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Lord Liverpool
The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool, 1770–1828
Norman Gash
Harvard University Press, 1984

Less cynical than Talleyrand, more imaginative than Metternich, as creative as Guizot, Lord Liverpool was one of the great European conservatives of his age. He served as prime minister for the longest continuous term in nineteenth-century Britain and presided over the triumphant years of the Napoleonic War, the strife-torn era of the “Peterloo” massacre, and the founding of the great liberal free-trade revolution in financial and commercial policy that heralded Victorianism.

Norman Gash’s biography is the first modern reassessment of this misunderstood statesman. Gash places Liverpool within the kaleidoscopic parliamentary politics of the time and shows how he governed with the collective strength and unity of the cabinet. By offering parsimonious administration and enlightened economic policy, Liverpool hoped to preserve the old constitution and prevent both Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. Balancing interests and preserving order, Liverpool also contended with the vicissitudes of the still powerful monarchs—the aging and disturbed George III and the capricious and self-indulgent George IV, whose attempted divorce almost toppled the Liverpool administration.

This is not only an account of one of the most professional prime ministers of Great Britain, but also the story of the personal relations that shaped Lord Liverpool and the private life that gave him immense satisfaction. Based on correspondence and Lord Liverpool’s private papers, Gash’s work recasts the history of a turbulent age and its most prominent political figure.

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Lord Morley's Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke
The First English Translation of the Trionfi
Francesco Petrarch
Harvard University Press, 1971

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Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August
African-Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930
Myra B. Young Armstead
University of Illinois Press, 1999
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.
 
Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves.
Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.
Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.
 
"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.     
 
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Lord Selkirk
A Life
J.M. Bumsted
University of Manitoba Press, 2008
Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk (1770–1820), was a complex man of his times, whose passions left an indelible mark on Canadian history. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment and witness to the French Revolution, he dedicated his fortune and energy to the vision of a new colony at the centre of North America. His final legacy, the Red River Settlement, led to the eventual end of the dominance of the fur trade and began the demographic and social transformation of western Canada.

The product of three decades of research, this is the definitive biography of Lord Selkirk. Bumsted’s passionate prose and thoughtful analysis illuminate not only the man, but also the political and economic realities of the British empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. He analyzes Selkirk’s position within these realities, showing how his paternalistic attitudes informed his “social experiments” in colonization and translated into unpredictable, and often tragic, outcomes. Bumsted also provides extensive detail on the complexities of colonization, the Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish peerage, the fur trade, the Red River settlement, and early British-Canadian politics.
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The Lord's First Night
The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage
Alain Boureau
University of Chicago Press, 1998
From the late Middle Ages to The Marriage of Figaro to Mel Gibson's Braveheart, the ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been the droit de cuissage, or right of a feudal lord to sleep with the bride of a vassal on her wedding night. The droit de cuissage even resurfaced in the debate over the French Penal Code of 1992 as a synonym for sexual harassment.

But, as Alain Boureau elegantly demonstrates in this book, the droit de cuissage is a myth. Under contextual examination, nearly all the supposed evidence for this custom melts away—yet belief in it has survived for seven hundred years. Boureau shows how each era turned the mythical custom to its own ends. For instance, in the late Middle Ages, monarchists raised the specter of the droit de cuissage to rally public opinion against local lords, and partisans of the French Revolution pointed to it as proof of the corruption of the Ancien Régime.

A fascinating case study of the folklore of sexuality, The Lord's First Night also offers evocative insights into popular (mis)conceptions of the Middle Ages.

On the French edition: "A richly informative study of attitudes to the past and the manipulation of history down the ages."—Peter Linehan, Times Literary Supplement
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The Lords of Lambityeco
Political Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Xoo Phase
Michael Lind
University Press of Colorado, 2010
The Valley of Oaxaca was unified under the rule of Monte Albán until its collapse around AD 800. Using findings from John Paddock’s long-term excavations at Lambityeco from 1961 to 1976, Michael Lind and Javier Urcid examine the political and social organization of the ancient community during the Xoo Phase (Late Classic period).Focusing on change within this single archaeological period rather than between time periods, The Lords of Lambityeco traces the changing political relationships between Lambityeco and Monte Albán that led to the fall of the Zapotec state. Using detailed analysis of elite and common houses, tombs, and associated artifacts, the authors demonstrate increased political control by Monte Albán over Lambityeco prior to the abandonment of both settlements. Lambityeco is the most thoroughly researched Classic period site in the valley after Monte Albán, but only a small number of summary articles have been published about this important locale. This, in combination with Lambityeco’s status as a secondary center—one that allows for greater understanding of core and periphery dynamics in the Monte Albán state—makes The Lords of Lambityeco a welcome and significant contribution to the literature on ancient Mesoamerica.
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Lords of the Fly
Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life
Robert E. Kohler
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The common fruit fly, Drosophila, has long been one of the most productive of all laboratory animals. From 1910 to 1940, the center of Drosophila culture in America was the school of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. They first created "standard" flies through inbreeding and by organizing a network for exchanging stocks of flies that spread their practices around the world.

In Lords of the Fly, Robert E. Kohler argues that fly laboratories are a special kind of ecological niche in which the wild fruit fly is transformed into an artificial animal with a distinctive natural history. He shows that the fly was essentially a laboratory tool whose startling productivity opened many new lines of genetic research. Kohler also explores the moral economy of the "Drosophilists": the rules for regulating access to research tools, allocating credit for achievements, and transferring authority from one generation of scientists to the next.

By closely examining the Drosophilists' culture and customs, Kohler reveals essential features of how experimental scientists do their work.
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Lords of the Levee
The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink
Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Winner of 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award-Certificate of Excellence

In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago's First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators as they rose to the top of the city's political world.
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Lords of the Mountain
Social Banditry and Peasant Protest in Cuba, 1878-1918
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
Lords of the Mountain is a colorful narrative that views how Cuba's violent history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century was also a history of economic violence. From the 1870s, the expanding sugar industry began to swallow up rural communities and destroy the traditional land tenure system, as the great sugar estates-the “latifundia” dominated the economy. Perez chronicles the popular resistance to these powerful landholders, and the violent uprisings and banditry propagated against them.
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Lords of the Ring
The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing's Greatest Team
Doug Moe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
    Lords of the Ring revives the exciting era—now largely forgotten—when college boxing attracted huge crowds and flashy headlines, outdrawing the professional bouts. On the same night in 1940 when Joe Louis defended his heavyweight crown before 11,000 fans in New York's Madison Square Garden, collegiate boxers battled before 15,000 fans in Madison . . . Wisconsin.
    Under legendary and beloved coach John Walsh, the most successful coach in the history of American collegiate boxing, University of Wisconsin boxers won eight NCAA team championships and thirty-eight individual titles from 1933 to 1960. Badger boxers included heroes like Woody Swancutt, who later helped initiate the Strategic Air Command, and rogues like Sidney Korshak, later the most feared mob attorney in the United States. A young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay also boxed in the Wisconsin Field House during this dazzling era.
    But in April 1960, collegiate boxing was forever changed when Charlie Mohr— Wisconsin’s finest and most popular boxer, an Olympic team prospect—slipped into a coma after an NCAA tournament bout in Madison. Suddenly, not just Mohr’s life but the entire sport of college boxing was in peril. It was to be the last NCAA boxing tournament ever held. Lords of the Ring tells the whole extraordinary story of boxing at the University of Wisconsin, based on dozens of interviews and extensive examination of newspaper microfilm, boxing records and memorabilia.
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Lords of the Sea
A History of the Barbary Corsairs
Alan G. Jamieson
Reaktion Books, 2012

The escalation of piracy in the waters east and south of Somalia has led commentators to call the area the new Barbary, but the Somali pirates cannot compare to the three hundred years of terror supplied by the Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean and beyond. From 1500 to 1800, Muslim pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa captured and enslaved more than a million Christians.

Lords of the Sea relates the history of these pirates, examining their dramatic impact as the maritime vanguard of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1500s through their breaking from Ottoman control in the early seventeenth century. Alan Jamieson explores how the corsairs rose to the apogee of their powers during this period, extending their activities from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and venturing as far as England, Ireland, and Iceland. Serving as a vital component of the main Ottoman fleet, the Barbary pirates also conducted independent raids of Christian ships and territory. While their activities declined after 1700, Jamieson reveals that it was only in the early nineteenth century that Europe and the United States finally curtailed the Barbary menace, a fight that culminated in the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. A welcome addition to military history, Lords of the Sea is an engrossing tale of exploration, slavery, and conquest.
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Lords of the Sea
Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan
Peter D. Shapinsky
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Lords of the Sea revises our understanding of the epic political, economic, and cultural transformations of Japan’s late medieval period (ca. 1300–1600) by shifting the conventional land-based analytical framework to one centered on the perspectives of seafarers who, though usually dismissed as "pirates," thought of themselves as sea lords.
Over the course of these centuries, Japan’s sea lords became maritime magnates who wielded increasing amounts of political and economic authority by developing autonomous maritime domains that operated outside the auspices of state authority. They played key roles in the operation of networks linking Japan to the rest of the world, and their protection businesses, shipping organizations, and sea tenure practices spread their influence across the waves to the continent, shaping commercial and diplomatic relations with Korea and China. Japan's land-based authorities during this time not only came to accept the autonomy of "pirates" but also competed to sponsor sea-lord bands who could administer littoral estates, fight sea battles, protect shipping, and carry trade. In turn, prominent sea-lord families expanded their dominion by shifting their locus of service among several patrons and by appropriating land-based rhetorics of lordship, which forced authorities to recognize them as legitimate lords over sea-based domains.
By the end of the late medieval period, the ambitions, tactics, and technologies of sea-lord mercenary bands proved integral to the naval dimensions of Japan’s sixteenth-century military revolution. Sea lords translated their late medieval autonomy into positions of influence in early modern Japan and helped make control of the seas part of the ideological foundations of the state.
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Lordship and Governance by the Inheriting Countesses of Boulogne, 1160–1260
Heather J. Tanner
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
Traditional scholarship argues that the changes fostered by the growth of royal power and feudalism in Western Europe directly impacted women’s public power and authority in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Focusing on the inheriting countesses of Boulogne (1160–1260) and their neighbours in northern France, this monograph investigates the influence of the rise of centralized government on elite women’s power. This chronological and comparative analysis highlights successive countesses’ governance of inherited lands, the roles they played in their spouses’ lands and in political affairs outside their inherited lands, along with crucial assessments of the social identity and status of the family. It challenges the established interpretation and shows that the establishment of feudalism and the elaboration of bureaucracy did not curtail elite women’s access to or exercise of lordship to any significant degree.
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lore
Davis McCombs
University of Utah Press, 2016

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize 

Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present. 
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Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism
Walter Burkert
Harvard University Press, 1972

For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional literature on the subject which appeared between 1962 and 1969.

By a thorough critical sifting of all the available evidence, the author lays a new foundation for the understanding of ancient Pythagoreanism and in particular of the relationship within it of “lore” and “science.” He shows that in the twilight zone when the Greeks were discovering the rational interpretation of the world and quantitative natural science, Pythagoras represented not the origin of the new, but the survival or revival of ancient, pre-scientific lore or wisdom, based on superhuman authority and expressed in ritual obligation.

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Lore of the Lumber Camps
Earl Clifton Beck
University of Michigan Press, 1948

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Lorenzo Da Ponte
The Life and Times of Mozart’s Librettist
Sheila Hodges
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Three of the greatest operas ever written—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—join the exquisite music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte’s own long life (1749–1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet, and librettist of genius who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became professor of Italian at Columbia University—wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III’s London to New York City.

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Lorine Niedecker
A Poet’s Life
Margot Peters
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation.
    Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life.
    During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair.


Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

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The Los Angeles Plaza
Sacred and Contested Space
By William David Estrada
University of Texas Press, 2008

2008 — Gold Award in Californiana – California Book Awards – Commonwealth Club of California
2010 — NACCS Book Award – National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies

City plazas worldwide are centers of cultural expression and artistic display. They are settings for everyday urban life where daily interactions, economic exchanges, and informal conversations occur, thereby creating a socially meaningful place at the core of a city.

At the heart of historic Los Angeles, the Plaza represents a quintessential public space where real and imagined narratives overlap and provide as many questions as answers about the development of the city and what it means to be an Angeleno. The author, a social and cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles, is well suited to explore the complex history and modern-day relevance of the Los Angeles Plaza. From its indigenous and colonial origins to the present day, Estrada explores the subject from an interdisciplinary and multiethnic perspective, delving into the pages of local newspapers, diaries and letters, and the personal memories of former and present Plaza residents, in order to examine the spatial and social dimensions of the Plaza over an extended period of time.

The author contributes to the growing historiography of Los Angeles by providing a groundbreaking analysis of the original core of the city that covers a long span of time, space, and social relations. He examines the impact of change on the lives of ordinary people in a specific place, and how this change reflects the larger story of the city.

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Los Angeles
The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California
Anton Wagner
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
For the first time, Anton Wagner’s groundbreaking 1935 book that launched the study of Los Angeles as an urban metropolis is available in English.
 
No book on the emergence of Los Angeles, today a metropolis of more than four million people, has been more influential or elusive than this volume by Anton Wagner. Originally published in German in 1935 as Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, it is one of the earliest geographical investigations of a city understood as a series of layered landscapes. Wagner demonstrated that despite its geographical disadvantages, Los Angeles grew rapidly into a dominant urban region, bolstered by agriculture, real estate development, transportation infrastructure, tourism, the oil and automobile industries, and the film business. Although widely reviewed upon its initial publication, his book was largely forgotten until reintroduced by architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1971 classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
 
This definitive translation is annotated by Edward Dimendberg and preceded by his substantial introduction, which traces Wagner's biography and intellectual formation in 1930s Germany and contextualizes his work among that of other geographers. It is an essential work for students, scholars, and curious readers interested in urban geography and the rise of Los Angeles as a global metropolis.
 

“This fine new translation by Timothy Grundy of Anton Wagner's Los Angeles with Edward Dimendberg's lucidly probing introduction constitutes a major contribution to urban history and our understanding of one of the world's most enigmatic and significant cities.”

—Thomas S. Hines, Research Professor of History and Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA
 

“Edward Dimendberg has done a remarkable job bringing Anton Wagner's classic study of Los Angeles to a wider readership. This landmark publication will enable many strands of urban scholarship to enter into dialogue for the first time.”

—Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge, and author of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022)


 “Anton Wagner was a prescient and troubling historical figure. Nearly a century ago, with his camera in hand, he walked Los Angeles in fervent exploration of metropolitan growth. This beautiful and expert book takes Wagner every bit as seriously as he took Los Angeles.”
—William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
 
"Anton Wagner’s geographic and ethnographic history of the urbanization of Los Angeles has long been unavailable to English-speaking readers. This early study, accompanied by Edward Dimendberg’s comprehensive introduction, will be of interest to all who, like Reyner Banham, admire its impressive scholarship and firsthand account of a city and ecology already in the throes of dynamic transformation."
—Joan Ockman, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History, Yale School of Architecture
 
"Encompassing copious photographs, insightful commentary, and thorough reconstruction of Wagner’s life and times, this new translation of Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles provides the missing link in scholarship about the metropolis during the early twentieth century. Its continuing relevance and controversial edge will appeal to urban researchers and college students beyond Southern California."
—Michael Dear, Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
 
"Scholars of Los Angeles, or any city, must rejoice at this first proper English-language publication of Wagner's brilliant, if problematic, urban studies masterpiece. The edition is made accessible and relevant by Edward Dimendberg's indispensable prefatory material and contextualization."
—Roger Keil, Professor of Environmental and Urban Change, York University
 
“Finally translating this fascinating book into English fills an important gap in our historical knowledge of Los Angeles and its interpretation. Edward Dimendberg's invaluable introduction situates Anton Wagner in a comprehensive intellectual context. Of more than merely historical interest, this in-depth picture of Los Angeles in 1933 is essential reading for anyone interested in cities.”
—Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley
 
“This key text from 1935 for understanding Los Angeles urbanism is finally available in an excellent English translation by Timothy Grundy. Revelatory introductory essays by Anthony Vidler and Edward Dimendberg explain how German geographer (and later Nazi Party member) Anton Wagner was able to map and conceptualize the radical originality of this archetypal American metropolis in ways that deeply influenced Reyner Banham and so many subsequent writers on the city.”
—Robert Fishman, Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan
 
"Expertly annotated by Edward Dimendberg, Anton Wagner’s book on the growth of Los Angeles, which first appeared in German in 1935, is a landmark study in the history of urbanization. At the same time, it can be read as an example of transnational and comparative history, in which an observer from one country commented on developments in another. This volume will interest historians of the modern city, both in America and in Germany."
—Andrew Lees, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University
 
“Blending his wide knowledge and his acute wit, Edward Dimendberg has meticulously reconstructed the genesis of a forgotten doctoral thesis, which had remained unread for more than eighty years, despite its acknowledgement by Reyner Banham. This pioneering scholarly study of the Southern Californian metropolis is now available for the first time in English, inscribed with subtlety in both its German and its American contexts on the basis of thorough investigations.”
—Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
 
"This is the odyssey of a book written and published in 1930s Nazi Germany, forgotten after the war, and rediscovered by Reyner Banham in the ‘70s. Los Angeles is a seminal text of modern architectural history and confronts readers in the present with the paradox of an unknown classic.“
—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey
 
“Finally, a translation of Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles, with extensive notes and a superb and deeply researched introduction by Edward Dimendberg, has arrived.  It turns out that it was worth the wait. This volume is not only an important historic document, but a still-unrivaled portrait of a great city.”
—Robert Bruegmann, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture, and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Sprawl: A Compact History
 
"Scholars of Los Angeles can rejoice that Anton Wagner’s legendary study of early 1930s Los Angeles is at last available in a masterful translation, with a luminous introduction by Edward Dimendberg that captures Wagner’s analytical brilliance as well as his troubling politics and racial views. An essential addition to any library of Southern California."
—Louis S. Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, University of California, Davis
 
“Anton Wagner’s study provides an invaluable and frequently perceptive window into the evolution of Los Angeles during the early twentieth century, showing how human agency transformed regional resources into a booming major city.  The translation is immensely enhanced by Edward Dimendberg’s skillful provision of context, including fascinating intellectual history.”
—Stephen Bell, Professor of Geography and History, UCLA
 
"Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California has always had an elusive presence in the conversation about the explosive growth of the Southern California metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century: an arcane text known to exist, but only accessible to very few. This expert first translation in English almost ninety years after it originally appeared in German is prefaced by a complex and engaging introduction by Edward Dimendberg that situates the original study in a multidisciplinary conversation. It elucidates the many ways this landmark essay on Los Angeles’s urban geography was not only filtered into subsequent scholarship on the city—Reyner Banham’s iconic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in particular—but also how it resonates with contemporary debates about cities as complex social organisms. This book will be essential reading not only for historians of Los Angeles but for those interested in the theorization of the modern metropolis more broadly. That the volume editor addresses Wagner’s problematic views on race and territorial conquest front and center, within their historic context, only adds to the significance of this undertaking."
—Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
 
 
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Los Lobos
Dream in Blue
By Chris Morris
University of Texas Press, 2015

Los Lobos leaped into the national spotlight in 1987, when their cover of “La Bamba” became a No. 1 hit. But what looked like an overnight achievement to the band’s new fans was actually a way station in a long musical journey that began in East Los Angeles in 1973 and is still going strong. Across four decades, Los Lobos (Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, and Steve Berlin) have ranged through virtually the entire breadth of American vernacular music, from rockabilly to primal punk rock, R&B to country and folk, Mexican son jarocho to Tex-Mex conjunto and Latin American cumbia. Their sui generis sound has sold millions of albums and won acclaim from fans and critics alike, including three Grammy Awards.

Los Lobos, the first book on this unique band, traces the entire arc of the band’s career. Music journalist Chris Morris draws on new interviews with Los Lobos members and their principal collaborators, as well as his own reporting since the early 1980s, to recount the evolution of Los Lobos’s music. He describes the creation of every album, lingering over highlights such as How Will the Wolf Survive?, La Pistola y El Corazon, and Kiko, while following the band’s trajectory from playing Mexican folk music at weddings and dances in East L.A. to international stardom and major-label success, as well as their independent work in the new millennium. Giving one of the longest-lived and most-honored American rock bands its due, Los Lobos celebrates the expansive reach and creative experimentalism that few other bands can match.

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Los Primeros Mexicanos
Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene People of Sonora
Guadalupe Sánchez
University of Arizona Press, 2016
In 1927, near the town of Folsom, New Mexico, a spectacular discovery altered our understanding of early humans on the American continent. Scientists excavating a bison from the late Pleistocene age discovered a fluted projectile point wedged between the animal’s ribs—forceful evidence that humans existed during the Ice Age together with now-extinct animals. Subsequent discoveries at nearby Clovis introduced scientists to the first large-scale occupation of the Americas—Clovis culture—with a time span of 13,250 to 12,500 years ago.

Los Primeros Mexicanos explores the Clovis occupation of Mexico’s northwest region of Sonora. Using extensive primary data concerning specific artifacts, assemblages, and Paleoindian archaeology, Mexican archaeologist Guadalupe Sánchez presents a synopsis and critical review of current data and a unique summary of information about the First People of México that is difficult to find in Spanish and until now not available in English.

Sánchez’s essential framework for early Sonora prehistory includes the Sonoran landscape, the biotic communities, a history of investigations, the regional cultural-historical chronology of Sonora, and the Clovis record in the surrounding area. The Sonoran settlement pattern, she asserts, indicates that Clovis groups were hunter-gatherers who exploited a wide range of environments, locating their settlements near lithic sources for tool-making, water sources, large-prey animals, and a variety of edible plants and small animals.

In 1592, a Jesuit priest, José de Acosta, chronicled his puzzlement over when man first arrived in the New World. Four hundred years later, the peopling of the American continent is still intensely interesting to scientists and researchers. Los Primeros Mexicanos offers an exhaustive synthesis of available archaeological evidence to shed light on Clovis occupation in Sonora, Mexico.
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Los Romeros
Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar
Walter Aaron Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Spanish émigré guitarist Celedonio Romero gave his American debut performance on a June evening in 1958. In the sixty years since, the Romero Family—Celedonio, his wife Angelita, sons Celín, Pepe, and Angel, as well as grandsons Celino and Lito—have become preeminent in the world of Spanish flamenco and classical guitar in the United States. Walter Aaron Clark's in-depth research and unprecedented access to his subjects have produced the consummate biography of the Romero family. Clark examines the full story of their genius for making music, from their outsider's struggle to gain respect for the Spanish guitar to the ins and outs of making a living as musicians. As he shows, their concerts and recordings, behind-the-scenes musical careers, and teaching have reshaped their instrument's very history. At the same time, the Romeros have organized festivals and encouraged leading composers to write works for guitar as part of a tireless, lifelong effort to promote the guitar and expand its repertoire. Entertaining and intimate, Los Romeros opens up the personal world and unfettered artistry of one family and its tremendous influence on American musical culture.
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Los Tucsonenses
The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1986
Originally a presidio on the frontier of New Spain, Tucson was a Mexican community before the arrival of Anglo settlers. Unlike most cities in California and Texas, Tucson was not initially overwhelmed by Anglo immigrants, so that even until the early 1900s Mexicans made up a majority of the town's population. Indeed, it was through the efforts of Mexican businessmen and politicians that Tucson became a commercial center of the Southwest. Los Tucsonenses celebrates the efforts of these early entrepreneurs as it traces the Mexican community's gradual loss of economic and political power. Drawing on both statistical archives and pioneer reminiscences, Thomas Sheridan has written a history of Tucson's Mexican community that is both rigorous in its factual analysis and passionate in its portrayal of historic personages.
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Los Zetas Inc.
Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico
By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
University of Texas Press, 2017

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

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Loser Sons
Politics and Authority
Avital Ronell
University of Illinois Press, 2013
There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illustrate that not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expanding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations.
 
In Loser Sons, Avital Ronell draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men. This would be old news if the problem didn't recur so often with such disastrous consequences. Looking beyond our current moment, she interrogates the problems of authority, paternal fantasy, and childhood as they have been explored and exemplified by Franz Kafka, Goethe's Faust, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojève, and Immanuel Kant.
 
Brilliantly weaving these threads into a polyvocal discourse, Ronell shows how, with their arrays of powerful symbols, ideologies of all sorts perpetuate the theme that while childhood represents innocence, adulthood entails responsible cruelty. The need for suffering--preferably somebody else's--has become a widespread assumption, not only justifying abuses of authority, but justifying authority itself. 
 
Shockingly honest, Loser Sons recognizes that focusing on the spectacular catastrophes of modernity might make writer and reader feel they're engaged in something important, while in fact what they are engaged in is still only spectacle. To understand the implications of her insights, Ronell addresses them directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it.
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Losers Dream On
Mark Halliday
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We are all losing all the time. Four titanic forces—time, mortality, forgetting, and confusion—win victories over us each day. We all “know” this yet we keep dreaming of beautiful fulfillments, shapely culminations, devotions nobly sustained—in family life, in romance, in work, in citizenship. What obsesses Halliday in Losers Dream On is how to recognize reality without relinquishing the pleasure and creativity and courage of our dreaming.
            Halliday’s poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves). Often Halliday gives a poem to a speaker who is distressed, angry, confused, defensive, self-excusing, or driven by yearning, so that the poem may dramatize the speaker’s state of mind while also implying the poet’s ironic perspective on the speaker. Meanwhile, a few other poems (for instance “A Gender Theory” and “Thin White Shirts” and “First Wife” and “You Lament”) try to push beyond irony into earnestness and wholehearted declaration.  The tension between irony and belief is the engine of Halliday’s poetry.
 
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Losing a Bit of Eden
Recent Stories
Levi S. Peterson
Signature Books, 2021
In these ten stories (three of which appear here for the first time), Levi S. Peterson demonstrates his continuing engagement to take seriously the duty of the fiction writer to illuminate and entertain. His subject remains Latter-day Saints caught between the polarities of conscience and passion. Among the stories are sober tellings of rape and misogyny, defiant statements of ascendant feminism and the worship of Heavenly Mother, and—most abundantly—narratives about impermissible love that sometimes lead to heartbreak and other times forges unexpected couplings destined to last a lifetime. Once again, Peterson shows himself as a peerless master of the English language, the tools of his craft, and the artistry of creative fiction.
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Losing a Lost Tribe
Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church
Simon G. Southerton
Signature Books, 2004
 For the past 175 years, the Latter-day Saint Church has taught that Native Americans and Polynesians are descended from ancient seafaring Israelites. Recent DNA research confirms what anthropologists have been saying for nearly as many years, that Native Americans are originally from Siberia and Polynesians from Southeast Asia. In the current volume, molecular biologist Simon Southerton explains the theology and the science and how the former is being reshaped by the latter.

In the Book of Mormon, the Jewish prophet Lehi says the following after arriving by boat in America in 600 BCE:

Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves (2 Ne. 1:9).

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Losing Control
Global Security in the 21st Century
Paul Rogers
Pluto Press, 2010

When Losing Control was first published a decade ago it was years ahead of its time. Its argument was simple - the real causes of global insecurity were the widening socio-economic divide, global marginalisation and environmental limitations, especially climate change and conflict over energy resources.

Paul Rogers, one of the most original thinkers on international security, pointed to a world in which irregular warfare from the margins would prevent powerful states from maintaining their position. He even predicted accurately how the United States would respond to a catastrophic attack.

The new edition brings the whole analysis right up to date, arguing persuasively that the world’s elite cannot maintain control and that a far more emancipatory and sustainable approach to global security has to be developed.

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Losing Control
Global Security in the Twenty-first Century
Paul Rogers
Pluto Press, 2021

'Outstanding ... combines a glimpse behind the security screens with a sharp analysis of the real global insecurities - growing inequality and unsustainability' - New Internationalist

Written in the late 1990s, Losing Control was years, if not decades, ahead of its time, predicting the 9/11 attacks, a seemingly endless war on terror and the relentless increase in revolts from the margins and bitter opposition to wealthy elites.

Now, more than two decades later and in an era of pandemics, climate breakdown and potential further military activity in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Paul Rogers has revised and expanded the original analysis, pointing to the 2030s and '40s as the decades that will see a showdown between a bitter, environmentally wrecked and deeply insecure world and a possible world order rooted in justice and peace.

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Losing Culture
Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times
David Berliner
Rutgers University Press, 2020
We’re losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away.

Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed?

To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced.

Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.
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Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses
Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture
Edited by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Amir Moosavi
Leiden University Press, 2021
Diverse approaches to sensoria in Persian literature.

We experience art with our whole bodies, yet traditional approaches to Persian literature overemphasize the mind—the political, allegorical, or didactic—and ignore the feelings that uniquely characterize aesthetics. Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses rediscovers the sensuality of Persian art across period, genre, and artist. Through readings of such well-known writers as Rumi and lesser-known artists as Hossein Abkenar, the authors demonstrate the significance of sensoria to the rich history of Persian letters.
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Losing the Good Portion
Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity
Leon J. Podles
St. Augustine's Press, 2017
Few books have explored in depth the lack of men in the churches. Podles’ book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity was the first book-length attempt to examine this phenomenon. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church was a popular presentation of Podles’ material. Marta Trzebiatowska’s and Steve Bruce’s short Why Are Women More Religious than Men? confines itself almost entirely to modern British and American examples.
      Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity explores the causes and consequences of the almost millennium-old disparity between the participation of lay men and lay women in the churches of Western Christianity. Podles considers both the anecdotal and statistical evidence for the lack of men: sermons, church rolls, censuses, and sociological analyses.
     Podles sees the intellectual roots of lack of men in the Aristotelian understanding of male and female as active and passive, an understanding which has formed all discussion of masculinity and femininity, from Aquinas through Schleiermacher, Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, all of whom saw femininity as more compatible with Christianity than masculinity. Men, according to anthropologists and psychologists, go through a difficult process to attain masculinity and therefore distance themselves from threats to that masculine identity, including Christianity.
     Men suspected the clergy was effeminate and sexually irregular. Historians of violence have examined the decline in violence in Europe and the civilizing role of the clergy, a role which further alienated men and led to violent anticlericalism
      Podles examines the presentation of Jesus’ masculinity in Scripture and images of Jesus’ masculinity in art, the role of thumos in spirituality, and the various movements that have helped keep men connected to the churches. He makes suggestions for possible outreach to men.
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Losing the Plot
Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
Pardis Dabashi
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.
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Losing Time
The Industrial Policy Debate
Otis Graham
Harvard University Press, 1992

Japan has had one since before the Pacific War. Germany has always had one. Britain has had one after another. Shouldn't the United States get one?

Though hotly debated throughout the 1980s, this was the wrong question, leading to years of delay and confusion. The United States already had an Industrial Policy, said Otis Graham, but one which was uncoordinated and often harmful. This policy morass, which continued in the 1990s under George Bush despite the erosion of America's competitive position, owes much to a misunderstood history of government economic policy. Elements of both parties, but especially Reagan Republicans, have obscured our real choices with historical myths.

What should the United States have done when the nation saw its industries rapidly becoming globally uncompetitive? What reforms do we need now, asks Graham, to redirect our public policies for competitive strength? Industrial policy reform is an important part of a public-private set of remedies, but it hinges upon an improved use of policy history and of historical perspective generally. He proposes an explicit if minimalist approach by the federal government that would pull together and reform our de facto industrial policies in order to equip the United States with the institutional capacity to formulate industrial interventions guided by continuous learning, strategic vision, and bipartisan participation by both labor and management.

Losing Time is important reading for policy-makers, community leaders, academics involved in public policy, economics, and history, and readers generally concerned about their future.

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Losing to Win
Why Congressional Majorities Play Politics Instead of Make Laws
Jeremy Gelman
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Most everyone, voters, political scientists, even lawmakers, think Congress is dysfunctional. Instead of solving problems, Democrats and Republicans spend their time playing politics. These days Capitol Hill seems more a place to bicker, not to pass laws. The reality is more complicated. Yes, sometimes Congress is broken. But sometimes it is productive. What explains this variation? Why do Democrats and Republicans choose to legislate or score political points? And why do some issues become so politicized they devolve into partisan warfare, while others remain safe for compromise?

Losing to Win answers these questions through a novel theory of agenda-setting. Unlike other research that studies bills that become law, Jeremy Gelman begins from the opposite perspective. He studies why majority parties knowingly take up dead-on-arrival (DOA) bills, the ideas everyone knows are going to lose. In doing so, he argues that congressional parties’ decisions to play politics instead of compromising, and the topics on which they choose to bicker, are strategic and predictable. Gelman finds that legislative dysfunction arises from a mutually beneficial relationship between a majority party in Congress, which is trying to win unified government, and its allied interest groups, which are trying to enact their policies. He also challenges the conventional wisdom that DOA legislation is political theater. By tracking bills over time, Gelman shows that some former dead-on-arrival ideas eventually become law. In this way, ideas viewed as too extreme or partisan today can produce long-lasting future policy changes.

Through his analysis, Gelman provides an original explanation for why both parties pursue the partisan bickering that voters find so frustrating. He moves beyond conventional arguments that our discordant politics are merely the result of political polarization. Instead, he closely examines the specific circumstances that give rise to legislative dysfunction. The result is a fresh, straightforward perspective on the question we have all asked at some point, “Why can’t Democrats and Republicans stop fighting and just get something done?”
 
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Loss, A Love Story
Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters
Sophie Ratcliffe
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A journey with the novels that shape our emotions, our romances, and ourselves

Part memoir, part imagined history, this unique personal essay depicts the intimate experience of childhood bereavement, lost love affairs, and the complicated realities of motherhood and marriage. Framed by an extended train journey, author Sophie Ratcliffe turns to the novels, novelists, and heroines who have shaped her emotional and romantic landscapes. She transports us with her to survey the messiness of everyday life, all while reflecting on steam propulsion and pop songs, handbags and honeymoons, Anna Karenina and Anthony Trollope, former lovers and forgotten muses. Frank, funny, tender, and transporting, Loss, A Love Story asks why we fall in, and out, of love—and how we might understand doing so amid the ongoing upheavals and unwritten futures of the twenty-first century.   
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The Loss
A Novella and Two Short Stories
Vladimir Makanin
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.

In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the character's lives. In the novella The Loss, Pekalov, a drunkard and dreamer obsessed with the idea of building a tunnel under the Ural River, disappears in a ditch while working and is made a saint by the people of his village. "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin" tells the story of what happens when one man becomes remarkably lucky while the other loses all his luck.
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The Loss and Recovery of Truth
Selected Writings of Gerhart Niemeyer
Gerhart Niemeyer
St. Augustine's Press, 2013

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Loss and Redemption at St. Vith
The 7th Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge
Gregory Fontenot
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.
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Loss and Restoration of Regenerative Capacity in Tissues and Organs of Animals
L. V. Polezhaev
Harvard University Press
This well-illustrated monograph is the first summary in English of L.V. Polezhaev's important but lesser known work on the regenerative phenomena in mammalian forms, conducted since World War II. During this period Soviet research underwent a pronounced shift in emphasis from basic biological studies based primarily upon amphibians to more practically oriented problems in mammalian systems. Polezhaev's experimentation underwent a corresponding shift, but the focus on restoration of lost regenerative capacity was retained since his earlier work, which is also reviewed here, on limb regeneration in frogs. Following a theoretical discussion, the monograph centers upon the author's most profound innovations: a successful method for producing bone to heal large skull defects, original research on heart regeneration, and trials in the restoration of limb regeneration following X-irradiation.
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Loss and Wonder at the World’s End
Laura A. Ogden
Duke University Press, 2021
In Loss and Wonder at the World's End, Laura A. Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Repeated algal blooms have closed fisheries in the archipelago. Glaciers are in retreat. Extractive industries such as commercial forestry, natural gas production, and salmon farming along with the introduction of nonnative species are rapidly transforming assemblages of life. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; and experiments in natural history and performance studies. Loss and Wonder at the World's End frames environmental change as imperialism's shadow, a darkness cast over the earth in the wake of other losses.
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The Loss of Hindustan
The Invention of India
Manan Ahmed Asif
Harvard University Press, 2020

Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize

“Remarkable and pathbreaking…A radical rethink of colonial historiography and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of Hindustan.”
—Mahmood Mamdani

“The brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name ‘Hindustan’…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger.”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books

“Remarkable…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant.”
—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire

“A tremendous contribution…This is not only a book that you must read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.”
—Audrey Truschke, Current History

Did India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Manan Ahmed Asif tackles this contentious question by inviting us to reconsider the work and legacy of the influential historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir. Inspired by his reading of Firishta and other historians, Asif seeks to rescue our understanding of the region from colonial narratives that emphasize difference and division.

Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, he uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. The Loss of Hindustan reveals how multicultural Hindustan was deliberately eclipsed in favor of the religiously partitioned world of today. A magisterial work with far reaching implications, it offers a radical reinterpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity.

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The Loss of Java
The Final Battles for the Possession of Java Fought by Allied Air, Naval and Land Forces in the Period of 18 February - 7 March 1942
P.C. Boer
National University of Singapore Press, 2011
The Loss of Java explains in detail the air, sea and land battles between the Allied and Japanese armed forces during the battle for Java that followed the evacuation of southern Sumatra in February 1942. Little has been written about the allied air campaign, or about why Dutch forces fought just one major land battle with the Japanese, the Battle of the Tjiater Pass, in the later stages of the struggle.
 
 P.C. Boer considers whether the assessment of Major General Van Oyen that deploying the Allied air forces might prevent Japanese invasion of Java was realistic, and whether reliance on air power limited the capacity of land and naval forces to repel Japan's advances. The generally accepted idea is that the Allies were ineffective in their fight against the Japanese invaders but in fact the Japanese suffered serious losses. Boer's study shows that Dutch strategy grew out of a carefully-devised plan of defense, and that the battle for Java comprised not one (the Battle of the Java Sea) but four major engagements. However, Japanese commanders at various levels consciously took steps that exposed their forces to great risk but succeeded in putting the Allies under great pressure. In the end the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) and the allied forces capitulated on 8 March 1942.
 
 This book is a translation of Het Verlies Van Java: Een kwestie van Air Power. De eindstrijd om Nederlands-Indie van de geallieerde lucht-, zee- en landstrijdkrschten in de periode van 18 februari t/m 7 maart 1942 (Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw BV for the Koninklijke Militaire Academie, 2006).
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Loss within Loss
Artists in the Age of AIDS
Edited by Edmund White; In Cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a project of the Alliance for the Arts
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. Loss within Loss  is a moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers, who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and eighteen others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent—James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz—but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. Loss within Loss spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects.

This landmark book is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. Loss within Loss stands as a powerful reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as the first real survey of that devastation. Though these accounts are often intensely sad, Loss within Loss is an invigorating, sometimes even exuberant, testimony to the sheer joy of being an artist . . . and being alive.

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Lost Among the Baining
Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork
Gail Pool
University of Missouri Press, 2015

In the late sixties, Gail Pool and her husband set off for an adventure in New Guinea. He was a graduate student in anthropology; she was an aspiring writer. They prepared, as academics do, by reading, practicing with language tapes, consulting with the nearest thing to experts, and then, excited and optimistic, off they went. But all their research could not prepare them for the reality of life in the jungle. As they warded off gargantuan insects, slogged through seemingly endless mud, and turned on each other in fatigue and frustration, they struggled to somehow connect with their enigmatic hosts, the Baining—a people who showed no desire to be studied.

Sixteen months later they returned home. Despite months of trying, they had not been able to make sense of the Baining’s culture. Worse yet, their lives no longer seemed to make sense. Pool put her journals away. Her husband abandoned the study of anthropology.

Decades later, Pool returned to her journals and found in her jumbled notes the understanding that had eluded her twenty-three–year-old self. Finally, she and her husband returned to New Guinea for a shorter visit and a warm reunion with the tribe that challenged them on so many levels and, Pool now realized, made their journey and lives deeper and richer.

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Lost and
Jeff Griffin
University of Iowa Press, 2013
Ever since he was a child sitting in the back of his parents' car, Jeff Griffin has been taking explorative journeys into the desert. In 2007, as an art student, he started wandering the back roads of the Mojave Desert with the purpose of looking for a place to reflect in the harshly beautiful surroundings. What he found were widely scattered postmodern ruins—abandoned trailers and campers and improvised structures—whose vanished occupants had left behind, in their trash, an archaeological record of astonishing richness and poignancy.
Lost and is both a chronicle of Griffin’s obsessive journeying and a portal into a world of dispossessed people and enduring desires. Comprised entirely of unaltered reproductions of extraordinary found materials—drawings, charts, questionnaires, compulsively detailed letters, legal documents, jottings, journal entries, stunningly vivid and mysterious photographs—this is a work of sociological and literary daring that defies categorization. Part documentary history, part literary adventure, part mystical detective story, Griffin’s immersion in extremity has yielded wrenching annals of the modes and manners in which lost people inscribe their psychic, sexual, religious, and economic yearnings.
At the core of the work is a collection of poems, mostly handwritten and composed without pretense to literary sophistication, that give direct expression to the abiding impulse to tap language’s transformative potential. Assembled with deep regard for the dignity of its collective group of anonymous authors, Lost and is a book of profound conceptual originality—an engrossing, shocking, and tender work of art that strives to awaken voices from the wilderness of the inexpressible.
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Lost and Found
Locating Foundlings in the Early Modern World
Nicholas Terpstra
Harvard University Press
Florence’s foundling home of the Innocenti is often taken as a symbol of Renaissance creativity, innovation, and humanity. Its progressive approach to caring for abandoned children was matched by the iconic architectural form designed one of the period’s leading architects, Filippo Brunelleschi. Did reality match the reputation? The essays in Lost and Found explore new dimensions and contexts for foundling care at the Innocenti and use archival documents and digital tools to locate it architecturally, geographically, and socially. They ask questions that reframe the Ospedale degli Innocenti in different contexts and open paths for further research: Was Brunelleschi’s design a failure? How can digital tools recover the Innocenti’s lost spaces and extensive real estate holdings? What did the law say about foundlings and abandonment? What was it like to live in the Innocenti and in homes elsewhere? What roles did race and enslavement play in infant abandonment?
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Lost and Found
Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration
Karen L. Ishizuka
University of Illinois Press, 2006

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history. 

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

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Lost and Found
Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan
Hiraku Shimoda
Harvard University Press, 2014

Lost and Found offers a new understanding of modern Japanese regionalism by revealing the tense and volatile historical relationship between region and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aizu, a star-crossed region in present-day Fukushima prefecture, becomes a case study for how one locale was estranged from nationhood for its treasonous blunder in the Meiji Restoration, yet eventually found a useful place within the imperial landscape. Local mythmakers—historians, memoirists, war veterans, and others—harmonized their rebel homeland with imperial Japan so as to affirm, ironically, the ultimate integrity of the Japanese polity. What was once “lost” and then “found” again was not simply Aizu’s sense of place and identity, but the larger value of regionalism in a rapidly modernizing society.

In this study, Hiraku Shimoda suggests that “region,” which is often regarded as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple and contingent spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities just as much as internal diversity.

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Lost and Found
The Adoption Experience
Betty Jean Lifton
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"[Looks] at adoption from all sides of the triangle: adoptee, birth mother, adoptive parents . . . A provocative, comprehensive inquiry."
---Kirkus Reviews

"Honest and moving."
---New York Times

"Important and powerful . . . [the author] is concerned not just with adoptees but with the experience of adoptive parents and birth parents."
---Psychology Today

"A moving and powerful plea for open discourse instead of secrecy among the participants in the adoption process."
---Public Welfare, American Public Welfare Association

The first edition of Betty Jean Lifton's Lost and Found advanced the adoption rights movement in this country in 1979, challenging many states' policies of maintaining closed birth records. For nearly three decades the book has topped recommended reading lists for those who seek to understand the effects of adoption---including adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and their friends and families.

This expanded and updated edition, with new material on the controversies concerning adoption, artificial insemination, and newer reproductive technologies, continues to add to the discussion on this important topic. A new preface and afterword by the author have been added, as well as a greatly expanded resources section that in addition to relevant organizations now lists useful Web sites.

Betty Jean Lifton, Ph.D., is a writer, psychotherapist, and leading advocate for adoption reform. Her many books include Journey of the Adopted Self and The King of Children, a New York Times Notable Book. She regularly makes appearances as a lecturer on adoption and has an adoption counseling practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City.

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Lost Apostles
Forgotten Members of Mormonism's Original Quorum of the Twelve
William Shepard
Signature Books, 2013
Before the LDS Church was organized, Joseph Smith received a revelation telling him that twelve men would be called as latter-day apostles. Their assignment would be to warn men and women that the end was near. Although the determination of who would fill these positions was delayed for five years, when it finally happened, God reiterated that these men were to “prune the vineyard for the last time” because the Second Coming was nigh. In fact, “fifty six years would wind up the scene,” they were told.

Of the twelve men selected, nine would eventually be pruned from the vineyard themselves, to varying degrees. Seven were excommunicated, one of whom was reinstated to his position in the Twelve. Of the other six, the subjects of this book, none returned to the apostleship and four never came back to the Church at all. Those who left faded into obscurity except for when they are occasionally still mentioned in sermons as cautionary tales. But two of them made their marks in other areas of society, John Boynton becoming a successful dentist, a popular lecturer, geologist, and inventor with dozens of important patents to his name, while Lyman Johnson became a prominent attorney and business owner. Even though Luke Johnson, Thomas B. Marsh, William McLellin, and William Smith became religious wanderers and tried unsuccessfully to adjust to life outside of the Church, their experiences were interesting and comprise valuable case studies in belief and disaffection.  
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The Lost Archive
Lynn C. Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
The characters—young and old, queer and straight, contemporary and historical—who inhabit Lynn C. Miller’s stories often find themselves in defining moments and crisis situations. As they search through the archives of memory, truth, and experience, they seek to understand not only the past and present but themselves.

Stretching the definition of “archive,” Miller builds interconnected webs that surprise, much like the seemingly random papers collected in a box of materials. Fraught relationships, mistaken identities, mysterious disappearances, and the search for love play out in these stories. Friendships are celebrated, ex-husbands cross the line, and Gertrude Stein attempts to write her memoir. 

An unusual collection that proves greater than the sum of its parts, The Lost Archive will haunt readers with the intensity of its vision.
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The Lost Art of Declaring War
Brien Hallett
University of Illinois Press, 1998

Historically, it has been assumed that war is violence and declarations of war are simply public announcements that serve to initiate combat. Brien Hallett denies both assumptions and claims that war is policy, not violence.

The Lost Art of Declaring War analyzes the crucial differences between combat and war and convincingly argues that the power to "declare" war is in actuality the power to compose a text, draft a document, write a denunciation. Once written, the declaration then serves three functions: to articulate the political purposes of the war, to guide and direct military operations, and to establish the boundary between justified combat and unjustified devastation.

Hallett sounds a clarion call urging the people and their representatives to take up the challenge and write fully reasoned declarations of war. Then, and only then, can a civilized nation like the United States lay claim to being fully democratic, not only in peacetime, but in wartime as well.

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The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
John Edward Huth
Harvard University Press, 2013

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fog bank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena—the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and “read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way.

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth’s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.

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The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward
Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life
Samuel Steward
University of Chicago Press, 2018
On August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, Samuel Steward (1909–93) sat down at his typewriter in Berkeley, California, and began to compose a remarkable autobiography. No one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: as Samuel Steward, he had been a popular university professor of English; as Phil Sparrow, an accomplished tattoo artist; as Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, a prolific essayist in the first European gay magazines; as Phil Andros, the author of a series of popular pornographic gay novels during the 1960s and 1970s. Steward had also moved in the circles of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Alfred Kinsey, among many other notable figures of the twentieth century. And, as a compulsive record keeper, he had maintained a meticulous card-file index throughout his life that documented his 4,500 sexual encounters with more than 800 men.

The story of this life would undoubtedly have been a sensation if it had reached publication. But after finishing a 110,000-word draft in 1979, Steward lost interest in the project and subsequently published only a slim volume of selections from his manuscript.

In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, Jeremy Mulderig has integrated Steward’s truncated published text with the text of the original manuscript to create the first extended version of Steward’s autobiography to appear in print—the first sensational, fascinating, and ultimately enlightening story of his many lives told in his own words. The product of a rigorous line-by-line comparison of these two sources and a thoughtful editing of their contents, Mulderig’s thoroughly annotated text is more complete and coherent than either source alone while also remaining faithful to Steward’s style and voice, to his engaging self-deprecation and his droll sense of humor. Compellingly readable and often unexpectedly funny, this newly discovered story of a gay life full of wildly improbable—but nonetheless true—events is destined to become a landmark queer autobiography from the twentieth century.
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The Lost Bible
Forgotten Scriptures Revealed
J. R. Porter
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The Lost Bible provides a fascinating introduction to sacred writings of great profundity and aesthetic merit that did not become part of the canon of the Old and New Testaments. In the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, the Jewish people drew faith and inspiration from hundreds of sacred writings, not just those that make up the Hebrew Bible we know today. Early Christianity itself produced a wealth of sacred writings, which, though they did not become part of the New Testament, were popular among believers and important in spreading the faith. After the canons of the Jewish and Christian Bibles were established, many of these works disappeared into obscurity. Some were lost entirely; others survived in translations.

J. R. Porter introduces the reader to a wide selection of these extraordinary and beautiful "lost" works-from words considered to be those of prophets, kings, and patriarchs (even Adam himself) to legends and stories that supply "missing" parts of the Gospels. For each work, commentary is followed by a translated extract in clear and up-to-date language. The commentary places writings in their religious, social, and political context; explains the crucial importance of these works to the development of Jewish and Christian thought; and highlights the many legends and artistic traditions that sprang from them. It also examines the reasons-both religious and political-why these writings did not become part of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.

Lavishly illustrated with beautiful artwork, and amplified by maps, timelines, and data boxes, this text is a rich resource for anyone interested in exploring the origins of Judaism and Christianity.

Part I: Works related to the Old Testament

*Apocalypses
*Testaments
*Comments on Scripture
*Wisdom and Philosophy
*Hymns and Prayers
*Sibylline Oracles
*Apocrypha and Deuterocanonical works
*Recent Discoveries, including the Dead Sea Scrolls

Part II: Works related to the New Testament
*Apocryphal Gospels
*Apocryphal Acts
*Apocryphal Letters
*Apocryphal Apocalypses
*Recent Discoveries, including the Gnostic Library
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The Lost Black Scholar
Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought
David A. Varel
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Allison Davis (1902–83), a preeminent black scholar and social science pioneer, is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking investigations into inequality, Jim Crow America, and the cultural biases of intelligence testing. Davis, one of America’s first black anthropologists and the first tenured African American professor at a predominantly white university, produced work that had tangible and lasting effects on public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and school testing practices. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who generated such an extensive body of work this marginalization is particularly surprising. But it is also revelatory.

In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
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The Lost Book of Alexander the Great
Andrew Young
Westholme Publishing, 2022
A Reconstruction of Ptolemy I’s History of Alexander’s Conquests, a Primary Source Cited in Later Books That Disappeared More Than One Thousand Years Ago
Alexander the Great is well known as one of the first great empire builders of the ancient world. Among those fellow Macedonian officers who accompanied Alexander in his epic conquests from Greece to India was Ptolemy Lagides. Ptolemy served alongside Alexander from the Persian defeat at the Battle of Issus in modern-day Turkey and the journey to find the oracle that proclaimed Alexander to be Zeus incarnate, to the Battle of the Hydaspes River in 326 BC that opened India to the West. Following Alexander’s death, Ptolemy gained control of Egypt where he founded the dynasty in his name, created the great library of Alexandria, and was patron of the mathematician Euclid. Sometime during his rule in Egypt, Ptolemy wrote a history of Alexander’s conquests. Although it is probable that Ptolemy enhanced his own importance, sources indicate that it was regarded as an accurate and even-handed account of the campaigns of Alexander. However, Ptolemy’s book was lost—perhaps with the destruction of the library he founded—and not even an original fragment has survived. His book, however, was acknowledged as a primary source of information for later Roman historians.
In The Lost Book of Alexander the Great, Andrew Young explores the world of ancient writings about the Macedonian leader in order to determine whether any of Ptolemy’s writings can be recovered. Inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s distinguished biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, and written for the general reader, the author uses literary forensics to suggest which parts of later books about Alexander the Great, most notably the account by Arrian of Nicomedia, might be the words of Ptolemy. In addition to separating later Roman sensibilities from the original Greek of Ptolemy, the author re-creates the famous library of Alexandria, and takes the reader along on Alexander’s conquests as closely as we can to how Ptolemy may have recounted them.
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Lost Canyons of the Green River
The Story before Flaming Gorge Dam
Roy Webb
University of Utah Press, 2012

After more than 50 years of plans to dam the Green River, it finally happened in 1963 as part of the Colorado River Storage Project. Today many people enjoy boating and fishing on the resultant Flaming Gorge Reservoir, but few know about what lies under the water. Compared to Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge has received little attention. In Lost Canyons of the Green River, Roy Webb takes the reader back in time to discover what lay along this section of the Green River before the Flaming Gorge Dam was built, and provides a historical account of this section of the Colorado River system.

A historian and a lifetime lover of rivers, Webb has spent decades exploring the region, digging into archives, and running the length of the Green River. The book chronicles the history that is most closely linked to the river and its bottomlands, sharing the stories of those who traveled the Green through Flaming Gorge and the other canyons now flooded by the reservoir, as well as those who lived, trapped, farmed, or ranched along its banks. In depicting the river of the past, Webb considers his book “a guidebook for a river you can no longer run.”

Finalist for the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction. 
 

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The Lost Capital of Byzantium
The History of Mistra and the Peloponnese
Steven Runciman
Harvard University Press, 2009
Clinging to a rugged hillside in the lush valley of Sparta lies Mistra, one of the most dramatically beautiful Byzantine cities in Greece, a place steeped in history, myth, and romance. Following the Frankish conquest of the Peloponnese in the thirteenth century, William II of Villehardouin built a great castle on a hill near Sparta that later came to be known as Mistra. Ten years later, in a battle in northern Greece, Villehardouin was defeated and captured by the Byzantine emperor. The terms for his release included giving Mistra to the Byzantine Greeks. Under their rule, the city flourished and developed into a center of learning and the arts and was a focal point for the cultural development of Europe. Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most distinguished historians of the Byzantine period, traveled to Mistra on numerous occasions and became enchanted with the place. Now published in paperback for the first time, Lost Capital of Byzantium tells the story of this once-great city—its rise and fall and its place in the history of the Peloponnese and the Byzantine empire.
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The Lost Cause
The Trials of Frank and Jesse James
James P. Muehlberger
Westholme Publishing, 2013
The True Story Behind the Legendary Outlaw Gang, a Civil War Vendetta, and the Forgotten Court Documents That Helped Seal Their Fate
On a dreary December 7, 1869, two strangers entered the Daviess County Savings and Loan in Gallatin, Missouri. One of the men asked the cashier for change and then unexpectedly raised a revolver and shot him at point-blank range. Until now, this crime has been considered the first of a string of bank and train robberies committed by Jesse James, his brother Frank, and other gang members. But a story has circulated for more than a century that the case was actually brought to trial by a young Missouri lawyer—and it was through this case that twenty-two-year-old Jesse was first identified as a criminal to the country. But until recently no evidence for such an action could be found. After years of painstaking searches through dusty court archives across Missouri, defense attorney James P. Muehlberger finally discovered the historic documents in 2007. These fascinating and important records reveal that the gunmen were forced to leave behind a magnificent thoroughbred that linked James to the murder and, more intriguing, that the attack was not a bank robbery at all, but a calculated assassination in retribution for a Civil War killing.
The Lost Cause: The Trials of Frank and Jesse James is a thoroughly researched, thrilling account of the rise, pursuit, and prosecution of the legendary outlaw gang. Beginning with the newfound evidence of the Gallatin bank teller murder, the author explains how Jesse James attempted to avenge the death of his Confederate partisan leader, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, but shot the wrong man. Having lost his thoroughbred, Jesse stole another horse. Newly minted lawyer Henry McDougal brashly sued Jesse and Frank James for the loss of property, which would hang the murder on their heads. While Jesse professed his innocence and remained at large, his case was taken up by John Newman Edwards, editor of the Kansas City Times. Through Edwards’s pen, the James brothers were transformed from petty criminals to noble outlaws still fighting for Southern honor—the “Lost Cause.” Not fooled by Edwards’s rhetoric and populist appeal, McDougal and others, including Pinkerton detectives and the governor of Missouri, led a behind-the-scenes fight to bring down the gang. As the author explains, they first prosecuted lesser gang members, and by infiltrating the group, the authorities slowly unraveled the gang, with Jesse being shot by a paid informant in 1882. Frank James gave himself up, and in what was called the “trial of the century,” he was exonerated on all charges and retired to become a notable horse racing official until his death in 1915. Combining true crime, western adventure, and the transformation of America into a modern nation, The Lost Cause is engaging, entertaining history.
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Lost Causes
Blended Sentencing, Second Chances, and the Texas Youth Commission
By Chad R. Trulson, Darin R. Haerle, Jonathan W. Caudill, and Matt DeLisi
Foreword by James W. Marquart
University of Texas Press, 2016

What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.

The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.

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LOST CAUSES
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN VICTORIAN LI
JASON B JONES
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

What if we didn’t always historicize when we read Victorian fiction?

Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature’s engagement with history has to be read otherwise.

Perhaps perversely, Lost Causes suggests simultaneously that psychoanalysis speaks pressingly to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a- nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language’s representation of the real. Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes.

In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Lost Causes demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge—one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.

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Lost Chicago
David Garrard Lowe
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed.

Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city,  a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress.

Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review

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The Lost Children
Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II
Tara Zahra
Harvard University Press, 2015

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself.

Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe.

Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

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Lost Cities Go to Paradise
Las Ciudades Perdidas Van al Paraíso
Alicia Borinsky
Swan Isle Press, 2014
In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, snapshots, and vignettes, this collection of quick-witted poems and short fiction mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than a festival of masks and self-invention.
           
At the center of Borinsky’s work are the cities, which are a masquerade of disaster and spectacle that moves through space and time. Within these cities reside a man with two bills who gives three out of generosity, a woman who hides her face so that she may be better seen, cheating lovers who betray only to end up entwined in a tango, and immigrants who borrow each other’s accents. Filled with energy and irreverence, Lost Cities Go to Paradise captures the indignities and excitement of living among others in a society and discovering what is valued—and all that is not.
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Lost City, Found Pyramid
Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices
Edited by Jeb J. Card and David S. Anderson
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Lost City, Found Pyramid delves into the fascinating world of sensational “pseudoarchaeology,” from perennial discoveries of lost pyramids or civilizations to contemporary ghost-hunting and reality TV. It examines how nonscientific pursuit of myths and legends warps both public perceptions of archaeology and of human history itself.
 
A collection of twelve engaging and insightful essays, Lost City, Found Pyramid does far more than argue for the simple debunking of false archaeology. Rather, it brings into focus the value of understanding how and why pseudoarchaeology captures the public imagination. By comprehending pseudoarchaeology’s appeal as a media product, cultural practice, and communication strategy, archaeologists can enhance and enliven how they communicate about real archaeology in the classroom and in the public arena.
 
The first part of Lost City, Found Pyramid provides numerous case studies. Some examine the work of well-intentioned romantics who project onto actual archaeological data whimsical interpretative frameworks or quixotic “proofs” that confirm legends, such as that of the Lost White City of Honduras, or other alternative claims. Other case studies lay bare how false claims may inadvertently lead to the perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes, economic exploitation, political adventurism, and a misunderstanding of science.
 
Offering much of interest to scholars and students of archaeology, archaeology buffs, as well as policy-makers involved in the discovery, curation, and care of archaeological sites and relics, Lost City, Found Pyramid provides an invaluable corrective and hopeful strategy for engaging the public’s curiosity with the compelling world of archaeological discovery.
 
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Lost Classroom, Lost Community
Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America
Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In the past two decades in the United States, more than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed, and more than 4,500 charter schools—public schools that are often privately operated and freed from certain regulations—have opened, many in urban areas. With a particular emphasis on Catholic school closures, Lost Classroom, Lost Community examines the implications of these dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape. 

More than just educational institutions, Catholic schools promote the development of social capital—the social networks and mutual trust that form the foundation of safe and cohesive communities. Drawing on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime reports collected at the police beat or census tract level in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett demonstrate that the loss of Catholic schools triggers disorder, crime, and an overall decline in community cohesiveness, and suggest that new charter schools fail to fill the gaps left behind.

This book shows that the closing of Catholic schools harms the very communities they were created to bring together and serve, and it will have vital implications for both education and policing policy debates.
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Lost Comrades
Socialists of the Front Generation, 1918–1945
Dan S. White
Harvard University Press, 1992

The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of the First World War. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately they failed.

Lost Comrades follows the Front Generation socialists from their questioning of Marxist orthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontations with the twin challenges of fascism and world depression in the early 1930s. Responding to these dangers, they devised—with little success—counterpropaganda against the fascists and planning blueprints for the economy. Eventually, some of the most prominent—Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain, Hendrik de Man in Belgium, Marcel Déat in France—shifted their hopes to fascism or, during the Second World War, to collaborationism in Hitler’s Europe. Others, however, like Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach in Germany, ended as martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet even these divergent paths showed parallels reflecting their common starting point.

In tracing these unfulfilled careers, Dan S. White brings a new clarity to the hopes and limitations of European socialism between the two world wars.

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Lost Eagles
One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars
Blaine Pardoe
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Praise for Lost Eagles

"The pilot and observer stories selected have not previously seen much exposure. Not only are they interesting, but I found myself relishing getting to the next chapter to find out what Frederick Zinn was doing during the next stage of his life."
---Alan Roesler, founding member, League of World War I Aviation Historians, and former Managing Editor, Over the Front

Praise for Blaine Pardoe's previous military histories (which average 4.5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com):

Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I

"This painstaking biography of World War I ace Frank Luke will earn Pardoe kudos . . . Pardoe has flown a very straight course in researching and recounting Luke's myth-ridden life. . . . Thorough annotation makes the book that much more valuable to WWI aviation scholars as well as for more casual air-combat buffs."
---Booklist

The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate

"This is a gem of a story, well told, and nicely laid out with photos, maps, and charts that cleverly illuminate the lost era of ‘gentlemen pirates' at sea . . . [German commerce raider Felix von Luckner's] legend lives on in this lively and readable biography."
---Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Naval History

Few people have ever heard of Frederick Zinn, yet even today airmen's families are touched by this man and the work he performed in both world wars. Zinn created the techniques still in use to determine the final fate of airmen missing in action. The last line of the Air Force Creed reads, "We will leave no airman behind." Zinn made that promise possible.

Blaine Pardoe weaves together the complex story of a man who brought peace and closure to countless families who lost airmen during both world wars. His lasting contribution to warfare was a combination of his methodology for locating the remains of missing pilots (known as the Zinn system) and his innovation of imprinting all aircraft parts with the same serial number so that if a wreck was located, the crewman could be identified. The tradition he established for seeking and recovering airmen is carried on to this day.

Blaine Pardoe is an accomplished author who has published dozens of military fiction novels and other books, including the widely acclaimed Cubicle Warfare: Self-Defense Tactics for Today's Hypercompetitive Workplace; Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I; and The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate.

Jacket photo: Frederick Zinn's Sopwith aircraft, which crashed during World War I. National Museum of the United States Air Force Archives. 

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Lost For Words?
Brazilian Liberationism in the 1990s
Goetz Frank Ottmann
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002

Lost for Words? explores the rise and decline of progressive Catholic grassroots activism and its drive for social justice and democratic change in four low-income neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil. Ottmann focuses on the obstacles faced by the poor who took seriously the claim that "the people" were to transform Brazilian society "from the bottom up." He follows their travails through periods of democratization, mass unemployment, and conservative backlash within the Church.

Frank Goetz Ottmann moves beyond purely political analysis to record how residents and progressive Catholic activists were drawn into a struggle for a "juster" society, and how this movement began to unravel even before it reached its peak in the early 1980s.

Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, and drawing on theoretical insights from recent debates on social movements and the sociology of religion, he examines how, by the early 1990s, the liberationist movement had lost its following, lost its allies, failed to achieve its core goals, and seemed to die. Ottmann then shows how in recent years activists have worked to create a new and pragmatic form of religious activism, one that draws on a range of agendas, including Catholic feminism.

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Lost Girls
The Invention of the Flapper
Linda Simon
Reaktion Books, 2017
In the glorious, boozy party after the first World War, a new being burst defiantly onto the world stage: the so-called flapper. Young, impetuous, and flirtatious, she was an alluring, controversial figure, celebrated in movies, fiction, plays, and the pages of fashion magazines. But, as this book argues, she didn’t appear out of nowhere. This spirited, beautifully illustrated history presents a fresh look at the reality of young women’s experiences in America and Britain from the 1890s to the 1920s, when the “modern” girl emerged. Linda Simon shows us how this modern girl bravely created a culture, a look, and a future of her own. Lost Girls is an illuminating history of the iconic flapper as she evolved from a problem to a temptation, and finally, in the 1920s and beyond, to an aspiration.
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The Lost Gold Mine of Juan Mondragón
A Legend from New Mexico performed by Melaquías Romero
Edited by Charles L. Briggs and Julián Josué Vigil
University of Arizona Press, 1990
Spanish and English version of Historia de la mina perdida de Juan Mondragón, with editorial matter in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. [249-262]) and index.
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LOST HIGHWAY
RICHARD CURRY
West Virginia University Press, 2005

Richard Currey's Lost Highway has attracted a legion of admirers since its initial publication in 1997. The book depicts the epic struggle of an ordinary person living his dreams and following his passion. Lost Highway is the story of Sapper Reeves, a gifted country musician from the small town of Maxwell, West Virginia. Sapper’s story covers the events of more than half a century, from his birth in a poor coal mining town through his travels on the back roads of Appalachia in search of recognition and respect. Along the way, Sapper’s embattled love for his wife and struggle to come to terms with his combat-wounded son form the basis of his artistic and personal redemption.

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Lost Histories
Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples
Kirsten L. Ziomek
Harvard University Press

A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.

Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life.

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The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes
Conevery Bolton Valencius
University of Chicago Press, 2013
From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent’s mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten.
           
In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons—environmental, scientific, social, and economic—why something as consequential as major earthquakes can be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial.     
           
Engagingly written and ambitiously researched—both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time—The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be an important resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, as well as history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.

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Lost Homelands
Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest
Audrey Goodman
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant’s dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how—since that time—these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community.

Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region’s psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland.

Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments.
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LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL
Rohan Chhetri
Tupelo Press, 2021
“In Rohan Chhetri’s Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful,? inherited literary forms— the ode, the lyric, and pristine tercets— are juxtaposed with gorgeously fractured and stylistically daring hybrid pieces. The end result is a work in which poetic technique is brought to bear on lingering questions of identity, artistic tradition, and the cruelty implicit in language itself. Here, form, grammar, and syntax function as a kind of containment, but also, a ‘ruined field’ that is rife with possibility. Chhetri dramatizes and resists the ways language, and its implicit logic, limit what is possible within our most solitary reflections, defining even those ‘vague dreams’ that in the end we greet alone. ‘This is how violence enters / a poem,’ he explains, ‘through a screen / door crawling out & Mother asleep on the couch.’ These pieces are as lyrical as they are grounded, and as understated as they are ambitious. ‘In my language, there is a name for this music,’ he tells us. As his stunning collection unfolds, Chhetri reminds us, with subtlety and grace, that the smallest stylistic decisions in poetry are politically charged. This is a haunting book.”
—from the Judge’s Citation by Kristina Marie Darling
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Lost Illusions
The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France
Christine Haynes
Harvard University Press, 2010

Linking the study of business and politics, Christine Haynes reconstructs the passionate and protracted debate over the development of the book trade in nineteenth-century France. While traditionalists claimed that the business of literature required tight state regulation, an increasingly influential group of reformers argued that books were ordinary commodities whose production and distribution were best left to the free market.

The French Revolution overthrew the system of guilds and privileges that had governed the trade under the Old Regime. In the struggle that followed, the new men known as éditeurs (publishers) pushed for increased liberalization of the market. They relied on collective organization, especially a professional association known as the Cercle de la Librairie, to advocate for abolition of licensing requirements and extension of literary rights. Haynes shows how publishers succeeded in transforming the industry from a tightly controlled trade into a free enterprise, with dramatic but paradoxical consequences for literature in France.

The modern literary marketplace was the outcome of a political struggle both within the publishing world and between the book trade and the state. In tracing the contest over literary production in France, Haynes emphasizes the role of the Second Empire in enacting—but also in limiting—press freedom and literary property.

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Lost in a Labyrinth of Red Tape
The Story of an Immigration that Failed
Armin Schmid and Renate Schmid
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Lost in a Labyrinth of Red Tape is the story of one family's desperate attempts to emigrate from Nazi Germany. The Frühaufs faced enormous obstacles with the German and foreign authorities when they attempted to take advantage of matriarch Hilde Frühauf's U.S. citizenship. At the mercy of various agencies and shippers, they became more and more entangled in the red tape of the title. The daughter went into hiding and fled to Belgium, where she was hidden by the Resistance and survived the war. Tragically, the remaining members of her family failed to emigrate, and were killed by the Nazis.
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Lost in Austin
A Nevada Memoir
Jim Andersen
University of Nevada Press, 2009

In 1974 Jim Andersen and his wife, tired of the congestion and high taxes in California, decided to start a new life in rural Nevada. They settled on Austin, a town of about 250 people perched on a mountainside along the legendary Highway 50, “the loneliest road in America.” In the middle of the nineteenth century, Austin was a free-wheeling boomtown at the center of a silver bonanza. By the time the Andersens arrived, it had shrunk to a quiet, isolated community of self-sufficient souls who ran their lives, economy, and local government their own way, with ingenuity, wit, and a certain disregard for convention. Andersen’s account of his life in Austin is a charming, sometimes hilarious account of city folks adapting to life in a small town. He addresses such matters as making a living from a variety of odd jobs, some of them odder than others; serving as a deputy sheriff, deputy coroner, and elected justice of the peace, and administering Austin’s unique version of justice; raising a family; finding ways to have fun; and exploring the austerely beautiful backcountry of central Nevada. He also introduces some of Austin’s residents and their stories, and describes the way the community comes together for entertainment or to respond to crises.Lost in Austin is fascinating reading for anyone who cherishes nostalgic memories of living in a small town, or who contemplates moving to one. It offers an engaging portrait of a Nevada that exists far from the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas and Reno, “a happy Bermuda Triangle” where rugged individualism and community spirit flourish amidst sagebrush and vast open spaces.

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Lost in the City
Tree of Desire and Serafin: Two novels by Ignacio Solares
By Ignacio Solares
University of Texas Press, 1998

Cristina, the young protagonist of Tree of Desire, and her little brother Joaquín run away from a home that is outwardly normal, but inwardly disfunctional. Lost on the streets of Mexico City, they confront some of the most terrifying aspects of city life. Or is it all a dream? The story suggests, without confirming, that sexual abuse has driven Cristina to her desperate escape. But is it an escape? Are they awakening from a dream, or reentering a nightmare?

Serafín, too, is lost in the city. Searching for his father who has deserted the family, he is virtually helpless amid the city dangers. Serafín finds compassion in surprising places, but will he survive to return to his mother and their rural village?

These two novels by one of Mexico's premier writers illuminate many aspects of contemporary Mexican life. Solares describes Mexico's different social classes with Dickensian realism. His focus on young protagonists, unusual in Mexican literature, opens a window onto problems of children's vulnerability that know no national borders. At the same time, his use of elements of the fantastic and the paranormal, and his evocative writing style, make reading his novels a most pleasurable experience.

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Lost in the Customhouse
Authorship in the American Renaissance
Jerome Loving
University of Iowa Press, 1993
In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century’s canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society.
From Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson to Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser, Loving finds the American literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the author’s real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative.
Loving celebrates, enjoys, and experiences these awakened and reborn writers as he challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately “cultural work.” In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbag—the American ego—and passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside their culture than within it.
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Lost in the Fifties
Recovering Phantom Hollywood
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood reveals two 1950s: an era glorified in Hollywood movies and a darker reality reflected in the esoteric films of the decade. Renowned film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon turns to the margins—the television shows and films of a hidden Hollywood—to offer an authentic view of the 1950s that counters the Tinsel-town version. Dixon examines the lost films and directors of the decade. Contrasting traditional themes of love, marriage, and family, Dixon’s 1950s film world unveils once-taboo issues of rape, prostitution, and gangs. Television shows such as Captain Midnight and Ramar of the Jungle are juxtaposed with the cheerful world of I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Highlighting directors including Herbert L. Strock, Leslie Martinson, Arnold Laven, and Charles Haas, Dixon provides new insights on the television series Racket Squad, Topper, and The Rifleman and the teen films I Was a Teenage Werewolf and High School Confidential.

Geared for scholars and students of film and pop culture, Lost in the Fifties includes twenty-five photos—many previously unpublished—and draws on rare interviews with key directors, actors, and producers. The volume provides the first detailed profile of the most prolific producer in Hollywood history, Sam Katzman, and his pop culture classics Rock Around the Clock and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Dixon profiles, for the first time, B-movie phenomenon Fred F. Sears, who directed more than fifty touchstone films of a generation, including the noir thriller Chicago Syndicate, the criminal career story Cell 2455 Death Row, and the 3-D color western The Nebraskan. Also profiled is Ida Lupino, the only woman to direct in Hollywood in the 1950s, who tackled issues of bigamy, teenage pregnancy, and sports corruption in The Bigamist, The Hitch-Hiker, Outrage, Never Fear, Not Wanted, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, when no major studio would touch such controversial topics. Dixon also looks at the era’s social guidance films, which instructed adolescents in acceptable behavior, proper etiquette, and healthy hygiene.

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Lost in the Game
A Book about Basketball
Thomas Beller
Duke University Press, 2022
For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.
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Lost in the Lights
Sports, Dreams, and Life
Paul Hemphill
University of Alabama Press, 2003

A veteran journalist’s collection of sportswriting on the blue-collar South.


Sport mirrors life. Or, in Paul Hemphill's opinion, “Sport is life.” The 15 pieces in this compelling collection are arranged along the timeline for an aspiring athlete's dream: “The Dawning,” with stories about boys hoping and trying to become men, “The Striving,” about athletes at work, defining themselves through their play, and “The Gloaming,” about the twilight time when athletes contend with broken dreams and fading powers. Through all the pieces, Hemphill exhibits his passion for the sports he covers and a keen eye for the dramas, details, and hopes that fire the lives of athletes, allowing them to become prototypes of all human existence.



Most of the stories have been previously published in such national magazines as Sports Illustrated, True, Life, Today’s Health, and Sport. In “White Bread and Baseball,” the author chronicles his own boyhood infatuation with the minor-league Birmingham Barons, while in “Yesterday’s Hero” he details the sad end of a former All-American football player named Bob Suffridge, a portrait of a lion in winter. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Whirl” covers nights on the road with the roller derby, and “Saturday Night at Dixie Speedway” captures all the raucous glory of a stock-car dirt track under the hot lights. “Big Night, Big City” tells of an anxious, small-town high school basketball team facing their crucial chance for glory at a state tournament in Atlanta, and the classic “Mister Cobb” details a personal lesson on sliding the young author received from “the greatest player in the history of baseball.”



These stories are often bittersweet, emotional, and mythic: little dramas bearing impact and psychological “size.” Some of them are distinctively “Dixie,” but they ultimately transcend time and place. Frye Gaillard, author of Kyle at 200 MPH: A Sizzling Season in the Petty-NASCAR Dynasty, writes, “For more than 30 years, Paul Hemphill has been one of the finest writers in the South, and I think he proves it again in this collection. He exudes a natural feel for the players and the game, drawing out the real-life themes of struggle and desire, occasional triumph, and the omnipresent possibilities of heartache and failure.”





 


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Lost in the Rentharpian Hills
Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi
R. Dixon Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

R. Dixon Smith has captured the enchanting story of the well known pulp writer Carl Jacobi. Jacobi wrote many fantasy and weird tales, while leading a somewhat bizarre yet magical life.

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Lost in the Shadow of the Word
Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe
Benjamin Paloff
Northwestern University Press, 2016
2018 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship

Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.
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Lost in the USA
American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March
Deborah Gray White
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Remembered as an era of peace and prosperity, turn-of-the-millennium America was also a time of mass protest. But the political demands of the marchers seemed secondary to an urgent desire for renewal and restoration felt by people from all walks of life. Drawing on thousands of personal testimonies, Deborah Gray White explores how Americans sought better ways of living in, and dealing with, a rapidly changing world. From the Million Man, Million Woman, and Million Mom Marches to the Promise Keepers and LGBT protests, White reveals a people lost in their own country. Mass gatherings offered a chance to bond with like-minded others against a relentless tide of loneliness and isolation. By participating, individuals opened a door to self-discovery that energized their quests for order, autonomy, personal meaning, and fellowship in a society that seemed hostile to such deeper human needs. Moving forward in time, White also shows what marchers found out about themselves and those gathered around them. The result is an eye-opening reconsideration of a defining time in contemporary America.
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Lost in the Yellowstone
"Thirty-Seven Days of Peril" and a Handwritten Account of Being Lost
Truman Everts; Edited by Lee H. Whittlesey
University of Utah Press, 2015

In 1870, Truman Everts visited what would two years later become Yellowstone National Park, traveling with an exploration party intent on mapping and investigating that mysterious region. Scattered reports of a mostly unexplored wilderness filled with natural wonders had caught the public’s attention and the fifty-four-year-old Everts, near-sighted and an inexperienced woodsman, had determined to join the expedition. He was soon separated from the rest of the party and from his horse, setting him on a grueling quest for survival. For over a month he wandered Yellowstone alone and injured, with little food, clothing, or other equipment. In “Thirty-seven Days of Peril” he recounted his experiences for the readers of Scribner’s Monthly.

In June 1996, Everts’s granddaughter arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park to meet with park archivist Lee Whittlesey. She brought two documents that her father had kept hidden and both were handwritten by Everts. One was a brief autobiography that gave new insight into his early life. The other was a never-published alternative account of his confused 1870 journey through Yellowstone. Both have been added to this volume, further enhancing Everts’s unlikely tale of survival. 


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Lost in Time
Locating the Stranger in German Modernity
June J. Hwang
Northwestern University Press
June J. Hwang’s provocative Lost in Time explores discourses of timelessness in the works of central figures of German modernity such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Helmuth Plessner, as well as those of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Hugo Bettauer. Hwang argues that in the Weimar Republic the move toward ahistoricization is itself a historical phenomenon, one that can be understood by exploring the intersections of discourses about urban modernity, the stranger, and German Jewish identity.
 
These intersections shed light on conceptions of German Jewish identity that rely on a negation of the specific and temporal as a way to legitimize a historical outsider position, creating a dynamic position that simultaneously challenges and acknowledges the limitations of an outsider’s agency. She reads these texts as attempts to transcend the particular, attempts that paradoxically reveal the entanglement of the particular and the universal.
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Lost in Transition
Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism
Kristen Ghodsee
Duke University Press, 2011
Lost in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social-support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.
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Lost in Transition
Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, Aaron D. Purcell presents a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century removal and resettlement projects across southern Appalachia. The book shares complex stories of loss and recollection that have grown and evolved over time.

This edited volume contains seven case studies of public land removal actions in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee from the 1930s through the 1960s. Some of the removals include the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Norris Basin, Shenandoah National Park and the New River, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Keowee-Toxaway Project in northwestern South Carolina. Each essay asks key questions: How did governmental entities throughout the twentieth century deal with land acquisition and removal of families and communities? What do the oral histories of the families and communities, particularly from different generations, tell us about the legacies of these removals? This collection reveals confrontations between past and present, federal agencies and citizens, and the original accounts of removal and resettlement and contemporary interpretations. The result is a blending of practical historical concerns with contemporary nostalgia and romanticism, which often deepen the complexity of Appalachian cultural life.

Lost in Transition provides a nuanced and insightful study of removal and resettlement projects that applies critical analysis of fact, mythology, and storytelling. It illustrates the important role of place in southern Appalachian history. This collection is a helpful resource to anthropologists, folklorists, and Appalachian studies scholars, and a powerful volume of stories for all readers who reflect upon the importance of place and home.

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Lost in Translation
Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier
Homay King
Duke University Press, 2010
In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic. The fantasy of an inscrutable East, she argues, is not merely a side note to film history, but rather a kernel of otherness that has shaped Hollywood cinema at its core. Through close readings of The Lady from Shanghai, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Lost in Translation, and other films, she develops a theory of the “Shanghai gesture,” a trope whereby orientalist curios and décor become saturated with mystery. These objects and signs come to bear the burden of explanation for riddles that escape the Western protagonist or cannot be otherwise resolved by the plot. Turning to visual texts from outside Hollywood which actively grapple with the association of the East and the unintelligible—such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: Cina, Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain—King suggests alternatives to the paranoid logic of the Shanghai gesture. She argues for the development of a process of cultural “de-translation” aimed at both untangling the psychic enigmas prompting the initial desire to separate the familiar from the foreign, and heightening attentiveness to the internal alterities underlying Western subjectivity.
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The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing
Curtis M. Hinsley
University of Arizona Press, 2002
In the fall of 1886, Boston philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway sponsored an archaeological expedition to the American Southwest. Directed by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, the Hemenway Expedition sought to trace the ancestors of the Zuñis with an eye toward establishing a museum for the study of American Indians. In the third year of fieldwork, Hemenway's overseeing board fired Cushing based on doubts concerning his physical health and mental stability, and much of the expedition's work went unpublished. Today, however, it is recognized as a critical base for research into southwestern prehistory.

This second installment of a multivolume work on the Hemenway Expedition focuses on a report written by Cushing—at the request of the expedition's board of directors—to serve as vindication for the expedition, the worst personal and professional failure of his life. Reconstructed between 1891 and 1893 by Cushing from field notes, diaries, jottings, and memories, it provides an account of the origins and early months of the expedition. Hidden in several archives for a century, the Itinerary is assembled and presented here for the first time.

A vivid account of the first attempt at scientific excavatons in the Southwest, Cushing's Itinerary is both an exciting tale of travel through the region and an intellectual adventure story that sheds important light on the human past at Hohokam sites in Arizona's Salt River Valley, where Cushing sought to prove his hypothesis concerning the ancestral "Lost Ones" of the Zuñis. It initiates the construction of an ethnological approach to archaeology, which drew upon an unprecedented knowledge of a southwestern Pueblo tribe and use of that knowledge in the interpretation of archaeological sites.
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Lost Laborers in Colonial California
Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma
Stephen W. Silliman
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Native Americans who populated the various ranchos of Mexican California as laborers are people frequently lost to history. The “rancho period” was a critical time for California Indians, as many were drawn into labor pools for the flourishing ranchos following the 1834 dismantlement of the mission system, but they are practically absent from the documentary record and from popular histories.
 
This study focuses on Rancho Petaluma north of San Francisco Bay, a large livestock, agricultural, and manufacturing operation on which several hundred—perhaps as many as two thousand—Native Americans worked as field hands, cowboys, artisans, cooks, and servants. One of the largest ranchos in the region, it was owned from 1834 to 1857 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the most prominent political figures of Mexican California. While historians have studied Vallejo, few have considered the Native Americans he controlled, so we know little of what their lives were like or how they adjusted to the colonial labor regime.
 
Because Vallejo’s Petaluma Adobe is now a state historic park and one of the most well-protected rancho sites in California, this site offers unparalleled opportunities to investigate nineteenth-century rancho life via archaeology. Using the Vallejo rancho as a case study, Stephen W. Silliman examines this California rancho with a particular eye toward Native American participation. Through the archaeological record—tools and implements, containers, beads, bone and shell artifacts, food remains—he reconstructs the daily practices of Native peoples at Rancho Petaluma and the labor relations that structured indigenous participation in and experience of rancho life. This research enables him to expose the multi-ethnic nature of colonialism, counterbalancing popular misconceptions of Native Americans as either non-participants in the ranchos or passive workers with little to contribute to history.
 
Lost Laborers in Colonial California draws on archaeological data, material studies, and archival research, and meshes them with theoretical issues of labor, gender, and social practice to examine not only how colonial worlds controlled indigenous peoples and practices but also how Native Americans lived through and often resisted those impositions. The book fills a gap in the regional archaeological and historical literature as it makes a unique contribution to colonial and contact-period studies in the Spanish/Mexican borderlands and beyond.
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Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies
The Search For A Value Of Place
Thomas Michael Power
Island Press, 1996
Over the past two decades, a growing consensus has emerged among Americans as to the importance of environmental quality. Yet at the same time, conflict over environmental issues has built to a point where rational discussion is often impossible. Efforts to protect unique ecosystems and endangered wildlife are portrayed as threatening entire regions and ways of life, and anti-environmental groups such as the Wise Use Movement are able to use economic insecurity as a weapon in an ongoing attempt to rescind environmental protection measures.In Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, economist Thomas Michael Power argues that the quality of the natural landscape is an essential part of a community's permanent economic base and need not be sacrificed in short-term efforts to maintain employment levels in industries that are ultimately not sustainable. He provides numerous case studies of the ranching, mining, and timber industries in a critical analysis of the role played by extractive industry in our communities. In addition, he looks at areas where environmental protection measures have been enacted and examines the impact of protected landscapes on local economies.Both environmental protection and extractive industry are economic activities that can contribute to local economic well-being. Both generate jobs and income. Both have a significant impact on people's lives. Power exposes the fundamental flaws in the widely accepted view of the local economy built around the "extractive model," a model that overemphasizes the importance of extractive industries and assumes that people don't care where they live and that businesses don't care about the available labor supply. By revealing the inadequacies of the extractive model, he lays to rest fears that environmental protection will cause an imminent collapse of the community, and puts economic tools in the hands of those working to protect their communities.
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The Lost Lawyer
Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession
Anthony Kronman
Harvard University Press, 1993

Anthony Kronman describes a spiritual crisis affecting the American legal profession, and attributes it to the collapse of what he calls the ideal of the lawyer-statesman: a set of values that prizes good judgment above technical competence and encourages a public-spirited devotion to the law.

For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those in the profession what it means for them personally to have chosen a life in the law.

A variety of factors have contributed to the declining prestige of prudence and public-spiritedness within the legal profession. Partly, Kronman asserts, it is the result of the triumph, in legal thought, of a counterideal that denigrates the importance of wisdom and character as professional virtues. Partly, it is due to an array of institutional forces, including the explosive growth of the country’s leading law firms and the bureaucratization of our courts. The Lost Lawyer examines each of these developments and illuminates their common tendency to compromise the values from which the ideal of the lawyer-statesman draws strength. It is the most important critique of the American legal profession in some time, and an an enduring restatement of its ideals.

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