originality myth itself.
Fascinating for its insights into the ways originality is both at risk and at work in Western literary culture, Hot Property will engage all those who have an interest in questions of authorship, textual soveriegnty, and the legitimacy of the critical establishment.
Hot Towns is about the vast, current national relocation of one million Americans a year. Successful, accomplished, and well-financed people of all ages are moving to communities they view as choice—places distinguished by fine climate, physical beauty, abundant natural recreation resources, and minimal social problems and low crime. Towns in this elite roster include Santa Fe, Aspen, Boulder, Bozeman, Chapel Hill, East Hampton, and many others.
These American boom towns, Peter Wolf writes, have grown in jobs and population at two to three times the national average. But warning signs of deterioration are already evident: overbuilding, failing natural resources, rising taxes, and traffic congestion are all taking a toll on these communities. Rapid migration can enhance or swamp America’s fastest growing and most desirable communities
Wolf examines the choices that people in these areas can make to both effectively accommodate growth and yet ensure their economic futures. A wise town undergoing growth will realize that what must be preserved is not the growth in-and-for itself, but the qualities which attract people in the first place. Wolf demonstrates how it is possible—even during a town’s rapid expansion—to enhance the quality of residents’ lives, to incorporate aesthetics and design into town evolution, to protect what is precious in nature, and to preserve the best that has already been built.
Wolf concludes with a practical checklist for the residents of hot towns, allowing them to evaluate how their communities are coping with growth.
In A Hot-Bed of Musicians, Paula Anderson-Green tells the stories of several of these legendary performers and instrument makers from the Upper New River Valley–Whitetop Mountain region, including Ola Belle Campbell Reed, Albert Hash, and Dave Sturgill. These men and women began to bring the music of Appalachia to a wider audience well before Nashville became the center of country music. Making extensive use of interviews, the book reveals the fascinating experiences and enduring values behind the practice of old-time music. This musical heritage remains an indispensable component of Appalachian culture, and Anderson-Green traces the traditions down to the present generation of musicians there.
Written for anyone with an interest in mountain music, this book focuses on performers from Alleghany and Ashe Counties in North Carolina and Carroll County and Grayson County in Virginia. It includes a comprehensive appendix of place names and music venues as well as annotated lists of musicians and the songs they have performed.
The Author: Paula Hathaway Anderson-Green is an adjunct professor of English at Kennesaw State University and does research in Appalachian studies.
Bernd Heinrich's widely praised Bumblebee Economics set a high standard for scientifically accurate yet gracefully articulate writing about nature's ingenious patterns, specifically thermoregulation. Hot-Blooded Insects takes a giant step forward by presenting an overview of what is now known about thermoregulation in all of the major insect groups, offering new insights on physiology, ecology, and evolution.
The book is richly illustrated by the author's exquisite sketches. By describing the environmental opportunities and challenges faced by moths and butterflies, grasshoppers and locusts, dungball rollers and other beetles, a wide range of bees, and other insects, Heinrich explains their dazzling variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations to what, for them, is a world of violent extremes of temperature. These mechanisms are apparent only through precise observations, but the small body size of insects poses large technical difficulties in whole-animal experiments, engendering controversy about the reliability of the data thus derived. Emphasizing an experimental approach, Heinrich pinpoints where he believes studies have gone astray, describing in detail both groundbreaking experiments and those which leave a reasonable doubt about the mechanism being interpreted. He reviews relevant work on the major taxa to show the underlying patterns that draw diversity together, opines on current controversies, and identifies questions that call for further study.
Physiologists, ecologists, entomologists, and zoologists—in fact, all biologists—will be stimulated and challenged to further research by this masterly synthesis of a new field; it will also appeal to informed readers interested in general science.
Adamshick’s poems are characteristically accessible and navigable. From the political to the erotic and everywhere in between, these poems take us on a sometimes sober, sometimes raunchy ride.
Incorporating the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, Florence Marryat, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as contemporary depictions of the hotels in Mad Men,American Horror Story, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Black examines how the hotel supported a corporate identity that would ultimately assist in the rise of modern capitalist structures and the middle class. In this way, Hotel London exposes the aggravations of class stratifications through the operations of status inside hotel life, giving a unique perspective on Victorian London that could only come from the stories of a hotel.
A specter, haunting the edges of society: because neoliberalism insists there are no social classes, thus, there is no working class, the main subject of Hotel Oblivion, a working class subject, does not exist. With no access to a past, she has no home, no history, no memory. And yet, despite all this, she will not assimilate. Instead, this book chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again. In the end, of course, the only true exit and only possibility for emancipation for the working class subject is through a return to one’s self. In Hotel Oblivion, through a series of fragments and interrelated poems, Cruz resists invisibilizing forces, undergoing numerous attempts at transfiguration in a concerted effort to escape her fate.
This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.
Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.
Houghton Library—the primary repository for Harvard University’s rare books, manuscripts, and much more—celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2017. Houghton’s holdings span nearly the entire history of the written word, from papyrus to the laptop. This anniversary volume presents a snapshot of the unique items that fill the library’s shelves.
From miniature books composed by a teenage Charlotte Brontë to a massive medieval manuscript hymnbook; from the plays of Shakespeare to costume designs for Star Trek; and from the discoveries of Copernicus to the laptops of twenty-first century writers, the selections celebrate great achievements in many and diverse fields of human endeavor. For the first time, readers will be able to tour the Houghton Library collection—which draws thousands of visitors from around the world each year—from home, with full-color illustrations.
A young woman who has been living abroad returns to her hometown of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her sister Ines—a beautiful, impetuous painter—who still lives there, soon appears and promptly asks for financial help. But the returning sister knew this was coming—it is how their relationship has always worked. And this time, she’s determined that that will change.
But our plans don’t always hold up to the surprises presented by life—and when the sister finds herself about to drift into an affair with Ines’s lover, the two women grow unexpectedly closer. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a tale of disorientation in a modern, fundamentally rootless society that has become increasingly erratic and self-absorbed—it is a powerful exploration of the difficulties of intimacy and addiction.
Hour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it “a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender.” Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.
At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a specialty of the renowned Ghent–Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or “books of hours,” from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery.
This manuscript owes its name to the French queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. The manuscript was painted by an artist known as the David Master, one of the renowned Flemish illuminators of the sixteenth century. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes, and detailed city scenes form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive.
Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-color facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.
A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.
As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants’ social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan.
Amid the turbulent swirl of foreign intrigue, external and internal threats to the young nation’s existence, and the domestic partisan wrangling of the 1790s, the United States Congress solidified its role as the national legislature. The ten essays in The House and Senate in the 1790s demonstrate the mechanisms by which this bicameral legislature developed its institutional identity. The first essay sets the scene for the institutional development of Congress by examining its constitutional origins and the efforts of the Founders to empower the new national legislature. The five following essays focus on two related mechanisms—petitioning and lobbying—by which citizens and private interests communicated with national lawmakers.
Although scholars tend to see lobbying as a later nineteenth-century development, the papers presented here clearly demonstrate the existence of lobbyists and lobbying in the 1790s. The final four papers examine other aspects of the institutional development of the House and the Senate, including the evolution of political parties and congressional leadership.
The essays in this collection, the third volume in the series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801, originated in a series of conferences held by the United States Capitol Historical Society from 1994 to 2001.
During the later half of the nineteenth century, a majority of Brazilian women worked, most as domestic servants, either slave or free. House and Street re-creates the working and personal lives of these women, drawing on a wealth of documentation from archival, court, and church records.
Lauderdale Graham traces the intricate and ambivalent relations that existed between masters and servants. She shows how for servants the house could be a place of protection—as well as oppression—while the street could be dangerous—but also more autonomous. She integrates her discoveries with larger events taking place in Rio de Janeiro during the period, including the epidemics of the 1850s, the abolition of slavery, the demolition of slums, and major improvements in sanitation during the first decade of the 1900s.
There exists a rich literature on the workings of the United States Congress, but The House at Work is the first book to focus on the institutional performance of the House of Representatives. A complete overview of the complex functioning and dynamics of Congress is presented by distinguished contributors, drawing upon both real-life experience and organization theory.
Each essay presents material on activities central to legislative work in the House, including the internal operations of member and committee offices, the administrative support system of the House, the impact of organizational structure and information resources on individual decision making, the expanding application of computer technology, the character of the personnel system, and the processing of constituent casework.
Nearly all contributors were professional staff members of the U.S. House Commission on Administrative Review in 1976 and 1977, whose analysis of the internal operations of the House was acomprehensive investigation. Their academic training, buttressed by significant practical experience on Capitol Hill, makes this book of great value to both students and scholars of the legislative process. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Glenn R. Parker, Thomas E. Cavanagh, Allan J. Katz, John R. Johannes, Thomas J. O'Donnell, David W. Brady, Louis Sandy Maisel, Susan Webb Hammond, Jarold A. Kieffer, James A. Thurber, and Jeffrey A. Goldberg.
King’s informal headquarters in Selma was the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson and their young daughter, Jawana. The House by the Side of the Road is Richie Jean’s firsthand account of the private meetings King and his lieutenants, including Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis, held in the haven of the Jackson home.
Sullivan Jackson was an African American dentist in Selma and a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement. Richie Jean was a close childhood friend of King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, a native of nearby Marion, Alabama. Richie Jean’s fascinating account narrates how, in the fraught months of 1965 that preceded the Voting Rights March, King and his inner circle held planning sessions and met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar to negotiate strategies for the event.
Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson made a televised addressed to a joint session of Congress on Monday, March 15. Jackson relates the intimate scene of King and his lieutenants watching as Johnson called the nation to dedicate itself to equal rights for all and ending his address with the words: “We shall overcome.” Five months later, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on August 6.
The major motion picture Selma now commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In it, Niecy Nash and Kent Faulcon star as Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson among a cast including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Wilkinson, and Cuba Gooding Jr. A gripping primary source, The House by the Side of the Road illuminates the private story whose public outcomes electrified the world and changed the course of American history.
In A House Divided, Richard Orr Curry investigates the political realities that led to the breakup of the Old Dominion and the emergence of a new state during the Civil War. Orr's analysis of the intra-state conflicts over political, economic, and social issues, party factions of Unionism and Secessionism and multiple layers of division within those factions, offer fascinating and original insights into the long debate that would lead to the ratification of the West Virginia state constitution in 1863.
- Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST)
- Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award
- Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year
- Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award
- Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society
- Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies)
- Winner of a 2023 The Brinck Book Award and Lecture series (University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning)
- Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals)
Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint.
Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.
With House Full, Lakshmi Srinivas takes readers deep into the moviegoing experience in India, showing us what it’s actually like to line up for a hot ticket and see a movie in a jam-packed theater with more than a thousand seats. Building her account on countless trips to the cinema and hundreds of hours of conversation with film audiences, fans, and industry insiders, Srinivas brings the moviegoing experience to life, revealing a kind of audience that, far from passively consuming the images on the screen, is actively engaged with them. People talk, shout, whistle, cheer; others sing along, mimic, or dance; at times audiences even bring some of the ritual practices of Hindu worship into the cinema, propitiating the stars onscreen with incense and camphor. The picture Srinivas paints of Indian filmgoing is immersive, fascinating, and deeply empathetic, giving us an unprecedented understanding of the audience’s lived experience—an aspect of Indian film studies that has been largely overlooked.
A bold account of property reform during the French Revolution, arguing that the lofty democratic ideals enshrined by revolutionary leaders were rarely secured in practice—with lasting consequences.
Property reform was at the heart of the French Revolution. As lawmakers proclaimed at the time, and as historians have long echoed, the Revolution created modern property rights. Under the new regime, property was redefined as an individual right to which all citizens were entitled. Yet as the state seized assets and prepared them for sale, administrators quickly found that realizing the dream of democratic property rights was far more complicated than simply rewriting laws.
H. B. Callaway sifts through records on Parisian émigrés who fled the country during the Revolution, leaving behind property that the state tried to confiscate. Immediately, officials faced difficult questions about what constituted property, how to prove ownership, and how to navigate the complexities of credit arrangements and family lineage. Mothers fought to protect the inheritances of their children, tenants angled to avoid rent payments, and creditors sought their dues. In attempting to execute policy, administrators regularly exercised their own judgment on the validity of claims. Their records reveal far more continuity between the Old Regime and revolutionary practices than the law proclaimed. Property ownership continued to depend on webs of connections beyond the citizen-state relationship, reinforced by customary law and inheritance traditions. The resulting property system was a product of contingent, on-the-ground negotiations as much as revolutionary law.
The House in the Rue Saint-Fiacre takes stock of the contradictions on which modern property rights were founded. As Callaway shows, the property confiscations of Parisian émigrés are a powerful, clarifying lens on the idea of ownership even as it exists today.
Ruth Stone has always eschewed self-promotion and, in the words of Leslie Fiedler, "has never been a member of any school or clique or gaggle of mutual admirers." But her poems speak so vibrantly for her that she cannot be ignored.
In her preface to this volume, Sandra M. Gilbert declares that Stone’s "intense attention to the ordinary transforms it into (or reveals it as) the extraordinary. Her passionate verses evoke impassioned responses." At the same time, Gilbert continues, the essays collected here "consistently testify to Stone’s radical unworldliness, in particular her insouciant contempt for the ‘floor walkers and straw bosses’ who sometimes seem to control the poetry ‘factory’ both inside and outside the university."
Wendy Barker and Sandra Gilbert have organized the book into three sections: "Knowing Ruth Stone," "A Life of Art," and "Reading Ruth Stone." In "Knowing Ruth Stone," writers of different generations who have known the poet over the years provide memoirs. Noting Stone’s singularity, Fiedler points out that "she resists all labels" and is "one of the few contemporaries whom it is possible to think of simply as a ‘poet.’" Sharon Olds defines her vitality ("A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands"), and Jan Freeman praises her aesthetic intensity ("Everything in the life of Ruth Stone is integrated with poetry").
"A Life of Art" sketches the outlines of Stone’s career and traces her evolution as a poet. Barker and Norman Friedman, for example, trace her development from the "high spirits and elegant craft" of her first volume—Inan Iridescent Time— through the "deepening shadows," "poignant wit," and "bittersweet meditations" of her later work. In interviews separated by decades (one in the 1970s and one in the 1990s), Sandra Gilbert and Robert Bradley discuss with Stone her own sense of her aesthetic origins and literary growth.
"Reading Ruth Stone" is an examination of Stone’s key themes and modes. Diane Wakoski and Diana O’Hehir focus on the tragicomic vision that colors much of her work; Kevin Clark and Elyse Blankley explore the political aspects of her poetry; Roger Gilbert analyzes her "often uncannily astute insights into the ‘otherness’ of other lives"; Janet Lowery and Kandace Brill Lombart draw on the biographical background of Stone’s "grief work"; and Sandra Gilbert studies her caritas, her empathic love that redeems pain.
This new edition of Adler's autobiography brings back into print a book that was a mass phenomenon, in both hardback and paperback, when it was first published. A self-consciously literary work, A House Is Not a Home provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the "white slavery" scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption.
Adler's story fills an important gap in the history of immigrant life, urban experience, and organized crime in New York City. While most other accounts of the New York underworld focus on the lives of men, from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York through more recent works on Jewish and Italian gangsters, this book brings women's lives and problems to the forefront.
A House Is Not a Home is compellingly readable and was popular enough to draw Hollywood's attention in the early 1960s—leading to a film starring Shelley Winters as Adler. The book has been largely forgotten in the ensuing decades, lost both to its initial audience of general readers and to scholars in women's studies, immigration history, and autobiography who are likely to find it a treasure trove. Now, with a new introduction by Rachel Rubin that contextualizes Adler's life and literary achievement, A House Is Not a Home is again available to the many readers who have come to understand such "marginal" life stories as a special refraction of the more typical American success narrative.
As Tantner shows, house numbers started their lives in a gray area between the military, tax authorities, and early police forces. With an engaging style, he moves from the introduction of house numbers in European towns in the eighteenth century, through the spread of the numbering system in the nineteenth century, and on into its global adoption today. He uncovers a contentious past, telling the stories of the many people who have resisted having their homes so systematically ordered. Along the way, his visual journey showcases a surprising diversity of house number displays, visiting historic addresses from the London house on Strand-on-the-Green that is numbered “Nought” to 1819 Ruston, Louisiana.
The result is a story that will forever change the way you see a city, one that elevates the seemingly insignificant house number to an important place in the history of urban planning.
Explores the connection between baseball card collecting and nostalgia among men of the baby boom.
Baseball card collecting carries with it images of idealized boyhoods in the sprawling American suburbs of the postwar era. Yet in the past twenty years, it has grown from a pastime for children to a big-money pursuit taken seriously by adults. In A House of Cards, John Bloom uses interviews with collectors, dealers, and hobbyists as well as analysis of the baseball card industry and extensive firsthand observations to ask what this hobby tells us about nostalgia, work, play, masculinity, and race and gender relations among collectors.
Beginning in the late 1970s and into the early 1990s, baseball card collecting grew into a business that embodied traditional masculine values such as competition, savvy, and industry. In A House of Cards, Bloom interviews collectors who reveal ambivalence about the hobby’s emphasis on these values, often focusing on its alienating, lonely, and unfulfilling aspects. They express nostalgia for the ideal childhood world many middle-class white males experienced in the postwar years, when they perceived baseball card collecting as a form of play, not a moneymaking enterprise. Bloom links this nostalgia to anxieties about deindustrialization and the rise of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. He examines the gendered nature of swap meets as well as the views of masculinity expressed by the collectors: Is the purpose of baseball card collecting to form a community of adults to reminisce or to inculcate young men with traditional masculine values? Is it to establish “connectedness” or to make money? Are collectors striving to reinforce the dominant culture or question it through their attempts to create their own meaning out of what are, in fact, mass-produced commercial artifacts? Bloom provides a fascinating exploration of male fan culture, ultimately providing insight into the ways white men of the baby boom view themselves, masculinity, and the culture at large. [Excerpt:]“Collectors often decried how money had ruined their hobby, making it hard for them to form meaningful friendships through their cards. Money, however, made the hobby not only profitable but also more serious, more instrumental, and therefore more manly. The same collectors who complained about greed often bragged in the same interview about the value of their cards. Yet money, in turn, made the hobby less akin to child’s play and more like work: lonely, competitive, unfulfilling, and alienating.”
Winner of the Gunter Grass Prize
Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she and discovers everyone-and everything-has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.
Richly imagined, weaving in anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. Since its original publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.
Though the banking crisis captured the public’s attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors. Increasing the flow of credit, they show, is disastrously counterproductive when the fundamental problem is too much debt. As their research shows, excessive household debt leads to foreclosures, causing individuals to spend less and save more. Less spending means less demand for goods, followed by declines in production and huge job losses. How do we end such a cycle? With a direct attack on debt, say Mian and Sufi. More aggressive debt forgiveness after the crash helps, but as they illustrate, we can be rid of painful bubble-and-bust episodes only if the financial system moves away from its reliance on inflexible debt contracts. As an example, they propose new mortgage contracts that are built on the principle of risk-sharing, a concept that would have prevented the housing bubble from emerging in the first place.
Thoroughly grounded in compelling economic evidence, House of Debt offers convincing answers to some of the most important questions facing the modern economy today: Why do severe recessions happen? Could we have prevented the Great Recession and its consequences? And what actions are needed to prevent such crises going forward?
In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low’s formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing.
Ultimately, these poems not only reconstruct an important historical event, but they also put pressure on the gaps, silences, and violence of the archive. Low asks readers to question not only what is remembered, but how history is remembered—and who is forgotten from it. Reflecting on the injustice of the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh lamented that though “the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus . . . no American ever was punished, not one.” These poems challenge this attempted erasure.
Founded in a working-class neighborhood in southeast Houston in 1941, Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios is a major independent studio that has produced a multitude of influential hit records in an astonishingly diverse range of genres. Its roster of recorded musicians includes Lightnin' Hopkins, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Junior Parker, Clifton Chenier, Sir Douglas Quintet, 13th Floor Elevators, Freddy Fender, Kinky Friedman, Ray Benson, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, Beyoncé and Destiny's Child, and many, many more.
In House of Hits, Andy Bradley and Roger Wood chronicle the fascinating history of Gold Star/SugarHill, telling a story that effectively covers the postwar popular music industry. They describe how Houston's lack of zoning ordinances allowed founder Bill Quinn's house studio to grow into a large studio complex, just as SugarHill's willingness to transcend musical boundaries transformed it into of one of the most storied recording enterprises in America. The authors offer behind-the-scenes accounts of numerous hit recordings, spiced with anecdotes from studio insiders and musicians who recorded at SugarHill. Bradley and Wood also place significant emphasis on the role of technology in shaping the music and the evolution of the music business. They include in-depth biographies of regional stars and analysis of the various styles of music they represent, as well as a list of all of Gold Star/SugarHill's recordings that made the Billboard charts and extensive selected historical discographies of the studio's recordings.
With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.
Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.
On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.
In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.
The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events.
Winner of the Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award.
"Whether or not one accepts Susan Lobo's optimistic analysis, her ability to translate the apparent chaos of shanty-town lives into such neat patterns and to help outsiders view life as the inhabitants do are important contributions." —Inter-American Review of Bibliography
"An extremely competent ethnography, simple and straightforward." —Anthropos
"A pleasure to read, a mine of information which will be useful in teaching students to formulate their own hypotheses." —International Journal of Urban & Regional Research
"Very well written and provides a great wealth of the liveliest sort of ethnographic detail." —Latin American Research Review
"Lobo's study of two squatter settlements in Lima provides a solid, well-written, detailed, traditional ethnography of poor families in a Third World urban setting." —Hispanic American Historical Review
"This well-written account . . . has a lot of heart and feeling for the human face of the urban poor." —International Migration Review
Employing the trope of architecture, Jane Sutton envisions the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house: a structure erected in ancient Greece by men that, historically, has made room for women but has also denied them the authority and agency to speak from within. Sutton’s central argument is that all attempts to include women in rhetoric exclude them from meaningful authority in due course, and this exclusion has been built into the foundations of rhetoric.
Drawing on personal experience, the spatial tropes of ancient Greek architecture, and the study of women who attained significant places in the house of rhetoric, Sutton highlights a number of decisive turns where women were able to increase their rhetorical access but were not able to achieve full authority, among them the work of Frances Wright, Lucy Stone, and suffragists Mott, Anthony, and Stanton; a visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the busts that became the Portrait Monument were displayed in the Woman’s Building (a sideshow, in essence); and a study of working-class women employed as telephone operators in New York in 1919.
With all the undeniable successes—socially, politically, and financially— of modern women, it appears that women are now populating the house of rhetoric as never before. But getting in the house and having public authority once inside are not the same thing. Sutton argues that women “can only act as far as the house permits.” Sojourn calls for a fundamental change in the very foundations of rhetoric.
Three rulers from the House of Orange-Nassau reigned over the Netherlands from 1813 to 1890: King William I from 1813 to 1840, King William II from 1840 to 1849, and King William III from 1849 to 1890. Theirs is an epic tale of joy and tragedy, progress and catastrophe, disappointment and glory—all set against the backdrop of a Europe plagued by war and revolution.
The House of Orange in Revolution and War relates one and a half centuries of House of Orange history in a gripping narrative, leading the reader from the last stadholders of the Dutch Republic to the modern monarchy of the early twentieth century, from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars to World War I and the European Revolutions that came after it.
Laurence Gonzales began his successful publishing career in 1989 with the publication of The Still Point and later The Hero’s Apprentice (1994), both with the University of Arkansas Press. From these collections of essays he went on to write for renowned magazines in addition to publishing several books, including the best selling Deep Survival. His journalism garnered two National Magazine Awards, and his latest nonfiction book, Surviving Survival, was named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2012.
This new collection of essays shows us the sometimes hair-raising, sometimes heart-wrenching writing that Gonzales has become known for. This “compelling and trustworthy guide” (Booklist) takes us from a maximum-security prison to a cancer ward, from a mental institution to the World Trade Center. Among the essays included is “Marion Prison,” a National Magazine Award finalist, with its intimate view inside the most maximum security prison in America. “House of Pain” takes the reader into the life of a brain surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a grim world that few ever see. “Rites of Spring,” another National Magazine Award finalist, follows Gonzales and his wife on their journey through cancer, not once, but twice.
Other stories venture above the Arctic Circle, flying deep into the Alaskan wilderness among grizzly bears and trumpeter swans; explore aerobatics in high-performance aircraft; and eulogize Memphis and Miami as American cities that mourn their fates in uniquely different ways.
Violet Crown Award, Writers League of Texas, 2007
Citation, San Antonio Conservation Society, 2009
Scarred by the deaths of his mother and sisters and the failure of his father's business, a young man dreamed of making enough money to retire early and retreat into the secure world that his childhood tragedies had torn from him. But Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning totally against the tide of avaricious capitalism, he determined to make a fortune by doing good. Starting with that unlikely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby founded a cafeteria empire that by the 1980s had revenues second only to McDonald's. So successfully did Luby and his heirs satisfy the tastes of America that Luby's became the country's largest cafeteria chain, creating more millionaires per capita among its employees than any other corporation of its size. Even more surprising, the company stayed true to Harry Luby's vision for eight decades, making money by treating its customers and employees exceptionally well.
Written with the sweep and drama of a novel, House of Plenty tells the engrossing story of Luby's founding and phenomenal growth, its long run as America's favorite family restaurant during the post-World War II decades, its financial failure during the greed-driven 1990s when non-family leadership jettisoned the company's proven business model, and its recent struggle back to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider stories and company records to recapture the forces that propelled the company to its greatest heights, including its unprecedented practices of allowing store managers to keep 40 percent of net profits and issuing stock to all employees, which allowed thousands of Luby's workers to achieve the American dream of honestly earned prosperity. The authors also plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, including a hushed-up theft that split the family for decades; the 1991 mass shooting at the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's good name across headlines nationwide; and the rapacious over-expansion that more than doubled the company's size in nine years (1987-1996), pushed it into bankruptcy, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide.
Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there are no second acts in American lives," House of Plenty tells the epic story of an iconic American institution that has risen, fallen, and found redemption—with no curtain call in sight.
More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future--but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.
Perhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics.
A House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion.
Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.
In The House of Song, he offers a hundred new poems in six parts. At turns elegiac, comic, and nostalgic, these poems venture to the seemingly infinitesimal points where people, legends, and culture collide with nature, memory, and action.
With characteristic wit and brevity, Wagoner chronicles the material invasions of the natural world, reconsidering Thoreau amid ruminations on voyeurs and destroyers, slug watchers and moth collectors.
The House of Song asserts Wagoner's place among the finest of American poets, past and present.
Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecessor and one that would illustrate “the folly” of tumbling down on posterity “an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate.” Many critics have faulted the novel for its explaining away of hereditary guilt or its contradictory denial of it. Denis Donoghue instructs the reader in a fresh appreciation of the novel.
The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The House of the Seven Gables in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Bringing this little-known story to light, The House on Lemon Street details the Haradas' decision to fight for the American dream. Chronicling their experiences from their immigration to the United States through their legal battle over their home, their incarceration during World War II, and their lives after the war, this book tells the story of the family's participation in the struggle for human and civil rights, social justice, property and legal rights, and fair treatment of immigrants in the United States.
The Harada family's quest for acceptance illuminates the deep underpinnings of anti-Asian animus, which set the stage for Executive Order 9066, and recognizes fundamental elements of our nation's anti-immigrant history that continue to shape the American story. It will be worthwhile for anyone interested in the Japanese American experience in the twentieth century, immigration history, public history, and law.
This publication was made possible with the support of Naomi, Kathleen, Ken, and Paul Harada, who donated funds in memory of their father, Harold Shigetaka Harada, honoring his quest for justice and civil rights. Additional support for this publication was also provided, in part, by UCLA's Aratani Endowed Chair as well as Wallace T. Kido, Joel B. Klein, Elizabeth A. Uno, and Rosalind K. Uno.
More than 2.5 million Americans are addicted to opioids, some half-million of these to heroin. For many of them, their drug addiction leads to lives of demoralization, homelessness, and constant peril. For parents, a child’s addiction upends family life, catapulting them onto a path no longer prescribed by Dr. Spock, but by Dante’s Inferno. Within this ten-year crucible, Paula is transformed by an excruciating, inescapable truth: the difference between what she can do and what she cannot do.
Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.
This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan García Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary "Mexican School" with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society.
Our penchant for keeping houseplants is an ancient practice dating back to the Pharaohs. House Plants explores the stories behind the plants we bring home and how they were transformed from wild plants into members of our households.
A billion-dollar global industry, house plants provide interaction with nature and contribute to our health, happiness, and well-being. They also support their own miniature ecosystems and are part of the home biome.
Featuring many superb illustrations, House Plants explores both their botanical history and cultural impact, from song (Gracie Fields’s “Biggest Aspidistra in the World”), literature (Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and cinema (Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors) to fashion, technology, contemporary design, and painting.
Through letters and diaries, church and business records, newspaper accounts, legal documents, and the recollections of neighbors who knew them, Luey introduces the diverse cast of historical characters who lived in these houses at various times from 1800 to the 2000s, including a Japanese castaway and his rescuer, a self-made millionaire, a seagoing adventurer, a religious pioneer, and an entrepreneurial immigrant. All of the houses are still standing and all but a lighthouse are still called home. In House Stories, Luey asks readers to join her as she considers the multiple meanings of "home" for these people and their families.
Veteran reporter Ray Long draws on four decades of observing state government to provide the definitive political analysis of Michael Madigan. Secretive, intimidating, shrewd, power-hungry--Madigan mesmerized his admirers and often left his opponents too beaten down to oppose him. Long vividly recreates the battles that defined the Madigan era, from stunning James Thompson with a lightning-strike tax increase, to pressing for a pension overhaul that ultimately failed in the courts, to steering the House toward the Rod Blagojevich impeachment. Long also shines a light on the machinery that kept the Speaker in power. Head of a patronage army, Madigan ruthlessly used his influence and fundraising prowess to reward loyalists and aid his daughter’s electoral fortunes. At the same time, he reshaped bills to guarantee he and his Democratic troops shared in the partisan spoils of his legislative victories. Yet Madigan’s position as the state’s seemingly invulnerable power broker could not survive scandals among his close associates and the widespread belief that his time as Speaker had finally reached its end.
Unsparing and authoritative, The House That Madigan Built is the page-turning account of one the most powerful politicians in Illinois history.
In a state assumed to have a constitutionally weak governor, the Speaker of the Texas House wields enormous power, with the ability to almost single-handedly dictate the legislative agenda. The House Will Come to Order charts the evolution of the Speaker's role from a relatively obscure office to one of the most powerful in the state. This fascinating account, drawn from the Briscoe Center's oral history project on the former Speakers, is the story of transition, modernization, and power struggles.
Weaving a compelling story of scandal, service, and opportunity, Patrick Cox and Michael Phillips describe the divisions within the traditional Democratic Party, the ascendance of Republicans, and how Texas business, agriculture, and media shaped perceptions of officeholders. While the governor and lieutenant governor wielded their power, the authors show how the modern Texas House Speaker built an office of equal power as the state became more complex and diverse. The authors also explore how race, class, and gender affected this transition as they explain the importance of the office in Texas and the impact the state's Speakers have had on national politics.
At the apex of its power, the Texas House Speaker's role at last receives the critical consideration it deserves.
The mysterious houseboat Veronica motors across a postapocalyptic freshwater lake, inhabited by a black-haired witch and her young male ward. They explore an unfolding world of shape-shifting moons, vampire moths, and submerged witch cemeteries—a world where voluntary imprisonment holds its own appeal and the heart yearns for the delicate dance between blood and power, beauty and terror.
Neither a pirate nor a mere witch, she is an artist, a master of water and time who shapes reality with her baffling powers. This lyrical and compelling novel beckons readers to explore the enigmatic depths of its prose, inviting them to traverse the waters of wonder and bewilderment. Embrace the bewitching allure of The Houseboat Veronica and lose yourself in its enchanting embrace.
In House/Garden/Nation the narratives of five Centro-Caribbean writers illustrate these times of transition: Dulce María Loynáz, from colonial rule to independence in Cuba; Jean Rhys, from colony to commonwealth in Dominica; Simone Schwarz-Bart, from slave to free labor in Guadeloupe; Gioconda Belli, from oligarchic capitalism to social democratic socialism in Nicaragua; and Teresa de la Parra, from independence to modernity in Venezuela. Focusing on the nation as garden, hacienda, or plantation, Rodríguez shows us these writers debating the predicament of women under nation formation from within the confines of marriage and home.
In reading these post-colonial literatures by women facing the crisis of transition, this study highlights urgent questions of destitution, migration, exile, and inexperience, but also networks of value allotted to women: beauty, clothing, love. As a counterpoint on issues of legality, policy, and marriage, Rodriguez includes a chapter on male writers: José Eustacio Rivera, Omar Cabezas, and Romulo Gallegos. Her work presents a sobering picture of women at a crossroads, continually circumscribed by history and culture, writing their way.
The authors take a methodological approach that integrates the study of household spatial organization with consideration of archaeological formation processes. Repeating the same set of analyses for each floor, they examine stability from standpoints of occupation and abandonment cycles, structure and organization of activity areas, and variation in positioning of wealth-related items. This volume is an outstanding example of research undertaken through a collaborative partnership between scholars from the University of Montana and the community of the St’át’imc Nation.
Discusses the concepts of “home,” “house,” and “household” in past societies
Because archaeology seeks to understand past societies, the concepts of "home," "house," and "household" are important. Yet they can be the most elusive of ideas. Are they the space occupied by a nuclear family or by an extended one? Is it a built structure or the sum of its contents? Is it a shelter against the elements, a gendered space, or an ephemeral place tied to emotion? We somehow believe that the household is a basic unit of culture but have failed to develop a theory for understanding the diversity of households in the historic (and prehistoric) periods.
In an effort to clarify these questions, this volume examines a broad range of households—a Spanish colonial rancho along the Rio Grande, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, plantations in South Carolina and the Bahamas, a Colorado coal camp, a frontier Arkansas farm, a Freedman's Town eventually swallowed by Dallas, and plantations across the South—to define and theorize domestic space. The essays devolve from many disciplines, but all approach households from an archaeological perspective, looking at landscape analysis, excavations, reanalyzed collections, or archival records. Together, the essays present a body of knowledge that takes the identification, analysis, and interpretation of households far beyond current conceptions.
Household Economy at Wall Ridge tells the story of a Native American household that occupied a lodge on the eastern Plains border during the early 1300s AD. Contributors use cutting-edge methods and the site’s unparalleled archaeological record to shed light on the daily technological, subsistence, and dietary aspects of the occupants’ lives. This work represents the first comprehensive study of a prehistoric Central Plains household in over half a century.
The research covers archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, dating, ceramics, lithics, bone and shell tools, diet, climate, ecology, and more. The study of plant and animal usage from the lodge stands as a tour de force of analytical methods, including stable isotope data that permit the discovery of dietary items missed by traditional studies. Many of these items have never been reported before from Central Plains sites. The book firmly sets the site’s occupancy at AD 1305, with a margin of error of only a few years. This result, based on high-precision dating methods, exceeds in accuracy all previously dated Plains lodges and provides a temporal backdrop for evaluating household activities.
As direct descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204) and his son Teika (1162–1244), the heirs of the noble Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage that spans over eight hundred years. During all that time, their primary goal has been to sustain the poetic enterprise, or michi (way), of the house and to safeguard its literary assets.
Steven D. Carter weaves together strands of family history, literary criticism, and historical research into a coherent narrative about the evolution of the Reizei Way. What emerges from this innovative approach is an elegant portrait of the Reizei poets as participants in a collective institution devoted more to the continuity of family poetic practices and ideals than to the concept of individual expression that is so central to more modern poetic culture.
In addition to the narrative chapters, the book also features an extensive appendix of one hundred poems from over the centuries, by poets who were affiliated with the Reizei house. Carter’s annotations provide essential critical context for this selection of poems, and his deft translations underscore the rich contributions of the Reizei family and their many disciples to the Japanese poetic tradition.
Little is known about the variability present at pithouse sites away from the major Mimbres and Gila River Valleys. Nonriverine occupations have been understudied until now. This book describes subsistence and settlement practices and compares the results with recent research conducted at the larger villages in the Mimbres River Valley. Despite basic similarities in material culture, households at La Gila Encantada appear to have followed different trajectories than those along the rivers. Examining these differences, archaeologist Barbara J. Roth provides insights into some of the reasons why they existed and shows that the variability present in pithouse occupations over the years was tied to multiple factors, including environmental differences, economic practices, and the social composition of groups occupying the sites. With chapters assessing ceramic data, chipped and groundstone analysis, shell and mineral jewelry, and regional context, this look at the past offers relevant insights into current issues in Southwest archaeology, including identity, interaction, and household organization.
With Housekeeping by Design, David Brody introduces us to those people—the housekeepers whose labor keeps the rooms clean and the guests happy. Through unprecedented access to staff at several hotels, Brody shows us just how much work goes on behind the scenes—and how much management goes out of its way to make sure that labor stays hidden. We see the incredible amount of hard physical work that is involved in cleaning and preparing a room, how spaces, furniture, and other objects are designed to facilitate a smooth flow of hidden labor, and, crucially, how that design could be improved for workers and management alike if front-line staff were involved in the design process. After reading this fascinating exposé of the ways hotels work—or don’t for housekeepers—one thing is certain: checking in will never be the same again.
A classic, available again.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography.
Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan’s last book, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines was the first to regard a set of problems that is still currently debated: what does domestic architecture show anthropologists and archaeologists about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture? As William Longacre makes clear in the new introduction, the development of anthropological archaeology was profoundly affected by this book, and its impact continues to resonate.
Demonstrating a lack of ethnocentrism rare for his day, Morgan gathered most of his own data from the field and from a gigantic correspondence. The result is a lively, readable work that is still fascinating and instructive today.
Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.
When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis.
In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."
Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects—the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard—help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how “memory communities” assert connections between the past and the present.
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