Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the many facets of his thought. (The magnum opus of Benjamin’s Paris years, The Arcades Project, has been published in a separate volume.)Walter Benjamin emerged from the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined “to be considered as the principal critic of German literature.” But the scene, as he found it, was dominated by “talented fakes,” so—to use his words—“only a terrorist campaign would I suffice” to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with “One Way Street,” one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals.The volume includes a number of his most important works, including “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “One Way Street.” He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.Benjamin’s sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.

The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism.

Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity--such as "The Storyteller" and "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"--as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in his work.

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.

This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.

Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mourning political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of Selected Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his career.

Previously concerned chiefly with literary theory, Benjamin during these Years does pioneering work in new areas, from the stud of popular Culture (a discipline he virtually created) to theories of the media and the visual arts. His writings on the theory of modernity-most of them new to readers of English--develop ideas as important to an understanding of the twentieth century as an contained in his widely anthologiied essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.

This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valéry and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened tip by techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of & Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse.

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature—by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project.

Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.”

Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.

Your doctor is the second most important person taking care of your health. You're the first. This book was written so that you can do a better job, without going to medical school. It is designed to help you sort out the vital health information you need--what to consider, what to ignore, what to worry about, what to forget.

Deciding how to take care of a pain, an injury, a fever--and whether to call in expert advice--is not always an easy task. Knowing how to prevent disease can be even harder: Will I really live longer and feel better if I cut down on dietary fat, or alcohol, or overwork? The main focus of this book is on prevention: habits you can modify, choices you can make in daily life. Good choices do make a difference. The life expectancy of American adults has been increasing, and it is quite clear that professional medical care is not the only reason people are living longer.

But when you do call in the professionals, this book will guide you in asking the right questions about your diagnosis and treatment. When medical decisions must be made, you can be an active partner in making them.

The doctors who wrote this book have made some fundamental assumptions about their readers: they are people who want to make their own choices about their health, based on the best possible evidence; they want straightforward information unencumbered with excessive detail; when they talk with their physician, they want to ask intelligent questions and understand the answers; they want to live a long life, but also enjoy it along the way; and they want to see "the big picture"--how their personal health is affected by environmental and social forces.

In this startling group memoir, four friends—black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born—use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.
 
Framing their book club around collective secrets, the group bears witness to how Morrison’s works and words can propel us forward while we sit with uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and identity. How do we make space for black vulnerability in the face of white supremacy and internalized self-loathing? How do historical novels speak to us now about the delicate seams that hold black minds and bodies together?
 
This slim and brilliant confessional offers a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we find ourselves in fiction and think of Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.

From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.

The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s. The pioneering radio program defined country and western entertainment until the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll supplanted it in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and South, delivering popular entertainment to both rural and urban areas while celebrating the fading folk traditions of an increasingly urbanized America.

The Hayloft Gang draws on the colorful commentary of performers and former listeners to analyze the National Barn Dance, its audience, and its impact. Contributors trace the history of barn dance radio, explore the paradox of a foundational country music program broadcast from a major city, investigate notions of authenticity in the presentation of country music and entertainment, and delve into provocative issues raised by the barn dance phenomenon.

Contributors: Chad Berry, Michael T. Bertrand, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Don Cusic, Wayne W. Daniel, Loyal Jones, Kristine M. McCusker, Stephen Parry, Susan Smulyan, Paul L. Tyler, and Michael Ann Williams.

According to 2016 Pew Research Center survey data, Millennials are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult demographic. But despite being core library users, millennials and other younger generations are often underrepresented on library boards and library advocacy groups, including Friends groups and Foundations.  But you can change that, with the help of this planner’s hands-on worksheets, brainstorming activities, checklists, and expert advice. Using this toolkit from United for Libraries you will

• understand generational differences and commonalities through statistics and analysis of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z/post-Millennials;
• learn how to navigate the challenges of fundraising with the “debt generations” by persuasively answering the question “what’s in it for me?”;
• master the ABCs of recruitment and retention, tailoring them to fit your library;
• craft several customized pitches, giving you confidence no matter the situation or audience;
• discover how to cement buy-in from two key groups, current organization members and your new recruits, thereby ensuring acceptance and enthusiasm all around;
• work towards defining and managing diversity for your advocacy group; and
• use tried and true methods for successful onboarding of volunteers, including a Board Member Orientation Checklist and guidance on mentoring.

Using this resource, libraries of all kinds will be empowered to grow and strengthen their recruitment, retention, and training of Trustees, Friends, and Foundation members.

Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in “intellectual property” has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics ranging from traditional knowledge to international trade. Though recognition of the central role played by “knowledge economies” has increased, there is a special urgency associated with present-day inquiries into where rights to information come from, how they are justified, and the ways in which they are deployed.  

 

Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, presents a range of diverse—and even conflicting—contemporary perspectives on intellectual property rights and the contested sources of authority associated with them. Examining fundamental concepts and challenging conventional narratives—including those centered around authorship, invention, and the public domain—this book provides a rich introduction to an important intersection of law, culture, and material production.

Statistics is the science that focuses on drawing conclusions from data, by modeling and analyzing the data using probabilistic models. In An Introduction to Mathematical Statistics the authors describe key concepts from statistics and give a mathematical basis for important statistical methods. Much attention is paid to the sound application of those methods to data. The three main topics in statistics are estimators, tests, and confidence regions. The authors illustrate these in many examples, with a separate chapter on regression models, including linear regression and analysis of variance. They also discuss the optimality of estimators and tests, as well as the selection of the best-fitting model. Each chapter ends with a case study in which the described statistical methods are applied. This book assumes a basic knowledge of probability theory, calculus, and linear algebra. Several annexes are available for Mathematical Statistics on this page.

The Strategic Victory that Established the Continental Army as a True Fighting Force
The battle of Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, is among the most important battles in the history of the American Army. Well known in American mythology as the battle where Molly Pitcher fought alongside her fallen husband, Monmouth Court House is regarded by historians as the moment when the image of the American army in both Europe and the colonies was transformed from that of a rag-tag band of ill-trained civilians to that of a disciplined, well-guided, professional military unit. In June 1778, British General Henry Clinton’s army evacuated Philadelphia and struck out across “the Jerseys” on its way back to New York City. George Washington’s Continental Army, retrained and confident after enduring a winter at Valley Forge and supplemented by a large number of fresh New Jersey militia, marched in pursuit. About 50 miles south of New York City, the armies clashed at Monmouth Court House on June 28, in the last major Revolutionary War battle in the north. Essentially a draw, the battle marked the first time in the war that the Continental Army was able to hold a battlefield, fighting the full force of the British army to a standstill. Monmouth Court House: The Battle that Made the American Army by Joseph G. Bilby and Katherine Bilby Jenkins is the story of this battle, how it came to be, and its influence on the course of the war and American history.

The authors set Monmouth Court House within the context of the American Revolution and the civil war between Tories and Whigs that erupted in New Jersey during that time. The entire campaign and battle are described, including an analysis of the commanders, personnel, organization, training, and weapons of both armies. The book also assesses the historiography and folklore of the battle, including the story of the real “Molly Pitcher,” the use of the battleground as Civil War muster-in camp, its eventual status as Monmouth Battleground State Park, and current efforts at interpretation and battlefield archaeology and how they have changed our understanding of the battle.

Prometheus brought the gift of enlightenment to humanity and suffered for his benevolence. This collection takes on scholars’ Promethean view of themselves as selfless bringers of light and instead offers a new vision of public scholarship as service to society.

Thomas J Billard and Silvio Waisbord curate essays from a wide range of specialties within the study of communication. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the contributors use approaches from critical meditations to case studies to how-to guides as they explore the possibilities of seeing shared knowledge not as a gift to be granted but as an imperative urging readers to address the problems of the world. Throughout the volume, the works show that a pivot to ideas of scholarship as public service is already underway in corners of communication studies across the country.

Visionary and provocative, Public Scholarship in Communication Studies proposes a needed reconsideration of knowledge and a roadmap to its integration with community.

Contributors: Elaine Almeida, Becca Beets, Thomas J Billard, Danielle K. Brown, Aymar Jean Christian, Stacey L. Connaughton, Paula Gardner, Larry Gross, Amy Jordan, Daniel Kreiss, Rachel Kuo, Susan Mancino, Shannon C. McGregor, Philip M. Napoli, Todd P. Newman, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Chad Raphael, Sue Robinson, Silvio Waisbord, Yidong Wang, and Holley Wilkin

In Cosmopolitics of the Camera, the leading experts in the field present Les Archives de la Planète—Albert Kahn’s stunning collection of early color photography and documentary film—and discuss the extraordinary intellectual context from which it grew. The archives, collected between 1909 and 1932, show the cultural richness and diversity of humanity at a time of drastic geographical and historical change. Consisting of 183 thousand meters of film, 72 thousand autochromes and more than 6 thousand stereographs, it portrays the beauty and creativity of cultures whose fatal disappearance Kahn believed to be only a question of time.
 
The Archives of the Planet was one of a string of institutions for research and international cooperation established in Kahn’s utopian World Gardens near Paris. Some of the best-known minds of the age met there regularly to discuss the problem of how to make new media of communication serve the cause of peace and human development. Cosmopolitics of the Camera presents ten expert voices from seven different countries, studying the work of Kahn and his key collaborators, the geographer Jean Brunhes and the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the spirit of their culturally diverse venture, placing it in its proper historical and intellectual context, and exploring its ambitious achievements and failures. By pushing Kahn’s work back into active discussion, the analysis forces us to reflect on the ways our world is shaped and recorded by the media, and reactivates the time capsule that Kahn designed to communicate with the future.

Hamza Bogary describes a bygone way of life that has now irreversibly disappeared. He speaks of life in Mecca before the advent of oil. Only partly autobiographical, the memoir is nevertheless rich in remembered detail based on Bogary's early observations of life in Mecca. He has transformed his knowledge into art through his sense of humor, empathy, and remarkable understanding of human nature. This work not only entertains; it also informs its readers about the Arabia of the first half of the twentieth century in a graphic and fascinating way. The narrator, young Muhaisin, deals with various aspects of Arabian culture, including education, pilgrimages, styles of clothing, slavery, public executions, the status of women, and religion. Muhaisin is frank in his language and vivid in his humor. The reader quickly comes to love the charming and mischievous boy in this universal tale.

George Boolos was one of the most prominent and influential logician-philosophers of recent times. This collection, nearly all chosen by Boolos himself shortly before his death, includes thirty papers on set theory, second-order logic, and plural quantifiers; on Frege, Dedekind, Cantor, and Russell; and on miscellaneous topics in logic and proof theory, including three papers on various aspects of the Gödel theorems. Boolos is universally recognized as the leader in the renewed interest in studies of Frege's work on logic and the philosophy of mathematics. John Burgess has provided introductions to each of the three parts of the volume, and also an afterword on Boolos's technical work in provability logic, which is beyond the scope of this volume.

This volume includes “Fabricating Celts: How Iron Age Iberians Became Indo-Europeanized during the Franco Regime,” by Aarón Alzola Romero and Eduardo Sánchez-Moreno; “Nations in Tune: The Influence of Irish Music on the Breton Musical Revival in the 1960s and 1970s,” by Yann Bévant; “Ethnicity, Geography, and the Passage of Dominion in the Mabinogi and Brut y Brenhinedd,” by Christina Chance; “Rejecting Mother’s Blessing: The Absence of the Fairy in the Welsh Search for Identity,” by Adam Coward; “Gwalarn: An Attempt to Renew Breton Literature,” by Gwendal Denez and Erwan Hupel; “At the Crossroads: World War One and the Shifting Roles of Men and Women in Breton Ballad Song Practice,” by Natalie Anne Franz; “Apocryphal Sanctity in the Lives of Irish Saints,” by Máire Johnson; “An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff and Its Connections with Arthurian Tradition,” by Herve Le Bihan; “A Walk on the Wild Side: Women, Men, and Madness,” by Edyta Lehmann; “The Early Establishment of Celtic Studies in North American Universities,” by Michael Linkletter; “‘In t-indellchró bodba fer talman’: A Reading of Cú Chulainn’s First Recension ríastrad,” by Elizabeth Moore; “Dream and Vision in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Epic Case of William Wallace,” by Kylie Murray; “‘Some of you will curse her’: Women’s Writing during the Irish-Language Revival,” by Riona Nic Congáil; “Dating Peredur: New Light on Old Problems,” by Natalia I. Petrovskaia; “‘From the shame you have done’: Comparing the Stories of Blodeuedd and Bláthnait,” by Sarah L. Pfannenschmidt; and “‘And there was a fourth son’: Narrative Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys,” by Kelly Ann Randell.

Writing and recording are key cultural activities that allow humans to communicate across time and space. Whereas Old World writing evolved into the alphabetic system that is now employed around the world, the indigenous peoples in the Americas autonomously developed alternative systems that conveyed knowledge in a tangible medium. New World systems range from the hieroglyphic script of the Maya, to the figural and iconic pictographies of the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs in Mexico and the Moche in Peru, to the abstract knotted khipus of the Andes. Like Old World writing, these systems represented a cultural category that was fundamental to the workings of their societies, one that was heavily impregnated with cultural value.

The fifteen contributors to Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America consider substantive and theoretical issues concerning writing and signing systems in the ancient Americas. They present the latest thinking about these graphic and tactile systems of communication. Their variety of perspectives and their advances in decipherment and understanding constitute a major contribution not only to our understanding of Pre-Columbian and indigenous American cultures but also to our comparative and global understanding of writing and literacy.

Federico Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1564–1631), is well known as a leading Catholic reformer and as the founder of the Ambrosiana library, art collection, and academy in that city. Less known is the fact that the institution's art museum was the culmination of many decades of reflection on the aesthetic qualities and religious roles of art. Borromeo recorded his reflections in two treatises.

De pictura sacra (Sacred Painting, 1624) laid out the rules that artists should follow when creating religious art. Borromeo touched on dozens of iconographical issues and in so doing drew on his deep knowledge not only of church fathers, councils, and scripture but also of classical art and literature. In Musaeum (1625) Borromeo showed a less doctrinaire and more personal side by walking the reader through the Ambrosiana and commenting on specific works in his collection. He offered some of the earliest and most important critiques to survive on works by artists such as Leonardo, Titian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

This volume offers, for the first time, translations of the treatises directly into English as well as freshly edited Latin texts, an introduction, extensive notes, and an appendix on the Academy of Design that was established in conjunction with the museum. These treatises will be of great interest to students of the history of art, museums, and religion.

The Central American region is a vital ecological resource that provides environmental balance for the rest of the American continents. Using comprehensive surveys and statistical studies, this volume presents an evaluation of the region's deforestation, sustainable agriculture, tourism, emerging carbon markets, trade, and growth.

By comparing and contrasting policies applied by other countries with similar environmental characteristics, the contributors argue that Central American governments must learn from the results of these policies in order to manage resources, foster sustainability and competitiveness, and procure positive results.

Renowned for their monumental architecture and rich visual culture, the Moche inhabited the north coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period (AD 100-800). Archaeological discoveries over the past century and the dissemination of Moche artifacts to museums around the world have given rise to a widespread and continually increasing fascination with this complex culture, which expressed its beliefs about the human and supernatural worlds through finely crafted ceramic and metal objects of striking realism and visual sophistication.

In this standard-setting work, an international, multidisciplinary team of scholars who are at the forefront of Moche research present a state-of-the-art overview of Moche culture. The contributors address various issues of Moche society, religion, and material culture based on multiple lines of evidence and methodologies, including iconographic studies, archaeological investigations, and forensic analyses. Some of the articles present the results of long-term studies of major issues in Moche iconography, while others focus on more specifically defined topics such as site studies, the influence of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on Moche society, the nature of Moche warfare and sacrifice, and the role of Moche visual culture in decoding social and political frameworks.

Abundantly illustrated, this catalogue is a fascinating and comprehensive reevaluation of the French modernist sculptor Camille Claudel.

Camille Claudel (1864–1943) was among the most daring and visionary sculptors of the late nineteenth century. Although much attention has been paid to her tumultuous life—her affair with her mentor, Auguste Rodin; the premature end to her career; her thirty-year institutionalization in an asylum—her art remains little known outside of France. Memorably praised by critic Octave Mirbeau in 1895 as “a revolt of nature: a woman of genius,” Claudel was celebrated for her brilliance during a time when women sculptors were rare.

Featuring more than two hundred photographs along with contributions from leading experts, this publication accompanies the first comprehensive survey of Claudel’s oeuvre in nearly forty years. With essays exploring the many facets of her life, work, and reception; a biography; commentary by American sculptor Kiki Smith; and a fascinating appendix of documents written by Claudel and her contemporaries, this volume reevaluates the artist’s work on its own merits and repositions her legacy within a more complex genealogy of modernism.

This volume, copublished with The Art Institute of Chicago, accompanies an exhibition on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from October 7, 2023, to February 19, 2024 and at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 2 to July 21, 2024.

How are refugee crises solved? This has become an urgent question as global displacement rates continue to climb, and refugee situations now persist for years if not decades. The resolution of displacement and the conflicts that force refugees from their homes is often explained as a top-down process led and controlled by governments and international organizations. This book takes a different approach. Through contributions from scholars working in politics, anthropology, law, sociology and philosophy, and a wide range of case studies, it explores the diverse ways in which refugees themselves interpret, create and pursue solutions to their plight. It investigates the empirical and normative significance of refugees’ engagement as agents in these processes, and their implications for research, policy and practice. This book speaks both to academic debates and to the broader community of peacebuilding, humanitarian and human rights scholars concerned with the nature and dynamics of agency in contentious political contexts, and identifies insights that can inform policy and practice.

The ocean and its inhabitants sketch and stretch our understandings of law in unexpected ways. Inspired by the blue turn in the social sciences and humanities, Blue Legalities explores how regulatory frameworks and governmental infrastructures are made, reworked, and contested in the oceans. Its interdisciplinary contributors analyze topics that range from militarization and Maori cosmologies to island building in the South China Sea and underwater robotics. Throughout, Blue Legalities illuminates the vast and unusual challenges associated with regulating the turbulent materialities and lives of the sea. Offering much more than an analysis of legal frameworks, the chapters in this volume show how the more-than-human ocean is central to the construction of terrestrial institutions and modes of governance. By thinking with the more-than-human ocean, Blue Legalities questions what we think we know—and what we don’t know—about oceans, our earthly planet, and ourselves.  

Contributors. Stacy Alaimo, Amy Braun, Irus Braverman, Holly Jean Buck, Jennifer L. Gaynor, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth R. Johnson, Stephanie Jones, Zsofia Korosy, Berit Kristoffersen, Jessica Lehman, Astrida Neimanis, Susan Reid, Alison Rieser, Katherine G. Sammler, Astrid Schrader, Kristen L. Shake, Phil Steinberg

The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here a distinguished international group of ancient historians explores the classical antiquity that Bowersock has given us over a scholarly career of almost fifty years.

The topics offered in East and West range throughout the ancient world from the second century BCE to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla’s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

This collection of essays represents the first attempt to take in Glen Bowersock’s well-developed scholarly interests as a whole. The contributors open up new avenues that often run well beyond the conventional geographical and temporal boundaries of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, leading to a host of fresh insights into antique thought and life.

This third volume of the Excavation of the Abri Pataud rock shelter in southern France focuses on the occupation that began about 27,000 years ago and compares the materials with artifacts from more than 50 sites in Italy, Spain, and France.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries

The Maoist state’s dominance over Chinese society, achieved through such watersheds as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, is well known. Maoism at the Grassroots reexamines this period of transformation and upheaval from a new perspective, one that challenges the standard state-centered view. Bringing together scholars from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, this volume marshals new research to reveal a stunning diversity of individual viewpoints and local experiences during China’s years of high socialism.

Focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to 1980, the authors provide insights into the everyday lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. They explore how ordinary men and women risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities. Many displayed a shrewd knack for negotiating the maze-like power structures of everyday Maoism, appropriating regime ideology in their daily lives while finding ways to express discontent and challenge the state’s pervasive control.

Heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions between official and popular culture were persistent features of Maoism at the grassroots. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories, teenagers penned searing complaints in diaries, mentally ill individuals cursed Mao, farmers formed secret societies and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercurrents were as representative of ordinary people’s lives as the ideals promulgated in state propaganda.

To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond: Theory and Methods for Developing Superior Second Language Ability addresses an important issue in Second Language Acquisition—how to help learners progress from Intermediate and Advanced proficiency to Superior and beyond. Due to the pressures of globalization, American society encounters an ever-increasing demand for speakers with advanced language abilities. This volume makes available cutting edge research on working memory and cognition and empirical studies of effective teaching. In addition it can serve as a practical handbook for seasoned and pre-professional instructors alike. The bringing together of the latest in second language acquisition theory, decades of empirical research, and practical classroom application makes for an unprecedented volume examining the achievement of Superior-level foreign language proficiency.

These days, it's rare to pick up a newspaper and not see a story related to intelligence. From the investigations of the 9/11 commission, to accusations of illegal wiretapping, to debates on whether it's acceptable to torture prisoners for information, intelligence—both accurate and not—is driving domestic and foreign policy. And yet, in part because of its inherently secretive nature, intelligence has received very little scholarly study. Into this void comes Reforming Intelligence, a timely collection of case studies written by intelligence experts, and sponsored by the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at the Naval Postgraduate School, that collectively outline the best practices for intelligence services in the United States and other democratic states.

Reforming Intelligence suggests that intelligence is best conceptualized as a subfield of civil-military relations, and is best compared through institutions. The authors examine intelligence practices in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, as well as such developing democracies as Brazil, Taiwan, Argentina, and Russia. While there is much more data related to established democracies, there are lessons to be learned from states that have created (or re-created) intelligence institutions in the contemporary political climate. In the end, reading about the successes of Brazil and Taiwan, the failures of Argentina and Russia, and the ongoing reforms in the United States yields a handful of hard truths. In the murky world of intelligence, that's an unqualified achievement.

Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought--investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this book reminds us of what our own reflections owe to theirs.

In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pursuit of knowledge, major thinkers, and schools of thought, this work shows us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and philosophical ideas, such as those on Utopia and the Critique of Politics, Observation and Research, and Ethics; others on specific fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea; studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek civilization--and that Aristotle considered a natural and universal trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations, this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek intellectual adventure.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Harvard University Library today is that in this largest university library in the world primary emphasis is placed upon a regard for the individual which extends alike to staff, faculty, students, and general users. As director of the Library, Paul Buck was responsible for this attitude. This book reflects his view that as the center of university education and research a library owes a responsibility both to the people who use libraries and to those who operate them. Personal consideration must be united with the mechanization and automation that is essential in developing a modern library's collections, circulation, and special services.

Here are addresses, articles, and reports in which Mr. Buck interprets the Harvard Library to its own staff, to the academic community, and to the general public. For the general reader who wants to know something of the nature and significance of university libraries, the author presents a historical view as well as an interesting picture of what the largest library of its kind is doing today.

The collection begins with a talk given at Monticello in 1954 in which Mr. Buck announced his university library credo, emphasizing the importance of the university library, its personnel, and its services to the community. This credo he restates at the end of this volume. Throughout the book are speeches bearing on the author's conception of libraries for teaching and research as well as a description of the administrative program at Harvard that he based on this conception.

He analyzes problems involved in recruiting, training, and retaining a quality staff of professional librarians. In one article he deals with the new personnel program adopted by the Harvard Library in 1958. In another he is concerned with the remarkably successful plan for recruiting "library interns" that is now in operation at Harvard. Still another paper discusses a landmark of his administration, the installation of a mechanized circulation system.

Included here also are addresses reflecting Mr. Buck's broad historical perspective. He deals with the long-range future of libraries generally and with the prospects of American universities. He is concerned with relations between historians, librarians, and businessmen. In a short paper he touches on another landmark of his administration--the first steps taken in planning the John F. Kennedy library.