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Yellowstone Wildlife
Ecology and Natural History of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
Paul A. Johnsgard
University Press of Colorado, 2013
Yellowstone Wildlife is a natural history of the wildlife species that call Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem their home. Illustrated with stunning images by renowned wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen, Yellowstone Wildlife describes the lives of species in the park, exploring their habitats from the Grand Tetons to Jackson Hole.

 From charismatic megafauna like elk, bison, wolves, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears, to smaller mammals like bats, pikas, beavers, and otters, to some of the 279 species of birds, Johnsgard describes the behavior of animals throughout the seasons, with sections on what summer and autumn mean to the wildlife of the park, especially with the intrusion of millions of tourists each year. Enhanced by Mangelsen’s wildlife photography, Yellowstone Wildlife reveals the beauty and complexity of these species’ intertwined lives and that of Yellowstone’s greater ecosystem.
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The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights
Law, Labor, and the Persistence of Primitive Accumulation
Sean Johnson Andrews
Temple University Press, 2019

The protection and accumulation of intellectual property rights—like property rights in general—is one of the most important contemporary American values. In his cogent book, The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights, Sean Johnson Andrews shows that the meaning, power, and value of intellectual properties are the consequence of an extended process of cultural production. 

Johnson Andrews argues that it is deeper ideological and historical roots which demand that, in the contemporary global, digital economy, all property rights be held sacrosanct and all value must flow back to the legal owner.  

Johnson Andrews explains that if we want to rebalance the protection of copyrights and trademarks, we should focus on undermining the reified culture of property that underpins capitalism as a whole. He outlines a framework for analyzing culture; situates intellectual property rights in the history of capitalist property relations; synthesizes key theories of media, politics, and law; and ultimately provides scholars and activists a path to imagining a different future where we prioritize our collective production of value in the commons.

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Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999
Ben F. Johnson III
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
This elegantly written narrative traces Arkansas's evolution from a primarily rural society in the early 1900s to its expanding manufacturing economy and its growing prosperity and parity with the rest of the nation. Ben Johnson explores the influence of federal-state relations, beginning with the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt and continuing through the administrations of native son Bill Clinton. With particular sensitivity, he examines organized labor in the timber industry and in row crop agriculture; school desegregation, "white flight," and the private academy movement in the delta region; the growth of Wal-Mart and the poultry industry in the northwest section of the state; and the expansion of outdoor recreation and tourism as lakes were constructed and game populations rejuvenated. This book is particularly impressive for the breadth of its scope. Johnson offers detailed information on women, music and literature, organized religion, environmental trends, and other important cultural influences. Third in the popular Histories of Arkansas series, Arkansas in Modern America extends the narrative into the contemporary era with a format aimed at students and general readers. This important book will set the standard, for years to come, for analysis and interpretation of Arkansas's place in the twentieth century.
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Arkansas in Modern America since 1930
Ben F. Johnson III
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
This second edition of Arkansas in Modern America since 1930 represents a significant rewriting of and elaboration on the first edition, published in 2000. Historian Ben F. Johnson fills in gaps, reconsiders his original conclusions, and reflects on new developments in historical scholarship, extending the book’s analysis of the political, economic, social, and cultural positions into 2018.

Particularly impressive for the breadth of its scope, Arkansas in Modern America since 1930 offers an overview of the factors that moved Arkansas from a primarily rural society to one more in step with the modern economy and perspectives of the nation as a whole. The narrative covers the roles of Daisy Bates, Sam Walton, Don Tyson, Bill Clinton, and other influential figures in the state’s history to reveal a state shaped by global as much as by local forces. The second edition of this important book will continue to set the standard for analysis and interpretation of Arkansas’s place in the contemporary world.

 
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John Barleycorn Must Die
The War Against Drink in Arkansas
Ben F. Johnson III
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
As the traditional British folk song that the rock group Traffic made famous in the 1970s and that lends its name to this book’s title demonstrates, the battle against John Barleycorn was a losing one: “And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl / Proved the strongest man at last.” Ben Johnson’s sweeping, highly readable, and extensively illustrated “spirited” overview of Arkansas’s efforts to regulate and halt the consumption of alcohol reveals much about the texture of life and politics in the state—and country—as Arkansas grappled with strong opinions on both sides. After early attempts to keep drink from the American Indians during the colonial period, temperance groups’ efforts switched to antebellum towns and middle-class citizens. After the Civil War new federal taxes on whiskey production led to violence between revenue agents and moonshiners, and the state joined the growing national movement against saloons that culminated in 1915 when the legislature approved a measure to halt the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol—including that of Arkansas’s substantial wine industry. The state supported national prohibition, but people became disillusioned with the widespread violations of the law. However, the state didn’t repeal its own prohibition law until a fiscal crisis in 1935 required it in order to raise revenue. The new law only authorized retail liquor stores, not the return of taverns or bars. A final effort to restore laws against John Barleycorn in 1950 was rebuffed by voters. Still, there are a number of counties in Arkansas that remain dry and disputes over the granting of private club licenses continue to make news.
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Zwicky
The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe
John Johnson Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2019

“A fitting biography of one of the most brilliant, acerbic, and under-appreciated astrophysicists of the twentieth century. John Johnson has delved deeply into a rich and eventful life, and produced a rollicking account of how Fritz Zwicky split his time between picking fights with his colleagues and discovering amazing things about our universe.”—Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture

Fritz Zwicky was one of the most inventive and iconoclastic scientists of his time. He predicted the existence of neutron stars, and his research pointed the way toward the discovery of pulsars and black holes. He was the first to conceive of the existence of dark matter, the first to make a detailed catalog of thousands of galaxies, and the first to correctly suggest that cosmic rays originate from supernovas.

Not content to confine his discoveries to the heavens, Zwicky contributed to the United States war against Japan with inventions in jet propulsion that enabled aircraft to launch from carriers in the Pacific. After the war, he was the first Western scientist to interview Wernher von Braun, the Nazi engineer who developed the V-2 rocket. Later he became an outspoken advocate for space exploration, but also tangled with almost every leading scientist of the time, from Edwin Hubble and Richard Feynman to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

In Zwicky, John Johnson, Jr., brings this tempestuous maverick to life. Zwicky not only made groundbreaking contributions to science and engineering; he rose to fame as one of the most imaginative science popularizers of his day. Yet he became a pariah in the scientific community, denouncing his enemies, real and imagined, as “spherical bastards” and “horses’ asses.” Largely forgotten today, Zwicky deserves rediscovery for introducing some of the most destructive forces in the universe, and as a reminder that genius obeys no rules and has no friends.

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Jesus among Her Children
Q, Eschatology, and the Construction of Christian Origins
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre
Harvard University Press, 2005
Was Jesus a wisdom sage or an apocalyptic prophet? Did later followers view him as the Danielic "Son of Man" or did he use this expression for himself? These are familiar questions among historical Jesus scholars, and there has been much debate over Jesus' eschatological outlook since the controversial work of the Jesus Seminar. This book asks what is at stake in these debates and explores how scholarly constructions of Christian origins participate in contemporary efforts to confirm or challenge particular understandings of the essence of Christianity. Proposing that a Jesus-centered perspective has overly shaped our interpretation of the sayings source Q, Johnson-DeBaufre offers alternative readings to key Q texts, readings that place an interest in the community that shaped Jesus at the center of inquiry.
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Solving Problems in Technical Communication
Johndan Johnson-Eilola
University of Chicago Press, 2012

The field of technical communication is rapidly expanding in both the academic world and the private sector, yet a problematic divide remains between theory and practice. Here Stuart A. Selber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, both respected scholars and teachers of technical communication, effectively bridge that gap.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication collects the latest research and theory in the field and applies it to real-world problems faced by practitioners—problems involving ethics, intercultural communication, new media, and other areas that determine the boundaries of the discipline. The book is structured in four parts, offering an overview of the field, situating it historically and culturally, reviewing various theoretical approaches to technical communication, and examining how the field can be advanced by drawing on diverse perspectives. Timely, informed, and practical, Solving Problems in Technical Communication will be an essential tool for undergraduates and graduate students as they begin the transition from classroom to career.
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Uncertain Honor
Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis
Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In most countries, educated women have fewer children and have them later than uneducated women. In Uncertain Honor, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks argues that this demographic fact has social causes by offering a rich case study of contraception, abortion, and informal adoption among educated, ethnic Beti women in southern Cameroon.

Combining insights from demography and cultural anthropology, Johnson-Hanks argues that Beti women delay motherhood as part of a broader attempt to assert a modern form of honor only recently made possible by formal education, Catholicism, and economic change. Through itinerant school careers and manipulations of marriage, educated Beti women now manage their status as mothers in order to coordinate major life events in the face of social and economic uncertainty.

Carefully researched and clearly written, Uncertain Honor offers an intimate look at the lives of African women trying to reconcile motherhood with new professional roles in a context of dramatic social change.
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The Computer and the Mind
An Introduction to Cognitive Science
Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Harvard University Press, 1988

In a field choked with seemingly impenetrable jargon, Philip N. Johnson-Laird has done the impossible: written a book about how the mind works that requires no advance knowledge of artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, or psychology. The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.

The author begins with a brief account of the history of psychology and the birth of cognitive science after World War II. He then describes clearly and simply the nature of symbols and the theory of computation, and follows with sections devoted to current computational models of how the mind carries out all its major tasks, including visual perception, learning, memory, the planning and control of actions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and the formation of new concepts and new ideas. Other sections discuss human communication, meaning, the progress that has been made in enabling computers to understand natural language, and finally the difficult problems of the conscious and unconscious mind, free will, needs and emotions, and self-awareness. In an envoi, the author responds to the critics of cognitive science and defends the computational view of the mind as an alternative to traditional dualism: cognitive science integrates mind and matter within the same explanatory framework.

This first single-authored introduction to cognitive science will command the attention of students of cognitive science at all levels including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists--as well as all readers curious about recent knowledge on how the mind works.

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Mental Models
Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness
Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Harvard University Press, 1983

Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of mind: comprehension, inference, and consciousness. In spirited and graceful prose, Johnson-Laird argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a digital computer. This book provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.

In several key areas of cognition, Johnson-Laird shows how an explanation based on mental modeling is clearly superior to previous theory. For example, he argues compellingly that deductive reasoning does not take place by tacitly applying the rules of logic, but by mentally manipulating models of the states of affairs from which inferences are drawn. Similarly, linguistic comprehension is best understood not as a matter of applying inference rules to propositions derived from sentences, but rather as the mind's effort to construct and update a model of the situation described by a text or a discourse. Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird's theory of consciousness: the mind's necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition.

This an extraordinarily rich book, providing a coherent account of much recent experimental work in cognitive psychology, along with lucid explanations of relevant theory in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy Not since Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's classic Plans and the Structure of Behavior has a book in cognitive science combined such sweep, style, and good sense. Like its distinguished predecessor, Mental Models may well serve to fix a point of view for a generation.

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For Women and the Nation
FUNMILAYO RANSOME-KUTI OF NIGERIA
Cheryl Johnson-Odim
University of Illinois Press, 1997
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a Nigerian activist who fought for suffrage and equal rights for her countrywomen long before the second wave of the women's movement in the United States. Her involvement in international women's organizations led her to travel the world in the period following World War II. She championed the causes of the poor and downtrodden of both sexes as she joined the anticolonial movement struggling for Nigeria's independence.
 
For Women and the Nation is the story of this courageous woman. One of a handful of full-length biographies of African women, let alone of African women activists, it will be welcomed by students of women's studies, African history, and biography, as well as by those interested in exploring the historical background of Nigeria.
 
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Our Perfect Wild
Ray & Barbara Bane's Journeys and the Fate of Far North
Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Ray and Barbara Bane worked as teachers in Barrow and Wainwright, Alaska, in the early 1960s—but they didn’t simply teach the children of their Iñupiat Eskimo and Koyukon friends and neighbors: they fully embraced their lifestyle. Doing so, they realized how closely intertwined life in the region was with the land, and, specifically, how critical wilderness was to the ancient traditions and wisdom that undergirded the Native way of life. That slow realization came to a head during a 1,200-mile dogsled trip from Hughes to Barrow in 1974—a trip that led them to give up teaching in favor of working, through the National Park Service, to preserve Alaska’s wilderness.

This book tells their story, a tale of dedication and tireless labor in the face of suspicion, resistance, and even violence. At a time when Alaska’s natural bounty remains under threat, Our Perfect Wild shows us an example of the commitment—and love—that will be required to preserve it.
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Jazz Radio America
Aaron J. Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Once a lively presence on radio, jazz now finds itself relegated to satellite broadcasters and low-watt stations at the edge of the dial. Aaron J. Johnson examines jazz radio from the advent of Black radio in 1948 to its near extinction from the commercial dial after 1980. Even in jazz’s heyday, programmers and DJs excluded many styles and artists, and Johnson delves into how the politics of decision-making and the political uses of the medium shaped jazz radio formats. Johnson shows radio’s role in the contradictory perceptions of jazz as American’s model artistic contribution to the world, as Black classical music, and as the soundtrack of African American rebellion and resistance for much of the twentieth century.

An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.

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Eusebius of Caesarea
Tradition and Innovations
Aaron Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2013
Eusebius of Caesarea was one of the most significant and voluminous contributors to the development of late antique literary culture. Despite his significance, Eusebius has tended to receive attention more as a source for histories of early Christianity and the Constantinian empire than as a writer and thinker in his own right. He was a compiler and copyist of pagan and Christian texts, collator of a massive chronographical work, commentator on scriptural texts, author of apologetic, historical, educational, and biographical works, and custodian of one of the greatest libraries in the ancient world. As such, Eusebius merits a primary place in our appreciation of the literary culture of late antiquity for both his self-conscious conveyance of multiple traditions and his fostering of innovative literary and intellectual trajectories. By focusing on the full range of Eusebius’s literary corpus, the collection of essays in Eusebius of Caesarea offers new and innovative studies that will change the ways classicists, theologians, and ancient historians think about this major figure.
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Sentencing Canudos
Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil
Adriana Michele Campos Johnson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro (“The Counselor”), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand.


Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, which has become the defining—and nearly exclusive—account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha’s contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Benício, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of “everydayness” by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories.


Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.

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Seventeen Years in Alaska
A Depiction of Life Among the Indians of Yakutat
Albin Johnson
University of Alaska Press, 2014
Swedish missionary Albin Johnson arrived in Alaska just before the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of miles from home and with just two weeks’ worth of English classes under his belt. While he intended to work among the Tlingit tribes of Yakutat, he found himself in a wave of foreign arrivals as migrants poured into Alaska seeking economic opportunities and the chance at a different life. While Johnson came with pious intentions, others imposed Western values and vices, leaving disease and devastation in their wake.

Seventeen Years in Alaska is Johnson’s eyewitness account of this tumultuous time. It is a captivating narrative of an ancient people facing rapid change and of the missionaries working to stem a corrupting tide. His journals offer a candid look at the beliefs and lives of missionaries, and they ultimately reveal the profound effect that he and other missionaries had on the Tlingit. Tracing nearly two decades of spiritual hopes and earthbound failures, Johnson’s memoir is a fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing world in one of the most far-flung areas of the globe.
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Improbable Libraries
A Visual Journey to the World's Most Unusual Libraries
Alex Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2015
How do you use your local library? Does it arrive at your door on the back of an elephant? Can it float down the river to you? Or does it occupy a phone booth by the side of the road?

Public libraries are a cornerstone of modern civilization, yet like the books in them, libraries face an uncertain future in an increasingly digital world. Undaunted, librarians around the globe are thinking up astonishing ways of reaching those in reading need, whether by bike in Chicago, boat in Laos, or donkey in Colombia. Improbable Libraries showcases a wide range of unforgettable, never-before-seen images and interviews with librarians who are overcoming geographic, economic, and political difficulties to bring the written word to an eager audience. Alex Johnson charts the changing face of library architecture, as temporary pop-ups rub shoulders with monumental brick-and-mortar structures, and many libraries expand their mission to function as true community centers. To take just one example: the open-air Garden Library in Tel Aviv, located in a park near the city’s main bus station, supports asylum seekers and migrant workers with a stock of 3,500 volumes in sixteen different languages.  

Beautifully illustrated with two hundred and fifty color photographs, Improbable Libraries offers a breathtaking tour of the places that bring us together and provide education, entertainment, culture, and so much more. From the rise of the egalitarian Little Free Library movement to the growth in luxury hotel libraries, the communal book revolution means you’ll never be far from the perfect next read.
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The Forest and the Trees
Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2014
New Third Edition!

If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical-the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it.
 
This Third Edition features:
• Updated key references, data, resources, and examples, from global warming, Obama's election, and gay marriage to transgender/cisgender and the Occupy Movement
• A glossary of terms
• The short essays in Chapter 6, framed around the power of sociology, dig beneath easy and popular understandings to reveal what lies beneath
• An additional analysis of how men's violence is made invisible even though most violence is perpetrated by men
• Chapter 7's focus on sociology as a worldview with an analysis of the origins of white privilege 
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The Forest and the Trees
Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2008

If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical—the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it.

This revised and updated edition features:

• A new chapter that brings together the various aspects of the sociological model described in previous chapters with a detailed application to the origins of racism in the United States

•A discussion of how individuals can participate in social change by stepping off paths of least resistance

•The addition of graphics to illustrate the sociological model of systems and individuals

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Gender Knot Revised Ed
Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2005
The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it. Johnson's simple yet powerful approach avoids the paralyzing trap of guilt, blame, anger, and defensive denial that often result from conversations about gender. He shows how we all participate in an oppressive system we didn't create and how each of us can contribute towards its dissolution. He argues persuasively that something much better is possible and that our individual choices matter more than we can ever know. This revised, and updated edition features expanded discussions of:

* the core characteristics of patriarchy and its power as a social system
* the relationship between individuals and social systems
* "men's movement" assessments of patriarchy and gender inequality
* key—and controversial—terms such as sexism, privilege, and political correctness
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The Gender Knot
Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2014
New Third Edition!

The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it. Johnson's simple yet powerful approach avoids the paralyzing trap of guilt, blame, anger, and defensive denial that often results from conversations about gender.
 
This edition features:
• Updated references, data, resources, and examples, especially in relation to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity (e.g., gay marriage, transgender/cisgender)
• A glossary of terms
• A new chapter, "What Changes and What Does Not: Manhood and Violence," that provides an extended analysis of the causes of men's violence as a patriarchal phenomenon 
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Not from Here
A Memoir
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2015
When Allan Johnson asked his dying father where he wanted his ashes to be placed, his father replied—without hesitation—that it made no difference to him at all. In his poignant, powerful memoir, Not from Here, Johnson embarks on an extraordinary, 2,000-mile journey across the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains to find the place where his father’s ashes belonged.
 
As a white man with Norwegian and English lineage, Johnson explores both America and the question of belonging to a place whose history holds the continuing legacy of the displacement, dispossession, and genocide of Native peoples.
 
More than a personal narrative, Not from Here illuminates the national silence around unresolved questions of accountability, race, and identity politics, and the dilemma of how to take responsibility for “a past we did not create.” Johnson’s story—about the past living in the present; of redemption, fate, family, tribe, and nation; of love and grief—raises profound questions about belonging, identity, and place.
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The Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States
With Special Reference to the Public Schools
Alvin Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1934
The Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States was first published in 1934. 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.
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The Unicameral Legislature
Alvin Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1938
The Unicameral Legislature was first published in 1938. 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.Here is a concise discussion of the movement for one-house legislatures, which began in Ohio and Oregon in 1912, took new impetus when Nebraska adopted the reform in 1934, and grew to striking proportions in 1937 when forty amendments proposing single chambers were considered in twenty-one states.Professor Johnson describes the historical process by which the two-house form was established in America following early experience with a single house, and he discusses the problems that have given rise to current dissatisfaction with the established system.There is a review of unicameralism in England, Canada, and other countries. This volume offers suggestive information on more phases of the subject than can be found in any other book.
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Separation of Church and State in the United States
Alvin W. Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1948

Separation of Church and State in the United States was first published in 1948. 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 book is more than a revised and enlarged edition of Dr. Johnson's Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States. Besides rewriting and bringing up to date much of the original material, the authors have added a number of chapters dealing with subjects that have gained prominence in recent years: citizenship and the bearing of arms, saluting the flag, distribution of religious literature, and freedom of speech for Communists. Such recent cases as the Supreme Court decision in McCollum v. Board of Education—better known as the Champaign, Illinois, case—are discussed in some detail.

School administrators will find the book of great practical value, for it deals predominantly with church-state relationships in the public schools, one of the chief areas of conflict. These conflicts include such questions as Bible readings and religious instruction in the public schools, dismissed and released time for religious education, the allowing of credit for religious instruction, public aid to sectarian schools, the wearing of religious garb, furnishing free textbooks and transportation for students in parochial schools.

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Objectifying Measures
The Dominance of High-Stakes Testing and the Politics of Schooling
Amanda Walker Johnson
Temple University Press, 2009

In the past twenty years, the number of educational tests with high-stakes consequences—such as promotion to the next grade level or graduating from high school—has increased. At the same time, the difficulty of the tests has also increased. In Texas, a Latina state legislator introduced and lobbied for a bill that would take such factors as teacher recommendations, portfolios of student work, and grades into account for the students—usually students of color—who failed such tests. The bill was defeated.

Using several types of ethnographic study (personal interviews, observations of the Legislature in action, news broadcasts, public documents from the Legislature and Texas Education Agency), Amanda Walker Johnson observed the struggle for the bill’s passage. Through recounting this experience, Objectifying Measures explores the relationship between the cultural production of scientific knowledge (of statistics in particular) and the often intuitive resistance to objectification of those adversely affected by the power of policies underwritten as "scientific."

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Darktown Follies
Amaud Johnson
Tupelo Press, 2013
Darktown Follies, Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s daring and surprising new collection of poems, responds to Black Vaudeville, specifically the personal and professional challenges African American variety performers faced in the early twentieth century. Johnson is fascinated by jokes that aren’t funny — particularly, what it means when humor fails or reveals something unintended about our national character. Darktown Follies is an act of self-sabotage, a poet’s willful attempt at recklessness, abandoning the “good sense” God gave him, as an effort to explore the boundaries and intersections of race and humor.
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Imperial Liquor
Poems
Amaud Johnson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Finalist, 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist, 2021 Rilke Prize

Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city. Slow Jams, red-lit rooms, cheap liquor, like seduction and betrayal—what’s more American? This book tracks echoes, rides the residue of music “after the love is gone.”
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Mekong Dreaming
Life and Death along a Changing River
Andrew Alan Johnson
Duke University Press, 2020
The Mekong River has undergone vast infrastructural changes in recent years, including the construction of dams across its main stream. These projects, along with the introduction of new fish species, changing political fortunes, and international migrant labor, have all made a profound impact upon the lives of those residing on the great river. It also impacts how they dream. In Mekong Dreaming, Andrew Alan Johnson explores the changing relationship between the river and the residents of Ban Beuk, a village on the Thailand-Laos border, by focusing on the effect that construction has had on human and inhuman elements of the villagers' world. Johnson shows how inhabitants come to terms with the profound impact that remote, intangible, and yet powerful forces—from global markets and remote bureaucrats to ghosts, spirits, and gods—have on their livelihoods. Through dreams, migration, new religious practices, and new ways of dwelling on a changed river, inhabitants struggle to understand and affect the distant, the inassimilable, and the occult, which offer both sources of power and potential disaster.
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Dragonflies and Damselflies in Your Pocket
A Guide to the Odonates of the Upper Midwest
Ann Johnson
University of Iowa Press, 2009

Just as more and more people enjoy watching birds and butterflies, watching the many shimmering dragonflies and damselflies—collectively called odonates, from Odonata, the name of this order of aquatic insects—has become a popular pastime. Now Dragonflies and Damselflies in Your Pocket introduces us to 50 of the showiest odonates of the Upper Midwest.

Ann Johnson’s text is clear and informative and her photographs are stunning; it is impossible to look at them without wanting to head out for the nearest stream and search for the living insects. In addition to providing useful general information about broad-winged damsels, spreadwings, pond damsels, darners, clubtails, cruisers, emeralds, and skimmers, she includes common and scientific names, sizes, general flight seasons, and the best habitats in which to find each species: rocky rivers, wetlands, ponds, still waters, and so on.

With their extremely large eyes, elongated transparent wings, long and slender abdomens, and prehensile extendible jaws, dragonflies and damselflies are efficient hunters and quick, darting fliers. Their beauty and their behavior make them delightful subjects for birdwatchers and other nature lovers. Dragonflies and Damselflies in Your Pocket will greatly enhance your appreciation of these winged marvels.
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Hitting the Brakes
Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge
Ann Johnson
Duke University Press, 2009
In Hitting the Brakes, Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge.

The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

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Reading Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim's Progress
Reception and the Protestant Reader
Barbara A Johnson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"—which she calls the Protestant and the lettered—Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson’s ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain.

Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland’s poem. She demonstrates by example that what is culturally transmitted has not been just the work itself; it includes vestiges of past readers’ encounters with the text that are traceable both in the way a text is presented as well as in the way that presentation is received.

Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than by literary concerns, Langland’s poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan’s place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrates the beginning of a new, more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.

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The Feminist Difference
Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender
Barbara E. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 1998

Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passé, feminism today seems becalmed without being calm. This is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture--yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In fresh readings of a wide array of texts--legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical--renowned literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point.

Employing surprising juxtapositions, The Feminist Difference looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective; at poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's rich, stimulating, unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--moments that re-emerge here as sources of a revitalized critical awareness.

In the final analysis, Johnson argues, literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book literature appears not as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.

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Mother Tongues
Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation
Barbara E. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2003

Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Plath make up the odd trio on which this book is based. It is in the surprising and revealing links between them--links pertaining to troublesome mothers, elusive foreign languages, and professional disappointments--that Barbara Johnson maps the coordinates of her larger claims about the ideal of oneness in every area of life, and about the damage done by this ideal.

The existence of sexual difference precludes an original or ultimate "one" who would represent all of mankind; the plurality of languages makes it impossible to think that one doesn't live in translation; and the plurality of the sexes means that every human being came from a woman's body, and some will reproduce this feat, while others won't. In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

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Persons and Things
Barbara E. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2010

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons.

In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.

The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.

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The Barbara Johnson Reader
The Surprise of Otherness
Barbara Johnson
Duke University Press, 2014
This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.

Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.  
 
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Ecology and Design
Frameworks For Learning
Bart Johnson
Island Press, 2001

Professionals, faculty, and students are aware of the pressing need to integrate ecological principles into environmental design and planning education, but few materials exist to facilitate that development.

Ecology and Design addresses that shortcoming by articulating priorities and approaches for incorporating ecological principles in the teaching of landscape design and planning. The book explains why landscape architecture and design and planning faculty should include ecology as a standard part of their courses and curricula, provides insights on how that can be done, and offers models from successful programs. The book:

  • examines the need for change in the education and practice of landscape architecture and in the physical planning and design professions as a whole
  • asks what designers and physical planners need to know about ecology and what applied ecologists can learn from design and planning
  • develops conceptual frameworks needed to realize an ecologically based approach to design and planning
  • offers recommendations for the integration of ecology within a landscape architecture curriculum, as an example for other design fields such as civil engineering and architecture
  • considers the implications for professional practice
  • explores innovative approaches to collaboration among designers and ecologists

In addition to the editors, contributors include Carolyn Adams, Jack Ahern, Richard T. T. Forman, Michael Hough, James Karr, Joan Iverson Nassauer, David Orr, Kathy Poole, H. Ronald Pulliam, Anne Whiston Spirn, Sandra Steingraber, Carl Steinitz, Ken Tamminga, and William Wenk. Ecology and Design represents an important guidepost and source of ideas for faculty, students, and professionals in landscape architecture, urban design, planning and architecture, landscape ecology, conservation biology and restoration ecology, civil and environmental engineering, and related fields.

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Fierce Solitude
A Life of John Gould Fletcher
Ben Johnson
University of Arkansas Press, 1993
This biography of John Gould Fletcher examines his Modernist work as poet and critic and his life as child, writer, husband, and lover. Fletcher moved in high literary circles, often causing confusion among his critics and followers with his writing—was he Imagist, Agrarian, or Modernist? Or was he simply John Gould Fletcher, the man, caught up in tumultuous times and events, seeking no particular label to pin on his writing, but rather reflecting the changing world as he saw and lived it?
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Pueblos within Pueblos
Tlaxilacalli Communities in Acolhuacan, Mexico, ca. 1272-1692
Benjamin Johnson
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Focusing on the specific case of Acolhuacan in the eastern Basin of Mexico, Pueblos within Pueblos is the first book to systematically analyze tlaxilacalli history over nearly four centuries, beginning with their rise at the dawn of the Aztec empire through their transformation into the “pueblos” of mid-colonial New Spain. Even before the rise of the Aztecs, commoners in pre-Hispanic central Mexico set the groundwork for a new style of imperial expansion. Breaking free of earlier centralizing patterns of settlement, they spread out across onetime hinterlands and founded new and surprisingly autonomous local communities called, almost interchangeably, tlaxilacalli or calpolli.

Tlaxilacalli were commoner-administered communities that coevolved with the Acolhua empire and structured its articulation and basic functioning. They later formed the administrative backbone of both the Aztec and Spanish empires in northern Mesoamerica and often grew into full and functioning existence before their affiliated altepetl, or sovereign local polities. Tlaxilacalli resembled other central Mexican communities but expressed a local Acolhua administrative culture in their exacting patterns of hierarchy. As semiautonomous units, they could rearrange according to geopolitical shifts and even catalyze changes, as during the rapid additive growth of both the Aztec Triple Alliance and Hispanic New Spain. They were more successful than almost any other central Mexican institution in metabolizing external disruptions (new gods, new economies, demographic emergencies), and they fostered a surprising level of local allegiance, despite their structural inequality. Indeed, by 1692 they were declaring their local administrative independence from the once-sovereign altepetl. Administration through community, and community through administration—this was the primal two-step of the long-lived Acolhua tlaxilacalli, at once colonial and colonialist.

Pueblos within Pueblos examines a woefully neglected aspect of pre-Hispanic and early colonial Mexican historiography and is the first book to fully demonstrate the structuring role tlaxilacalli played in regional and imperial politics in central Mexico. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American ethnohistory, history, and anthropology.

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Bridging National Borders in North America
Transnational and Comparative Histories
Benjamin Johnson
Duke University Press, 2010
Despite a shared interest in using borders to explore the paradoxes of state-making and national histories, historians of the U.S.-Canada border region and those focused on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have generally worked in isolation from one another. A timely and important addition to borderlands history, Bridging National Borders in North America initiates a conversation between scholars of the continent’s northern and southern borderlands. The historians in this collection examine borderlands events and phenomena from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Some consider the U.S.-Canada border, others concentrate on the U.S.-Mexico border, and still others take both regions into account.

The contributors engage topics such as how mixed-race groups living on the peripheries of national societies dealt with the creation of borders in the nineteenth century, how medical inspections and public-health knowledge came to be used to differentiate among bodies, and how practices designed to channel livestock and prevent cattle smuggling became the model for regulating the movement of narcotics and undocumented people. They explore the ways that U.S. immigration authorities mediated between the desires for unimpeded boundary-crossings for day laborers, tourists, casual visitors, and businessmen, and the restrictions imposed by measures such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Immigration Act. Turning to the realm of culture, they analyze the history of tourist travel to Mexico from the United States and depictions of the borderlands in early-twentieth-century Hollywood movies. The concluding essay suggests that historians have obscured non-national forms of territoriality and community that preceded the creation of national borders and sometimes persisted afterwards. This collection signals new directions for continental dialogue about issues such as state-building, national expansion, territoriality, and migration.

Contributors: Dominique Brégent-Heald, Catherine Cocks, Andrea Geiger, Miguel Ángel González Quiroga, Andrew R. Graybill, Michel Hogue, Benjamin H. Johnson, S. Deborah Kang, Carolyn Podruchny, Bethel Saler, Jennifer Seltz, Rachel St. John, Lissa Wadewitz

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

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You're Doing it Wrong!
Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise
Bethany L. Johnson
Rutgers University Press, 2019
New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital? Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout.
 
You’re Doing it Wrong! investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some. They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere.
 
Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages.
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Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security
Brad Johnson
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Nothing is off-limits in this ultimately American text. Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security attempts to position large academic ideas in shared public spaces, often discovering the absurdity and humor in making such connections. The poems herein take the dizzying influences affecting the post-postmodern American and make poetry of it all, skipping whimsically from the Pixies to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from the Confederate flag to unisex public toilets, from eggplant emojis to Vladimir Putin stealing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring. While the volume gives the reader a specific sense of voice and character, it also allows for identification with the author’s collected  observations, all the while providing a succinct feel for the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist.
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Conrad’s Models of Mind
Bruce Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. 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.

In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter."

The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer.

Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.

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More God, Less Crime
Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More
Byron Johnson
Templeton Press, 2012

 

In More God, Less Crime renowned criminologist Byron R. Johnson proves that religion can be a powerful antidote to crime. The book describes how faith communities, congregations, and faith-based organizations are essential in forming partnerships necessary to provide the human and spiritual capital to effectively address crime, offender rehabilitation, and the substantial aftercare problems facing former prisoners. There is scattered research literature on religion and crime but until now, there has never been one publication that systematically and rigorously analyzes what we know from this largely overlooked body of research in a lay-friendly format. The data shows that when compared to current strategies, faith-based approaches to crime prevention bring added value in targeting those factors known to cause crime: poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. In an age of limited fiscal resources, Americans can’t afford a criminal justice system that turns its nose up at volunteer efforts that could not only work better than the abysmal status quo, but also save billions of dollars at the same time. This book provides readers with practical insights and recommendations for a faith-based response that could do just that.

 

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Cervantes and the Material World
Carroll B. Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2000
In this innovative revisiting of Don Quixote and the Novelas ejemplares, Carroll B. Johnson investigates in detail the cultural and material environment in which Cervantes placed his characters.
 
Cervantes and the Material World reveals a recurrent preoccupation with the clash of two different economic systems: a reenergized feudalism and an incipient capitalism. Overturning the common assumption that Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and myriad other colorful characters carry out their adventures in a timeless social milieu, Johnson demonstrates how their perspectives and experiences are shaped by the events and crises of their immediate historical context.
 
Johnson examines how questions of the distribution of wealth, the ownership of the means of production, and membership in one or another economic order permeate Cervantes's fiction. Thoughtfully contextualizing key excerpts, he suggests how business activities, legal codes, and other materialist practices actively impinge on the lives of the characters, influencing and in some cases determining their motivations and their possibilities for action.
 
A major study that will change the face of Cervantes scholarship, Cervantes and the Material World is also an important resource for students of the Spanish Golden Age and Renaissance and baroque literature and culture.
 
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Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South
Cassidy Johnson
University College London, 2021
A study on urban risk and resettlement programs in the Global South in the era of climate change.

Environmental changes impact everyone, but the burden is especially heavy upon the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor and those living in informal settlements. In an effort to reduce urban residents’ exposure to climate change and natural disasters, resettlement programs are becoming widespread across the Global South. Yet, while resettlement may reduce a region’s future climate-related disaster risk, it can also often increase poverty and vulnerability. This volume collates the findings from a research project that examined urban areas across the globe, including case studies from India, Uganda, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The book offers a unique approach to resettlement, providing an opportunity for urban planners to re-think how disaster risk management can better address the accumulation of urban risks in the era of climate change.
 
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Revolutionaries to Race Leaders
Black Power and the Making of African American Politics
Cedric Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate.

Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.

Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself.

Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics.

Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

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The Neoliberal Deluge
Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans
Cedric Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Katrina was not just a hurricane. The death, destruction, and misery wreaked on New Orleans cannot be blamed on nature’s fury alone. This volume of essays locates the root causes of the 2005 disaster squarely in neoliberal restructuring and examines how pro-market reforms are reshaping life, politics, economy, and the built environment in New Orleans.

The authors—a diverse group writing from the disciplines of sociology, political science, education, public policy, and media theory—argue that human agency and public policy choices were more at fault for the devastation and mass suffering experienced along the Gulf Coast than were sheer forces of nature. The harrowing images of flattened homes, citizens stranded on rooftops, patients dying in makeshift hospitals, and dead bodies floating in floodwaters exposed the moral and political contradictions of neoliberalism—the ideological rejection of the planner state and the active promotion of a new order of market rule.

Many of these essays offer critical insights on the saga of postdisaster reconstruction. Challenging triumphal narratives of civic resiliency and universal recovery, the authors bring to the fore pitched battles over labor rights, gender and racial justice, gentrification, the development of city master plans, the demolition of public housing, policing, the privatization of public schools, and roiling tensions between tourism-based economic growth and neighborhood interests. The contributors also expand and deepen more conventional critiques of “disaster capitalism” to consider how the corporate mobilization of philanthropy and public good will are remaking New Orleans in profound and pernicious ways.

Contributors: Barbara L. Allen, Virginia Polytechnic U; John Arena, CUNY College of Staten Island; Adrienne Dixson, Ohio State U; Eric Ishiwata, Colorado State U; Avis Jones-Deweever, National Council of Negro Women; Chad Lavin, Virginia Polytechnic U; Paul Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Linda Robertson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Chris Russill, Carleton U; Kanchana Ruwanpura, U of Southampton; Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Wayne State U; Geoffrey Whitehall, Acadia U.
 

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Standing at the Water's Edge
Bob Straub's Battle for the Soul of Oregon
Charles K. Johnson
Oregon State University Press, 2012
Standing at the Water’s Edge chronicles the life of a unique, and perhaps unlikely, political figure in Oregon’s history: former Governor Robert W. Straub.

A man of intelligence, drive, creativity, and fascinating contradictions, Straub overcame personal challenges and inevitable comparisons to his charismatic predecessor and friendly Republican rival, Tom McCall, to have a lasting impact on Oregon and the nation. Charles Johnson shares insights into Straub’s significant legacy, focusing on his leading role in the state’s financial and environmental issues and his influence on McCall. Johnson also reveals much of Straub’s warm personal story, along with his secret struggles, including his battle with depression while Governor.

Standing at the Water’s Edge
offers rich descriptions of other intriguing political figures of the time as well, capturing the flavor of what has been called Oregon’s political “golden age” of the sixties and seventies—created in part by the symbiotic relationship between Straub and McCall—and describing how and why it ended.

Standing at the Water’s Edge is an essential addition to the literature about Oregon’s political leaders for historians, political scientists, and general readers interested in Oregon history.
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Shadow of the Plantation
Charles Spurgeon Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 1934

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Ice Ship
The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram
Charles W. Johnson
University Press of New England, 2014
In the golden age of polar exploration (from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s), many an expedition set out to answer the big question—was the Arctic a continent, an open ocean beyond a barrier of ice, or an ocean covered with ice? No one knew, for the ice had kept its secret well; ships trying to penetrate it all failed, often catastrophically. Norway’s charismatic scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, convinced that it was a frozen ocean, intended to prove it in a novel if risky way: by building a ship capable of withstanding the ice, joining others on an expedition, then drifting wherever it took them, on a relentless one-way journey into discovery and fame . . . or oblivion. Ice Ship is the story of that extraordinary ship, the Fram, from conception to construction, through twenty years of three epic expeditions, to its final resting place as a museum. It is also the story of the extraordinary men who steered the Fram over the course of 84,000 miles: on a three-year, ice-bound drift, finding out what the Arctic really was; in a remarkable four-year exploration of unmapped lands in the vast Canadian Arctic; and on a two–year voyage to Antarctica, where another famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, claimed the South Pole. Ice Ship will appeal to all those fascinated with polar exploration, maritime adventure, and wooden ships, and will captivate readers of such books as The Endurance, In the Heart of the Sea, and The Last Place on Earth. With more than 100 original photographs, the book brings the Fram to life and light.
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City Behind Fence
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946
Charles W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the U.S. government during World War II to aid in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Drawing on oral history and previously classified material, this book portrays the patterns of daily life in this unique setting.


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Bogs of the Northeast
Charles W. Johnson
University Press of New England, 1985
What makes bogs so interesting yet so misunderstood? This generously illustrated book presents many of the exciting, almost enthralling, facets of bogs--unusual plants, intricate ecological relationships, animals, myths and folklore, and the myriad history recorded in the peats. Despite the fascinating bogs hold, until now there has been no popular book that deals with them in a comprehensive yet authoritative manner. The Northeastern United States has a wonderful diversity of bogs: some are southern in nature, others are very arctic, and still others maritime. And although this is a book primarily about peatlands in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the six New England states, it will interest a much wider audience seeking an exciting and attractive approach to these often-neglected areas of our natural heritage.
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Deep in Alaska
Christine Johnson
University of Alaska Press, 2013
On a wintry white day, a small boy and a red sled step out for an adventure. As they slip through the snowy woods, their imagined journey takes place against real black-and-white photos of Eagle River, Alaska. Told entirely in haiku, this gentle book evokes both joy and calm. The black, red, and white color scheme is perfect for very young children, but readers of all ages will find the lyrical tone and captivating pictures a delightful invitation to explore the forest again and again.
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This Grand and Magnificent Place
The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains
Christopher Johnson
University of New Hampshire Press, 2020
This is the complex story of New Hampshire's White Mountains, from the range's days as the majestic homeland of the Abenaki, first seen by English colonists four centuries ago, to its unassailable standing today as one of America's most beloved national forests, comprising 112,000 acres of protected wilderness.

Christopher Johnson, an avid hiker intimately familiar with the White Mountains, achieves two important objectives in This Grand and Magnificent Place. He lovingly explores their rich ecological, political, economic, and cultural history and, more broadly, opens a panoramic window on the evolution of American attitudes and policies toward wilderness over time.

Two competing visions of wilderness historically have coexisted in America: the instrumental, in which the wilderness is seen as a conglomeration of resources to be exploited for the benefit of entrepreneurs and consumers, and the aesthetic, in which the wilderness is appreciated for its natural beauty, the personal growth that it stimulates, the national pride it engenders, and the spiritual truth it offers. Johnson never loses sight of this fundamental dichotomy as he shares marvelous true tales of the first intrepid European settlers who "tamed" the Whites. He discusses Ethan Allen Crawford, the area's first innkeeper, the emergence of tourism, and America's love affair with the "wilderness experience"; and he explores tales of Thomas Cole, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other renowned artists who immortalized these mountains in their works. He considers the coming of grand resort hotels—and the contemporaneous wilderness revival—in the late nineteenth century and the passing of the landmark 1911 Weeks Act, which was instrumental in preserving American wilderness in the face of development and threats of irreparable environmental damage. Johnson traces the perilous course of the twentieth-century movement toward wilderness preservation, which has successfully conserved the Whites, an extraordinary American treasure, for future generations. Finally, he poses thoughtful and essential questions regarding the destiny of this American wilderness, exploring the balance between maintaining its usefulness while conserving its glorious heritage.

This skillful and accessible history will rivet general readers, students, and professionals interested in the history, culture, and politics of the White Mountains, as well as those fascinated by environmental history and wilderness protection everywhere.
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Hyperboles
The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought
Christopher D. Johnson
Harvard University Press
This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama (King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher D. Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.
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&luckier
Christopher J Johnson
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Mountain West Poetry Series
 
In his first collection of poems, &luckier, Christopher J Johnson explores the depths to which we can know our most intimate friends, habits, and—even more so—selves. From a mosaic of coffee cups, dinner engagements, razors, walks around his city, and the wider realm of nature, the poet continually asks to what degree our lives can be understood, our joys engaged with, and our sorrows mitigated. In a voice that is at once contemporary and yet almost primal, these poems seek an affinity with the natural world, the passing of history, and the deepness and breadth of ancestry; they do not question the mystery of life but ask rather how we have become separated from and might return to a more aware place within the frame of it. These are poems rich with metaphor and music but also direct in their voice. Johnson exhibits a poetic tradition that—rather than employing academic allusions and direct personal statements—remains elusive in its use of the poetic “I.” The reader is never certain if they are reading about the poet, their friends, or themselves.
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Forests for the People
The Story of America's Eastern National Forests
Christopher Johnson
Island Press, 2013
Forests for the People tells one of the most extraordinary stories of environmental protection in our nation’s history: how  a diverse coalition of citizens, organizations, and business and political leaders worked to create a system of national forests in the Eastern United States. It offers an insightful and wide-ranging look at the actions leading to the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911—landmark legislation that established a system of well-managed forests in the East, the South, and the Great Lakes region—along with case studies that consider some of the key challenges facing eastern forests today.
 
The book begins by looking at destructive practices widely used by the timber industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including extensive clearcutting followed by forest fire that devastated entire landscapes. The authors explain how this led to the birth of a new conservation movement that began simultaneously in the Southern Appalachians and New England, and describe the subsequent protection of forests in New England (New Hampshire and the White Mountains); the Great Lakes region (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and the Southern Appalachians. 
 
Following this historical background, the authors offer eight case studies that examine critical issues facing the eastern national forests today, including timber harvesting, the use of fire, wilderness protection, endangered wildlife, oil shale drilling, invasive species, and development surrounding national park borders.
 
Forests for the People is the only book to fully describe the history of the Weeks Act and the creation of the eastern national forests and to use case studies to illustrate current management issues facing these treasured landscapes. It is an important new work for anyone interested in the past or future of forests and forestry in the United States.
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The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art
Claudia Durst Johnson
University of Alabama Press, 1981
In The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art, Claudia D. Johnson identifies and explores the tension between Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concepts of art and morality by describing its sources, plotting its manifestations, and suggesting how the opposing elements of this tension are finally reconciled.
 
Hawthorne’s major works, including his short fiction, exhibit a profound conflict between eighteenth-century views of an orderly, balanced, and static universe on the one hand and nineteenth-century conceptions of a universe in constant flux on the other. Johnson argues that Hawthorne, though he did not identify with any organized church, found in theology the myths that allowed him to negotiate a bridge between these two opposed views of the world and to forge the social, psychological, and aesthetic values that inform his art.
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Equivocal Beings
Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
Claudia L. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions.

Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."
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Jane Austen
Women, Politics, and the Novel
Claudia L. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."—Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative impact on attempts to define the family as a site of care and generosity in Sense and Sensibility, makes claims for the desirability of 'personal happiness as a liberating moral category' in Pride and Prejudice, validates the rights of female authority in Emma, and stresses the benefits of female independence in Persuasion, Johnson offers an original and persuasive reassessment of Jane Austen's thought."—Kate Fullbrook, Times Higher Education Supplement
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Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures
Claudia L. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Jane Austen completed only six novels, but enduring passion for the author and her works has driven fans to read these books repeatedly, in book clubs or solo, while also inspiring countless film adaptations, sequels, and even spoofs involving zombies and sea monsters. Austen’s lasting appeal to both popular and elite audiences has lifted her to legendary status. In Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, Claudia L. Johnson shows how Jane Austen became “Jane Austen,” a figure intensely—sometimes even wildly—venerated, and often for markedly different reasons.

Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created. She then passes through the four critical phases of Austen’s reception—the Victorian era, the First and Second World Wars, and the establishment of the Austen House and Museum in 1949—and ponders what the adoration of Austen has meant to readers over the past two centuries. For her fans, the very concept of “Jane Austen” encapsulates powerful ideas and feelings about history, class, manners, intimacy, language, and the everyday. By respecting the intelligence of past commentary about Austen, Johnson shows, we are able to revisit her work and unearth fresh insights and new critical possibilities.
 
An insightful look at how and why readers have cherished one of our most beloved authors, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures will be a valuable addition to the library of any fan of the divine Jane.
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Paradox at Play
Metaphor in Meister Eckhart's Sermons: with previously unpublished sermons
Clint Johnson
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Fresh translations of Meister Eckhart’s sermons are made available in this volume: three for the first time in English and sixteen others for the first time since C. de B. Evans translated them in 1924 and 1931, long before the critical editions of the manuscripts were published in 2003. Other important sermons are included in the translations as well. They improve upon previous translations which were not as sensitive to Eckhart’s metaphorical repertoire and his subtle word choice and phrasing. The extended introductory essay describes Eckhart’s metaphors and how they work together to form a cohesive whole. By looking at what his metaphors tell us about what an individual person is and how the view of the individual changed in the late medieval world, his ostensibly shocking rhetoric (in places where it is actually novel) is shown to be indicative of a larger cultural tide that culminated in the modern worldview. Finally, all of his homiletic choices are shown to be in service of the greater goal: catalyzing transformative change in his audience by stubbornly insisting on his paradoxes and jarring people out of their customary way of relating to God and themselves.
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Just Queer Folks
Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Colin R. Johnson
Temple University Press, 2013

 Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were just beginning to take shape. 

Eschewing the notion that identity is always the best measure of what can be known about gender and sexuality, Colin R. Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, "mannish" farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbors were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces, including the notion that queer history is always urban history.

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Chipped Stone Technological Organization
Central Place Foraging and Exchange on the Northern Great Plains
Craig M. Johnson
University of Utah Press, 2019
Over a 40-year period, Craig Johnson collected data on chipped stone tools from nearly 200 occupations along the Missouri River in the Dakotas. This book integrates those data with central place foraging theory and exchange models to arrive at broad conclusions supporting archaeological theory. The emphasis is on the last 1,000 years, when the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farmer-hunters dominated the area, but also looks back some 10,000 years to more nomadic peoples. The long timespan and large number of villages and campsites help define changes through time and over large distances of local and nonlocal tool stone and its manufacture into arrow points, knives, and other tools.
 
Central place foraging theory, through the field processing model, posits that the farther a source material is from the central living area, the more it will be processed before it is transported back, to avoid hauling heavy, nonusable parts on long trips. Johnson’s data support this theory and demonstrate that this model applies not only to nomadic hunter-gatherers but also to semisedentary farmer-hunters. His results also indicate that toolstone usage creates distinctive spatial patterns along the Missouri River, largely related to village distance from the sources. This is best illustrated with Knife River flint, which gradually declines in popularity downriver from its source in west-central North Dakota but increases in central South Dakota because of exchange.
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The Power of Mammon
The Market, Secularization, and New York Baptists, 1790–1922
Curtis D. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In The Power of Mammon, Curtis D. Johnson describes how the market economy and market-related forces, such as the media, politics, individualism, and consumerism, radically changed the nature of Baptist congregational life in New York State during three centuries. Collectively, these forces emphasized the importance of material wealth over everything else, and these values penetrated the thinking of Baptist ministers and laypeople alike. Beginning in the 1820s, the pastorate turned into a profession, the laity’s influence diminished, closeknit religious fellowships evolved into voluntary associations, and evangelism became far less effective. Men, being the most engaged in the market, secularized the more quickly and became less involved in church affairs. By the 1870s, male disengagement opened the door to increased female participation in church governance. While scientific advances and religious pluralism also played a role, the market and its related distractions were the primary forces behind the secularization of Baptist life.

The Power of Mammon is history from the ground up. Unlike many denominational histories, this book emphasizes congregational life and the importance of the laity. This focus allows the reader to hear the voices of ordinary Baptists who argued over a host of issues. Johnson deftly connects large social trends with exhaustive attention to archival material, including numerous well-chosen records preserved by forty-two New York churches. These records include details related to membership, discipline, finance, and institutional history. Utilizing statistical analysis to achieve even greater clarity, Johnson effectively bridges the gap between the particularity of church records and the broader history of New York’s Baptist churches.

Johnson’s narrative of Baptist history in New York will serve as a model for other regional studies and adds to our understanding of secularization and its impact on American religion.

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A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming
Dale Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2002
For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western.
A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has resonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.
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Yuarn Music Dramas
Studies in Prosody and Structure and a Complete Catalogue of Northern Arias in the Dramatic Style
Dale Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 1981
Part One of Yuarn Music Dramas presents a detailed analysis of form and structure in Yuarn music drama, with sections on the act, the suite, the aria, the verse, metrics of repeated graph patterns, parallelism, and the matching of suite and mode. [vii]
Part Two presents the first catalogue of arias of its kind to be published in a language other than Chinese. It is a compilation of all of the arias in the northern dramatic style that are found in the 162 titles contained in the Yuarn-chyuu shyuann and the Yuarn-chyuu shyuaan waih-bian. It is modeled on several such catalogues compiled over the past six hundred years. [99]
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The Cornett-Whitley Gang
Violence Unleashed in Texas
David Johnson
University of North Texas Press, 2019

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The Horrell Wars
Feuding in Texas and New Mexico
David Johnson
University of North Texas Press, 2014

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How Myths about Language Affect Education
What Every Teacher Should Know
David Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2013

How Myths about Language Affect Education: What Every Teacher Should Know clarifies some of the most common misconceptions about language, particularly those that affect teachers and the decisions they make when they teach English language learners. The chapters in this book address myths about language in general, about first and second language acquisition, about language and society, and about language and thinking. Each chapter concludes with activities for teachers that give examples, exercises, or simple questions that relate directly to teachers' everyday dealings with ELLs and language.

How Myths about Language Affect Education is not intended to be a complete introduction to linguistics; it does not contain information on phonetics or complex syntactic explanations, and technical jargon is kept to a minimum. The aim of this book is not to settle language issues but rather to highlight popular misconceptions and the ways that they influence debates regarding language and affect language policies in and out of the classroom.
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John Ringo, King of the Cowboys
His Life and Times from the Hoo Doo War to Tombstone, Second Edition
David Johnson
University of North Texas Press, 2008
Few names in the lore of western gunmen are as recognizable. Few lives of the most notorious are as little known. Romanticized and made legendary, John Ringo fought and killed for what he believed was right. As a teenager, Ringo was rushed into sudden adulthood when his father was killed tragically in the midst of the family's overland trek to California. As a young man he became embroiled in the blood feud turbulence of post-Reconstruction Texas.

The Mason County “Hoo Doo” War in Texas began as a war over range rights, but it swiftly deteriorated into blood vengeance and spiraled out of control as the body count rose. In this charnel house Ringo gained a reputation as a dangerous gunfighter and man killer. He was proclaimed throughout the state as a daring leader, a desperate man, and a champion of the feud. Following incarceration for his role in the feud, Ringo was elected as a lawman in Mason County, the epicenter of the feud’s origin.

The reputation he earned in Texas, further inflated by his willingness to shoot it out with Victorio’s raiders during a deadly confrontation in New Mexico, preceded him to Tombstone in territorial Arizona. Ringo became immersed in the area’s partisan politics and factionalized violence. A champion of the largely Democratic ranchers, Ringo would become known as a leader of one of these elements, the Cowboys. He ran at bloody, tragic odds with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, finally being part of the posse that hounded these fugitives from Arizona. In the end, Ringo died mysteriously in the Arizona desert, his death welcomed by some, mourned by others, wrongly claimed by a few. Initially published in 1996, John Ringo has been updated to a second edition with much new information researched and uncovered by David Johnson and other Ringo researchers.
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The Mason County "Hoo Doo" War, 1874-1902
David Johnson
University of North Texas Press, 2006

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Spectacle and Sacrifice
The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China
David Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2009

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.

Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

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Violence and Naming
On Mexico and the Promise of Literature
David E. Johnson
University of Texas Press, 2019

Reclaiming the notion of literature as an institution essential for reflecting on the violence of culture, history, and politics, Violence and Naming exposes the tension between the irreducible, constitutive violence of language and the reducible, empirical violation of others. Focusing on an array of literary artifacts, from works by journalists such as Elena Poniatowska and Sergio González Rodríguez to the Zapatista communiqués to Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666, this examination demonstrates that Mexican culture takes place as a struggle over naming—with severe implications for the rights and lives of women and indigenous persons.

Through rereadings of the Conquest of Mexico, the northern Mexican feminicide, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the disappearance of the forty-three students at Iguala in 2014, and the 1999 abortion-rights scandal centering on “Paulina,” which revealed the tenuousness of women’s constitutionally protected reproductive rights in Mexico, Violence and Naming asks how societies can respond to violence without violating the other. This essential question is relevant not only to contemporary Mexico but to all struggles for democracy that promise equality but instead perpetuate incessant cycles of repression.

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Local Constraints vs. Economy
David E. Johnson
CSLI, 1999
The book offers a detailed critique of the economy-of-derivation model of grammar that has emerged within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. It looks at the conceptual and computational complexity problems as well as the empirical consequences of both global and local economy principles. The book compares the economy-of-derivation model with a local constraint model of grammar that does not invoke conditions on sets of derivations or on possible operations in a derivation. It argues that the pure local constraint model of grammar avoids the complexity problems resulting from economy-of-derivation principles and provides a more satisfactory explanation of the linguistic facts that economy theorists have cited in support of their approach. The local constraint model also allows for a more natural and empirically well-motivated grammatical architecture than the one postulated by the Minimalist Program.
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The 2008 Battle of Sadr City
Reimagining Urban Combat
David E. Johnson
RAND Corporation, 2013
In 2008, U.S. and Iraqi forces defeated an uprising in Sadr City, a district of Baghdad with ~2.4 million residents. Coalition forces’ success in this battle helped consolidate the Government of Iraq’s authority, contributing significantly to the attainment of contemporary U.S. operational objectives in Iraq. U.S. forces’ conduct of the battle illustrates a new paradigm for urban combat and indicates capabilities the Army will need in the future.
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The Lavender Scare
The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
David K. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The McCarthy era is generally considered the worst period of political repression in recent American history. But while the famous question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if more discreetly: "Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?"

Historian David K. Johnson here relates the frightening, untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a "Lavender Scare" more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy's Red Scare. Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also shows, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle.

The Lavender Scare shatters the myth that homosexuality has only recently become a national political issue, changing the way we think about both the McCarthy era and the origins of the gay rights movement. And perhaps just as importantly, this book is a cautionary tale, reminding us of how acts taken by the government in the name of "national security" during the Cold War resulted in the infringement of the civil liberties of thousands of Americans.
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The Lavender Scare
The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
David K. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A new edition of a classic work of history, revealing the anti-homosexual purges of midcentury Washington.

In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson tells the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and long-lasting than Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Drawing on declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in midcentury Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where anti-homosexual purges ruined the lives and careers of thousands of Americans. This enlarged edition of Johnson’s classic work of history—the winner of numerous awards and the basis for an acclaimed documentary broadcast on PBS—features a new epilogue, bringing the still-relevant story into the twenty-first century.
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Richard Linklater
David T. Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Richard Linklater's filmmaking choices seem to defy basic patterns of authorship. From his debut with the inventive independent narrative Slacker, the Austin-based director's divergent films have included the sci-fi noir A Scanner Darkly, the socially conscious Fast Food Nation, the kid-friendly The School of Rock, the teen ensemble Dazed and Confused, and the twin romances Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Yet throughout his varied career spanning two decades, Linklater has maintained a sense of integrity while working within a broad range of budgets, genres, and subject matters.
 
Identifying a critical commonality among so much variation, David T. Johnson analyzes Linklater's preoccupation with the concept of time in many of his films, focusing on its many forms and aspects: the subjective experience of time and the often explicit, self-aware ways that characters discuss that experience; time and memory, and the ways that characters negotiate memory in the present; the moments of adolescence and early adulthood as crucial moments in time; the relationship between time and narrative in film; and how cinema, itself, may be becoming antiquated. While Linklater's focus on temporality often involves a celebration of the present that is not divorced from the past and future, Johnson argues that this attendance to the present also includes an ongoing critique of modern American culture. Crucially filling a gap in critical studies of this American director, the volume concludes with an interview with Linklater discussing his career.
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Watsuji on Nature
Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger
David W. Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson’s Watsuji on Nature reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960). Johnson situates Watsuji’s philosophy in relation to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. He shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called fūdo(<風土). By fully unfolding Watsuji’s novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics.
 
In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, Watsuji on Nature radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation.
 
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Transgenerational Media Industries
Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture
Derek Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Within corporate media industries, adults produce children’s entertainment. Yet children, presumed to exist outside the professional adult world, make their own contributions to it—creating and posting unboxing videos, for example, that provide content for toy marketers. Many adults, meanwhile, avidly consume entertainment products nominally meant for children. Media industries reincorporate this market-disrupting participation into their strategies, even turning to adult consumers to pass fandom to the next generation.

Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of “kids’ media” to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals’ identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures.

This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.
 
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Overconfidence and War
The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions
Dominic D. P. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2004

Opponents rarely go to war without thinking they can win--and clearly, one side must be wrong. This conundrum lies at the heart of the so-called "war puzzle": rational states should agree on their differences in power and thus not fight. But as Dominic Johnson argues in Overconfidence and War, states are no more rational than people, who are susceptible to exaggerated ideas of their own virtue, of their ability to control events, and of the future. By looking at this bias--called "positive illusions"--as it figures in evolutionary biology, psychology, and the politics of international conflict, this book offers compelling insights into why states wage war.

Johnson traces the effects of positive illusions on four turning points in twentieth-century history: two that erupted into war (World War I and Vietnam); and two that did not (the Munich crisis and the Cuban missile crisis). Examining the two wars, he shows how positive illusions have filtered into politics, causing leaders to overestimate themselves and underestimate their adversaries--and to resort to violence to settle a conflict against unreasonable odds. In the Munich and Cuban missile crises, he shows how lessening positive illusions may allow leaders to pursue peaceful solutions.

The human tendency toward overconfidence may have been favored by natural selection throughout our evolutionary history because of the advantages it conferred--heightening combat performance or improving one's ability to bluff an opponent. And yet, as this book suggests--and as the recent conflict in Iraq bears out--in the modern world the consequences of this evolutionary legacy are potentially deadly.

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Failing to Win
Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics
Dominic D. P. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2006

How do people decide which country came out ahead in a war or a crisis? Why, for instance, was the Mayaguez Incident in May 1975--where 41 U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens more wounded in a botched hostage rescue mission--perceived as a triumph and the 1992-94 U.S. humanitarian intervention in Somalia, which saved thousands of lives, viewed as a disaster? In Failing to Win, Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney dissect the psychological factors that predispose leaders, media, and the public to perceive outcomes as victories or defeats--often creating wide gaps between perceptions and reality.

To make their case, Johnson and Tierney employ two frameworks: "Scorekeeping," which focuses on actual material gains and losses; and "Match-fixing," where evaluations become skewed by mindsets, symbolic events, and media and elite spin. In case studies ranging from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the current War on Terror, the authors show that much of what we accept about international politics and world history is not what it seems--and why, in a time when citizens offer or withdraw support based on an imagined view of the outcome rather than the result on the ground, perceptions of success or failure can shape the results of wars, the fate of leaders, and the "lessons" we draw from history.

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South Sudan
A New History for a New Nation
Douglas H. Johnson
Ohio University Press, 2016

Africa’s newest nation has a long history. Often considered remote and isolated from the rest of Africa, and usually associated with the violence of slavery and civil war, South Sudan has been an arena for a complex mixing of peoples, languages, and beliefs. The nation’s diversity is both its strength and a challenge as its people attempt to overcome the legacy of decades of war to build a new economic, political, and national future.

Most recent studies of South Sudan’s history have a foreshortened sense of the past, focusing on current political issues, the recently ended civil war, or the ongoing conflicts within the country and along its border with Sudan. This brief but substantial overview of South Sudan’s longue durée, by one of the world’s foremost experts on the region, answers the need for a current, accessible book on this important country.

Drawing on recent advances in the archaeology of the Nile Valley, new fieldwork as well as classic ethnography, and local and foreign archives, Johnson recovers South Sudan’s place in African history and challenges the stereotypes imposed on its peoples.

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Appropriating Blackness
Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
E. Patrick Johnson
Duke University Press, 2003
Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

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Honeypot
Black Southern Women Who Love Women
E. Patrick Johnson
Duke University Press, 2019
E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.
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No Tea, No Shade
New Writings in Black Queer Studies
E. Patrick Johnson
Duke University Press, 2016
The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions.

Contributors. Jafari S. Allen, Marlon M. Bailey, Zachary Shane Kalish Blair, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Cathy J. Cohen, Jennifer DeClue, Treva Ellison, Lyndon K. Gill, Kai M. Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kwame Holmes, E. Patrick Johnson, Shaka McGlotten, Amber Jamilla Musser, Alison Reed, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Tanya Saunders, C. Riley Snorton, Kaila Story, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Julia Roxanne Wallace, Kortney Ziegler
 

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Black Queer Studies
A Critical Anthology
E. Patrick Johnson
Duke University Press, 2005
While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project.

The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.

Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace

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Blacktino Queer Performance
E. Patrick Johnson
Duke University Press, 2016
Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art. The collection contains nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists, each accompanied by an interview and critical essay conducted or written by leading scholars of black, Latina/o, and queer expressive practices. As the volume's framing device, "blacktino" grounds the specificities of black and brown social and political relations while allowing the contributors to maintain the goals of queer-of-color critique. Whether interrogating constructions of Latino masculinity, theorizing the black queer male experience, or examining black lesbian relationships, the contributors present blacktino queer performance as an artistic, critical, political, and collaborative practice. These scripts, interviews, and essays not only accentuate the value of blacktino as a reading device; they radiate the possibilities for thinking through the concepts of blacktino, queer, and performance across several disciplines. Blacktino Queer Performance reveals the inevitable flirtations, frictions, and seductions that mark the contours of any ethnoracial love affair. 
 

Contributors. Jossiana Arroyo, Marlon M. Bailey, Pamela Booker, Sharon Bridgforth, Jennifer Devere Brody, Cedric Brown, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Javier Cardona, E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, John Keene, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, D. Soyini Madison, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., Andreea Micu, Charles I. Nero, Tavia Nyong'o, Paul Outlaw, Coya Paz, Charles Rice-González, Sandra L. Richards, Matt Richardson, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Celiany Rivera-Velázquez, Tamara Roberts, Lisa B. Thompson, Beliza Torres Narváez, Patricia Ybarra, Vershawn Ashanti Young

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solo/black/woman
scripts, interviews, and essays
E. Patrick Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2013
The collection solo/black/woman features seven solo performances by emerging and established feminist performance artists from the past three decades. The scripts are accompanied by interviews and critical essays, as well as a DVD showcasing the performances. The performers range from Robbie McCauley and Rhodessa Jones, who were at the leading edge of the solo monologue boom of the 1980s, to new talents such as Stacey Robinson and Misty DeBerry. Collectively, their work displays an enormous range of aesthetic approach and thematic emphasis. The anthology offers a comprehensive, stimulating introduction to the beauty, richness, urgency, pleasure, and political promise of black feminist performance.
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Sweet Tea
A Play
E. Patrick Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2020
This book is the stage version of E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History, a groundbreaking text for the fields of Black studies, queer studies, and southern oral history and ethnography. Between 2004 and 2006, Johnson edited a series of narratives from Black gay men who were born and raised in the South and have continued to live there. While the scholarly text of Sweet Tea has enjoyed wide circulation, Johnson knew that the stories of these individuals weren’t able to come fully alive on the page. He transformed the text into a theatrical performance, which originally toured the country as Pouring Tea; the oral history has also been adapted into a feature-length documentary, Making Sweet Tea.

Based on several tours and individual stagings, Sweet Tea: A Play invites readers, students, theater practitioners, and audiences from different backgrounds to engage with the lives of eleven men and one gender-nonconforming person—incredible characters all originally played by the author in a one-man show.
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Legends of the Capilano
E. Pauline Johnson
University of Manitoba Press, 2023

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The Organization of Space in Developing Countries
E.A. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 1970

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American Imperialism in the Image of Peer Gynt
Memoirs of a Professor-Bureaucrat
E.A.J. Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

American Imperialism in the Image of Peer Gynt was first published in 1971. 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 is the life story of an economic historian whose distinguished career has included nine years of service as a United States government official in various capacities, both military and civilian, around the world. It is a revealing and often disturbing account, evoking in the author's mind, as he reflects on his own experiences and those of other American emissaries abroad, the image of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who wandered over the earth thinking he was doing good, only to find when he returned home that both his virtues and his sins were so insignificant that his soul was scheduled by the buttonmolder to be cast into limbo in the form of a little lead button.

Professor Johnson's book is much more than an autobiography. From the vantage point of his experiences and observations he provides a critical evaluation of American efforts abroad. He discusses cultural factors that have shaped American preconceptions and attitudes over the last half century and attempts to explain why a generation of presumably well-equipped Americans has been singularly incapable of materializing the hopes and aspirations of both the American people and the world community.

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Justice and Reform
The Formative Years of the OEO Legal Services Program
Earl Johnson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1974
Justice and Reform is the first study of the origins, philosophy, creation, management, and impact of the Office of Economic Opportunity Legal Services Program. As such, it clearly and concisely describes the Program's role both as an instrument of equal justice and as a strategy for overcoming poverty. Timely, important, and unique, it tells the story behind the OEO Legal Services Program—an endeavor that has been called both the most successful element of the war on poverty and the most stimulating development to occur in the American legal profession during the Twentieth Century. The early chapters in the book reveal the nature and motivations of the two groups which joined to create the Program: the conservative, American Bar Association sponsored 89-year-old legal aid movement and the Ford Foundation-financed neighborhood lawyer experiments that started in 1962 under the direction of young activist lawyers. Why they merged and how they merged forms the background for a description of how the partners persuaded the OEO bureaucracy to start a legal services program and convinced over 200 communities (including most large cities) to set up a federally funded legal assistance agency. Legal Services Program established policy, how it settled upon "law reform" as the priority function of the Program, how it preserved the integrity of its policies within OEO, and how it caused its grantees to engage in law reform. Chapter 8 evaluates, for the first time, the economic, political, and social impact of the Program as of 1972. The final chapter speculates on the future of government-subsidized legal assistance in the United States from the perspective of the OEO program's twin goals of equal justice and social reform.
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Fathers' Fair Share
Helping Poor Men Manage Child Support and Fatherhood
Earl S. Johnson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1999
One of the most challenging goals for welfare reformers has been improving the collection of child support payments from noncustodial parents, usually fathers. Often vilified as deadbeats who have dropped out of their children's lives, these fathers have been the target of largely punitive enforcement policies that give little consideration to the complex circumstances of these men's lives. Fathers' Fair Share presents an alternative to these measures with an in-depth study of the Parents Fair Share Program. A multi-state intervention run by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, the program was designed to better the life skills of nonpaying fathers with children on public assistance, in the belief that this would encourage them to improve their level of child support. The men chosen for the program frequently lived on the margins of society. Chronically unemployed or underemployed, undereducated, and often earning their money on the streets, they bore the scars of drug or alcohol abuse, troubled family lives, and arrest records. Among those of African American and Hispanic descent, many felt a deep-rooted distrust of the mainstream economy. The Parents Fair Share Program offered these men the chance not only to learn the social skills needed for stable employment but to participate in discussions about personal difficulties, racism, and problems in their relationships with their children and families. Fathers' Fair Share details the program's mix of employment training services, peer support groups, and formal mediation of disputes between custodial and noncustodial parents. Equally important, the authors explore the effect of the participating fathers' expectations and doubts about the program, which were colored by their often negative views about the child support and family law system. The voices heard in Fathers' Fair Share provides a rare look into the lives of low-income fathers and how they think about their struggles and prospects, their experiences in the workplace, and their responsibilities toward their families. Parents Fair Share demonstrated that, in spite of their limited resources, these men are more likely to make stronger efforts to improve support payments and to become greater participants in their children's lives if they encounter a less adversarial and arbitrary enforcement system. Fathers' Fair Share offers a valuable resource to the design of social welfare programs seeking to reach out to this little-understood population, and addresses issues of tremendous importance for those concerned about welfare reform, child support enforcement, family law, and employment policy.
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Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve
Eleanor Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.
 
Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
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Staging Contemplation
Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama
Eleanor Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics.
            Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.
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