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Melting the Ice Curtain
The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier
David Ramseur
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.
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Melville Biography
An Inside Narrative
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by a lifetime of intimate working partnerships with great Melville scholars of different generations and by the author’s experience of successive phases of literary criticism. Throughout this bold book, Hershel Parker champions archival-based biography and the all-but-lost art of embodying such scholarship in literary criticism. First is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating the award-winning and comprehensive  Herman Melville: A Biography. Then Parker traces six decades of the “unholy war” waged against biographical scholarship, in which critics repeatedly imposed the theory of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted life—not just on his writings—while truncating his body of work and ignoring his study of art and aesthetics. In this connection, Parker celebrates discoveries made by “divine amateurs,” before throwing open his workshop to challenge ambitious readers with research projects. This is a book for Melville fans and Parker fans, as well as for readers, writers, and would-be writers of biography.

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Melville in His Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollection, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
Steven Olsen-Smith
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Owing to the decline of his contemporary fame and to decades of posthumous neglect, Herman Melville remains enigmatic to readers despite his status as one of America’s most securely canonical authors. Born into patrician wealth but plunged into poverty as a child, in 1840 he signed aboard the whaleship Acushnet in the midst of a nationwide depression and sailed to the South Pacific. At the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and lived for a time among one of the group’s last unsubjugated tribes. Upon his return home, he achieved overnight success with a book based on his experiences, Typee (1846).

Melville’s mastery of the English language and heterodox views made him a source of both controversy and fascination to western readers, until his increasing commitment to artistry and contempt for artificial conventions led him to write Moby-Dick (1851) and its successor Pierre (1852). Although the former is considered his masterwork today, the books offended mid-nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities and alienated Melville from the American literary marketplace. The resulting eclipse of his popular reputation was deepened by his voluntary withdrawal from society, so that obituaries written after his death in 1891 frequently expressed surprise that he hadn’t died long before.

With most of his personal papers and letters lost or destroyed, his library of marked and annotated books dispersed, and first-hand accounts of him scattered, brief, and frequently conflicting, Melville’s place in American literary scholarship illustrates the importance of accurately edited documents and the value of new information to our understanding of his life and thought. As a chronologically organized collection of surviving testimonials about the author, Melville in His Own Time continues the tradition of documentary research well-exemplified over the past half-century by the work of Jay Leyda, Merton M. Sealts, and Hershel Parker. Combining recently discovered evidence with new transcriptions of long-known but rarely consulted testimony, this collection offers the most up-to-date and correct record of commentary on Melville by individuals who knew him.
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Melville
The Making of the Poet
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2007

“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” the London John Bull remarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, “few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition.” A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was “poetic” in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. 

Here Parker, the dean of Melville studies, gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. His work corrects two of the most pernicious misconceptions about Melville perpetuated by earlier critics: that he repudiated fiction writing after Pierre, and that he hadn’t begun writing poetry (let alone had a book of poems ready for publication) as early as 1860. In clearing up these misapprehensions, Parker gives a thorough and thoroughly involving account of Melville’s development as a poet. Parker demonstrates for the first time just how crucial poetry was to Melville from childhood to old age, especially its re-emergence in his life after 1849. Drawing on Melville's shrewd annotations of great British poets and on his probing, skeptical engagement with commentaries on poetry (particularly by the great Scots reviewers), Parker paints a richly textured portrait of a hitherto unseen side of Herman Melville.


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Melville’s Israel Potter
Reflections on the American Dream
Alexander Keyssar
Harvard University Press, 1969
Alexander Keyssar’s study focuses on Melville’s treatment of the social and existential condition of the American common man—his inability to realize the happiness promised by the American dream and the impurity of democracy in a society with marked economic classes. The author discusses the literary coherence—thematic rather than narrative—of Melville’s work as illustrated by Israel Potter and as representative of the novelist’s writing during the 1853–1856 period. He includes a brief analysis of Melville’s conception of literary “truth” and a discussion of the peculiar role of comedy in the sad story of Israel Potter. Melville’s insights into the political and social flaws of America “contain remarkable relevance for the contemporary reader.”
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Melville's Prisoners
Harrison Hayford
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Bringing together in one volume the essays of the world's foremost authority on Herman Melville, this collection is both an essential companion and guide to any reading of the American master's work and a model of literary interpretation that is at once precise, judicious, and inspired. The book allows those who (sometimes unknowingly) felt Harrison Hayford's influence to experience firsthand the interpretive force of his critical method and, through his work, to rediscover the compelling mysteries and intricacies of Melville's writing.

Written over many years, these essays retain the power to enlighten and surprise-and often, as Hershel Parker notes in his Foreword, to dazzle. Along with the never-before-published essay from which the book takes its title, Melville's Prisoners includes "Loomings," widely viewed as the single best piece of criticism ever written on Moby-Dick, and "Unnecessary Duplicates," a classic of textual speculation on Melville's methods. Others offer, along with their enduring insights into Melville's work, example after example of a capacious and astonishingly energetic mind at work and at play-a long view of how scholarship at its best is done. In sum, this volume constitutes the finest set of scholarly-critical essays ever written one of America's great writers.
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Mema's House, Mexico City
On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos
Annick Prieur
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Mema's house is in the poor barrio Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbors, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young, homosexual men who meet to do what they can't do openly at home. They chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a mustache.

Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and to conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities—at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos—on visits with their families and even in prisons, a fascinating story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit.

She analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, ultimately asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society—the very society from which the term machismo stems. Expertly weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men.

A riveting account of heroes and moral dilemmas, community gossip and intrigue, Mema's House, Mexico's City offers a rich story of a hitherto unfamiliar culture and lifestyle.
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Members of The Tribe, expanded Pilot edition
Dr. Sandra Lilienthal
Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning, The, 2020

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Membranes to Molecular Machines
Active Matter and the Remaking of Life
Mathias Grote
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes. When we think, microscopic "channels" open and close in our brain cell membranes; when we run, tiny "motors" spin in our muscle cell membranes; and when we see, light operates "molecular switches" in our eyes and nerves. A molecular-mechanical vision of life has become commonplace in both the halls of philosophy and the offices of drug companies, where researchers are developing “proton pump inhibitors” or medicines similar to Prozac.
 
Membranes to Molecular Machines explores just how late twentieth-century science came to think of our cells and bodies this way. This story is told through the lens of membrane research, an unwritten history at the crossroads of molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and the neurosciences, that directly feeds into today's synthetic biology as well as nano- and biotechnology. Mathias Grote shows how these sciences not only have made us think differently about life, they have, by reworking what membranes and proteins represent in laboratories, allowed us to manipulate life as "active matter" in new ways. Covering the science of biological membranes in the United States and Europe from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, this book connects that history to contemporary work with optogenetics, a method for stimulating individual neurons using light, and will enlighten and provoke anyone interested in the intersection of chemical research and the life sciences—from practitioner to historian to philosopher.

The research described in the book and its central actor, Dieter Oesterhelt, were honored with the 2021 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his contribution to the development of optogenetics. 
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Meme
Susan Wheeler
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love.
 
A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, “are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
 

Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems,” a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or—The Introjects.” In the book’s third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in “The Split.” A set of variations on losses and break-ups—wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad—“The Split” brings Wheeler’s lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme “Should I stay or should I go?” will be altered in your head forever. 

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A Memoir
John A. Hannah
Michigan State University Press, 1980

This is a very personal look at the growth and evolution of Michigan State University, as seen from the eyes of its dynamic president. As twelfth president of Michigan State University, John Alfred Hannah served from July 1, 1941, to April 1, 1969. His tenure was characterized by extensive growth of the University, in both size and enrollments. President Hannah's activities were not limited to the University, as he filled a variety of positions in both the federal government and private industry.

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The Memoir and the Memoirist
Reading and Writing Personal Narrative
Thomas Larson
Ohio University Press, 2007

The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true.

In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir—a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author’s past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered.

The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one’s deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O’Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process.

For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.

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The Memoir of Ednah Shepard Thomas
Ednah Shepard Thomas
University Press of Colorado, 2017
The Memoir of Ednah Shepard Thomas offers an in-depth look at what it was to be a Writing Program Administrator during the period from after World War II up to the time of the early 1970s, a time for which we have little in the way of documentation for the work of early WPAs. Written at a time when the civil rights movement and the women's movement were just beginning to influence the way one thought and wrote about issues of race, class, and gender, this memoir offers insights into a period of time when the field was only beginning to come into focus. A foreword by Susan McLeod, an introduction and extensive footnotes by David Stock, and an afterword by David Fleming contextualize the memoir and highlight its relevance to scholars, teachers, and program administrators in composition-rhetoric. As a local history of writing program administration in its pre-professional era, the memoir offers a vital counternarrative to David Fleming's (2011) award-winning account of the abolition of UW-Madison's Freshman English program in 1969-70.
 
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Memoir of Italo Svevo
Livia Veneziani Svevo
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Writer Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition; a friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce); and a long list of neuroses. His choice of a wife, however, was anything but common. Livia Veneziani Svevo tirelessly worked on her husband's behalf after his tragic early death and also penned this remarkable portrait of a serious artist and a loving (if quirky) marriage. Memoir of Italo Svevo tells the story of how a successful middle-aged businessman, as obsessed with smoking as with his abandoned literary ambitions, somehow became one of the great authors of the twentieth century.
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The Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months
Susan Paul
Harvard University Press, 2000
“The design of this Memoir is, to present the incidents in the life of a little colored boy.” So begins the life story of James Jackson, as set down by his African American teacher, Susan Paul, in 1835, as an example to other children and adults who might learn from the boy’s goodness.This remarkable document—the first African American biography and a work that predates Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by almost thirty years—is a lost treasure from the annals of African American history. With its combination of eyewitness accounts, personal testimony, and excerpts from traditional Sunday school texts, the memoir is an extraordinary social history rooted in both nineteenth-century evangelicalism and the experiences of free African Americans.Susan Paul’s portrayal of James Jackson’s Christian sensibility, his idealism, and his racial awareness emphasizes his humanity and exemplary American character over his racial identity, even as it embeds him in his African American community.
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Memoir of My Youth in Cuba
A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898
Dolores J. Walker
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Memoir of My Youth in Cuba: A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898 is a translation of the memoir Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba: Un soldado del ejército español en la guerra separatista (1895–1898) by Josep Conangla. The English edition is based on the Spanish version edited by Joaquín Roy, who found the memoir and was given access to the Conangla family archives. Conangla’s memoir, now available in English, is an important addition to the accounts of Spanish and Cuban soldiers who served in Cuba’s second War of Independence.
 
Spaniard Josep Conangla was conscripted at the age of twenty and sent to Cuba. In the course of his time there, he reaffirmed his pacifism and support of Cuban independence. The young man was a believer who unfailingly connected his view of events to the Christian humanitarianism on which he prided himself. Conangla’s advanced education and the influence of well-placed friends facilitated his assignment to safe bureaucratic positions during the war, ensuring that he would not see combat. From his privileged position, he was a keen observer of his surroundings. He described some of the decisions he made—which at times put him at odds with the military bureaucracy he served—along with what he saw as the consequences of General Valeriano Weyler’s decree mandating the reconcentración, an early version of concentration camps. What Conangla saw fueled his revulsion at the collusion of the Spanish state and its state-sponsored religion in that policy. “Red Mass,” published six years after the War of Independence and included in his memoir, is a vivid expression in verse of his abhorrence.
 
Conangla’s recollections of the contacts between Spaniards and Cubans in the areas to which he was assigned reveal his ability to forge friendships even with Creole opponents of the insurrection. As an aspiring poet and writer, Conangla included material on fellow writers, Cuban and Spanish, who managed to meet and exchange ideas despite their circumstances. His accounts of the Spanish defeat, the scene in Havana around the end of the war, along with his return to Spain, are stirring.
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The Memoire Justificatif of Chevalier Monberaut
Indian Diplomacy in British West Florida, 1763-1765
Montault Monberaut
University of Alabama Press, 1965
Presents in greater detail the circumstances and procedure of Indian diplomacy on the Gulf Coast at the beginning of the British period
 
Historians of the Gulf Coast have long delighted in the romance of Spanish discovery and French settlement. The period of British occupation was relatively brief, fruitless, and prosaic, if we are to believe the older authorities. Today the availability of materials which were closed to an earlier generation enables us to re-create the story of British West Florida in terms more precise, with details more personal, and with no less dramatic coloration than has long been given-with less accuracy-to the earlier epochs.
 
In The Memoire Justificatif of Chevalier Monberaut, the translators have undertaken the resurrection of one of those gallant Frenchmen of the ancien regime who remained be­hind to serve the new Anglo-Saxon masters of West Florida. The Chevalier Montault de Monberaut is not unknown to historians of the colonial scene, but he has never enjoyed a full portrayal of his contribution nor a balanced evaluation of his role. By concentrating our attention upon the man as well as his milieu, we have been able to present in greater detail than before the circumstances and procedure of Indian diplomacy on the Gulf Coast at the begin­ning of the British period. By placing Monberaut against the back­drop of British colonial government and its problems, we have replaced some of the romantic fallacies with historic realities. The resulting clarity adds to the picture's significance and appeal.
 
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Memoirs
Marie Mancini and Hortense Mancini
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The memoirs of Hortense (1646–1699) and of Marie (1639–1715) Mancini, nieces of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin and members of the court of Louis XIV, represent the earliest examples in France of memoirs published by women under their own names during their lifetimes. Both unhappily married—Marie had also fled the aftermath of her failed affair with the king—the sisters chose to leave their husbands for life on the road, a life quite rare for women of their day.

Through their writings, the Mancinis sought to rehabilitate their reputations and reclaim the right to define their public images themselves, rather than leave the stories of their lives to the intrigues of the court—and to their disgruntled ex-husbands. First translated in 1676 and 1678 and credited largely to male redactors, the two memoirs reemerge here in an accessible English translation that chronicles the beginnings of women’s rights to personal independence within the confines of an otherwise circumscribed early modern aristocratic society.
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Memoirs (1630-1680)
Sophia of Hanover
Iter Press, 2013
Granddaughter of James I of England, Sophia (1630–1714) began life a penniless princess in exile. She ended it as electress dowager of Hanover, an emerging European power. Had she lived two months longer, she would have succeeded to the British crown before her son, George I. In keeping with Sophia’s reputation as the era’s “most entertaining woman,” her memoirs, which she wrote in French, paint a captivating and often humorous portrait of her life as one of Europe’s preeminent noblewomen and celebrities. They also recall, with insight and verve, her interactions with leading men and ladies (Charles II, Louis XIV, Queen Christina of Sweden) and long-forgotten bit players (cavaliers, concubines, clerics, and quacks). The memoirs, which recount the first fifty years of Sophia’s life, appear here in English for the first time in their entirety. Their publication in this series is particularly timely, as it coincides with the three hundredth anniversary of the Hanoverian succession (2014).
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Memoirs and Letters
Oscar W. Firkins
University of Minnesota Press, 1934

Memoirs and Letters was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume, the last in a set of four containing posthumous works of Oscar W. Firkins, consists mainly of some two hundred personal letters, which reveal many delightful facets of a unique character.

Oscar W. Firkins—critic, biographer, playwright, lecturer, and teacher—was regarded as a recluse, living in a world peopled largely by "poets dead and gone" and the creatures of their imagination and his own. That he enjoyed warm friendships with men and women of his time is brought to light in these miscellaneous letters: letters to clergymen and children, to editors and club women, to students and poets, to actors and college deans.

Many brilliantly epigrammatic comments from Firkins' famous classroom lectures are included in the section of this book entitled "From Oscar Firkins' Notebooks." The "Estimate and Appreciation" with which the volume opens is by Dr. Richard Burton, for many years a colleague of Professor Firkins at the University of Minnesota. "Oscar Firkins as a Teacher" is contributed by a former student. A complete bibliography, compiled by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, concludes the volume.

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Memoirs and Reflections
Evgeny Kissin
University Press of New England, 2018
Evgeny Kissin is an internationally renowned classical pianist admired for his interpretations of the repertoires of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev. The intensity of Kissin’s thinking animates this candid memoir, illuminating his astonishing memory, his fondness for his family and teachers, and his artistic sense of self. Memoirs and Reflections chronicles Kissin’s musical education and his early career. His writing is infused with his lifelong engagement with music: an obsessive love that captured, challenged, and nurtured him from a young age. He recounts fortuitous events and serendipitous encounters with remarkable musicians and conductors, including Herbert von Karajan. This book shows Kissin to be surprisingly modest and down-to-earth in spite of his astonishing gift. He writes of his family and friends with tender affection and touching detail. Reading this intimate memoir is like having a private audience with the great pianist himself.
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Memoirs (demo)
Aristophanes
Midway Plaisance Press, 2007

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Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy
The Genesis of China's Fifth Generation
Zhen Ni
Duke University Press, 2002
After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou transformed Chinese cinema with Farewell My Concubine, Yellow Earth, Raise the Red Lantern, and other international successes. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy tells the riveting story of this class of 1982, China’s famous "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers. It is the first insider’s account of this renowned cohort to appear in English. Covering these directors’ formative experiences during China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution and later at the Beijing Film Academy, Ni Zhen—who was both their screenwriter and teacher—provides unique insights into the origins of the Fifth Generation’s creativity. Drawing on his personal knowledge and interviews conducted especially for this volume, Ni Zhen demonstrates the diversity of the Fifth Generation. He comments on the breadth of styles and themes explored by its members and introduces a range of male and female directors, cinematographers, and production designers famous in China but less well-known internationally. The book contains vivid descriptions of the production processes of two pioneering films—One and Eight and Yellow Earth.
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Memoirs
Hans Jonas
Hans Jonas
Brandeis University Press, 2021

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but the Nazi regime forced him to leave Germany for London in 1933. He later emigrated to Palestine and eventually enlisted in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitler. Following the Israeli War of Independence, he emigrated to the United States and took a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich.   

This memoir, a diverse collection of previously unpublished materials—diaries, letters, interviews, and public statements—has been organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas’s life and philosophy. Because Jonas’s life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish émigré intellectuals in New York. Since Memoirs was first published in 2008, interest in the work of Hans Jonas has grown among American academics in recent years.

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Memoirs of a Black Psychiatrist
A Life of Advocacy for Social Change
Dr. James L. Curtis
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
Born during the Great Migration, pursuing an education during World War II, and beginning a career during the Civil Rights movement, Dr. James L. Curtis has surmounted many racial hurdles to rise to the top of academic medicine. Memoirs of a Black Psychiatrist tells Dr. Curtis’s story of working toward his life goal of improving the quality of life and full citizenship of his people, with the help of mentors both black and white. He shows that in only a few decades of his life was it possible for his parents—later, for him and other family members, the whole black community, and eventually the world—to step up a little higher, or be forced back again to the back of the bus.
 
In his two previous books, Dr. Curtis illustrated the leadership role he played in changing how medicine is practiced for the better. His first book, Blacks, Medical Schools and Society (University of Michigan Press, 1971), was written when he was an associate dean of the Cornell University Medical College. As dean in the beginning years of Affirmative Action in Medicine, Dr. Curtis took action in this movement by desegregating medical school admissions not only at Cornell, but also in all US medical schools. After his retirement, his second book, Affirmative Action in Medicine: Improving Health Care for All (University of Michigan Press, 2003), was published: a twenty-five-year progress report on the social benefit of these programs in the American practice of medicine.
 
Dr. Curtis retired in 2000 as Clinical Professor of Psychiatry of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, having been a faculty member for eighteen years. During his tenure at Columbia he was also Director of Psychiatry at Harlem Hospital Center, serving one of the most economically deprived neighborhoods of New York City. Since 2003, he has lived in his hometown of Albion, Michigan, one of the formerly vibrant and prosperous cities devastated by the collapse of the automobile industry. With a small group of others, he is developing new social service programs to benefit Albion.
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Memoirs Of A Cold War Son
Post, Gaines, Jr.
University of Iowa Press, 2000

In 1951 Gaines Post was a gangly, bespectacled, introspective teenager preparing to spend a year in Paris with his professorial father and older brother; his mother, who suffered from extreme depression, had been absent from the family for some time. Ten years later, now less gangly but no less introspective, he was finishing a two-year stint in the army in West Germany and heading toward Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, having narrowly escaped combat in the Berlin crisis of 1961. His quietly intense coming-of-age story is both self-revealing and reflective of an entire generation of young men who came to adulthood before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.

Post's experiences in high school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Paris, his Camus-influenced undergraduate years at Cornell University, and his army service in Germany are set very effectively against the events of the Cold War. McCarthyism and American crackdowns on dissidents, American foreign and military policy in Western Europe in the nuclear age, French and German life and culture, crises in Paris and Berlin that nearly bring the West to war and the Post family to dissolution—these are the larger scenes and subjects of his self-disclosure as a contemplative, conflicted "Cold War agnostic."

His intelligent, talented mother and her fragile health hover over Post's narrative, informing his hesitant relationships with women and his acutely questioning sense of self-worth. His story is strongly academic and historical as well as political and military; his perceptions and judgments lean toward no ideological extreme but remain true to the heroic ideals of his boyhood during the Second World War.

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Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew
An Italian Story
Dan Vittorio Segre
University of Chicago Press, 2008
“I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head.” From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre’s memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws only to be thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine, completely unprepared for the dangers of life in Israel during World War II. Beautifully narrated, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew is an ironic, philosophical meditation on the historical reverberations of the twentieth century.
 
“Taut and illuminating . . . memorable . . . written with the humility of he who confesses himself and with the honesty of he who bore witness.”—Primo Levi
 
“The writing of memoirs is a difficult art that Dan Segre fully possesses. Under his pen, history and psychology merge in one captivating narrative which illuminates the turmoils, fears and triumphs of his generation.”—Elie Wiesel
 
“Beautifully written. . . . [A] labyrinthine, spell-binding autobiography, full of passionate tenderness.”—New York Review of Books
 
“An unusually attractive book—attractive in its irony, its energy and its moral insight. Mr. Segre had some rich material to work with, and he has done it justice.”—New York Times 
 

 
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Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Victor Serge
University of Iowa Press, 2002

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Memoirs of a Yukon Priest
Segundo Llorente, SJ
Georgetown University Press

This is an engagingly personal account of the hardships, challenges, and rewards of a life lived wholly in the presence of God and at the service of the Alaskan people. In September 1935, Segundo Llorente, a wide-eyed twenty-eight-year-old Jesuit priest from Spain set foot in Alaska for the the first time. His memoirs are filled with all that he saw, endured, and enjoyed for forty years in Uncle Sam's "icebox," whether by dogsled in the 1930s or by plane and snowmobile in the 1970s. He prayed, worked, scolded, helped, and laughed with a practical wisdom that recalls the Ignatian spirituality in everyday life that also marks Father Walter Cisek's Russian journal, He Leadeth Me.

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The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady
From the Great War to the Cold War
Edited & Intro by John T. McNay
University of Missouri Press, 2009

When Henry Grady died in 1957, one obituary called him “America’s top diplomatic soldier” for a critical period of the Cold War, and over a long career he was deeply involved in events that changed our role in the world. Even so, this self-described “soft” cold warrior has been largely overlooked by historians. His memoirs, left to languish with his other papers, are now published for the first time, offering new insight into the origins and implementation of American trade and development policies—and into the tumult that was the Cold War.

A specialist in international economic policy, Grady helped create the system of reciprocal trade established under FDR during the depression. Progressing in his career through his abilities rather than through political connections, he was sent to India during World War II to spark its production for the war effort, then to Italy to help jump-start its economy once German forces were driven out. After the war, he was the first American ambassador to an independent India, then served as ambassador to Greece and Iran—where he was embroiled in the oil industry crisis that eventually led to the CIA’s overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Grady’s memoirs are an intriguing and informative account of early Cold War diplomacy in significant and turbulent regions of the Third World, embellished by his thoughts about the changing nature of American economic policies and his role as a representative of that system abroad. It offers new perspectives on the crisis in Iran in the early 1950s, where Grady was especially critical of Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s support for the remnants of British imperialism in Iran—and paid for his criticism with his job. Editor John McNay’s introduction and comments shed light on Grady’s thinking and his role in the policy-making process.

More than a chronicle of a wide-ranging career—one that reflects the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading economic power—Grady’s memoirs are a trenchant critique of U.S. foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. They provide modern readers an opportunity to reconsider the conflict between realism and idealism in foreign relations during the Cold War years.

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Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist
The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi
Anbara Salam Khalidi
Pluto Press, 2013

Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist is the first English translation of the memoirs of Anbara Salam Khalidi, the iconic Arab feminist. At a time when women are playing a leading role in the Arab Spring, this book brings to life an earlier period of social turmoil and women's activism through one remarkable life.

Anbara Salam was born in 1897 to a notable Sunni Muslim family of Beirut. She grew up in 'Greater Syria', in which unhindered travel between Beirut, Jerusalem and Damascus was possible, and wrote a series of newspaper articles calling on women to fight for their rights within the Ottoman Empire. In 1927 she caused a public scandal by removing her veil during a lecture at the American University of Beirut.

Later she translated Homer and Virgil into Arabic and fled from Jerusalem to Beirut following the establishment of Israel in 1948. She died in Beirut in 1986. These memoirs have long been acclaimed by Middle East historians as an essential resource for the social history of Beirut and the larger Arab world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Memoirs of an Indo Woman
Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad
Marguérite Schenkhuizen
Ohio University Press, 1993

The memoirs of Marguérite Schenkhuizen provide an overview of practically the whole of the twentieth century as experienced by persons of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry who lived in the former Dutch East Indies. The memoirs provide vignettes of Indonesian life, both rural and urban, as seen through the eyes of the author first as a girl, then as a wife separated from her husband during the Japanese occupation, finally as an immigrant to the United States after World War II.

This self-portrait gives glimpses of the life of Indos from inside their society, glimpses that are valuable for their descendents as well as for outsiders. Written with humor and a positive town, Schenkhuizen’s story sets aside the myth that Indos were denied access to the upper layers of Dutch colonial society or were otherwise disadvantaged. Instead, her life story provides an authentic view of a vital Indo culture and experience that has been unavailable to the general reader of English.

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Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist
George J. Stigler
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In this witty and modest intellectual autobiography, George J. Stigler gives us a fascinating glimpse into the little-known world of economics and the people who study it. One of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century, Stigler was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work on public regulation. He also helped found the Chicago School of economics, and many of his fellow Chicago luminaries appear in these pages, including Fredrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker. Stigler's appreciation for such colleagues and his sense of excitement about economic ideas past and present make his Memoirs both highly entertaining and highly educational.
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The Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow
The Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2007

Numerous documents attest to the horrific conditions endured by African slaves during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Less well known is the perspective of those who wielded power during this dark time in human history. The Bodleian Library fills that gap here with the memoirs of a principal figure in the slave trade, Captain Hugh Crow.

The first-hand account of a man who commanded one of the last legal slave vessels to cross the Atlantic, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain offers a revealing if frequently troubling look into the psyche of a slave trader. His chronicle leaves nothing to the imagination, as he recounts the harsh routine of daily life on a slave vessel, where on average a fifth of the crew—let alone the human cargo—never survived the crossing. Crow portrays himself as an “enlightened” slaver, a claim he justifies through the link between his close attention to his “negroes” and his financial success, and the songs composed for him by the slaves. His account also includes commentary on the social propriety of the slave trade and notes about the conditions on West Indian and Caribbean plantations as well as on slave ships. John Pinfold’s illuminating introduction recounts the life of Hugh Crow and sets him in the rich historical context of eighteenth-century mercantilism and its battle with the abolitionist movement. An eye-opening read, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain reveals an often overlooked facet in the complicated history of transatlantic slavery.

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Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge
Frances H. Whipple
West Virginia University Press, 2013
Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a series of common court cases as alternately defendant and plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated and co-authored Eldridge’s story, expressing a proto-feminist outrage at the male “extortioners” who caused Eldridge’s loss and distress.
 
With the rarity of Eldridge’s material achievements aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Eldridge’s life from her birth through the first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between 1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge’s exceptional life as a freeborn woman of color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and interpretations of American Transcendentalism.
With an introduction by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge—from her acquisition of wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown, and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women patrons, this biography challenges typical African and indigenous women’s literary production of the early national period and resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and historical figure of the nineteenth century.
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The Memoirs of Harry S. Truman
A Reader's Edition
Edited by Raymond H. Geselbracht
University of Missouri Press, 2019
This new “Reader’s Edition” of Harry Truman’s memoirs removes the overload of detail and reproduced historical documents, reduces the bloated cast of characters, clarifies the often confusing balance between chronological and thematic presentation, and corrects some important problems of presentation that made the two volumes of Truman’s memoirs, published in 1955 and 1956, difficult to read and enjoy.  This new edition, reduced to half the length of the original text, offers a new generation of readers the thrill of hearing the unique and authentic voice of Harry S. Truman, probably the most important president of the last seventy-five years, telling the story of his life, his presidency, and some of the most important years in American history.
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Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott
Timothy D. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
The remarkable military career of General Winfield Scott spanned fifty-three years, fourteen presidents, and six wars, both foreign and domestic. However, his lengthy service did not secure his rightful place among the nation’s pantheon of great military leaders. Instead, he is most often remembered as the aged, overweight, and sickly commanding general who was replaced by George McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War. Originally published in 1864, only two years before his death, Scott’s memoirs touch on many of the significant events of the early and mid-nineteenth century. This new edition of those remembrances, expertly edited by Timothy D. Johnson, showcases Scott’s rare strategic insights, battlefield prowess, and diplomatic shrewdness, restoring him to his proper place as arguably the most important American general to ever serve his country.

Scott joined the army in 1808, earned the rank of brigadier general in 1814, and was promoted to commanding general in 1841. During the Mexican-American War, he commanded one of the most brilliant military campaigns in American history and mentored the generation of officers who fought the Civil War, including Generals Grant, Lee, Longstreet, Beauregard, Jackson, and Meade. As a young general, he wrote the first comprehensive set of regulations to govern the army and pushed for the professionalization of the U.S. officer corps. Yet, he was ridiculed at the beginning of the war for his prescient prediction that the Civil War would be a prolonged conflict requiring extensive planning and superior strategic thinking.

With this edition, Johnson has merged Scott’s large two-volume memoir into a single, manageable volume without losing any of the original 1864 text. Extensive new annotations update Scott’s outdated notes and provide valuable illumination and context. Covering a wide range of events—from the famous 1804 duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton through the end of the Civil War—Scott’s extraordinary account reveals the general as a sometimes
egocentric but always astute witness to the early American republic.
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Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Daniel P. Schreber
Harvard University Press, 1988

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Memoirs of Pancho Villa
By Martín Luis Guzmán
University of Texas Press, 1965

This is a tale that might be told around a campfire, night after night in the midst of a military campaign. The kinetic and garrulous Pancho Villa talking on and on about battles and men; bursting out with hearty, masculine laughter; weeping unashamed for fallen comrades; casually mentioning his hotheadedness—"one of my violent outbursts"—which sent one, two, or a dozen men before the firing squad; recounting amours; and always, always protesting dedication to the Revolutionary cause and the interests of "the people."

Villa saw himself as the champion, eventually almost the sole champion, of the Mexican people. He fought for them, he said, and opponents who called him bandit and murderer were hypocrites.

This is his story, his account of how it all began when as a peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor.

Great battles of the Revolution are described, sometimes as broad sweeps of strategy, sometimes as they developed half hour by half hour. Long, dusty horseback forays and cold nights spent pinned down under enemy fire on a mountainside are made vivid and gripping. The assault on Ciudad Juárez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of Torreón, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregón prepare to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended.

Martín Luis Guzmán, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. General Villa offered young Martín Luis a position as his secretary, but he declined. When many years later some of Villa's private papers, records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography came into Guzmán's hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it, and of the General's life as known only to Villa himself.

The Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were extremely popular; this volume was the first English publication. Virginia H. Taylor, translator in the Spanish Archives of the State of Texas Land Office, has accurately captured in English the flavor of the narrative.

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The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova
Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova
Duke University Press, 1995
Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (1743–1810), Russian princess, playwright, author, President of the Academy of Sciences, and founder and Director of the Russian Academy, was one of the first women in Europe to hold public office. Her memoir, among the earliest examples of autobiography in Russia, is part of what has become a long and powerful tradition of autobiographical writing by Russian women. It offers a rare glimpse into the life of a strong and outspoken public figure who was well recognized in much of her own time for her potent intellect but who died in isolation and has largely been forgotten today.
Originally written in French, first published in English, and long out of print, Dashkova’s Memoirs tell the story of a woman who at age eighteen played an important role in the coup that brought Catherine the Great to the throne. The relationship between these two women, often tense, is a central theme throughout this story. Dashkova, occupying the highly unusual position of both stateswoman and mother, also reveals her own path between the demands and limitations of the "private" and "public" spheres of her society. She provides a view of the expectations of Russian aristocratic women, the possibilities available to them, and the ways in which gender roles were conceived in the eighteenth century.
With a new introduction by Jehanne M Gheith, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova will renew interest in the life of a fascinating woman for students of Russian history, women’s studies, and eighteenth-century studies. It will be a significant text for those engaged in the cross-cultural study of the traditions of women’s autobiographical writing.
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Memoirs of Swedenborg and Other Documents
Carl Robsahm
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2011
Written in 1782, Memoirs of Swedenborg by Carl Robsahm is without doubt the most compelling eyewitness account of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) to be published in any language. Drawing on reminiscences from his own long-standing friendship with and years as a neighbor to Swedenborg, Robsahm offers a fascinating picture of the Swedish philosopher and mystic as a man of gentleness and integrity.
 
Rich in detail and generosity, this memoir is a classic in its own right and a primary resource for all subsequent biographies. This edition has been selected and edited by Stephen McNeilly featuring revised translations, an introduction, and annotations by the renowned Swedish scholar Anders Hallengren. It also contains eight other historical documents concerning Swedenborg’s day-to-day life, three of which are from the hand of Swedenborg himself.
 
The volume includes:
 
• “Memoirs of Swedenborg” by Carl Robsahm
• “Reply to a Letter from a Friend” by Emanuel Swedenborg
• “A Truthful Account of the Late Queen Dowager at Haga in 1774” by Anders von Hopken
• Extract from the Proceedings of the Exegetic and Philanthropic Society in Stockholm
• “Memoranda in the Notebook of 1747–48” by Emanuel Swedenborg
• “Description of the Late Assessor, Mr. Emanuel Swedenborg’s Estate at Södermalm”
• “A List of Valuables of 1770” by Emanuel Swedenborg
• “A Visit to Swedenborg’s Home” by Carl Christoffer Gjörwell
• Testimony by Christian de Tuxen
 
Each document is accompanied by its own individual contextual introduction and annotations by Anders Hallengren. Also included in the volume are a general foreword and introduction by Anders Hallengren, a chronology of Swedenborg’s life and works, and an index.
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Memoirs of the Blind
The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of
vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to
drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary
collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints
and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict
blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old
and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the
Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in
these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation.

For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in
memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one
kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately,
he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are
themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist
only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on
a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure"
identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the
word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the
visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the
very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple
enactments and statements of blindness and sight.

Memoirs of the Blind is both a sophisticated
philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings.
Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser
known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including
Diderot's Lettres sur les aveugles, the notion of
mnemonic art in Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern
Life, and Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the
Invisible. Along with engaging meditations on the history
and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers
approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art
enriches philosophical reflection.

An exploration of sight, representation, and art,
Memoirs of the Blind extends and deepens the
meditation on vision and painting presented in Truth and
Painting. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will
profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the
visual arts.
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Memoirs of the Civil War
Between the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States of America 1861 to 1865
William W. Chamberlaine
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages

Memoirs of the Civil War, though relatively little known because of its rarity in the original edition, contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages. A Virginian whose Confederate career included service in an infantry regiment early in the war, Chamberlaine’s most important military service was as a staff officer attached to Brigadier General Reuben Lindsay Walker, who commanded the Third Corps artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Includes excellent material on the duties of staff officers, operation of Confederate conscription, and the role of artillery in Lee’s campaigns. He is especially eloquent and revealing about a number of famous battles: the Seven Days; Antietam, where Chamberlaine distinguished himself and was wounded; and the Wilderness, where he had a memorable encounter with Lee.
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Memoirs of the Count of Comminge and The Misfortunes of Love
Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin
Iter Press, 2016
These translations from the French bring two of Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin’s novels back to life: The Memoirs of the Count of Comminge (1735), presented as a much-needed new translation, and The Misfortunes of Love (1747), appearing here for the first time in English. Published more than half a century after Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, they belonged less to Tencin’s time than to the tradition of the “feminine historical novel” inspired by Lafayette. Beautifully written in the spare but powerful prose characteristic of French classicism and widely read both in Tencin’s lifetime and beyond, the novels were forgotten in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the work of Abbé Prévost and Pierre de Marivaux, they were important contributions to the early sentimental novel. They also anticipated, surprisingly, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe which appeared later in the century.
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Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere
A Novel
Madame de Villedieu
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640-83) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest women to write for a living, she defied cultural convention by becoming an innovator and appealing to popular tastes through fiction, drama, and poetry.

Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, a semi autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and novelistic conventions. A striking work, the story skillfully mixes real events from the author's life with fictional adventures. At a time when few women published, Villedieu's Memoirs is a significant achievement in creating a voice for the early modern woman writer. Produced while the French novel form was still in its infancy, it should be welcomed by any scholar of women's writing or the early development of the novel.
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Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Elaw
Zilpha Elaw
West Virginia University Press, 2021
The remarkable autobiography of a Black woman evangelist.

As a young Black orphan indentured to a Quaker family in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Zilpha Elaw (c. 1793–1873) decided to join the upstart Methodists in 1808. She preached her first sermon a decade later, ignoring her husband and the many church leaders, clergy, and laity who tried to silence her. Elaw’s memoir chronicles the first twenty years of her forty-year itinerant ministry during massive Protestant revivalism in the United States and England.

Elaw preached from Maine to Virginia, attracting multiracial and multidenominational audiences that included powerful men, wealthy White women, poor families, and enslaved communities. She moved from Bristol to Burlington, New Jersey, then to Nantucket, Massachusetts, and finally, in 1840, to London’s East End. In England, Elaw’s celebrity expanded, and at least twice she drew crowds so large they caused human stampedes and multiple injuries.

Blockett’s introduction and extensive annotations draw on newly unearthed information about the entirety of Elaw’s evangelism to provide context for this remarkable story of an antebellum Black woman’s personal and professional mobility.
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The Memoirs of Wendell W. Young III
A Life in Philadelphia Labor and Politics
Francis Ryan
Temple University Press, 2019

Philadelphia native Wendell W. Young III was one of the most important American labor leaders in the last half of the twentieth century. An Acme Markets clerk in the 1950s and ’60s, he was elected top officer of the Retail Clerks Union when he was twenty-four. His social justice unionism sought to advance wages while moving beyond collective bargaining to improve the conditions of the working-class majority, whether in a union or not. Young quickly gained a reputation for his independence, daring at times to publicly criticize the policies of the city’s powerful AFL-CIO leadership and tangle with the city’s political machine.

Editor Francis Ryan, whose introduction provides historical context, interviewed Young about his experiences working in the region’s retail and food industry, measuring the changes over time and the tangible impact that union membership had on workers. Young also describes the impact of Philadelphia’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s and recounts his activism for civil rights and the anti-war movements as well as on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

The Memoirs of Wendell W. YoungIII  provides the most extensive labor history of late twentieth-century Philadelphia yet written.

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Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apology
Xenophon
Harvard University Press

Socrates without Plato.

Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC), a member of a wealthy but politically quietist Athenian family and an admirer of Socrates, left Athens in 401 BC to serve as a mercenary commander for Cyrus the Younger of Persia, then joined the staff of King Agesilaus II of Sparta before settling in Elis and, in the aftermath of the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, retiring to Corinth. His historical and biographical works, Socratic dialogues and reminiscences, and short treatises on hunting, horsemanship, economics, and the Spartan constitution are richly informative about his own life and times.

This volume collects Xenophon’s portrayals of his associate, Socrates. In Memorabilia (or Memoirs of Socrates) and in Oeconomicus, a dialogue about household management, we see the philosopher through Xenophon’s eyes. Here, as in the accompanying Symposium, we also obtain insight on life in Athens. The volume concludes with Xenophon’s Apology, an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial.

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Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apology
Xenophon
Harvard University Press
In Memorabilia or Memoirs of Socrates and in Oeconomicus, a dialogue about household management, we see the philosopher through Xenophon's eyes. Here, and in the accompanying Symposium we also obtain insight on life in Athens. The volume concludes with Xenophon's Apology, an interesting complement to Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial. Ostensibly an account of a dinner party in the summer of 421 BCE, Xenophon's Symposium is a vibrant picture of an Athenian evening of quiet entertainment and conversation. Among the guests Socrates is the central figure, and—as in Plato's Symposium—love is the main subject of debate. But the style here is more relaxed and less artful than in Plato's philosophical dialogue, yielding an engaging portrait of Socrates and of Athenian social life.
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Memorable Doings and Sayings, Volume I
Books 1–5
Valerius Maximus
Harvard University Press, 2000

Exemplary wisdom from ancient Rome.

Valerius Maximus compiled his handbook of notable deeds and sayings during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). The collection was admired in antiquity and has recently been attracting renewed scholarly attention. Yet to date there has been no modern English translation of Memorable Doings and Sayings. This work is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, in two volumes, a freshly edited Latin text facing D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s pleasing and authoritative translation.

Valerius arranges his instructive examples in short chapters, each focused on a particular virtue, vice, religious practice, or traditional custom—including Omens, Dreams, Anger, Cruelty, Bravery, Fidelity, Gratitude, Friendship, Parental Love. The moral undercurrent of this collection is readily apparent. But Valerius tells us that the book’s purpose is simply practical: he decided to select worthwhile material from famous writers so that people looking for illustrative examples might be spared the trouble of research. Whatever the author’s intention, his book is an interesting source of information on Roman attitudes toward religion and moral values in the first century.

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Memorable Doings and Sayings, Volume II
Books 6–9
Valerius Maximus
Harvard University Press, 2000

Exemplary wisdom from ancient Rome.

Valerius Maximus compiled his handbook of notable deeds and sayings during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). The collection was admired in antiquity and has recently been attracting renewed scholarly attention. Yet to date there has been no modern English translation of Memorable Doings and Sayings. This work is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, in two volumes, a freshly edited Latin text facing D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s pleasing and authoritative translation.

Valerius arranges his instructive examples in short chapters, each focused on a particular virtue, vice, religious practice, or traditional custom—including Omens, Dreams, Anger, Cruelty, Bravery, Fidelity, Gratitude, Friendship, Parental Love. The moral undercurrent of this collection is readily apparent. But Valerius tells us that the book’s purpose is simply practical: he decided to select worthwhile material from famous writers so that people looking for illustrative examples might be spared the trouble of research. Whatever the author’s intention, his book is an interesting source of information on Roman attitudes toward religion and moral values in the first century.

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Memorable Singularity
Crafting Unique Individuals in an Amazonian Society
Anne-Christine Taylor
HAU, 2018
Individual sovereignty is a central value among Amazonian groups, in keeping with a cosmology premised on the production of people rather than material property. The Jivaroan Indians of Western Amazonia exemplify these ideals to an unusual degree. Jivaroean have long been notorious for a reputed addiction to warfare, their custom of shrinking enemies’ heads, and their fierce resistance to colonial and post-colonial attempts to convert them to Christianity and to deprive them of their land, identity, and lifeways. Becoming and remaining an accomplished Jivaroan person is a taxing and risk-fraught achievement: it requires living and imagining in the heroic mode and mastering the art of making one’s self memorable.
 
In Memorable Singularity, anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor describes how Jivaroans strive for uniqueness of being and destiny, unconstrained by the claims of any institutionalized form authority beyond the individual. Taylor covers a wide range of subjects: feuding and intertribal warfare, Jivaroan notions of personhood, corporeality, reflexive consciousness, thought and affect, memory, and visual culture. An essential collection of one of the foremost Amazonian specialists, Memorable Singularity is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of crafting and imagining the human self.
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Memorandoms by James Martin
An Astonishing Escape from Early New South Wales
Edited by Tim Causer
University College London, 2017
On the night of March 28, 1791, James Martin, William Bryant, his wife Mary, and their two children, along with six other male convicts—among the first cohort of prisoners sent to Australia from England— stole a small boat from Sydney Harbor and sailed up the coast of Australia. They reached East Timor on June 5. Once there, they posed as survivors of a shipwreck, until they were eventually discovered and ordered back to England. The Memorandoms of James Martin is the only known chronicle written by members of that first group of prisoners, and this convict narrative is also the only firsthand account of the best-known Australian convict escape. This document, confirmed in its details by careful scholarly analysis, clarifies one of the most important origin stories of Australian history.
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A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada
Francisco Núñez Muley
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century—including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by Francisco Núñez Muley, one of many coerced Christian converts, this extraordinary letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all converted Muslims in Granada to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and be buried exactly as the Castilian settler population did.

Now available in its first English translation, Núñez Muley’s account is an invaluable example of how Spain’s former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant—given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation—this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.
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Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society
A Novel
Joseph G. Peterson
University of Iowa Press, 2022
When his girlfriend, Rosemary, asks about his life, Jim Moore, a successful salesman whose territory covers the entire continental United States and parts of Canada, doesn’t think there is anything to say and so he tells her “nothing happened,” or maybe he doesn’t know how to put it all into words or maybe he doesn’t want to.

Stuck in an airport because of blizzard conditions, and packed into a crowded terminal with other travelers, Moore has come to believe that his life is not worth reporting about because it has largely been a life lived without incident. However, chance encounters with a yoga instructor, a man traveling to bury his mother, and an enigmatic woodsman reawaken long dormant emotions about his father’s suicide and cause Jim to newly reflect on his own life and on a memorandum that he later discovered in his deceased father’s papers, which lists all the names of the clouds, and which Jim now, from time to time, recants as if it were his own private kaddish to memorialize his lost father.

Like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales who pass the time telling stories while stranded in the Tabard Inn, Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society tells the tale of a traveling salesman and what really happened over the course of his forty- six years.
 
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Memoria Romana
Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory
edited by Karl Galinsky
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Concern with memory permeated Roman literature, history, rhetorical training, and art and architecture. This is the first book to look at the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, including cognitive science. There is no orthodoxy in memory studies and the approaches are both empirical and theoretical. A central issue is: who and what preserved and shaped cultural memory in Rome, and how did that process work? Areas and subjects covered include the Romans' view of the changing physical fabric of the city, monuments (by etymology related to memory) such as the Arch of Constantine, memory and the Roman triumph, Roman copies of Greek sculpture and their relation to memory, the importance of written information and of continuing process, the creation of memory in Republican memoirs and Flavian poetry, the invention of traditions, and the connection of cultural and digital memory.

The ten chapters present original findings that complement earlier scholarship from the perspective of memory and open up new horizons for inquiry. The introduction by volume editor Karl Galinsky situates the work within current studies on cultural and social memory, and the concluding chapter by Daniel Libeskind provides the perspective of a contemporary practitioner.

Additional contributors include Richard Jenkyns, Harriet I. Flower, T. P. Wiseman, Karl-J. Hölkeskamp, Gianpiero Rosati, Diane Favro, Jessica Hughes, Anna Anguissola, Lisa Marie Mignone, and Bernard Frischer.

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Memorial
Ferdinando Camon
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Memorial is the third part of the celebrated trilogy Camon called "the cycle of the lowliest," which traced one of the most important but least recognized events of modern history: the death of Italy's peasant civilization.

Camon's northern Italy was primitive and poor; little more than strong religious beliefs helped sustain its people through years of poverty, hunger, and disease. With the arrival of modern life and its "civilizing" aspects, the peasant ways, and all they stood for, changed forever.
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Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors
Edith Wharton and Material Culture
Gary Totten
University of Alabama Press, 2007

In Edith Wharton’s works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her meditations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts.

In The Decoration of Houses she notes that furniture and bric-à-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a "lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls," and that unless an ornamental object "adequately expresses an artistic conception" it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism.

Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton's work to a growing female readership ; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d’art; and her characters’ attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. All of Wharton’s major novels—The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep—as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored.

Gary Totten is Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University. His essays on Wharton and her contemporaries have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, American Literary Realism, College Literature, Dreiser Studies, and MELUS.

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Memorial Mania
Public Feeling in America
Erika Doss
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts.

Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

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Memorializing Motherhood
Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother's Day
Katharine Lane Antolini
West Virginia University Press, 2017

Few know the name Anna Jarvis, yet on the second Sunday in May, we mail the card, buy the flowers, place the phone call, or make the brunch reservation to honor our mothers, all because of her. 

Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in Grafton, West Virginia in 1908 and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization. She designed her Mother’s Day celebration around a sentimental view of motherhood and domesticity, envisioning a day venerating the daily services and sacrifices of mothers within the home.

     After Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914, many organizations sought to align the holiday’s meaning with changing perceptions of modern motherhood in the twentieth century. Instead of restricting a mother’s service and influence solely to the domestic sphere, they emphasized the power of mothers both within their homes and throughout their communities. 

     Jarvis refused to accept this changing interpretation, claiming both intellectual and legal ownership of Mother’s Day. Her obsession with protecting the purity of her vision sustained a war of verbal and legal assaults against rival holiday promoters, patriotic women’s organizations, charitable foundations, public health reformers, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The struggle for control of Mother’s Day ultimately threatened her livelihood, physical health, and emotional stability. 

Memorializing Motherhood explores the complicated history of Anna Jarvis’s movement to establish and control Mother’s Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.

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Memorializing Pearl Harbor
Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
Geoffrey M. White
Duke University Press, 2016
Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented—in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming—Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.
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Memorializing Violence
Transnational Feminist Reflections
Alison Crosby
Rutgers University Press
Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it means to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate–as well as urges to forget–in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask: How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other in a world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what’s at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard?
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Memorials Matter
Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites
Jennifer K. Ladino
University of Nevada Press, 2019
From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions?

In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways.

In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.
 
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Memorias
Sancho Cota
Harvard University Press

This is the first printed edition of the sixteenth-century autograph manuscript by the Castilian Sancho Cota, secretary to Eleanor, sister of the Spanish Emperor Charles V, and later Queen of Portugal and France. The language of the original, typical of Toledan speech in the early sixteenth century, is preserved without change. An informative introduction by Keniston discusses the language and the work, and provides the reader with a brief biography of the author.

Though not a great work of literature, Sancho Cota's combination of diary, prose, and verse presents an account of the ideas and customs of the courts of Flanders, Spain, and France at the time. Included is his interesting summary of the major events of Western Europe during the period from 1506 to 1538, written partly from his eyewitness observation, and partly from official dispatches to which his position gave him access.

The lyrical and allegorical verses contained in the Memorias are the only example we have of the literary activity of the Castilians who were in Flanders during the early years of the young Prince Charles. To the gentlemen and prelates who read his poems Cota brought the revelation that far-off Spain was not wholly barbarous, but had a tradition of classical learning and literary composition.

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Memories before the State
Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion
Joseph P. Feldman
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Honorable Mention for Best Book Award from the Historia Reciente y Memoria Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)​

Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.
 
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Memories of a Bygone Age
Qajar Persia and Imperial Russia 1853-1902
Prince Arfa
Gingko, 2016
Set against the backdrop of Iran’s struggle against the rising powers of Russia and Britain, the memoirs of Mirza Riza Khan Arfa’-ed-Dowleh—otherwise known as Prince Arfa (1853–1902)—are packed with picaresque adventures as the prince tells the story of his rise from humble provincial beginnings to the heights of the Iranian state. With this translation, his incredible story is brought to life for the first time in English.

Prince Arfa writes with arresting wit about the deadly intrigues of the Qajar court. Lamentingly, but resolutely, he chronicles the decline of Iran from a once great empire to an almost bankrupt, lawless state, in which social unrest is channelled and exploited by the clergy. He describes the complex interactions between Iran and Europe, including an account of Naser-od-Din Shah’s profligate visits to Britain and France; the splendor and eccentricities of the doomed Tsar Nicholas II’s court; the Tsar’s omen-laden coronation; and his own favor with the Tsarina, who would grant him concessions on matters of vital importance to his country. The result is a memoir of extraordinary political intrigue.
 
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Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood
Coming of Age in the Sixties
John D'Emilio
Duke University Press, 2022
John D’Emilio is one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history. At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word divorce was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City?

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement.

This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.
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Memories of a Hyphenated Man
Ramón Eduardo Ruiz Urueta
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Ramon Eduardo Ruiz would be the first to admit that he is not your typical Mexican American. But he has always known who he is.

Historian, author, and intellectual, Ruiz has established himself through such books as Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People and Cuba: The Making of a Revolution, and in 1998 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton. Now he turns his pen on his own life to offer a personal look at what it really means to be American by birth but Mexican by culture.

Little has been written by or about persons of Mexican origin who have achieved the academic stature of Ruiz, and his memoir provides insights not found in the more common biographies of labor leaders and civil rights activists. His early life straddled the social worlds of his parent's Mexico and semi-rural America, where his father's success as an entrepreneur and property owner set his family's experiences apart from those of most other Mexican Americans at the time. His parents reinforced in their children an identity as mexicanos, and that connection with his ancestral roots was for Ruiz a lifejacket in the days of acute bigotry in America.

In making an early, self-conscious commitment to a life of the mind, Ruiz became aware of his unique nature, and while not immune to prejudice he was able to make a name for himself in several endeavors. As a student, he attended college when few Mexican Americans were given that opportunity, and he was one of the first of his generation to earn a Ph.D. As an Army Air Force officer during World War II, he served as a pilot in the Pacific theatre. And as an intellectual, he navigated the currents of the historical profession and charted new directions in Latin American research through his prolific writing.

Ruiz's career teaching took him to Mexico, Massachusetts, Texas, Oregon—often as the lone "Mexican professor," and ultimately back to his native California. While teaching at Smith, he exulted in being "free to interpret Spanish American life and culture to my heart's content," and at the University of California, San Diego, he saw the era of campus racial barrier give way to the birth of affirmative action. While at UCSD, he taught hundreds of Chicanos and trained one of the largest groups of Chicano Ph.D's.

Memories of a Hyphenated Man is the story of a unique individual who, while shaped by his upbringing and drawing on deep cultural roots, steadfastly followed his own compass in life. It tells of a singular man who beat the odds as it poignantly addresses the ambiguities associated with race, class, citizenship, and nationality for Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

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Memories of Buenos Aires
Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina
Max Page
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In the 1970s, Argentina was the leader in the "Dirty War," a violent campaign by authoritarian South American regimes to repress left-wing groups and any others who were deemed subversive. Over the course of a decade, Argentina's military rulers tortured and murdered upwards of 30,000 citizens. Even today, after thirty years of democratic rule, the horror of that time continues to roil Argentine society.

Argentina has also been in the vanguard in determining how to preserve sites of torture, how to remember the "disappeared," and how to reflect on the causes of the Dirty War. Across the capital city of Buenos Aires are hundreds of grassroots memorials to the victims, documenting the scope of the state's reign of terror. Although many books have been written about this era in Argentina's history, the original Spanish-language edition of Memories of Buenos Aires was the first to identify and interpret all of these sites. It was published by the human rights organization Memoria Abierta, which used interviews with survivors to help unearth that painful history.

This translation brings this important work to an English-speaking audience, offering a comprehensive guidebook to clandestine sites of horror as well as innovative sites of memory. The book divides the 48 districts of the city into 9 sectors, and then proceeds neighborhood-by-neighborhood to offer descriptions of 202 known "sites of state terrorism" and 38 additional places where people were illegally detained, tortured, and killed by the government.
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Memories of Buenos Aires
Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina
Max Memoria Abierta
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
In the 1970s, Argentina was the leader in the “Dirty War,” a violent campaign by authoritarian South American regimes to repress left-wing groups and any others who were deemed subversive. Over the course of a decade, Argentina’s military rulers tortured and murdered upwards of 30,000 citizens. Even today, after thirty years of democratic rule, the horror of that time continues to roil Argentine society. Argentina has also been in the vanguard in determining how to preserve sites of torture, how to remember the “disappeared,” and how to reflect on the causes of the Dirty War. Across the capital city of Buenos Aires are hundreds of grassroots memorials to the victims, documenting the scope of the state’s reign of terror. Although many books have been written about this era in Argentina’s history, the original Spanish-language edition of Memories of Buenos Aires was the first to identify and interpret all of these sites. It was published by the human rights organization Memoria Abierta, which used interviews with survivors to help unearth that painful history. This translation brings this important work to an English-speaking audience, offering a comprehensive guidebook to clandestine sites of horror as well as innovative sites of memory. The book divides the 48 districts of the city into 9 sectors, and then proceeds neighborhood-by-neighborhood to offer descriptions of 202 known “sites of state terrorism” and 38 additional places where people were illegally detained, tortured, and killed by the government.
[more]

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Memories of Earth and Sea
An Ethnographic History of the Islands of Chiloé
Anton Daughters
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Memories of Earth and Sea recounts the history of more than two dozen islands clustered along the Patagonian flank of South America. Settled over the centuries by nomadic seafarers, indigenous farmers, and Spanish explorers, southern Chile’s Archipelago of Chiloé remained until recently a rural outpost resistant to cultural pressures from the mainland. Islanders developed a way of life heavily dependent on marine resources, native crops like the potato, and the cooperative labor practice known as the minga.
 
Staring in the 1980s, Chiloé was thrust into the global economy when major companies moved into the region to extract wild stocks of fish and to grow salmon and shellfish for export. The archipelago’s economy shifted abruptly from one of subsistence farming and fishing to wage labor in export industries. Local knowledge, traditions, memories, and identities similarly shifted, with young islanders expressing a more critical view of the rural past than their elders.
 
This book highlights the region’s unique past, emphasizing the generational tensions, disconnects, and continuities of the last half century. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and historical documents, Anton Daughters brings to life one of South America’s most culturally distinct regions.
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Memories of Eden
A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad
Violette Shamash
Northwestern University Press, 2010

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century.

Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.

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Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders
Edited by Elizabeth M. Tornes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders is a collection of interviews with fifteen Ojibwe elders of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin. The elders, in their seventies and eighties when interviewed, all experienced enormous changes in their lifetimes. In their stories they discuss these changes as well as the traditions and beliefs that the Ojibwe have continued to maintain, despite attempts at forced assimilation on the part of the U.S. government and others. Their stories are testimony to the enduring strength of the Ojibwe people and their way of life.
    Most historical accounts of the Ojibwe have been written by Americans of European descent. This book tells the history of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe in their own words. It also includes a historical introduction, by Leon Valliere, Jr., going back four hundred years to Lac du Flambeau’s original settlement. A black-and-white photographic portrait of each elder prefaces each interview, and historical photos from the George W. Brown Jr. Ojibwe Museum Cultural Center and collection illustrate the text.

Distributed for the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures.
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Memories of Lazarus
By Adonias Filho
University of Texas Press, 1969

These are the recollections of Alexandre—of his life, his death-in-life, and his ultimate death, as they are played out against the mobile tapestry of the valley where he was born. The valley itself, in the backlands of the state of Bahia, Brazil, alternates at different stages in Alexandre’s consciousness between reality and symbol. It swings from a harsh regional specificity to become the panorama of all human life, its endless, eroding wind the devouring hostility of all environments and its pain the pain of every human being in the face of his own brutality and that of others.

Throughout the novel Alexandre’s mind ranges from sharp awareness, through hallucination, to oblivion (“a man dies while alive,” says Jeronimo, his mentor), and back again as he experiences the violent, obtuse phenomena of life in the valley—his universe and ours. This latter-day Lazarus leaves the resisting hills and black sky once only, hounded by the valley dwellers who believe he has murdered his wife, her father, and her brother. Yet despite his awareness of the horror of the valley and his intuition of something beyond it, it is precisely his contact with the gentler existence to which he escapes that forces Alexandre to recognize his nature for what it is. Turning his back on a greater and more varied range of feeling and experience, he chooses the narrow ferocity of the valley, to which he returns to die the final death for which the earlier deaths have prepared him.

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Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
Wendy Wilson-Fall
Ohio University Press, 2015

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.

Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.

By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

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Memories of Odysseus
Frontier Tales From Ancient Greece
François Hartog
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The conception of the Other has long been a problem for philosophers. Emmanuel Levinas, best known for his attention to precisely that issue, argued that the voyages of Ulysses represent the very nature of Western philosophy: "His adventure in the world is nothing but a return to his native land, a complacency with the Same, a misrecognition of the Other." In Memories of Odysseus, François Hartog examines the truth of Levinas' assertion and, in the process, uncovers a different picture. Drawing on a remarkable range of authors and texts, ancient and modern, Hartog looks at accounts of actual travelers, as well as the way travel is used as a trope throughout ancient Greek literature, and finds that, instead of misrecognition, the Other is viewed with doubt and awe in the Homeric tradition. In fact, he argues, the Odyssey played a crucial role in shaping this attitude in the Greek mind, serving as inspiration for voyages in which new encounters caused the Greeks to revise their concepts of self and other. Ambitious in scope, this book is a sophisticated exploration of ancient Greece and its sense of identity.
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Memories of Revolt
The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past
Ted Swedenburg
University of Arkansas Press, 2003
“This wonderful monograph treats a subject that resonates with anyone who studies the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and particularly Palestinian nationalism: that how Palestinian history is remembered and constructed is as meaningful to our understanding of the current struggle as arriving as some sort of ‘complete empirical understanding’ of its history. Swedenburg . . . studies how a major anti-colonial insurrection, the 1936–38 strike and revolt in Palestine [against the British], is remembered in Palestinian nationalist historiography, western and Israeli ‘official’ historical discourse, and Palestinian popular memory. Using primarily oral history interviews, supplemented by archival material and national monuments, he presents multiple, complex, contradictory, and alternative interpretations of historical events. . . . The book is thematically divided into explorations of Palestinian nationalist symbols, stereotypes, and myths; Israeli national monuments that simultaneously act as historical ‘injunctions against forgetting’ Jewish history and efforts to ‘marginalize, vilify, and obliterate’ the Arab history of Palestine; Palestine subaltern memories as resistance to official narratives, including unpopular and controversial recollections of collaboration and assassination; and finally, how the recodification and revival of memories of the revolt informed the Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987.” —MESA Bulletin
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Memories of the Revolution
The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater
Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The women’s experimental theater space called the WOW Café (Women’s One World) has been a vital part of New York’s downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others.

Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW’s history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Café veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.
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Memories of the Slave Trade
Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone
Rosalind Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 2002
How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.
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Memories of Tiananmen
Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019
Francis Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, vigil onsite surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. Memories of Tiananmen demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While the book mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong's autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.
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Memories of Two Generations
A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas
Alexander Z. Gurwitz, Edited and Introduced by Bryan Edward Stone
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The 1935 autobiography of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, an Orthodox Jew whose lively recounting of his life in Tsarist Russia and his immigration to San Antonio, Texas, in 1910 captures turbulent changes in early twentieth-century Jewish history

In 1910, at the age of fifty-one, Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz made the bold decision to emigrate with his wife and four children from southeastern Ukraine in Tsarist Russia to begin a new life in Texas. In 1935, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a retrospective autobiography, Memories of Two Generations, that recounts his personal story both of the rich history of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe and of the rambunctious development of frontier Jewish communities in the United States.
 
In both Europe and America, Gurwitz inhabited an almost exclusively Jewish world. As a boy, he studied in traditional yeshivas and earned a living as a Hebrew language teacher and kosher butcher. Widely travelled, Gurwitz recalls with wit and insight daily life in European shtetls, providing perceptive and informative comments about Jewish religion, history, politics, and social customs. Among the book’s most notable features is his first-hand, insider’s account of the yearly Jewish holiday cycle as it was observed in the nineteenth century, described as he experienced it as a child.
 
Gurwitz’s account of his arrival in Texas forms a cornerstone record of the Galveston Immigration Movement; this memoir represents the only complete narrative of that migration from an immigrant’s point of view. Gurwitz’s descriptions about the development of a thriving Orthodox community in San Antonio provide an important and unique primary source about a facet of American Jewish life that is not widely known.
 
Gurwitz wrote his memoir in his preferred Yiddish, and this translation into English by Rabbi Amram Prero captures the lyrical style of the original. Scholar and author Bryan Edward Stone’s special introduction and illuminating footnotes round out a superb edition that offers much to experts and general readers alike.
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Memories Of Underdevelopment
Chanan, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 1990
Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema. The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director.

This double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based. An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.
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Memory
A Fourth Memoir
Wallace Fowlie
Duke University Press, 1990
Wallace Fowlie is known to three generations of students at Duke University for his course in Proust. His observations on the changing interests of college students (Bob Dylan to Jim Morrison, Fellini to Pasolini) are part of this fourth memoir. In Memory, Fowlie brings us once more into his broad range of vision as he examines the offerings of memory, more real to him he tells us than the town in which he now lives. the reader follows his search for words, his early more mystical search for a father-son relationship, his remembering of the small acts that determine life.
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Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict
Unwanted Memories
Orli Fridman
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book investigates the study of memory activism and memory of activism, emerging after conflict, as a political civic action. It examines the appearance and growth of memory activism in Serbia amid the legacies of unwanted memories of the wars of the 1990s, approaching the post-Yugoslav region as a region of memory and tracing the alternative calendars and alternative commemorative practices of memory activists as they have evolved over a period of more than two decades. By presenting in-depth accounts of memory activism practices, on-site and online, Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories analyses this evolution in the context of generational belonging and introduces frameworks for the study of #hashtag #memoryactivism, alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity.
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Memory against Culture
Arguments and Reminders
Johannes Fabian
Duke University Press, 2007
In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences—about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian’s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to conversational and transnational practices, refusing epistemological claims that privilege any one voice, language, or point of view.

Fabian returns to his landmark book Time and the Other to consider how the role of the other in anthropological inquiry has been transformed over the past two decades. He explores the place of linguistics in contemporary language-centered anthropology, and he ponders how studies of material culture imbue objects with “otherness.” Meditating on the place of memory and forgetting in ethnography, he draws from his own ethnographic work in the Congo to ask why Africa, the site of so much early anthropological study, continues to be forgotten in the wake of colonization. Arguing for the importance of remembering Africa, Fabian focuses on the relationship between thought and memory in the Swahili language. In so doing, he suggests new methods for investigating memory practices across cultures. Turning to the practice of ethnography, he examines the role of the Internet and the place of field notes and other memoranda in ethnographic writing. At once wide-ranging and incisive, Memory against Culture is a significant reflection on the state of the field by one of its most thoughtful and engaged practitioners.

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Memory and Dreams
The Creative Human Mind
Christos, George
Rutgers University Press, 2003

Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? How does the brain turn a collection of new experiences into memories, dreams, and creative thoughts?

After synthesizing much of what is known about the neurobiological basis of memory and dreaming, Memory and Dreams: The Creative Human Mind offers new interpretations of how memories are formed, the nature of creativity, the purpose of dream sleep, and, in its most original section, the causes of SIDS.

Memory is represented in the brain by specific neural firing patterns that share common neurons and connections. Mathematical models therefore suggest that the brain can generate its own set of “spurious memories” by combining various features of stored memories. George Christos suggests that these spurious memories represent the basis for creativity.

The function of dreaming in humans and almost all other mammals is one of the great unsolved biological mysteries. Christos argues that we dream in order to process recently acquired memories, to forget unimportant memories, and to generate more creative states. By organizing our memories, dreaming allows us to be more predisposed for learning the next day.

The last section of the book deals with one of the most puzzling and heartbreaking problems in medical science, SIDS. Christos posits that infants, through dreaming, may trigger fetal breathing pathways and stop breathing without any alarms going off. In other words, SIDS has no physical cause; the cause is in the mind of the infant, who “dreams” it is back in the safety of its mother’s womb—a state in which it does not breathe. Christos asserts that this is the only theory that explains the causes as well as the trigger mechanisms of SIDS and is consistent with all of the known facts. The book concludes with a list of suggested preventative measures derived from this provocative theory.

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Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity
A Conversation with Barry Schwartz
Tom Thatcher
SBL Press, 2014

Essential reading for scholars and students interested in sociology and biblical studies

In this collection scholars of biblical texts and rabbinics engage the work of Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Schwartz provides an introductory essay on the study of collective memory. Articles that follow integrate his work into the study of early Jewish and Christian texts. The volume concludes with a response from Schwartz that continues this warm and fruitful dialogue between fields.

Features:

  • Articles that integrate the study of collective memory and social psychology into religious studies
  • Essays from Barry Schwartz
  • Theories applied rather than left as abstract principles
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Memory and Narrative
The Weave of Life-Writing
James Olney
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Memory and Narrative presents an elegant, authoritative account of how life-writing has changed over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

"This is an elegant work of scholarship." —Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune

"Examines how the fascinating, reciprocal relationship between memory and narrative has evolved over the course of 17 centuries. . . . Olney's work is a valuable companion to his subjects' primary texts." —Booklist
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Memory And Representation
Constructed Truths & Competing Realities
Elisabeth Dena Eber
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Eber and Neal address some of the theoretical issues connected with symbolic constructions of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. Linkages between what we remember and how we represent it give humans their distinctive characteristics. We construct our reality from how we perceive the events in our lives and, from that reality, we create a symbol system to describe our world. It is through such symbolic constructions that we are provided with a usable backdrop for shaping our memories and organizing them into meaningful lines of action.
          These case studies present a new and creative synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of contemporary perceptions of truth.
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Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space
Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds.
Duke University Press, 2004
Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space explores the effects of major upheavals—wars, decolonization, and other social and economic changes—on the ways in which public histories are presented around the world. Examining issues related to public memory in twelve countries, the histories collected here cut across political, cultural, and geographic divisions. At the same time, by revealing recurring themes and concerns, they show how basic issues of history and memory transcend specific sites and moments in time. A number of the essays look at contests over public memory following two major political transformations: the wave of liberation from colonial rule in much of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America during the second half of the twentieth century and the reorganization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc beginning in the late 1980s.

This collection expands the scope of what is considered public history by pointing to silences and absences that are as telling as museums and memorials. Contributors remind us that for every monument that is erected, others—including one celebrating Sri Lanka’s independence and another honoring the Unknown Russian Soldier of World War II—remain on the drawing board. While some sites seem woefully underserved by a lack of public memorials—as do post–Pinochet Chile and post–civil war El Salvador—others run the risk of diluting meaning through overexposure, as may be happening with Israel’s Masada. Essayists examine public history as it is conveyed not only in marble and stone but also through cityscapes and performances such as popular songs and parades.

Contributors
James Carter
John Czaplicka
Kanishka Goonewardena
Lisa Maya Knauer
Anna Krylova
Teresa Meade
Bill Nasson
Mary Nolan
Cynthia Paces
Andrew Ross
Daniel Seltz
T. M. Scruggs
Irina Carlota Silber
Daniel J. Walkowitz
Yael Zerubavel

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Memory, Brain, and Belief
Daniel L. Schacter
Harvard University Press, 2000

The scientific research literature on memory is enormous. Yet until now no single book has focused on the complex interrelationships of memory and belief. This book brings together eminent scholars from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, literature, and medicine to discuss such provocative issues as “false memories,” in which people can develop vivid recollections of events that never happened; retrospective biases, in which memories of past experiences are influenced by one’s current beliefs; and implicit memory, or the way in which nonconscious influences of past experience shape current beliefs.

Ranging from cognitive, neurological, and pathological perspectives on memory and belief, to relations between conscious and nonconscious mental processes, to memory and belief in autobiographical narratives, this book will be uniquely stimulating to scholars in several academic disciplines.

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Memory Bytes
History, Technology, and Digital Culture
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, eds.
Duke University Press, 2004
Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society at different moments in time.

These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic” sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used.

Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew, Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Swiss

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Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea
Namhee Lee
Duke University Press, 2022
In Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea Namhee Lee explores memory construction and history writing in post-1987 South Korea. The massive neoliberal reconstruction of all aspects of society shifted public discourse from minjung (people) to simin (citizen), from political to cultural, from collective to individual. This shift reconstituted people as Homo economicus, rights-bearing and rights-claiming individuals, even in social movements. Lee explains this shift in the context of simultaneous historical developments: South Korea’s transition to democracy, the end of the Cold War, and neoliberal reconstruction understood as synonymous with democratization. By examining memoirs, biographies, novels, and revisionist conservative historical scholarship, Lee shows how the dominant discourse of a “complete break with the past” erases the critical ethos of previous emancipatory movements foundational to South Korean democracy.
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Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia
Embedded Remembering
Grace Tjandra Leksana
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This book examines how community remembers one of the most gruesome acts of violence in the 20th century: the anti-communist violence in 1965 in Indonesia. Through a case study in a rural district in East Java, this research presents complexities of memory culture of violence. These memories are not exclusively determined by the state’s repressive memory project, but are actually embedded in intricate social relations and local context where the violence occurred. What people remember, forget, or silenced is part of the continuous negotiation to claim one’s right, to relate to the state, and to be Indonesian citizen. This book redefines the politics of memory – that it does not necessarily appear in formal arenas, but actually lies in the intricate web of local dynamics, often involving transactional and clientelistic practices.
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Memory Distortion
How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past
Daniel L. Schacter
Harvard University Press, 1995

Hypnosis, confabulation, source amnesia, flashbulb memories, repression--these and numerous additional topics are explored in this timely collection of essays by eminent scholars in a range of disciplines. This is the first book on memory distortion to unite contributions from cognitive psychology, psychopathology, psychiatry, neurobiology, sociology, history, and religious studies. It brings the most relevant group of perspectives to bear on some key contemporary issues, including the value of eyewitness testimony and the accuracy of recovered memories of sexual abuse.

The distinguished contributors to this volume explore the full range of biological phenomena and social ideas relevant to understanding memory distortion, including the reliability of children's recollections, the effects of hypnosis on memory, and confabulation in brain-injured patients. They also look into the activity and role of brain systems, cellular bases of memory distortion, and the effects of emotion and trauma on the accuracy of memory. In a section devoted to the social aspects of memory distortion, additional essays analyze the media's part in distorting social memory, factors influencing historical reconstruction of the collective past, and memory distortion in religion and other cultural constructs. Daniel Schacter launches the collection with a history of psychological memory distortions. Subsequent highlights include new empirical findings on memory retrieval by a pioneer in the field, some of the foremost research on computational models, studies of the relationship between emotion and memory, new findings on amnesia by a premier neuroscientist, and reflections on the power of collective amnesia in U.S. history, the Nazi Holocaust, and ancient Egypt.

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The Memory Eaters
Elizabeth Kadetsky
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips.

As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold.

At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
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Memory Effects
The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing
Apel, Dora
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future.

Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

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Memory
Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar
John Scanlan
Reaktion Books, 2013
 When we think of getting older, we know we will slowly lose more and more of our memory—and with it, our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we considered the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us into a future when the limits of our memory become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both with and within it, as well as what might come from memory becoming a process as simple as retrieving and reading data.
 
Probing the ways philosophers look at memory, Scanlan reveals that some argue that being human means having the ability to remember, to see oneself as a being in time, with a past and future. At the same time, he shows, our memories can undo our present sense of time and place by presenting us with our past lives. And in a digital age, we are immersed in a vast archive of data that not only colors our everyday experiences, but also supplies us with information on anything we might otherwise have forgotten—breaking down the distinction between the memories of the individual and the collective. Drawing on history, philosophy, and technology, Memory offers an engaging investigation of how we comprehend recollection and how memory, as a phenomenon, continually remakes everyday life.
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Memory Fever
Ray Gonzalez
University of Arizona Press, 1999
For poet Ray Gonzalez, growing up in El Paso during the 1960s was a time of loneliness and vulnerability. He encountered discrimination in high school not only for being Latino but also for being a non-athlete in a school where sports were important. Like many young people, he found diversion in music; unlike most, he found solace in the desert. In these vignettes, Gonzalez shares memories of boyhood that tell how he discovered the natural world and his creative spirit.

Through 29 storylike essays, Gonzalez takes readers into the heart of the desert and the soul of a developing poet. He introduces us to the people who shaped his life. We learn of his father's difficulties with running a pool hall and of his grandmother's steadfast religious faith. We meet sinister Texas Rangers, hallucinatory poets, illegal aliens, and racist high school jocks. His vivid recollections embrace lizard hunts and rattlesnake dreams, rock music and menudo making—all in stories that convey the pains and joys of growing up on the border. As Gonzalez leads us through his desert of hope and vision, we come to recognize the humor and sadness that permeate this special place.
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Memory
Fragments of a Modern History
Alison Winter
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Picture your twenty-first birthday. Did you have a party? If so, do you remember who was there? Now step back: how clear are those memories? Should we trust them to be accurate, or is there a chance that you’re remembering incorrectly? And where have the many details you can no longer recall gone? Are they hidden somewhere in your brain, or are they gone forever?

Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and, as Alison Winter shows in Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, the answers have changed dramatically in just the past century. Tracing the cultural and scientific history of our understanding of memory, Winter explores early metaphors that likened memory to a filing cabinet; later, she shows, that cabinet was replaced by the image of a reel of film, ever available for playback. That model, too, was eventually superseded, replaced by the current understanding of memory as the result of an extremely complicated, brain-wide web of cells and systems that together assemble our pasts. Winter introduces us to innovative scientists and sensationalistic seekers, and, drawing on evidence ranging from scientific papers to diaries to movies, explores the way that new understandings from the laboratory have seeped out into psychiatrists' offices, courtrooms, and the culture at large. Along the way, she investigates the sensational battles over the validity of repressed memories that raged through the 1980s and shows us how changes in technology—such as the emergence of recording devices and computers—have again and again altered the way we conceptualize, and even try to study, the ways we remember.

Packed with fascinating details and curious episodes from the convoluted history of memory science, Memory is a book you'll remember long after you close its cover.

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