A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
--David O. Sears, Professor of Psychology and Political Science, UCLA
"Lane's deep knowledge of the sources of human happiness enables him to develop a powerful critique of economic theory."
---Robert A. Dahl, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Yale University
Robert E. Lane is the Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. His previous publications include The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000) and The Market Experience (1991).
In the late nineteenth century, life became more stable and orderly for most American city dwellers, but not for blacks. Roger Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Philadelphia serves as test case because of the richness of the data: Du Bois’s classic study, The Philadelphia Negro, newspapers, records of the criminal justice system and other local agencies, and the federal census. The author presents numerical details, along with many examples of the human stories—social and political—behind the statistics.
Lane reveals how social and economic discrimination created a black criminal subculture. This subculture, overlooked by those histories depending on often inaccurate census materials, eroded family patterns, encouraged violence, discouraged efforts at middle-class respectability, and intensified employment problems by adding white fear to the white prejudice that had helped to create it.
Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years to the 1980s. Lane not only charts Philadelphia’s story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.
Roger Lane uses the statistics on violent death in Philadelphia from 1839 to 1901 to study the behavior of the living. His extensive research into murder, suicide, and accident rates in Philadelphia provides an excellent factual foundation for his theories. A computerized study of every homicide indictment during the sixty-two years covered is the source of the most detailed information. Analysis of suicide and accident statistics reveals differences in behavior patterns between the sexes, the races, young and old, professional and laborer, native and immigrant, and how these patterns changed overtime.
Using both these group differences and the changing overall incidence of the three forms of death, Lane synthesizes a comprehensive theory of the influences of industrial urbanization on social behavior. He believes that the demands of the rising industrial system, as transmitted through factory, school, and bureaucracy, combined to socialize city dwellers in new ways, to raise the rate of suicide, and to lower rates of simple accident and murder. Finally, Lane suggests a relation between these developments and the violent disorder in the postindustrial city, which has lost the older mechanisms of socialization without finding any effective new ones. Original and probing, Lane's combination of statistics and theory makes this a significant new work in social, urban, and medical history.
In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane’s Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue—decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson’s work, Lane’s poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson’s poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.
In this lively and entertaining book, Yvette Florio Lane embarks on a lively historical tour of the production and consumption of Earth’s beloved crustacean. Over the centuries, shrimp have been hailed as an indulgence, a luxury, and even an aphrodisiac. They have been served to show hospitality, demonstrate status, and celebrate special occasions. They can also be culinary ambassadors, inspiring novel cooking techniques and the introduction of new tastes around the world. Demand for the creatures, however, has now exceeded supply. Whether fished from the ocean with nets or deep-sea trawlers, or raised in modern aquaculture farms, the world produces and eats more (and cheaper) shrimp than ever before, but often at great cost. Shrimp is a delicious, fascinating, and troubling history of a culinary favorite.
2003 — Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Award – The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write "proper" English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to "talk in a way that feel peculiar to [their] mind," as a character in Alice Walker's The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself.
Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.
The just war tradition is central to the practice of international relations, in questions of war, peace, and the conduct of war in the contemporary world, but surprisingly few scholars have questioned the authority of the tradition as a source of moral guidance for modern statecraft. Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice brings together many of the most important contemporary writers on just war to consider questions of authority surrounding the just war tradition.
Authority is critical in two key senses. First, it is central to framing the ethical debate about the justice or injustice of war, raising questions about the universality of just war and the tradition’s relationship to religion, law, and democracy. Second, who has the legitimate authority to make just-war claims and declare and prosecute war? Such authority has traditionally been located in the sovereign state, but non-state and supra-state claims to legitimate authority have become increasingly important over the last twenty years as the just war tradition has been used to think about multilateral military operations, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and sub-state violence. The chapters in this collection, organized around these two dimensions, offer a compelling reassessment of the authority issue’s centrality in how we can, do, and ought to think about war in contemporary global politics.
What obligations do nations have to protect citizens of other nations? As responsibility to our fellow human beings and to the stability of civilization over many years has ripened fully into a concept of a "just war," it follows naturally that the time has come to fill in the outlines of the realities and boundaries of what constitutes "just" humanitarian intervention.
Even before the world changed radically on September 11, policymakers, scholars, and activists were engaging in debates on this nettlesome issue—following that date, sovereignty, human rights, and intervention took on fine new distinctions, and questions arose: Should sovereignty prevent outside agents from interfering in the affairs of a state? What moral weight should we give to sovereignty and national borders? Do humanitarian "emergencies" justify the use of military force? Can the military be used for actions other than waging war? Can "national interest" justify intervention? Should we kill in order to save?
These are profound and troubling questions, and questions that the distinguished contributors of Just Intervention probe in all their complicated dimensions. Sohail Hashmi analyzes how Islamic tradition and Islamic states understand humanitarian intervention; Thomas Weiss strongly advocates the use of military force for humanitarian purposes in Yugoslavia; Martin Cook, Richard Caplan, and Julie Mertus query the use of force in Kosovo; Michael Barnett, drawing on his experience in the United Nations while it debated how best to respond to Rwandan genocide, discusses how international organizations may become hamstrung in the ability to use force due to bureaucratic inertia; and Anthony Lang ably envelopes these—and other complex issues—with a deft hand and contextual insight.
Highlighting some of the most significant issues in regard to humanitarian intervention, Just Intervention braves the treacherous moral landscape that now faces an increasingly unstable world. These contributions will help us make our way.
The convergence of activists in Seattle during the World Trade Organization meetings captured the headlines in 1999. These demonstrations marked the first major expression on U.S. soil of worldwide opposition to inequality, privatization, and political and intellectual repression. This turning point in world politics coincided with an ongoing quandary in academia-particularly in the humanities where the so-called "death of theory" has left the field on tenuous footing.
In What Democracy Looks Like, the editors and twenty-seven contributors argue that these crises-in the world and the academy-are not unrelated. The essays insist that, in the wake of "Seattle," teachers and scholars of American literature and culture are faced with the challenge of addressing new points of intersection between American studies and literary studies. The narrative, the poem, the essay, and the drama need to be reexamined in ways that are relevant to the urgent social and political issues of our time.
Collectively urging scholars and educators to pay fresh attention to the material conditions out of which literature arises, this path-breaking book inaugurates a new critical realism in American literary studies. It provides a crucial link in the growing need to merge theory and practice with the goal of reconnecting the ivory tower elite to the activists on the street.
In From Codex to Hypertext, scholars from multiple disciplines engage with both of these strands. This volume includes essays that consider how changes such as the mounting ubiquity of digital technology and the globalization of structures of publication and book distribution are shaping the way readers participate in the encoding and decoding of textual meaning. Contributors also examine how and why reading communities cohere in a range of contexts, including prisons, book clubs, networks of zinesters, state-funded programs designed to promote active citizenship, and online spaces devoted to sharing one's tastes in books.
As concerns circulate in the media about the ways that reading—for so long anchored in print culture and the codex—is at risk of being irrevocably altered by technological shifts, this book insists on the importance of tracing the historical continuities that emerge between these reading practices and those of previous eras.
In addition to the volume editor, contributors include Daniel Allington, Bethan Benwell, Jin Feng, Ed Finn, Danielle Fuller, David S. Miall, Julian Pinder, Janice Radway, Julie Rak, DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Megan Sweeney, Joan Bessman Taylor, Molly Abel Travis, and David Wright.
Lang's Introduction describes briefly the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, discusses each of the Pre-Raphaelite poets, both individually and in relation to the others, and grapples with the questions of definition of Pre-Raphaelitism and the similarities between its painting and poetry. The book is appropriately illustrated with thirty-two works by D. G. Rossetti, John Ruskin, William H. Hunt, and other Pre-Raphaelite artists.
This is the only anthology available that provides a representative selection of the work of these important poets. It will be indispensable to students of Victorian poetry and appreciated by readers interested in the Pre-Raphaelites.
"This is a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly documented historical case study of the movements for African American liberation in St. Louis. Through detailed analysis of black working class mobilization from the depression years to the advent of Black Power, award-winning historian Clarence Lang describes how the advances made in earlier decades were undermined by a black middle class agenda that focused on the narrow aims of black capitalists and politicians. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the black working class insurgency that underpinned the civil rights and Black Power campaigns of the twentieth century."
---V. P. Franklin, University of California, Riverside
"A major work of scholarship that will transform historical understanding of the pivotal role that class politics played in both civil rights and Black Power activism in the United States. Clarence Lang's insightful, engagingly written, and well-researched study will prove indispensable to scholars and students of postwar American history."
---Peniel Joseph, Brandeis University
Breaking new ground in the field of Black Freedom Studies, Grassroots at the Gateway reveals how urban black working-class communities, cultures, and institutions propelled the major African American social movements in the period between the Great Depression and the end of the Great Society. Using the city of St. Louis in the border state of Missouri as a case study, author Clarence Lang undermines the notion that a unified "black community" engaged in the push for equality, justice, and respect. Instead, black social movements of the working class were distinct from---and at times in conflict with---those of the middle class. This richly researched book delves into African American oral histories, records of activist individuals and organizations, archives of the black advocacy press, and even the records of the St. Louis' economic power brokers whom local black freedom fighters challenged. Grassroots at the Gateway charts the development of this race-class divide, offering an uncommon reading of not only the civil rights movement but also the emergence and consolidation of a black working class.
Clarence Lang is Assistant Professor in African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Photo courtesy Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Lang describes how working and lower class students openly acknowledge and struggle with challenging experiences on a predominantly middle and upper middle class campus. We appreciate how first generation students are risk takers, boundary crosser, and successful social class immigrants. Resourceful first-gen efforts become the basis of connection and community as students begin their social mobility journeys. Overtime a public story emerges: stories making the invisible visible; stories of courage and persistence; stories of structural changes; a thoughtful student movement that is hard to ignore. We come to better understand the power of shared determination.
These writers explore social class heritages at a time when more and more Americans are recognizing economic inequality as a core structural problem facing millions, independent of individual effort and talent. They shed light on what is too often denied both on and off college campuses: social class. By their very nature these types of explorations are political.
In America, where economic differences frequently go unnoticed when discussing inequality, openly writing about one’s personal class experiences can be controversial. These University of Michigan students and alumni have the courage to make public how social class structures American life.
Edmund Booth was born in 1810 and died in 1905, and during the 94 years of his life, he epitomized virtually everything that characterized an American legend of that century. In his prime, Booth stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall, weighed in at 210 pounds, and wore a long, full beard. He taught school in Hartford, CT, then followed his wife-to-be Mary Ann Walworth west to Anamosa, Iowa, where in 1840, he built the area’s first frame house. He pulled up stakes nine years later to travel the Overland Trail on his way to join the California Gold Rush. After he returned to Iowa in 1854, he became the editor of the Anamosa Eureka, the local newspaper. Edmund Booth fit perfectly the mold of the ingenious pioneer of 19th-century America, except for one unusual difference — he was deaf.
Edmund Booth: Deaf Pioneer follows the amazing career of this American original and his equally amazing wife in fascinating detail. Author Harry G. Lang vividly portrays Booth and his wife by drawing from a remarkable array of original material. A prolific writer, Booth corresponded with his fiancé from the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, and he kept a journal during his days on the California trail, parts of which have been reproduced here. He also wrote an autobiographical essay when he was 75, and his many newspaper articles through the years bore first-hand witness to the history of his times, from the Civil War to the advent of the 20th century.
Edmund Booth depicts a larger-than-life man in larger-than-life times, but perhaps its greatest contribution derives from its narrative about pioneer days as seen through Deaf eyes. Booth became a respected senior statesman of the American Deaf community, and blended with his stories of the era’s events are anecdotes and issues vital to Deaf people and their families. His story proves again that extraordinary people vary in many ways, but they often possess a common motive in acting to enhance their own communities.
Lang pieces together hundreds of stories, accompanied by numerous historical images, to reveal a powerful new perspective on the Civil War. These soldiers and civilians were not “disabled” by their deafness. On the contrary, despite the marginalization and paternalism they experienced in society, they were able to apply their skills and knowledge to support the causes in which they ardently believed.
Fighting in the Shadows is a story of how deaf civilians and soldiers put aside personal concerns about deafness, in spite of the discrimination they faced daily, in order to pursue a cause larger than themselves. Yet their stories have remained in the shadows, leaving most Americans, hearing and deaf, largely unaware of the deaf people who made significant contributions to the events that changed the course of our nation’s history. This book provides new insights into Deaf history as well as into mainstream interpretations of the Civil War.
In 1964, of the more than 85 million telephones in the United States and Canada, less than one percent were used regularly by deaf people. If they didn’t ask their hearing neighbors for help, they depended upon their hearing children, some as young as three years old, to act as intermediaries for business calls or medical consultations. In that same year, three enterprising deaf men, Robert H. Weitbrecht, James C. Marsters, and Andrew Saks, started the process that led to deaf people around the world having an affordable phone system that they could use.
Weitbrecht, a successful physicist with the Stanford Research Institute, had been experimenting with a teletypewriter (TTY) used with shortwave radios. When Marsters, a prominent deaf orthodontist, met Weitbrecht and saw his TTY, he immediately suggested the possibility of resolving deaf people’s decades-long struggle to have access to telecommunications without relying totally upon hearing people as go-betweens. Andrew Saks brought his business acumen to the group, which soon set to work overcoming the daunting problems they faced.
Harry G. Lang’s A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell tells how these three men collaborated to solve the technical difficulties of developing a coupling device for TTYs that would translate sounds into discernible letters. More remarkably, and with the help of an expanding corps of Deaf advocates, they successfully assaulted the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which in its efforts to protect its monopoly, smashed old TTYs to keep them from being used for potentially competitive purposes. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also resisted efforts to build a telephone system for deaf people that was available, affordable, portable, and fully accessible. Lang recounts in vivid terms how many other Deaf individuals and groups from all walks of life joined Weitbrecht, Marsters, and Saks against these forces. A Phone of Our Own is an entertaining and engrossing story of how they fought and won, and changed the world for the better for deaf people everywhere.
The Sixth Volume in the Deaf Lives Series
Robert F. Panara lost his hearing from spinal meningitis in 1931 at the age of ten. However, he could read and write, and with his friends’ help, Bob (as he was known), made it through high school. His new solitude created a new passion – reading, reading, and reading. The stage was set for the emergence of one of the great deaf educators in modern time, a life fully captured in Harry G. Lang’s Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story.
Bob Panara’s many achievements began after his discovery of Gallaudet College in the 1940s. There, he wrote “The Significance of the Reading Problem,” which first expressed his belief that teaching “comes from the heart and soul.” The article secured him his first job at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains. Bob returned to teach at Gallaudet College from 1948 until 1965, when he left to help found the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) and the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) — all in the same year. He continued to expand arts and literature at NTID until his retirement in 1987.
Bob Panara’s genius resides in the people he inspired with his vivacious teaching style. He believed ardently in involving students, that they should “be the book.” Former students tell story after story about his fabulous interpretations of drama and poetry, a legacy confirmed by his own story in Teaching from the Heart and Soul.
Lang describes the legislation, programs, and people who contributed great ingenuity and passion over decades to realize widespread access to captions, one breakthrough at a time. He also chronicles the resistance to captioned films from Hollywood studios and others, and the Deaf and hearing activists who championed the right to access. Deaf, hard of hearing, disabled, and English-as-a-second-language audiences now experience improved access to the educational, occupational, and cultural benefits of film and television programming. The struggle continues as deaf audiences advocate for equal access in a variety of settings such as movie theaters and online video-sharing platforms. This is a history of technological innovation, as well as a testament to the contributions of the Deaf community to the benefit of society as a whole.
This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nearly three-quarters of college students cheat during their undergraduate careers, a startling number attributed variously to the laziness of today’s students, their lack of a moral compass, or the demands of a hypercompetitive society. For James Lang, cultural or sociological explanations like these are red herrings. His provocative new research indicates that students often cheat because their learning environments give them ample incentives to try—and that strategies which make cheating less worthwhile also improve student learning. Cheating Lessons is a practical guide to tackling academic dishonesty at its roots.
Drawing on an array of findings from cognitive theory, Lang analyzes the specific, often hidden features of course design and daily classroom practice that create opportunities for cheating. Courses that set the stakes of performance very high, that rely on single assessment mechanisms like multiple-choice tests, that have arbitrary grading criteria: these are the kinds of conditions that breed cheating. Lang seeks to empower teachers to create more effective learning environments that foster intrinsic motivation, promote mastery, and instill the sense of self-efficacy that students need for deep learning.
Although cheating is a persistent problem, the prognosis is not dire. The good news is that strategies which reduce cheating also improve student performance overall. Instructors who learn to curb academic dishonesty will have done more than solve a course management problem—they will have become better educators all around.
You go into teaching with high hopes: to inspire students, to motivate them to learn, to help them love your subject. Then you find yourself facing a crowd of expectant faces on the first day of the first semester, and you think “Now what do I do?”
Practical and lively, On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you’re trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. What do you put on the syllabus? How do you balance lectures with group assignments or discussions—and how do you get a dialogue going when the students won’t participate? What grading system is fairest and most efficient for your class? Should you post lecture notes on a website? How do you prevent cheating, and what do you do if it occurs? How can you help the student with serious personal problems without becoming overly involved? And what do you do about the student who won’t turn off his cell phone?
Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life.
From mapping early English literature to a team-based approach to the American survey, and from multimedia galleries to a “blank syllabus,” contributors propose alternatives to the traditional emphasis on lectures and breadth of coverage. The volume is at once a set of practical suggestions for working teachers (including sample documents like worksheets and syllabi) and a provocative engagement with the question of what introductory courses can and should be.
Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.
John T. Lang begins by grounding the debates in the biology and chemistry behind genetic modification. He then shows how food is deeply imbued with religious, social, cultural, and ethical meanings, which bring a variety of non-scientific issues to the forefront and make genetically modified food a proxy for larger debates regarding topics such as globalization and corporate greed. Centrally, he contends that the controversies surrounding the technology reflect ongoing tensions between social and political power, democratic practice, and corporate responsibility. As Lang illustrates, while modern, mechanized, and genetically enhanced production has given the consumer an unprecedented variety and quantity of food, it has also introduced new social and environmental vulnerabilities and uncertainties into the global food system.
Bringing together science, politics, economics, and culture, this book offers a deeply informed look at an important aspect of modern agriculture. It will prove invaluable to anyone who shops at the grocery store, whether they like the benefits that genetic modification has to offer or fear that nature is something we should have left alone.
When at the beginning of this century, new instrumentation in astronomy came together with innovative concepts in physics, a science was born that has yielded not only staggering quantities of information about the universe but an elegant and useful conception of its origins and behavior. This volume in Harvard’s distinguished series of Source Books serves to record the achievements of this science and illuminate its brief history by bringing together the major contributions through the year 1975.
The volume is organized to trace the development of the basic ideas of astrophysics. The 132 selections document chronologically the changing answers to such fundamental questions as: How did the solar system originate? What makes the stars shine? What lies in the vacuous space between the stars? Are the spiral nebulae distant “island universes”? Will the universe expand forever? The articles range from Hale’s popular piece in Harper’s Magazine to the tensor calculus of Schwarzschild and Einstein. They include Chamberlain and Moulton’s account of the collision hypothesis; Edwin Hubble’s identification of the Crab Nebula with the supernova of 1054; Ralph Fowler’s work on the application of degenerate gas statistics to white dwarfs; and Jan Oort’s detection of galactic rotation. The complexity and richness of twentieth-century astrophysics is felt in these selections and a sense of discovery is provided in reading, in the words of the pioneer scientist, accounts of the first observations of the cosmic rays, the Van Allen belts, the Martian volcanoes and canyons, pulsars, interstellar hydrogen, cosmic magnetic fields, quasars and the remnant background of the primeval big bang.
About half of the papers are printed in their entirety and the others in careful abridgment. Editors Kenneth Lang and Owen Gingerich provide substantial commentary that describes related developments before, during and after the selected research. Works by Heinrich Vogt, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Karl Schwarzschild, Albert Einstein, Aleksandr Friedman and many others appear for the first time in translation.
The Battle of Antietam has long been known as the bloodiest day in American military history with more than twenty thousand soldiers either dead, wounded, or missing. The Confederacy, emboldened after a conclusive victory at the Battle of Second Manassas, launched the Maryland Campaign and considered a decisive battle on northern soil as a lynchpin to their objectives. As Gen. Robert E. Lee pushed his veteran Army of Northern Virginia deeper into Maryland, Gen. George B. McClellan hastily assembled a refurbished Army of the Potomac. After engagements at South Mountain and Harpers Ferry, Lee concentrated his forces near the small village of Sharpsburg. On September 17, 1862, McClellan attacked at dawn, igniting a battle that raged until sunset. By the end of the following day, Lee’s battered army began its withdrawal. The eventual Confederate retreat provided the Lincoln Administration a much sought after victory. President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation just four days later, dramatically altering the very nature of the war.
Decisions at Antietam introduces readers to critical decisions made by Confederate and Union commanders throughout the battle. Michael S. Lang examines the decisions that prefigured the action and shaped the contest as it unfolded. Rather than a linear history of the battle, Lang’s discussion of the critical decisions presents readers with a vivid blueprint of the battle’s developments. Exploring the critical decisions in this way allows the reader to progress from a sense of what happened in these battles to why they happened as they did
Complete with maps and a guided tour, Decisions at Antietam is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the battle can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into the battle and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.
Decisions at Antietam is the ninth in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.
Decisions of the Red River Campaign explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the campaign and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the operation, Michael S. Lang hones in on a sequence of decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contest to provide a blueprint of the campaign at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of Civil War battles and campaigns to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened.
Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions of the Red River Campaign is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the campaign can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into the campaign and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.
Decisions of the Red River Campaign is the twenty-second in a series of books that explores the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.
Robert Lang's introduction to this volume explores in fascinating detail the warped view of history that this great film presents. Griffith, a Southerner, was intent on resurrecting, idealizing, and justifying the South. In The Birth of a Nation, it is racism that unites the white North and South; the protection or abolition of slavery is not the divisive issue. In a powerful synthesis of spectacle and narrative, Griffith seeks to give the Southern cause a sense of glamour and high purpose. Lang considers the film as a historical melodrama, and by examining Griffith's "historiography as ideological practice," he traces the way in which the bloody, traumatic reality of the Civil War and Reconstruction becomes melodramatic myth. This unparalleled guide to The Birth of a Nation offers a shot-by-shot continuity script; a biographical sketch of the director; a sampling of contemporary reviews; a series of essays by distinguished critics including James Chandler, Michael Rogin, Janet Staiger, and Mimi White; and a filmography and bibliography.
As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities.
This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span. Sabine Lang explores such topics as their religious and secular roles; the relation of the roles of women-men and men-women to the roles of women and men in their respective societies; the ways in which gender-role change was carried out, legitimized, and explained in Native American cultures; the widely differing attitudes toward women-men and men-women in tribal cultures; and the role of these figures in Native mythology. Lang's findings challenge the apparent gender equality of the "berdache" institution, as well as the supposed universality of concepts such as homosexuality.
This engrossing new novel by acclaimed author Susan Lang continues the saga of Ruth Farley, the fiercely independent young woman who was the protagonist of Small Rocks Rising, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2002. Ruth is still on her homestead at the end of a rugged canyon in California’s Mojave Desert, still struggling to survive on her own and to recover from a brutal rape and the murder of her lover. Now she must also face the responsibility of motherhood. The ensuing story expands Ruth’s world to encompass the panorama of Depression-era Southern California—miners and ranchers hanging on until times are better; Indians trying to preserve their ancient culture and identity; Okies, vagrants, and breadlines; the wealth and glitter of the movie industry; and narrow-minded small-town gossips. Ruth’s life also expands as she adjusts to motherhood, trying to maintain her autonomy and isolation and trying to preserve the tenuous web that links her to the seductive ruthlessness of the desert and to its ancient people and their wisdom. Ruth is one of the most engaging characters in recent fiction, complex and contradictory, stubborn and vulnerable, passionately in love with her austere desert home. Lang tells her story, the saga of a fully modern woman seeking her own identity and destiny against the turbulent, colorful setting of the rapidly changing twentieth-century West.
The writings of Pope Pius VI, head of the Catholic Church during the most destructive period of the French Revolution, were compiled in two volumes by M.N.S. Guillon and published in 1798 and 1800. But during the Revolution, the reign of Napoleon, and the various revolutionary movements of the 19th century, there were extraordinary efforts to destroy writings that critiqued the revolutionary ideology. Many books and treatises, if they survived the revolution or the sacking from Napoleon’s armies. To this day, no public copy of Guillon’s work exists in Paris.
Now, for the first time in English, these works comprising the letters, briefs, and other writings of Pius VI on the French Revolution are available. Volume I treats the first shock of the Revolution and the efforts of the Pope in 1790 and 1791 to oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which famous revolutionary and shrewd diplomat Talleyrand referred to as “the greatest fault of the National Assembly”). Volume II will be published later, and deals with the aftermath of the Civil Constitution through Pius’s death in exile). Editor and translator Jeffrey Langan presents the materials leading up to and directly connected with these decrees, in which the National Assembly attempted to set up a Catholic Church that would be completely submissive to the demands of the Assembly. Volume I also covers Pius’s efforts to deal with the immediate aftermath of the Constitution after the National Assembly implemented it, including his encyclical, Quod Aliquantum.
The letters will show how Pius chose to oppose the Civil Constitution. He did so not by a public campaign, for he had no real temporal power to oppose the violence, but by attempting to work personally with Louis XVI and various archbishops in France to articulate what were the points on which he could concede (matters dealing with the political structures of France) and what were the essential points in which he could not concede (matters dealing with the organization of dioceses and appointment of bishops).
Since the 1980s, with the writings and school that developed around François Furet, as well as Simon Schama’s Citizens, a new debate over the French Revolution has ensued, bringing forth a more objective account of the Revolution, one that avoids an excessively Marxist lens and that brings to light some of its defects and more gruesome parts – the destruction and theft of Church property, and the sadistic methods of torture and killing of priests, nuns, aristocrats, and fellow-revolutionaries.
An examination of the writings of Pius VI will not only help set the historical record straight for English-speaking students of the Revolution, it will also aid them to better understand the principles that the Catholic Church employs when confronted with chaotic political change. They will see that the Church has a principled approach to distinguishing, while not separating, the power of the Church and the power of the state. They will also see, as Talleyrand himself also saw, that one of the essential elements that makes the Church the Church is the right to appoint bishops and to discipline its own bishops. The Church herself recognizes that she cannot long survive without this principle that guarantees her unity.
Pius VI’s efforts were able to keep the Catholic Church intact (though badly bruised) so that she could reconstitute herself and build up a vibrant life in 19th-century France. (He did this in the face of the Church’s prestige having sunk to historic lows; some elites in Europe thought there would be no successor to Pius and jokingly referred to him as “Pius the Last.”) He began a process that led to the restoration of the prestige of the Papacy throughout the world, and he initiated a two-century process that led to the Church finally being able to select bishops without any interference from secular authorities. This had been at least a 1,000-year problem in the history of the Church. By 1990, only two countries of the world, China and Vietnam, were interfering in any significant way in the process that the Church used to select bishops.
Pius VI’s papacy, especially during the years of the French Revolution, was a pivotal point for the French Revolution and for the interaction between Church and state in Western history. All freedom-loving people will be happy to read his distinc-tions between the secular power and the spiritual power. His papacy also was important for the internal developments that the Church would make over the next 200 years with respect to its self-understanding of the Papacy and the role of the bishop.
The Roman Catholic Church's first significant legislative enactment on the nature and role of the Catholic university, the apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae (1990) grew out of thirty years of dialogue between ecclesiastical authorities and academic representatives. The final document affirms the explicit Catholic identity of Catholic educational institutions and outlines provisions for maintaining that identity; the questions of how to implement its provisions have in turn created the need for more dialogue and examination. In this volume, distinguished scholars and legal experts define the key questions and explore the future implications of Ex corde for American Catholic colleges and universities.
The assertion of the Catholic identity of Catholic institutions of higher education prompts the contributors to examine the definition of Catholic education as a special synthesis of the religious and the academic, of faith and reason; and to discuss corollary issues such as secularization; the counter-cultural features of Catholic education; and the great diversity of such schools in the United States and of their sponsoring religious orders. The contributors probe the schools' relationships with the Church hierarchy, exploring in particular the role of the bishops, the degree of autonomy from ecclesiastical control, and questions of academic freedom. They also consider specific legal issues that American Catholic colleges must face, including recognition of student groups, tenure and promotion decisions, governance, student and faculty conduct, and the relationship between canon and civil law, including compliance with national and local civil rights provisions. This volume also includes the complete text in English of Ex corde Ecclesiae and the preliminary draft of ordinances from the Ex corde Ecclesiae Implementation Committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Appearing at a time when universities must face major issues of their own identity and governance, this volume will be of interest to all faculty and administrators, diocesan authorities and legal counsel, and everyone concerned with the future of Catholic higher education.
In his Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for Ecumenic Wisdom, Thomas Langan argued that the close interaction of traditions in today's society calls for methodical critical appropriation of the beliefs fostered by the principal traditions. He also promised to demonstrate by example how such appropriation could be accomplished. In The Catholic Tradition, Langan successfully fulfills that vow by showing how a tradition—the Catholic—has shaped his own outlook.
In this comprehensive study, Langan examines the history of the Catholic Church and the origins of its teachings since the Church's conception. Although committed to the Catholic religion, Langan does not obscure the Church's failings as he lays out the fundamentals of the Catholic faith.
He provides insight into the great Christological councils, discusses the differences in the spiritualities of East and West, and portrays the crucial roles that the pope and bishops played during the Middle Ages. He incorporates the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and medieval Catholicism as he traces the rise and decline of Christian Europe, the great issues raised by the reform: priesthood, the Eucharist, spirituality, and Church structure.
Satan has no greater triumph, Langan asserts, than when Catholics, who are recipients of the Good News of God's universal love, allow selections from their tradition to be turned into sectarianism and ideology. This balanced history of the Church as human reality faces such perversions squarely. But despite betrayals by its own across the centuries, the Catholic tradition, with its origin at Sinai, remains the oldest and largest extant religious institution.
In a last section Langan offers a unique overview of the church's present situation, its strengths and weaknesses, the new movement and the challenge of the "new evangelization."
As the technological phenomenon known as the worldwide web permeates civilization, it creates some cultures and destroys others. In this pioneering book, philosopher Thomas Langan explores "virtual reality"Can inherently contradictory phrase"and the effects of technology on our very being. In our present-day high- technology environment, making simple, everyday decisions is difficult because the virtual world we've created doesn't necessarily operate according to the old "common sense." To retain our intellectual fitness, we must, Langan argues, consider these essential questions: If virtual reality is, in fact, reality, what is this life that we are caught up in? What is being within the context of virtual reality? How can we establish a system for distinguishing truth from fiction?
Although technology minimizes distances between people and makes the information they seek more accessible, it simultaneously blurs the line dividing fact from falsehood and real from virtual. An individual's intellectual survival is threatened as technological advancement challenges our collective understanding of what reality is. Because much of the information that is presented as fact simply works to fulfill a specific agenda, we cannot accept as truth everything that appears on the internet or in the media. To survive, we must learn to manage our lives and resources despite the flood of information we are bombarded with daily.
Addressing the general educated reader, Surviving the Age of Virtual Reality expertly interweaves the worlds of technology and philosophy, pushing the analysis of this technological and human phenomenon to new depths.
Our emerging world system is bringing the great traditions and cultures it has spawned into ever more intimate and dangerous contact. Langan argues that we must struggle toward a unity of discourse respectful of genuine experiences of varying civilizations if we are to live peacefully on one planet.
The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.
Painter, poet, and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the preeminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new biography traces Rosa’s strategies of self-promotion and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter—witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic, and dark violence—and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime.
Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.
In Within Walking Distance, journalist and urban critic Philip Langdon looks at why and how Americans are shifting toward a more human-scale way of building and living. He shows how people are creating, improving, and caring for walkable communities. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Starting conditions differ radically, as do the attitudes and interests of residents. To draw the most important lessons, Langdon spent time in six communities that differ in size, history, wealth, diversity, and education, yet share crucial traits: compactness, a mix of uses and activities, and human scale. The six are Center City Philadelphia; the East Rock section of New Haven, Connecticut; Brattleboro, Vermont; the Little Village section of Chicago; the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon; and the Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi. In these communities, Langdon examines safe, comfortable streets; sociable sidewalks; how buildings connect to the public realm; bicycling; public transportation; and incorporation of nature and parks into city or town life. In all these varied settings, he pays special attention to a vital ingredient: local commitment.
To improve conditions and opportunities for everyone, Langdon argues that places where the best of life is within walking distance ought to be at the core of our thinking. This book is for anyone who wants to understand what can be done to build, rebuild, or improve a community while retaining the things that make it distinctive.
Against the backdrop of West Berlin in 1987, meet Soja—a skilled typesetter, a refugee from East Germany, and a temporary florist with a generous heart. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she crosses paths with Harry—a tall, free-spirited individual with a quietly determined demeanor, haunted by a complex past and an uncertain future. Their encounter sets in motion a fateful connection that leaves a lasting mark on Soja’s life.
The remnants of their story are encapsulated in a school notebook, containing precisely eighty-nine undated entries where Harry chronicled his thoughts during their time together. However, conspicuous by its absence in the narrative is Soja herself. Years later, driven by the need to tell their tale and fill the void left by Harry, she embarks on a poignant journey of remembrance.
As Soja revisits the man who both impressed her with determination and disconcerted her with a mysterious gift, she finds herself captivated by his childlike essence. Despite Harry’s troubled history—ten years in prison, probation violations due to discontinued drug therapy, and the looming threat of immediate imprisonment—Soja remains resolute in her passion for him.
Katja Lange-Müller, an acclaimed storyteller, skillfully draws readers into the heart of this novel. With sensitivity, humor, and melancholy, she unfolds the narrative of an unhappy love story that transforms into the greatest happiness in life. Along the way, Lange-Müller paints an atmospherically dense portrait of the divided and stagnant Berlin of the 1980s, creating a captivating and emotionally charged reading experience.
“What now?” wonders Asta, a nurse who has returned to Germany after a final assignment in Nicaragua. After over twenty years working for international aid organizations, her services are no longer needed. No one is waiting for her. She has nowhere to go. Even the language has lost its familiarity. She stands next to a revolving door at Munich airport, observing the other travelers as she smokes one duty-free cigarette after another. Some of these strangers resemble figures from her past, bringing memories of an adventurous life flooding back. Her catalog of tragicomic attempts at assistance in Germany, Nicaragua, India, Mongolia, and Tunisia raises questions about what it takes to help and whom we are really helping. Katja Lange-Müller’s works have been critically acclaimed for their dark humor and affectionate, nuanced portrayals of characters wrestling with knotty situations and relationships. Revolving Door marks a fitting English debut of this most idiosyncratic of narrative voices.
For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.
Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.
Traditionally, social scientists have assumed that past imperialism hinders the future development prospects of colonized nations. Challenging this widespread belief, Matthew Lange argues in Lineages of Despotism and Development that countries once under direct British imperial control have developed more successfully than those that were ruled indirectly.
Combining statistical analysis with in-depth case studies of former British colonies, this volume argues that direct rule promoted cogent and coherent states with high levels of bureaucratization and inclusiveness, which contributed to implementing development policy during late colonialism and independence. On the other hand, Lange finds that indirect British rule created patrimonial, weak states that preyed on their own populations. Firmly grounded in the tradition of comparative-historical analysis while offering fresh insight into the colonial roots of uneven development, Lineages of Despotism and Development will interest economists, sociologists, and political scientists alike.
Readers will go deep into a Vermont sugar bush and its web of plastic tubes, mainline valves, and collection tanks. They will visit sugarhouses crammed with gas evaporators and reverse-osmosis machines. And they will witness encounters between sugar makers and the tourists eager to invest Vermont with mythological fantasies of rural simplicity.
So much more than a commodity study, Meanings of Maple frames a new approach for evaluating the broader implications of iconic foodways, and it will animate conversations in food studies for years to come.
Lange draws on 152 interviews with YouTube participants at gatherings throughout the United States, content analyses of more than 300 videos, observations of interactions on and off the site, and participant-observation. She documents how the introduction of monetization options impacted perceived opportunities for open sharing and creative exploration of personal and social messages. Lange’s book provides new insight into patterns of digital migration, YouTube’s influence on off-site interactions, and the emotional impact of losing control over images. The book also debunks traditional myths about online interaction, such as the supposed online/offline binary, the notion that anonymity always degrades public discourse, and the popular characterization of online participants as over-sharing narcissists.
YouTubers' experiences illustrate fascinating hybrid forms of contemporary sociality that are neither purely mediated nor sufficient when conducted only in person. Combining intensive ethnography, analysis of video artifacts, and Lange’s personal vlogging experiences, the book explores how YouTubers are creating a posthuman collective characterized by interaction, support, and controversy. In analyzing the tensions between YouTubers' idealistic goals of sociality and the site's need for monetization, Thanks for Watching makes crucial contributions to cultural anthropology, digital ethnography, science and technology studies, new media studies, communication, interaction design, and posthumanism.
For its perceptive analysis of video blogging for self-expression and sociality, Thanks for Watching received the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression (2020), from the National Communication Association.
This book is the first study of the iconography at San Xavier since its restoration in the 1990s by an international team of professional conservators. It expands our understanding of the numerous Catholic images and emblems of San Xavier through a close analysis of the newly revealed iconographic elements and an interpretation of the significance of their placement. It also proposes that the selection of specific religious themes and their locations was determined by an unfamiliar convention based on a tree-like design, in which the founder of a religious Order appears as the root and followers above in later branchings—an inversion of the more familiar top-to-bottom hierarchy.
Historians Lange and Ahlborn identify all the saintly images and religious elements that adorn San Xavier and suggest how and why they are so arranged. They examine the sculptures and paintings of the church from the façade throughout the cruciform interior in order to determine the organizational concepts that underlie their placement. They note that the selection of images in this Franciscan mission follows traditional Roman Catholic practice for decorating churches in order to instruct novices and reinforce the teaching of conversion in a pictographic catechism of Church doctrine. In short, the book is a dictionary of religious personages and symbols that will help the visitor identify the biblical stories and people portrayed, as well as associated signs and symbols. Entries include a description of the subject, its location, appropriate cross-references, and a bibliography. Recent illustrations by photographer Helga Teiwes and a floor plan facilitate the location of images by visitors.
A handsome, large-format book featuring more than one hundred photographs and supporting line illustrations, Lange and Ahlborn’s work confirms the significance of San Xavier’s iconography for art historians, students of religion, and visitors alike. It is both an incomparable guide and valuable reference source for the famed mission’s magnificent artistic heritage.
Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading Petersburg. Guided by Bely's fertile but challenging notions of art and philosophy, he analyzes the novel first as an object embodying intentions and essences, then as a pattern of signification and events, and finally as a dance of gestures that coordinate body and meaning, regularity and surprise, self and other, and author, novel, and reader. The terms are derived from Bely's own writings, but they are nuanced with reference to Russian and European contexts and clarified with reference to philosophy and literary theory. Langen shows how Bely invariably challenges his own concepts and patterns, thereby creating an unusually demanding and dynamic text. In finding an approach to these enriching difficulties, this book at long last shows readers a welcoming way into Bely's thought, and his masterwork, and their place in the complex world of early twentieth-century literature.
Included in this volume:
Sacred Blood, by Zinaida Gippius; The Unknown Woman, by Alexander Blok; Vladimir Mayakovsky, by Vladimir Mayakosky; The Case of the Entry Room, by Victor Ardov; Squaring the Circle, by Valentin Kataev; Elizaveta Bam, by Daniil Kharms; Grain, by Vladimir Kirshon; and The Guests, by Leonid Zorin.
Only recently have international relations scholars started to seriously examine the influence of collective memory on foreign policy formation and relations between states and peoples. The ways in which the memories of past events are interpreted, misinterpreted, or even manipulated in public discourse create the context that shapes international relations.
Power and the Past brings together leading history and international relations scholars to provide a groundbreaking examination of the impact of collective memory. This timely study makes a contribution to developing a theory of memory and international relations and also examines specific cases of collective memory’s influence resulting from the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust, and September 11. Addressing concerns shared by world leaders and international institutions as well as scholars of international studies, this volume illustrates clearly how the memory of past events alters the ways countries interact in the present, how memory shapes public debate and policymaking, and how memory may aid or more frequently impede conflict resolution.
Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries’ motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.
Laos is a major arena of international confrontation despite the Geneva Accords of 1962. Yet there is a dearth of published material on Laos, and the crucial issue of North Vietnam's role in that country has hardly been examined. This important study illuminates the North Vietnamese-Pathet Lao partnership, an understanding of which is so critical to the search for peace in Indochina.
The authors reconstruct dispassionately the politics of the Lao revolution since its beginning after the Second World War. Focusing on North Vietnam's past and present role in Laos they trace the origins, evolution, organization, and leadership of the Pathet Lao organization. They demonstrate that the war in Laos is really three wars--Vietnamese traditional attempts to assert hegemony over regions of Laos important to North Vietnam's security; an extension of the struggle in South Vietnam; and a civil war between Lao Communists and anti-Communists. They show that Hanoi's active role springs from its interest in protecting its borders, gaining access to South Vietnam, and establishing a politically congenial regime in Laos. They conclude that the Viet Minh were a key factor in the genesis of the Pathet Lao and that the Vietnamese have continued to provide guidance and vital assistance to the revolutionary organization which now controls a significant portion of the country. On the other hand, the authors point out that the Pathet Lao share common interests with the North Vietnamese Communists and that, from their own perspective, they have not compromised their legitimacy as a nationalist movement by their heavy dependence on Hanoi.
Langer and Zasloff, experienced analysts of Southeast Asian affairs, conducted extensive field research in Laos. They interviewed a wide variety of persons with intimate knowledge of the Lao Communist movement, including former Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese military and civilian personnel. They talked with Lao, in and out of the Government, who had gone to school with their future Lao or Vietnamese adversaries, were linked to them by family ties, had been in the same political camp, or had confronted them at the conference table. They interviewed specialists on Laos and Vietnam, among them scholars, journalists, officials of international agencies, and foreign government officials. They examined a range of internal Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese documents diaries, letters, party directives, and training guides, as well as textbooks, newspapers, propaganda leaflets, and general literature. They studied Pathet Lao, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Chinese, and Soviet radio broadcasts and consulted printed materials about Laos from Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow.
Modern theories of meaning usually culminate in a critique of science. This book presents a study of human intelligence beginning with a semantic theory and leading into a critique of music.
By implication it sets up a theory of all the arts; the transference of its basic concepts to other arts than music is not developed, but it is sketched, mainly in the chapter on artistic import. Thoughtful readers of the original edition discovered these far-reaching ideas quickly enough as the career of the book shows: it is as applicable to literature, art and music as to the field of philosophy itself.
The topics it deals with are many: language, sacrament, myth, music, abstraction, fact, knowledge--to name only the main ones. But through them all goes the principal theme, symbolic transformation as the essential activity of human minds. This central idea, emphasizing as it does the notion of symbolism, brings Mrs. Langer's book into line with the prevailing interest in semantics. All profound issues of our age seem to center around the basic concepts of symbolism and meaning. The formative, creative, articulating power of symbols is the tonic chord which thinkers of all schools and many diverse fields are unmistakably striking; the surprising, far-reaching implications of this new fundamental conception constitute what Mrs. Langer has called "philosophy in a new key."
Mrs. Langer's book brings the discussion of symbolism into a wider general use than criticism of word meaning. Her volume is vigorous, effective, and well written and will appeal to everyone interested in the contemporary problems of philosophy.
How can we agree to disagree in today’s pluralistic society, one in which individuals and groups are becoming increasingly polarized by fierce convictions that are often at odds with the ideas of others? Civil Disagreement: Personal Integrity in a Pluralistic Society shows how we can cope with diversity and be appropriately open toward opponents even while staying true to our convictions. This accessible and useful guide discusses how our conversations and arguments can respect differences and maintain personal integrity and civility even while taking stances on disputed issues. The author examines an array of illustrative cases, such as debates over slavery, gay marriage, compulsory education for the Amish, and others, providing helpful insights on how to take firm stands without denigrating opponents. The author proposes an approach called “perspective pluralism” that honors the integrity of various viewpoints while avoiding the implication that all reasonable views are equally acceptable or true.
Civil Disagreement offers a concise yet comprehensive guide for students and scholars of philosophical or religious ethics, political or social philosophy, and political science, as well as general readers who are concerned about the polarization that often seems to paralyze national and international politics.
Antonin Scalia is considered one of the most controversial justices to have been on the United States Supreme Court. A vocal advocate of textualist interpretation, Justice Scalia argued that the Constitution means only what it says and that interpretations of the document should be confined strictly to the directives supplied therein. This narrow form of constitutional interpretation, which limits constitutional meaning to the written text of the Constitution, is known as textualism.
Scalia v. Scalia:Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation examines Scalia’s discussions of textualism in his speeches, extrajudicial writings, and judicial opinions. Throughout his writings, Scalia argues textualism is the only acceptable form of constitutional interpretation. Yet Scalia does not clearly define his textualism, nor does he always rely upon textualism to the exclusion of other interpretive means.
Scalia is seen as the standard bearer for textualism. But when textualism fails to support his ideological aims (as in cases that pertain to states’ rights or separation of powers), Scalia reverts to other forms of argumentation. Langford analyzes Scalia’s opinions in a clear area of law, the cruel and unusual punishment clause; a contested area of law, the free exercise and establishment cases; and a silent area of law, abortion. Through her analysis, Langford shows that Scalia uses rhetorical strategies beyond those of a textualist approach, concluding that Scalia is an opportunistic textualist and that textualism is as rhetorical as any other form of judicial interpretation.
Faulkner’s Revision of Absalom, Absalom! is a study of the creative process as exemplified in one of the major achievements in twentieth-century fiction. Portions of the original handwritten version of the story are collated, line by line, with corresponding sections of the published version. In an introductory discussion the major changes are analyzed and evaluated.
It is particularly interesting to observe Faulkner revising not only his choice of words and the construction of his sentences but also the central design of the story. Most notably, he changed his mind about having it known from the beginning that Charles Bon was Sutpen’s part-Negro son, and he developed Quentin Compson into the pivotal figure who finally supplies this missing piece of information.
In the process of revision Absalom, Absalom! became a kind of detective story, and the reader is forced to join the quest and participate in the undertaking which is the basic subject of the book—the human attempt to comprehend and deal with the past.
To trace the process of this revision is to experience a sharp focusing of theme and to witness a demonstration of how the meaning of a fictional work can shape its structure and, in turn, stand revealed by what has become the outward sign, or form, of that meaning.
Was Sanctuary really a “cheap idea,” as Faulkner himself called it, a book “deliberately conceived to make money”? The question has teased the reading public since its publication. Many readers have had their worst suspicions about Faulkner’s work confirmed by his statement, but most serious critics have discounted the disparagement, emphasizing instead Faulkner’s further statement that when the galley proofs arrived from his publisher, “I saw that it was so terrible that there were two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. I thought again, ‘It might sell; maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.’ So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book.”
Now that two sets of the original galleys are available for inspection, one can see just how Faulkner reworked the novel. In the collation provided here by Gerald Langford, using Faulkner’s own corrected galleys held by the University of Texas at Austin, the reader can reconstruct the first version for himself, noting the cancellations, the additions, and the rewritten passages. As Gerald Langford makes clear in his introductory analysis, neither of Faulkner’s statements is to be trusted. Through revision, Sanctuary became theatrically more effective but thematically less interesting than the original version. Particularly noteworthy is the experimental narrative method of the original version, which foreshadows the method of Absalom, Absalom! as opposed to the straightforward, easily accessible method to which Faulkner turned in the revised Sanctuary and Light in August.
To the wild and fabulous country where the Rio Grande makes its big bend, J. O. Langford came in 1909 with his wife and daughter in search of health and a home. High on a bluff overlooking the spot where Tornillo Creek pours its waters into the turbulent Rio Grande, the Langfords built their home, a rude structure of adobe blocks in a land reputed to be inhabited only by bandits and rattlesnakes.
Big Bend is the story of the Langfords' life in the rugged and spectacularly beautiful country which they came to call their own. Langford's account is told with the help of Fred Gipson, author of Old Yeller and Hound Dog Man.
Interweaving theory with narrative, Langford explores the strategies of contemporary practitioners who reconfigure Ayurvedic knowledge through institutions and technologies such as hospitals, anatomy labs, clinical trials, and sonograms. She shows how practitioners appropriate, transform, or circumvent the knowledge practices implicit in these institutions and technologies, destabilizing such categories as medicine, culture, science, symptom, and self, even as they deploy them in clinical practice. Ultimately, this study points to the future of Ayurveda in a transnational era as a remedy not only for the wounds of colonialism but also for an imagined cultural emptiness at the heart of global modernity.
From bleak expressionist works to the edgy political works of the New German Cinema to the feel-good Heimat films of the postwar era, Directory of World Cinema: Germany aims to offer a wider film and cultural context for the films that have emerged from Germany—including some of the East German films recently made available to Western audiences for the first time. With contributions by leading academics and emerging scholars in the field, this volume explores the key directors, themes, and periods in German film history, and demonstrates how genres have been adapted over time to fit historical circumstances. Rounding out this addition to the Directory of World Cinema series are fifty full-color stills, numerous reviews and recommendations, and a comprehensive filmography.
In this systematic historical analysis, Nino Langiulli focuses on a key philosophical issue, possibility, as it is refracted through the thought of the Italian philosopher Nicola Abbagnano. Langiulli examines Abbagnano's attempt to raise possibility to a level of prime importance and investigates his understanding of existence. In so doing, the author offers a sustained exposition of and argument with the account of possibility in the major thinkers of the Western tradition—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Kierkegaard. He also makes pertinent comments on such philosophers as Diodorus Cronus, William of Ockham, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hegel, as well as such logicians as DeMorgan and Boole.
Nicola Abbagnano, who died in 1990, recently came to the attention of the general public as an influential teacher of author Umberto Eco. Creator of a dictionary of philosophy and author of a multiple-volume history of Western philosophy, Abbagnano was the only philosopher, according to Langiulli, to argue that "to be is to be possible."
Even though the concept of probability and the discipline of statistics are grounded in the concept of possibility, philosophers throughout history have grappled with the problem of defining it. Possibility has been viewed by some as an empty concept, devoid of reality, and by others as reducible to actuality or necessity—concepts which are opposite to it. Langiulli analyzes and debates Abbagnano's treatment of necessity as secondary to possibility, and he addresses the philosopher's conversation with his predecessors as well as his European and American contemporaries.
In the series Themes in the History of Philosophy, edited by Edith Wyschogrod.
In the essays collected here, nine distinguished scholars provide an overview of the differences the feminist perspective makes—and could make—in scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Carefully documented and judiciously critical, these essays inform the reader about developments in feminist scholarship in literary criticism, the performing arts, religion, history, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. The authors point out achievements of lasting value and indicate how these might become an integral part of the various disciplines.
Embodying Cold War political and gendered tensions, Brazil's increasingly violent military government mounted fierce challenges to student political activity just as students were beginning to see themselves as representing an otherwise demobilized civil society. By challenging the students' political legitimacy at a pivotal moment, the dictatorship helped to ignite the student protests that exploded in 1968. In her attentive exploration of the years after 1968, Langland analyzes what the demonstrations of that year meant to later generations of Brazilian students, revealing how student activists mobilized collective memories in their subsequent political struggles.
Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism—known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
A groundbreaking philosophy of design for the stage
Standby proposes a practical philosophy of contemporary theatrical design that addresses all design disciplines, all theatrical collaborators, and all forms of theatre, from the traditional to the avant-garde. In a field that is too often dismissed as purely technical, Joshua Langman celebrates design as a transformative force with the power to elevate a performance and enable it to resonate beyond the bounds of its physical production. Beginning with the proposition that design contributes essential layers of meaning to an experience, Standby argues for a unique approach centered on the creation of revelatory theatrical moments.
In a mission to illuminate the soul of the craft, Langman investigates the purposes of design, details the elements of a production concept, uncovers the mechanics of creating meaning, explores the relationship of theatrical design to fine art and art history, and offers practical guidance on designing productions. He also considers what has changed as designers have embraced digital technology and suggests fifteen concrete methods for preserving the magic of live theatre in a digital age. Blending scholarship and storytelling, personal experience and contrarian wisdom, Standby challenges theatre-makers to harness the rich dramatic potential of theatrical design.
For additional information and supplemental materials, please visit www.standbybook.com.
The narrative uses the life and career of Jack Curley—a boxing promoter whose fortune took a turn for the better when he began promoting wrestling matches—as a compass as it charts the development of wrestling. By the late 1910s, Curley’s shows were selling out Madison Square Garden monthly. Ballyhoo chronicles his competition with the other promoters, as well as the lives of colorful athletes like “Strangler” Ed Lewis, Frank Gotch, the “Masked Marvel,” Jim Londos, “Gorgeous George” Wagner, “Farmer” Martin Burns, and “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg.
How superhero narratives in the margins of the mainstream tell innovative, feminist stories.
It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Sam Langsdale’s work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts.
Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working towards a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile.
“Call me what you want—corrections officer, C.O., guard, jailcop, turnkey—I helped keep people there against their will. For this, the jail rewarded me with food.”
When Ben Langston took a job at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, it was because there were few other options. At his previous job—putting labels on water bottles—he did not have cups of human waste thrown in his face. He did not have to finger sweaty armpits in search of weapons. There were no threats against his life. But the jail paid better.
Jail Speak is a memoir written from a guard’s perspective. It’s about the grind, about dehumanization, drama, punishment, and the cycles of harm perpetrated by the prison industry. It’s about masculinity and conformity and emotional detachment. It’s a look at the inside that you didn’t want to know about, and it’s for mature audiences only. Know your limits.
Environmental historian Nancy Langston explores three “ghost species” in the Great Lakes watershed—woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Ghost species are those that have not gone completely extinct, although they may be extirpated from a particular area. Their traces are still present, whether in DNA, in small fragmented populations, in lone individuals roaming a desolate landscape in search of a mate. We can still restore them if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive. In this meticulously researched book, Langston delves into how climate change and human impact affected these now ghost species. Climate Ghosts covers one of the key issues of our time.
An extreme faction of aesthetic modernity intent on bulldozing contemporary life, the avant-garde has regularly employed visions of violence in their push for societal and cultural renewal. But in the shadow of unparalleled war and genocide, such aesthetic violence lost its force. This book explores the reconfiguration of the avant-garde in response to the violent transformation of European reality. Citing the emergence of independent avant-garde practitioners in the place of the previous collective, Richard Langston considers six individual exemplars of Germany’s post-fascist avant-garde—works that span the last six decades: painter, writer, and filmmaker Peter Weiss’s appropriation of French surrealism in the fifties; writer Dieter Wellershoff’s coterie of “new realists”; artist Wolf Vostell’s mediation and conflation of the experiences of the Auschwitz trials and the Vietnam War; poet and novelist Dieter Brinkmann’s collages from the seventies; the multimedia displacements of Alexander Kluge; and the performative engagements of dramatists Christoph Schlingensief and Rene Pollesch.
Taking stock of the evolution of Germany’s post-fascist avant-gardes, Langston’s book shows how the movement from Weiss to Pollesch exhibits the problems that both modernity and postmodernity pose for an aesthetic engagement of Germany’s violent past.
This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality.
Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements.
"Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.
Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.
This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself.
Persuading us with uncommon grace and power that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, Lanham proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."
The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking "pages," annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition.
The purpose of text is to better address the many aspects of environmental security and to represent this major area of academic research in an introductory text format that can be used in the rapidly growing number of homeland security studies programs as well as related degree programs. The concepts, challenges, and case studies in this text vitally extended such curricula, giving students a deeper appreciation for the critical role environmental security plays in overall state security, as well as for our nation, our way of life, and indeed for the human race at large.
"[Lanigan] provides illuminating sociological background and lucidly marshals the existing biolgraphical data." —Choice
"Mary Hunter Austin was a well-known and respected author and activitst in her lifetime but is little known in ours. In this excellent biography...[Lanigan] chose to focus on a few central relationships in Austin's life, to explore in some depth a few central texts, and to understand the interior life of her subject. She has done a splendid job." —Ann J. Lane in the Journal of American History
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