Before Mark Twain became a national celebrity with his best-selling The Innocents Abroad, he was just another struggling writer perfecting his craft—but already “playin’ hell” with the world. In the first book in more than fifty years to examine the initial phase of Samuel Clemens’s writing career, James Caron draws on contemporary scholarship and his own careful readings to offer a fresh and comprehensive perspective on those early years—and to challenge many long-standing views of Mark Twain’s place in the tradition of American humor.
Tracing the arc of Clemens’s career from self-described “unsanctified newspaper reporter” to national author between 1862 and 1867, Caron reexamines the early and largely neglected writings—especially the travel letters from Hawaii and the letters chronicling Clemens’s trip from California to New York City. Caron connects those sets of letters with comic materials Clemens had already published, drawing on all known items from this first phase of his career—even the virtually forgotten pieces from the San Francisco Morning Call in 1864—to reveal how Mark Twain’s humor was shaped by the sociocultural context and how it catered to his audience’s sensibilities while unpredictably transgressing its standards.
Caron reveals how Sam Clemens’s contemporaries, notably Charles Webb, provided important comic models, and he shows how Clemens not only adjusted to but also challenged the guidelines of the newspapers and magazines for which he wrote, evolving as a comic writer who transmuted personal circumstances into literary art. Plumbing Mark Twain’s cultural significance, Caron draws on anthropological insights from Victor Turner and others to compare the performative aspects of Clemens’s early work to the role of ritual clowns in traditional societies
Brimming with fresh insights into such benchmarks as “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” and “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” this book is a gracefully written work that reflects both patient research and considered judgment to chart the development of an iconic American talent. Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter should be required reading for all serious scholars of his work, as well as for anyone interested in the interplay between artistic creativity and the literary marketplace.
Contributors. Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter, Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar, Eric Sundquist
From Michael C. White, the author of the critically acclaimed novels A Brother's Blood and The Blind Side of the Heart, comes a new book, Marked Men. It is a gripping collection of twelve wide-ranging stories about those unexpected moments in our lives when the layers of our defenses are peeled away, one by one, and we are left with the harsh inevitability of our fates. Touching on themes of loneliness and isolation, Marked Men deals with characters who have been alienated from society, from family and friends, from their past, and sometimes from their own feelings.
In "Heights," we meet a young woman whose husband is paralyzed and who must come to grips with the life she now finds herself inhabiting; in "Disturbances," a doctor is called to the scene of a brutal murder, only to discover he will be asked to do much more than pronounce the man dead; in "Burn Patterns," an arson investigator traveling to the scene of a fire picks up a young runaway drifter, an event that causes him to reflect on his own failed marriage; in "The Crossing," a recent widow learns to deal with her fears regarding her alien new life; and in "The Cardiologist's House," the narrator builds model houses at night when he can't sleep and at the same time keeps watch on a neighbor who is having an affair.
These are powerful and moving stories told in White's distinctive style. His earlier prose has been hailed by the New York Times as "stunningly well written" and by Booklist as "remarkable." Engaging the reader from the first line, White provides a suspenseful and surprise-filled journey as his characters face and resolve their conflicts.
Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crime? For the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year, their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives.
The product of an innovative field experiment, Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable—yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.
“Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, [Pager] shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job. . . . Both informative and convincing.”—Library Journal
“Marked is that rare book: a penetrating text that rings with moral concern couched in vivid prose—and one of the most useful sociological studies in years.”—Michael Eric Dyson
Julia Roberts played a prostitute, famously, in Pretty Woman. So did Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Jane Fonda in Klute, Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie, Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, and Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award for Monster. This engaging and generously illustrated study explores the depiction of female prostitute characters and prostitution in world cinema, from the silent era to the present-day industry. From the woman with control over her own destiny to the woman who cannot get away from her pimp, Russell Campbell shows the diverse representations of prostitutes in film.
Marked Women classifies fifteen recurrent character types and three common narratives, many of them with their roots in male fantasy. The “Happy Hooker,” for example, is the liberated woman whose only goal is to give as much pleasure as she receives, while the “Avenger,” a nightmare of the male imagination, represents the threat of women taking retribution for all the oppression they have suffered at the hands of men. The “Love Story,” a common narrative, represents the prostitute as both heroine and anti-heroine, while “Condemned to Death” allows men to manifest, in imagination only, their hostility toward women by killing off the troubled prostitute in an act of cathartic violence.
The figure of the woman whose body is available at a price has fascinated and intrigued filmmakers and filmgoers since the very beginning of cinema, but the manner of representation has also been highly conflicted and fiercely contested. Campbell explores the cinematic prostitute as a figure shaped by both reactionary thought and feminist challenges to the norm, demonstrating how the film industry itself is split by fascinating contradictions.
“Essential and thoroughly engaging…Harvey Cox’s ingenious sense of how market theology has developed a scripture, a liturgy, and sophisticated apologetics allow us to see old challenges in a remarkably fresh light.”
—E. J. Dionne, Jr.
We have fallen in thrall to the theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It can raise nations and ruin households, and comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evangelical zeal. Harvey Cox brings this theology out of the shadows, demonstrating that the way the world economy operates is shaped by a global system of values that can be best understood as a religion.
Drawing on biblical sources and the work of social scientists, Cox points to many parallels between the development of Christianity and the Market economy. It is only by understanding how the Market reached its “divine” status that can we hope to restore it to its proper place as servant of humanity.
“Cox argues that…we are now imprisoned by the dictates of a false god that we ourselves have created. We need to break free and reclaim our humanity.”
—Forbes
“Cox clears the space for a new generation of Christians to begin to develop a more public and egalitarian politics.”
—The Nation
Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.
"Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich account of how the discourses and practices of the free market penetrated the hearts and minds of everyday Czech citizens. Weiner's provocative analysis takes readers inside the worlds of female factory workers to expose the discontinuities between their radiant market dreams and their everyday realities--and juxtaposes them to the continuities experienced by female managers. In the process, it challenges many of our ideas about post/socialism, marketization, and gender and reveals the enduring power of stories in shaping social identities and actions."
---Lynne Haney, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University
"Through interviews and a careful analysis of newspaper articles written in the first decade after the collapse of state socialism, Weiner explores the complicated interconnections between personal stories and the emerging neoliberal metanarrative of the free market in the Czech Republic after 1989. Her book transcends many of the dichotomies with which researchers of post-state socialism have been struggling: 'East' vs. 'West,' losers and winners, emancipation vs. oppression, etc., and thus makes a truly novel contribution to our understanding of women's lives after state socialism."
---Éva Fodor, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Central European University
"Weiner's rich and innovative study of female Czech managers and workers exemplifies the importance of narrative analysis for understanding why gender and class have not (yet) reconfigured the sense of postcommunism's alternatives. This is critical reading for feminists, class analysts, and students of postcommunist social change."
---Michael Kennedy, Director, Center for European Studies, University of Michigan
Elaine Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Visit the author's website at: www.mcgill.ca/sociology/faculty/weiner/.
Cover Credit: Frank Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
In Market Encounters, Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.
Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.
This volume explores the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which twentieth-century notions of market failure were developed. Markets can fail to perform in ways that best promote the larger interests of society: this idea is as old as economics itself and is one of the most crucial issues with which economic thinkers have had to grapple. However, while the history of the theory of market failure has received some critical examination, little attention has been paid to the larger contexts in which these theoretical analyses emerged. Contributors to this volume directly examine these contexts to gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for the influence of external ideas and events on the development of economic theories and to stimulate additional scholarship around this important facet of the history of economics.
Contributors. Nahid Aslanbeigui, Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Sebastian Berger, David Colander, J. Daniel Hammond, Marianne Johnson, Thomas C. Leonard, Alain Marciano, Steven G. Medema, Guy Oakes, Malcolm Rutherford, John D. Singleton
Long before Deng Xiaoping’s market-based reforms, commercial relationships bound the Chinese Communist Party to international capitalism and left lasting marks on China’s trade and diplomacy.
China today seems caught in a contradiction: a capitalist state led by a Communist party. But as Market Maoists shows, this seeming paradox is nothing new. Since the 1930s, before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, Communist traders and diplomats have sought deals with capitalists in an effort to fuel political transformation and the restoration of Chinese power. For as long as there have been Communists in China, they have been reconciling revolutionary aspirations at home with market realities abroad.
Jason Kelly unearths this hidden history of global commerce, finding that even Mao Zedong saw no fundamental conflict between trading with capitalists and chasing revolution. China’s ties to capitalism transformed under Mao but were never broken. And it was not just goods and currencies that changed hands. Sustained contact with foreign capitalists shaped the Chinese nation under Communism and left deep impressions on foreign policy. Deals demanded mutual intelligibility and cooperation. As a result, international transactions facilitated the exchange of ideas, habits, and beliefs, leaving subtle but lasting effects on the values and attitudes of individuals and institutions.
Drawing from official and commercial archives around the world, including newly available internal Chinese Communist Party documents, Market Maoists recasts our understanding of China’s relationship with global capitalism, revealing how these early accommodations laid the groundwork for China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and after.
Market signaling, a phrase formulated by A. Michael Spence, means the activities and characteristics of individuals which are visible to somebody else and convey information in a market, such as the job market. This study attempts to explain the informational content of market signals.
In many markets, people are screened. Employers screen job applicants. Banks screen loan applicants. In screening processes like these, the attributes of individuals, such as education, previous experience, personal appearance, sex, and race may be read as signals. Thus education may be a signal of an ability to do a certain kind of job. Spence finds that when education is regarded as a job-market signal there is a systematic tendency to overinvest in it.
The author also extends the concept of “market equilibrium” to include signaling. A signaling equilibrium, when applied to a job market, is defined as a situation in which employers’ beliefs about the relationship between (1) applicants’ signals and (2) their productivity are confirmed by their performance after they are hired. Spence uses this concept to derive insights into the efficiency of a market system for allocating jobs to people and people to jobs. His approach gives economists and policy makers a way of looking at the welfare properties of various signals and of studying the informational structures of particular markets.
Conceived in 1853 as a canny real-estate scheme by two young investors expecting to get rich off the idea, Market Square came to be Knoxville’s most public spot, a marketplace familiar to every man, woman, and child in the area. By the 1860s, it was the busiest place in a burgeoning city. In a town that became bitterly divided by politics, race, and background, Market Square became a rare common ground: a place to buy all sorts of local produce, but also a place to experience new things, including the grandiose Market House itself, considered a model in a progressive era. Beset by urban blight by the mid-1900s, Market Square had become more of a curiosity than a point of municipal pride, and the neighborhood declined. After years of controversy, the city razed the Market House and struggled to modernize the old Square itself.
This second edition is packed with more information about the colorful history of this eccentric place, including details about its African American heritage, the surprising origins of a recent international bestseller, and a much fuller account of its present-day resurgence as an example of vigorous urban revival. Through a combination of public and private efforts in the 21st century, Market Square seems to be returning to its original diverse spirit, suggesting why, on a good day, it can resemble—as a reporter described it in 1900—“the most democratic place on earth.”
Jack Neely is the award-winning “Secret History” columnist for Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s weekly newspaper. He is the author of From the Shadow Side and Other Stories about Knoxville, Tennessee, and, with Aaron Jay, of The Marble City: A Photographic Tour of Knoxville’s Graveyards.
Martin Shubik brings classical oligopoly theory and research in mathematical economics close to new studies in industrial organization and simple game experiments in this imaginative and important new work. He engages the reader by creating a market model and by explaining its availability as a computer program, thus promoting interest in game experiments. In all, he admirably succeeds in increasing our understanding of the meaning of competitive and cooperative behavior and of market structure.
This unusual book covers a variety of topics: economic explanation, model building, analyses of duopoly and oligopoly, product differentiation, contingent demand, demand fluctuations, the study of non-symmetric markets, and advertising. All of these parts of Shubik's overall pattern of interpretation may also be used in a game which, more or less, coincides with the exposition of theory and the subject matter of accounting. A complete linking of basic accounting items to the oligopoly model and theory is made. Shubik bridges the gap between information as it appears to the businessman—the player in the game—and the economic model and abstraction of the market as it appears to the economic theorist.
The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers—two of the country's prized exports—is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines, and nurses working in the United States. Guevarra's multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers—managing migration and garnering wages—to govern social conduct, and brings this isolated yet widespread social problem to life.
Although historians have written extensively on propaganda during Napoleon III’s regime and Vichy, they have virtually ignored the Third Republic. Focusing on Third Republic policies, Marketing Marianne suggests that Americans’ long-lasting love affair with French culture is no accident. Robert J. Young argues that the French used subtle but effective means to influence U.S. policy in Europe. He examines French propaganda efforts and the methods of the French Foreign Ministry, always highlighting the wider cultural and social context of Franco-American relations. French propagandists believed that the steady promotion of their nation as the cultural capital of the world was the best way to foster goodwill among Americans. They slowly recognized the important role the United States played in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Young argues that the French deliberately exploited America’s sense of cultural inferiority when faced with Europe’s rich heritage, and the rise of new technologies and modern forms of government in France encouraged the development of more sophisticated forms of propaganda.
To posterity, William Shakespeare may be the Bard of Avon, but to mid-seventeenth-century theatergoers he was just another dramatist. Yet barely a century later, he was England’s most popular playwright and a household name. In this intriguing study, Don-John Dugas explains how these changes came about and sealed Shakespeare’s reputation even before David Garrick performed his work on the London stage.
While Hollywood executives spend millions of dollars making movies, even more money is poured into selling those films to the public. In the second edition of his comprehensive guidebook, Marketing to Moviegoers, veteran film and TV journalist Robert Marich plumbs the depths of the strategies and tactics used by studios to market their films to consumers. Packed with real life examples and useful data, this new edition blends practical, up-to-date information with theory to clearly explain all aspects of promoting motion pictures.
Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics takes readers carefully through all of the key components of film marketing. From creative strategy, market research, and advertising to publicity, product placement, and distribution to theaters, Marich's book covers everything film professionals need to know to mount a successful marketing campaign. Each chapter contains a wealth of useful information—including the historical background of the business, sample market research documents and advertising budgets, comments from successful industry insiders, and over thirty-five tables—and offers intriguing insight into the strategies of modern promotion.
Most other film marketing books focus mainly on marketing by independent distributors, but Marich specifically outlines the marketing methods of the six major Hollywood studios, which are notoriously secretive about these methods, while also detailing the marketing plans of the independent and foreign film sectors. In addition, he examines in depth the effectiveness of both new and old media, especially the ways in which the advent of the Internet has both helped and hindered the movie marketing process.
While many books have been written on the business-to-business aspect of film promotion, Marich's volume is one of the few that focuses on the methods used to sell motion pictures to those who truly make or break a film's success—the public.
This essential reference contains detailed examples, more than twenty illustrations, and a comprehensive glossary of marketing terms. A highly navigable handbook that breaks down a complicated process into manageable strategies in an easy-to-read style, Marketing to Moviegoers is a must for all film professionals and filmmaking students.
While Hollywood executives spend millions of dollars making movies, even more money is poured into selling those films to the public. In the third edition of his comprehensive guidebook, Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics, veteran film and TV journalist Robert Marich plumbs the depths of the methods used by studios to market their films to consumers. Updates to the third edition include a chapter on marketing movies using digital media; an insightful discussion of the use of music in film trailers; new and expanded materials on marketing targeted toward affinity groups and awards; fresh analysis of booking contracts between theaters and distributors; a brief history of indie film marketing; and explorations of the overlooked potential of the drive-in theater and the revival of third-party-financed movie campaigns.
While many books have been written on the business-to-business aspect of film promotion, Marich’s volume is one of the few that focuses on the techniques used to sell motion pictures to those in a position to truly make or break a film—the public. A highly navigable handbook that breaks down a complicated process into manageable strategies in an easy-to-read style, Marketing to Moviegoers is a must for all professionals and students in today’s rapidly evolving film industry.
This all-new edition gathers a range of contributors to explore real-world uses of library marketing technology, perfect for novices ready to dive in as well as practitioners on the lookout for ways to improve existing efforts. Inside, librarians share insights on how they use their favorite social media tools to promote their library and build community. Applicable to all types of institutions, this guide
A media theory of markets
Markets abound in media—but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail and inflects them in three distinct ways. Nik-Khah and Mirowski show how the denigration of human cognition and the concomitant faith in computation prevalent in contemporary market-design practices rely on neoliberal conceptions of information in markets. Schröter confronts the asymmetries and abstractions that characterize money as a medium and explores the absence of money in media. Beverungen situates these inflections and gathers further elements for a politically and historically attuned media theory of markets concerned with contemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies.
A staunch neoclassical economist, Sherwin Rosen drew inspiration from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, particularly his theory of compensating wage differentials, which Rosen felt was central to all economic problems involving product differentiation and spatial considerations. The main theme of his collection is how markets handle diversity, including the determination of value in the presence of diversity, the allocation of idiosyncratic buyers to specialized sellers, and the effects of heterogeneity and sorting on inequality.
Rosen felt that good economics required combining simple but powerful concepts such as optimizing and equilibrium with careful empirical analysis. It was important for the relatively simple rules of behavior implied by rationality to have useful, empirically descriptive content and predictive power. If they did, it was often possible to infer underlying structure (tastes and technology, for example) from actual behavior. Using this approach, Rosen was able to develop powerful insights into such phenomena as the enormous salaries paid to sports and entertainment stars and top business executives. He also explored with fruitful results the premium paid to workers in risky jobs, learning and experience in the labor market, and other labor market phenomena.
Markets in Oaxaca is a study of the regional peasant marketing system in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. It relates the marketing system to other aspects of the regional economy, to neighboring regions, and to the Mexican national economy. Combining ethnographic, theoretical, and regional analyses, it suggests new directions in the fields of peasant and development studies.
Contributors to the volume describe the operation and nature of several marketplaces in the region, analyze village-based artisan production and various specialized economic roles (particularly the role of traders), and describe the operation of several total regional marketing systems. The editors then consider their findings against the background of political, economic, and social structures from the pre-Conquest period to the present. In their conclusion, the editors find the regional peasant economy to be responsive both to the influence of the urban metropolitan sector, on the one hand, and to its own indigenous structural integrity and internal dynamism, on the other.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to Markets in Oaxaca are Ralph L. Beals, Richard L. Berg Jr., Beverly Chiñas, Herbert M. Eder, Charlotte Stolmaker, Carole Turkenik, John C. Warner, Ronald Waterbury, and Cecil R. Welte. Their essays combine analyses of the elements of the system within a comprehensive theoretical framework. Together, they present a complete and integrated view of a peasant economy.
A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success.
American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education.
Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research.
Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.
When István Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of Hont’s contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas, and methods.
Richard Tuck, John Pocock, John Dunn, Raymond Geuss, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Sonenscher, John Robertson, Keith Tribe, Pasquale Pasquino, and Peter N. Miller contribute original essays on themes Hont treated with penetrating insight: the politics of commerce, debt, and luxury; the morality of markets; and economic limits on state power. The authors delve into questions about the relationship between states and markets, politics and economics, through examinations of key Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment figures in context—Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to Hont’s lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx.
The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to Hont’s influence while developing its own provocative and illuminating arguments. Markets, Morals, Politics will be a valuable companion to readers of Hont and anyone concerned with political economy and the history of ideas.
Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” Selection
A New York Times Best Art Book of the Year
An Art Newspaper Book of the Year
A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system.
More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them.
Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art.
As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.
“Ten thousand years of history, and we find the remains
of ancestors removed from their burial mound . . . “
Impressions of the past, markings on earth, are part of the world of Karenne Wood. A member of the Monacan tribe of Virginia, she writes with insight and grace on topics that both reflect and extend her Native heritage.
Markings on Earth is a cyclical work that explores the many dimensions of human experience, from our interaction with the environment to personal relationships. In these pages we relive the arrival of John Smith in America and visit the burial mounds of the Monacan people, experience the flight of the great blue heron and witness the dance of the spider. We also share the personal journey of one individual who seeks to overcome her sense of alienation from her people and her past.
Wood’s palette is not only Nature but human nature as well. She writes pointedly about shameful episodes of American history, such as the devastation of Appalachia by mining companies and the “disappearance” of Indian peoples. She also addresses forms of everyday violence known to many of us, such as alcoholism and sexual abuse. Wood conveys an acceptance of history and personal trauma, but she finds redemption in a return to tradition and a perception of the world’s natural grace.
Through these elegantly crafted words, we come to know that Native writers need not be limited to categorical roles determined by their heritage. Markings on Earth displays a fidelity to human experience, evoking that experience through poems honed to perfection. It is an affirmation of survival, a work that suggests one person’s life cannot be separated from the larger story of its community, its rootedness in history, and its timeless connections to the world.
Rita Magdaleno was born near Dachau shortly after World War II to a German mother and a Mexican American GI. Her family moved to Arizona in 1947, and Rita was raised with her father's traditions—but she remains at heart a child of two cultures.
This poetic memoir, recalling Magdaleno's return to the land of her birth, is an intertwining of personal and public history, bridging continents and cultures in search of family secrets. Her poems recall a mother "Marlene Dietrich pretty, / her smoky voice / & those wide Aryan / eyes that promised / never to lie," a war bride who named her child after a Hollywood movie star even before casting eyes on America. They also offer a new, intimate view of the war—and of today's reunified Germany—and show that the consequences of events played out half a century ago continue to resonate with the children of that era.
Magdaleno navigates currents of emotion that would drown less capable poets. With patience, courage, and abiding love, she draws on memories of mother and motherland to show us that healing can come in many forms.
Written over a hundred-year period, the letters of Zenas Bartlett and his family and friends capture the vitality that marked the expansion and development of Texas during the nineteenth century. Warm, humorous, and illuminating, these letters and other papers record the changes in a family and in a region as bustling towns replaced clusters of log cabins and the hardships of the frontier were gradually mellowed by the luxuries of settled life.
The earliest letters describe the adventures of young Zenas Bartlett, who left his home in Maine and traveled first to Alabama and then to camps of the California Gold Rush. A new venture brought him to Marlin, Texas, in 1854. The transformation of a wilderness area into a prosperous community is the unifying theme of the rest of the collection.
Churchill Jones, Bartlett’s future father-in-law, writes about his struggles to establish a cotton plantation at the Falls of the Brazos River. Zenas’ antebellum letters perceptively reveal the poignancy of his partner’s death and the joys of his own fulfilling marriage.
John Watkins, an associate in Bartlett’s store, expresses the pride, loyalty, and eventual disillusionment of a soldier in the Civil War. Zenas’ correspondence with his family in the East describes the privations endured by Marlin during Reconstruction.
Beguiling Mollie Dickson’s schoolgirl journal and the letters of Zenas’ large family depict happier times during the eighties and nineties. The last letters were written by Lottie Barnes, a former servant who recalls the tranquil years following the turn of the century. An epilogue brings the story to conclusion, and selections from the author’s delightful collection of family photographs illustrate the book.
Frank Calvert Oltorf was reared on the “Marlin Compound,” the home where members of this singular family lived or visited and where many of the manuscripts included in this book were found. His comments bind the letters in a narrative of pioneering, which is also a humorous and human family history.
Maroon is the debut collection of Haitian-American poet Danielle Legros Georges, who writes of the pain of exile, the beauty of nature, and the delights of love in highly rhythmic, highly original language. The range of her voice is remarkable— from the comic to the tragic to the lyric. Her poetry is electric with an overpowering zest for life and vitality of language, as she examines the traumatic experiences that brought her parents to America and searches for a more complete understanding of self.
Interpretive social science and literary analysis converge in this absorbing book. It is a psychosocial drama in three acts, featuring three very different confrontations between nineteenth-century Americans and the natives of the Marquesas Islands. The Americans, in seeking to come to terms with the Marquesans, found their own cultural identity challenged; they were compelled, under conditions of extreme psychic stress, to discover what it meant to them to be civilized.
The protagonists are the Reverend William Alexander, who led a mission to the Marquesas to rescue the islanders from sin and savagery through the word of God; Captain David Porter, a rationalist intent upon civilizing the natives by educating them; and Herman Melville, seaman, who was held captive for a time by the Typees. The Calvinist, rationalist, and romantic preconceptions of the three were shaken by their experiences in the alien environment of Polynesia. Only Melville, however, came to investigate the civilized identity itself as a source of these shared consternations. T. Walter Herbert offers a fresh perspective on Melville's Typee by considering it in the context of the earlier encounters, and by drawing, as he does throughout, on the insights of cultural anthropology.
How did propertied families in late medieval and early modern Florence maintain their power and affluence while equally important clans elsewhere were fatally undermined by the growth of commerce and personal freedom, and the consequences of the Plague? Drawing on a vast array of archival research—from letters and memoirs to fiscal declarations to records of the Dowry Fund, Anthony Molho suggests that the answer is found in the twin institutions of arranged marriage and the dowry.
Molho focuses on the relations between Florentine families of this period and demonstrates that the links among families—created by arranged marriages within a narrow and well-defined social class, a system of dowries that was a combination of speculation and manipulation, and an entrenched memory of these processes—account for the resilience of this ruling class. The individuals or single families whose records Molho has scrutinized, as well as his analysis of several thousand marriages over nearly a century and a half, illuminate a culture that consistently and relentlessly subordinated individual goals and preferences to larger and deeper concerns. The book combines the application of quantitative methods and close reading of contemporary texts in order to gain new insights into the history of Florence in the late Middle Ages.
In an era when half of marriages end in divorce, cohabitation has become more commonplace and those who do get married are doing so at an older age. So why do people marry when they do? And why do some couples choose to cohabit? A team of expert family sociologists examines these timely questions in Marriage and Cohabitation, the result of their research over the last decade on the issue of union formation.
Situating their argument in the context of the Western world’s 500-year history of marriage, the authors reveal what factors encourage marriage and cohabitation in a contemporary society where the end of adolescence is no longer signaled by entry into the marital home. While some people still choose to marry young, others elect to cohabit with varying degrees of commitment or intentions of eventual marriage. The authors’ controversial findings suggest that family history, religious affiliation, values, projected education, lifetime earnings, and career aspirations all tip the scales in favor of either cohabitation or marriage. This book lends new insight into young adult relationship patterns and will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and demographers alike.
Widely praised as the best available study of its kind, Marriage and Divorce, in a new, revised edition, incorporates recent statistics to bring its treatment up to date. This book is replete with information about factors affecting the stability of marriage, the decision to marry or to divorce, and differences in marriage and divorce patterns among various socioeconomic classes and races. There are, in addition, chapters on people who never marry, on the relationship of marital status and health, on family composition and living arrangements, and on work experience and income of married persons. The new, concluding chapter focuses on developments in the turbulent decade of the sixties and early seventies.
Sociologists, psychologists, marriage counselors, and practitioners in the medical and health fields as well as demographers will find this study invaluable, as will students in these and related areas.
Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.
What did it mean to be a wife, woman, or slave in a society in which a land-owning woman was forbidden to lay with her male slave but the same slave might be allowed to take concubines? Jurists of the nascent Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi‘i legal schools frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. Juggling scripture, precedent, and custom on one hand, and the requirements of logical consistency on the other, legal scholars engaged in vigorous debate. The emerging consensus demonstrated a self-perpetuating analogy between a husband’s status as master and a wife’s as slave, even as jurists insisted on the dignity of free women and, increasingly, the masculine rights of enslaved husbands.
Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam presents the first systematic analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage—its rights and obligations—using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery. Kecia Ali explores parallels between marriage and concubinage that legitimized sex and legitimated offspring using eighth- through tenth-century legal texts. As the jurists discussed claims spouses could make on each other—including dower, sex, obedience, and companionship–they returned repeatedly to issues of legal status: wife and concubine, slave and free, male and female.
Complementing the growing body of scholarship on Islamic marital and family law, Ali boldly contributes to the ongoing debates over feminism, sexuality, and reform in Islam.
The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source.
Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. Birge’s meticulously annotated translation clarifies the meaning of terms and passages, some in a hybrid Sino-Mongolian language, for specialists and general readers alike. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.
With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation.
The legal experts, anthropologists, historians, and development workers contributing to Marriage by Force? focus on the role that marriage plays in the mobilization of labor, the accumulation of wealth, and domination versus dependency. They also address the crucial slippage between marriages and other forms of gendered violence, bondage, slavery, and servile status.
Only by examining variations in practices from a multitude of perspectives can we properly contextualize the problem and its consequences. And while early and forced marriages have been on the human rights agenda for decades, there is today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue, thus making the coherent, multifaceted approach of Marriage by Force? even more necessary.
With roller coaster changes in marriage and divorce rates apparently leveling off in the 1980s, Andrew Cherlin feels that the time is right for an overall assessment of marital trends. His graceful and informal book surveys and explains the latest research on marriage, divorce, and remarriage since World War II.
Cherlin presents the facts about family change over the past thirty-five years and examines the reasons for the trends that emerge. He views the 1950s, when Americans were marrying and having children early and divorcing infrequently, as the aberration, and he discusses why this period was unusual. He also explores the causes and consequences of the dramatic changes since 1960—increases in divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation, decreases in fertility—that are altering the very definition of the family in our society. He concludes with a discussion of the increasing differences in the marital patterns of black and white families over the past few decades.
This new facsimile edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes a plate-by-plate guide to the texts, interlinear figures, and larger designs in a commentary accompanying the transcript of each reproduced plate. Drawings from Blake’s manuscript notebook, which were used as a basis for the designs, as well as working proof impressions, are also included, demonstrating the evolution of the work. This edition also reproduces a single plate from each of the other eight surviving copies, revealing how over a period of more than thirty years Blake altered the way he finished each copy. An introduction explores the book's literary and historical background, Blake’s printing process, and the book's anonymous initial publication.
This expertly edited work is available for students and scholars in paperback and for collectors in a special hardcover edition. Both versions allow Blake’s vision to reassert its breathtaking power.
This new facsimile edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes a plate-by-plate guide to the texts, interlinear figures, and larger designs in a commentary accompanying the transcript of each reproduced plate. Drawings from Blake’s manuscript notebook, which were used as a basis for the designs, as well as working proof impressions, are also included, demonstrating the evolution of the work. This edition also reproduces a single plate from each of the other eight surviving copies, revealing how over a period of more than thirty years Blake altered the way he finished each copy. An introduction explores the book's literary and historical background, Blake’s printing process, and the book's anonymous initial publication.
This expertly edited work is available for students and scholars in paperback and for collectors in a special hardcover edition. Both versions allow Blake’s vision to reassert its breathtaking power.
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