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Mental Disorder, Work Disability, and the Law
Edited by Richard J. Bonnie and John Monahan
University of Chicago Press, 1996
A barrage of "handbooks" and "resource manuals" aimed at employers and legal practitioners on the employment rights of people with disabilities has begun to appear. Until now, however, there has been no serious book-length scholarly treatment of how mental disorder can affect work, how work can affect mental disorder, and the role of law in addressing employment discrimination based on mental rather than physical disability. In Mental Disorder, Work Disability and the Law, the editors bring together original work by leading scholars who have studied mental disorder and work disability from the fields of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, law, and economics. The authors' contributions build upon one another to create the first integrated account of the important policy issues at stake when law deals with the rights of mentally disordered citizens to work when they are able to, and to receive benefits when they are not.

This book will be of great value to scholars in law and the mental health professions and to policy makers and the administrators of disability programs.
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Mental Disorders / Suicide
Morton Kramer, Earl S. Pollack, Richard W. Redick, and Ben Z. Locke
Harvard University Press, 1972
This is an analysis of the statistical data on two important public health problems. Although systematic annual morbidity statistics for mental disorders are nonexistent, extensive data exist for the United States on patterns of use of mental hospitals and other types of psychiatric facilities. The chapters dealing with mental disorders examine these data in considerable detail. The section on suicide provides mortality rates from this cause derived from data on all deaths occurring in the United States, and discusses demographic variables as well as various sociological and psychological theories about suicide. The authors are affiliated with the National Institute of Mental Health.
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The Mental Growth of Children From Two to Fourteen Years
A Study of the Predictive Value of the Minnesota Preschool Scales
Florence Goodenough
University of Minnesota Press, 1942
The Mental Growth of Children from Two to Fourteen Years was first published in 1942. 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 discussion of the development and application of the Minnesota Preschool Scales includes detailed accounts of the statistical analyses used, follow-up studies, and a number of case histories, as well as a review of previous work in the testing of infants and young children. Covers a 12-year period during which trained examiners tested the same children at stated intervals. 1,350 tests were used in the standardization of verbal and nonverbal forms. Test standing on the Minnesota scales showed correlation with standing on tests given at the completion of high school.
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Mental Health Disorders in Adolescents
A Guide for Parents, Teachers, and Professionals
Hazen, Eric P
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Mental Health Disorders in Adolescents provides essential information to help parents, educators, and general practitioners find effective ways to identify and treat psychiatric disorders that many teens face. The first of two reader-friendly sections, "Recognizing the Problem, Finding Help, and Negotiating the System," is designed to help caregivers navigate the often confusing adolescent mental health system. Readers will find comprehensive information about when and how to seek help and the kinds of treatments that are available, including a detailed discussion of psychiatric medications and psychotherapy options. "Common Psychiatric Problems in Adolescence," the second section, offers information on specific psychiatric disorders, including symptoms and warning signs, diagnostic evaluations, treatment options, prognosis, and associated risks for each disorder.

Additionally, Eric P. Hazen, Mark A. Goldstein, and Myrna Chandler Goldstein have compiled two practical appendices-one provides a list of resources, organizations, books, websites, and phone numbers for further information and support. The other serves as a "treatment organizer" to help parents know what school and medical data to bring to a psychiatric evaluation and teach them how to keep track of important discussions related to their child's treatment.

By recognizing the early symptoms of a psychiatric disorder, adults may be able to save a teen's life. Mental Health Disorders in Adolescents offers real options to anyone searching for ways to help at-risk teens.
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The Mental Health Practitioner and the Law
A Comprehensive Handbook
Lawrence E. Lifson M.D.
Harvard University Press, 1998

"Could I be sued?" The exploding number of malpractice lawsuits in recent years has brought this question to the mind of every clinician---the conscientious as well as the negligent.

A unique and practical guide to clinical risk management, this book combines the expertise of mental health professionals, judges, attorneys, and insurance industry experts, to help the clinician provide effective treatment while reducing the risk of legal liability. Wide-ranging, clinically based, and up to date, it will be a welcome guide for medical and surgical practitioners as well.

The first section gives clinicians a working knowledge of legal regulation in psychiatry and medicine, covering informed consent, documentation of patient care, and potential conflicts of interest. The second section identifies high-risk areas for lawsuits, including managing suicidal and violent patients, boundary violations, supervision issues, prescription of medications, liability in managed care settings, and treatment termination. The book concludes with a primer on clinical testimony in the courtroom.

The broad range of distinguished contributors to this volume will provide a survival guide to clinicians in the increasingly complex and rapidly changing world of health care.

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Mental Health Racism And Sexism
Charles V. Willie
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995

The essays in this volume discuss racism and sexism as they affect mental health. In particular, they focus on training, diagnosis, treatment, and research, emphasizing the power relationships between individuals and groups that cause unequal access to mental health care. They offer perspectives on issues and their distinct effects on mental health: interracial adoptions, teenage motherhood, gender bias in mental health diagnosis and therapy, prisons used as substitutes for hospitals, homeless families, and increasing violence- in the home, on college campuses, and in the streets.

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Mental Health Services for Deaf People
Treatment Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges
Benito Estrada Aranda
Gallaudet University Press, 2015
The World Congress on Mental Health and Deafness first met at Gallaudet University in October 1998, and it has convened five more times in the succeeding years. This volume collects the very best research presented at the Fifth World Congress, which took place in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2012. The eighteen international contributors represent the pioneers of mental health and deafness services in their respective countries.

       Volume editors Benito Estrada Aranda and Ines Sleeboom-van Raaij have divided the book into three parts—Mental Health Issues and Treatment, Deaf Populations, and Deaf Children and Their Families. In the first part, the contributors provide in-depth analysis of specific challenges and treatment modalities ranging from the provision of mental healthcare as a basic human right to psychopharmacological treatment, the challenges in developing mental health services for deaf and hard of hearing people in countries where none exist, and new treatment therapies.

       Part two looks at issues of self-esteem and cultural identity among deaf and hard of hearing adults in Greece and Cyprus, the services for deaf people at a public health clinic in Austria, and the quality of life among Latino Deaf bilinguals in the United States. In the last part, the contributors focus on mental health issues found in deaf children and adolescents and on the relationships between deaf teenagers and their hearing mothers. The volume concludes with a case study of a prelingually deaf child diagnosed as autistic. Taken all together, these cutting-edge articles explore the important issues within the specialized area of mental health and deafness.
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Mental Hygiene for Community Nursing
Eric K. Clarke
University of Minnesota Press, 1942

Mental Hygiene for Community Nursing was first published in 1942. 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.

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Mental Illness and the Economy
M. Harvey Brenner
Harvard University Press, 1973

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Mental Models
Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness
Philip Johnson-Laird
Harvard University Press, 1983

Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of mind: comprehension, inference, and consciousness. In spirited and graceful prose, Johnson-Laird argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a digital computer. This book provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.

In several key areas of cognition, Johnson-Laird shows how an explanation based on mental modeling is clearly superior to previous theory. For example, he argues compellingly that deductive reasoning does not take place by tacitly applying the rules of logic, but by mentally manipulating models of the states of affairs from which inferences are drawn. Similarly, linguistic comprehension is best understood not as a matter of applying inference rules to propositions derived from sentences, but rather as the mind's effort to construct and update a model of the situation described by a text or a discourse. Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird's theory of consciousness: the mind's necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition.

This an extraordinarily rich book, providing a coherent account of much recent experimental work in cognitive psychology, along with lucid explanations of relevant theory in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy Not since Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's classic Plans and the Structure of Behavior has a book in cognitive science combined such sweep, style, and good sense. Like its distinguished predecessor, Mental Models may well serve to fix a point of view for a generation.

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Mental Retardation
Robert B. Edgerton
Harvard University Press, 1979

The economic cost of retardation measures in the billions each year and the human cost is incalculable. However, many forms of retardation can now be prevented medically and much is now known about how to help the retarded lead more normal and satisfactory lives. In Mental Retardation, Dr. Robert Edgerton provides an extraordinarily useful and humane guide to this new knowledge in the brief and readable format that has become a trademark of the Developing Child series.

The book begins with a clear review of what is known about the causes of retardation, ranging from genetic abnormalities to prenatal infection, malnutrition in early childhood, environmental toxins (such as lead paint), and poverty. Edgerton shows how many of these problems can be avoided by genetic counseling, improved prenatal care, and the elimination of environmental hazards. But he also goes on to consider the questions that inevitably arise when prevention fails and family and society must cope with a retarded child: What is the impact of the child on the family? Is care within the family preferable to institutionalization? How can schools best educate the retarded? Is "mainstreaming" sensible? And how far can the retarded adult go towards normal patterns of work and social life within the community?

Mental Retardation makes it clear that many of the problems of retardation are caused by the misunderstanding and intolerance of a society like our own, which places extraordinary emphasis on mental ability and its measurable manifestations: school achievement and IQ. It is just this sort of intolerance and misunderstanding that this book does so much to dispel.

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Mental Traveler
A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia
W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2020
How does a parent make sense of a child’s severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry?  W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son.

 Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son’s attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy, or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe’s declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective.    

Shot through with love and pain, Mental Traveler shows how Gabe drew his father into his quest for enlightenment within madness. It is a book that will touch anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.
 
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Mentality and Machines
Keith Gunderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Mentality and Machines was first published in 1985. 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.

Mentality and Machines — with a new preface and an extended postscript—is a general essay on the philosophy of mind, oriented to philosophical and psychological questions about real as well as imagined, robots and machines. The second edition retains all of the essays from the original book, including Gunderson's influential critique ("The Imitation Game") of A.M. Turing's treatment of the question "Can machines think?" and his controversial distinction between program-receptive and program-resistant aspects of the mind. This edition's postscript includes further reflections on these themes and others, and relates them to recent writings of other philosophers and computer scientists.

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Mentality and Modality
John P. Burgess
Harvard University Press

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Mentor and Muse
Essays from Poets to Poets
Edited by Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today’s leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry.
            Gathered here are numerous experts eager to share their wisdom with other writers. Each author examines in detail a particular poetic element, shedding new light on the endless possibilities of poetic forms. Addressed within are such topics as the fluid possibilities of imagery in poetry; the duality of myth and the personal, and the power of one to unlock the other; the surprising versatility of traditional poetic forms; and the pleasure of collaboration with other poets. Also explored in depth are the formative roles of cultural identity and expectations, and their effect on composition; advice on how to develop one’s personal poetic style and approach; the importance of setting in reading and meaning; and the value of indirection in the lyric poem. Challenges to conventional concepts of beauty are examined through Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ghost of Longfellow is called upon to guide students through the rewards and roadblocks of writing popular poetry. Poetic persona is demystified through Newton’s law of gravity, while the countless permutations of punctuation are revealed with analysis of e. e. cummings and W. S. Merwin.

            The essays include the full text of the poems discussed, and detailed, relevant writing exercises that allow students the opportunity to directly implement the strategies they have learned. While many advanced topics such as authenticity, discordant music, and prosody are covered, this highly readable volume is as user-friendly as it is informative. Offering a variety of aesthetics and approaches to tackling the issues of composition, Mentor and Muse takes poets beyond the simple stages of poetic terms and strategies. These authorsinvite students to explore more advanced concepts, enabling them to draw on the traditions of the past while at the same time forging their own creative paths into the future.

 Chosen as one of the "Best Books for Writers" by Poets & Writers magazine

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Mentoring and Managing Students in the Academic Library
Michelle Reale
American Library Association, 2013

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Mentoring A-Z
Julie Todaro
American Library Association, 2015

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The Mentoring Guide
Helping Mentors and Mentees Succeed
Vineet Chopra
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019
The Mentoring Guide is the go-to resource for mentors and mentees. Written by authors with decades of experience in both roles, it compiles a wide array of stories and data providing concrete, actionable advice to make the most of any mentoring relationship. From getting started as a mentee, to the importance of being a standout mentor, The Mentoring Guide will help avoid pitfalls, address challenges, and develop longlasting, productive, and successful mentoring relationships.
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Mentoring in the Library
Building for the Future
Marta K. American Library Association
American Library Association, 2011

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Mentorship/Methodology
Reflections, Praxis, and Futures
Leigh Gruwell
Utah State University Press, 2024
Mentorship/Methodology brings together emerging and established scholars to consider the relationship between mentoring practices and research methodologies in writing studies and related fields. Each essay in this edited collection produces a new intellectual space from which to theorize the dynamics of combining mentoring and research in institutions and communities of higher education.
 
The contributors consider how methodology informs mentorship, how mentorship activates methodology, and how to locate the future of the field in these moments of intersection. Mentorship, through the research and relationships it nourishes, creates the future of writing studies—or, conversely, reproduces the past. At the juncture where this happens, the contributors inquire, Where have current arrangements of mentorship/methodology taken writing studies? Where do these points of intersection exist in performance and practice, in theory, in research? What images of the field do they produce? How can scholars better articulate and write about these moments or spaces in which mentorship and methodology collide in productive disciplinary work?
 
By making the “slash” more visible, Mentorship/Methodology provides significant opportunities to support and cultivate diverse ways of knowing and being in rhetoric and composition, both locally and globally. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional communication, as well as readers interested in conversations about mentorship and methodology.
 
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Mercados
Recipes from the Markets of Mexico
By David Sterling
University of Texas Press, 2019

Part travelogue, part cookbook, Mercados takes us on a tour of Mexico’s most colorful destinations—its markets—led by an award-winning, preeminent guide whose passion for Mexican food attracted followers from around the globe. Just as David Sterling’s Yucatán earned him praise for his “meticulously researched knowledge” (Saveur) and for producing “a labor of love that well documents place, people and, yes, food” (Booklist), Mercados now invites readers to learn about local ingredients, meet vendors and cooks, and taste dishes that reflect Mexico’s distinctive regional cuisine.

Serving up more than one hundred recipes, Mercados presents unique versions of Oaxaca’s legendary moles and Michoacan’s carnitas, as well as little-known specialties such as the charcuterie of Chiapas, the wild anise of Pátzcuaro, and the seafood soups of Veracruz. Sumptuous color photographs transport us to the enormous forty-acre, 10,000-merchant Central de Abastos in Oaxaca as well as tiny tianguises in Tabasco. Blending immersive research and passionate appreciation, David Sterling’s final opus is at once a must-have cookbook and a literary feast for the gastronome.

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The Mercantile Effect
Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World During the 17th and 18th Centuries
Edited by Sussan Babaie and Melanie Gibson
Gingko, 2017
This lavishly illustrated volume of essays introduces a fascinating array of subjects, each exploring an aspect of the far-reaching “mercantile effect” and its impact across western Asia in the early modern era. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the increased movement of merchants and goods from China to Europe brought desirable commodities to new markets, but also spread ideas, tastes, and technologies across western Asia as never before. Through the newly-established Dutch, English, and French East India companies, as well as much older mercantile networks, commodities including silk, ivory, books, and glazed porcelains were transported both east and west. The Mercantile Effect shows a fascinating array of trade objects and the customs and traditions of traders that brought about a period of intense cultural interchange.
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Merce Cunningham
After the Arbitrary
Carrie Noland
University of Chicago Press, 2020
One of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century, Merce Cunningham is known for introducing chance to dance. Far too often, however, accounts of Cunningham’s work have neglected its full scope, focusing on his collaborations with the visionary composer John Cage or insisting that randomness was the singular goal of his choreography. In this book, the first dedicated to the complete arc of Cunningham’s career, Carrie Noland brings new insight to this transformative artist’s philosophy and work, providing a fresh perspective on his artistic process while exploring aspects of his choreographic practice never studied before.
Examining a rich and previously unseen archive that includes photographs, film footage, and unpublished writing by Cunningham, Noland counters prior understandings of Cunningham’s influential embrace of the unintended, demonstrating that Cunningham in fact set limits on the role chance played in his dances. Drawing on Cunningham’s written and performed work, Noland reveals that Cunningham introduced variables before the chance procedure was applied and later shaped and modified the chance results. Chapters explore his relation not only to Cage, but also Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones. Ultimately, Noland shows that Cunningham approached movement as more than “movement in itself,” and that his work enacted archetypal human dramas. This remarkable book will forever change our appreciation of the choreographer’s work and legacy.
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Mercenaries
An African Security Dilemma
Edited by Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. Kayode Fayemi
Pluto Press, 1999
This powerful book critiques mercenary involvement in post-Cold War African conflicts. The contributors investigate the links between the rise in internal conflicts and the proliferation of mercenary activities in the 1990s; the distinction in the methods adopted by Cold War mercenaries and their contemporary counterparts; the convoluted network between private armies; business interests and sustained poverty in Africa’s poorest countries; and the connection between mercenary activities and arms proliferation. Countries discussed include Sierra Leone, Zaire, Angola, Uganda and Congo.
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The Mercenary
Moinul Ahsan Saber
Seagull Books
This gripping novel brilliantly straddles the divide between thrillers and literature. Moinul Ahsan Saber here tells the story of Kobej Lethel, a ruthless soldier of fortune employed by a corrupt village chief. Lethel has never had a problem with the job before: he gets an assignment and handles it, even if that entails violence. But during Bangladesh’s War of Independence, the chief sides with the Pakistani army as it carries out unspeakable atrocities. Suddenly, Lethel can no longer accept his role—he refuses, and rebels. But the transformation proves temporary: by the end of the war, he’s back to his old ways, fighting for nothing more than a paycheck, on nothing more than an order.

​A powerful novel of war, history, and the deadly draw of violence, The Mercenary is an unforgettable look into the mind of a man who cannot escape the killing that has become his occupation.
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The Mercenary Mediterranean
Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon
Hussein Fancy
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Sometime in April 1285, five Muslim horsemen crossed from the Islamic kingdom of Granada into the realms of the Christian Crown of Aragon to meet with the king of Aragon, who showered them with gifts, including sumptuous cloth and decorative saddles, for agreeing to enter the Crown’s service.
           
They were not the first or only Muslim soldiers to do so. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian kings of Aragon recruited thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers to serve in their armies and as members of their royal courts. Based on extensive research in Arabic, Latin, and Romance sources, The Mercenary Mediterranean explores this little-known and misunderstood history. Far from marking the triumph of toleration, Hussein Fancy argues, the alliance of Christian kings and Muslim soldiers depended on and reproduced ideas of religious difference. Their shared history represents a unique opportunity to reconsider the relation of medieval religion to politics, and to demonstrate how modern assumptions about this relationship have impeded our understanding of both past and present.
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Merchant Capital and Islam
By Mahmood Ibrahim
University of Texas Press, 1990

The rise of merchant capital in Mecca conditioned the development of Meccan social, economic, religious, and political structure. Mahmood Ibrahim traces the roots of capitalism from the emergence of merchants as the main force in Mecca through the first civil war in Islam (656–661). Through a rereading of original Arabic sources and drawing from modern scholarship on the subject, Ibrahim offers a new interpretation of the rise of Islam.

He argues that Islam contributed certain institutional beliefs and practices that unblocked obstacles and helped merchants gain political and economic hegemony over western Asia. Ibrahim contends that, with the conquest of Mecca, the newly formed Muslim state spread its control to the rest of Arabia, which mobilized a significant social force and allowed for further expansion outside Arabia, thus extending merchant control to include new surplus-producing regions, a vast network of trade routes, and wider markets.

This extensively researched study offers a new interpretation of the history of Islam, including the formation of Islamic society and the unfolding of the first civil war. In offering a better understanding of the Umayyad Caliphate that ruled Islam for a century to come, Ibrahim helps lay the groundwork for understanding the Middle East as it is today.

Of interest to scholars of Middle Eastern studies, this important work will be necessary reading for students of Near Eastern and North African history, as well as students of the history of Medieval Europe.

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The Merchant Class of Medieval London
1300-1500
Sylvia L. Thrupp
University of Michigan Press, 1989
A social history of the merchant class of 14th- and 15th-century London
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The Merchant John Askin
Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac
Justin M. Carroll
Michigan State University Press, 2017
John Askin, a Scots-Irish migrant to North America, built his fur trade between the years 1758 and 1781 in the Great Lakes region of North America. His experience serves as a   vista from which to view important aspects of the British Empire in North America. The close interrelationship between trade and empire enabled Askin’s economic triumphs but also made him vulnerable to the consequences of imperial conflicts and mismanagement. The ephemeral, contested nature of British authority during the 1760s and 1770s created openings for men like Askin to develop a trade of smuggling liquor or to challenge the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly over the fur trade, and allowed them to boast in front of British officers of having the “Key of Canada” in their pockets. How British officials responded to and even sanctioned such activities demonstrates the vital importance of trade and empire working in concert. Askin’s life’s work speaks to the collusive nature of the British Empire—its vital need for the North American merchants, officials, and Indigenous communities to establish effective accommodating relationships, transgress boundaries (real or imagined), and reject certain regulations in order to achieve the empire’s goals.
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MERCHANT OF ILLUSION
JAMES ROUSE, AMERICA'S SALESMAN OF THE BUSINESSMAN'S UTOPIA
NICHOLAS DAGEN BLOOM
The Ohio State University Press, 2004

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The Merchant of Prato's Wife
Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360-1423
Ann Crabb
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Although the fourteenth-century Italian merchant Francesco Datini has received attention from business historians, there has previously been no full study of his wife, Margherita Datini. Drawing on a sizable trove of Margherita’s correspondence held in the Archivio di Stato di Prato, including hundreds of letters she exchanged with Francesco, Ann Crabb investigates the social and economic importance of women’s roles as wives and mothers, early modern European views on honor, and the practice of letter writing in Margherita’s world.

Margherita’s often colorful comments demonstrate her attitudes toward her rather unhappy marriage and her inability to have children, along with other aspects of her life. Her letters reveal the pride she felt in carrying out her many responsibilities as a wife and, later, a widow: in scribal letter writing, in business, in household management, and in farming. Crabb emphasizes that the role of a wife was a recognized social position, beyond her individual relations with her husband, and provided opportunities beyond what restrictive laws or restrictive views of female honor would suggest. Further, Crabb considers Margherita’s successful efforts, on her own initiative and in her late thirties, to learn to read and write at a literate level.

This book will be of interest to both scholars and general readers of women’s history. In addition, historians of early modern Italy and, more generally, of early modern Europe will find this book valuable.
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The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
An updated version of The Merchant of Venice that speaks to our contemporary reckoning with racism and injustice. 
 
Elise Thoron’s translation of Shakespeare’s searing The Merchant of Venice cuts straight to the heart of today’s fraught issues of social justice and systemic racism. Thoron’s clear, compelling contemporary verse translation retains the power of the original iambic pentameter while allowing readers and audiences to fully comprehend and directly experience the brutal dilemmas of Shakespeare’s Venice, where prejudice and privilege reign unchallenged. As the author of three acclaimed music-theater works on the Jewish experience and informed by her work directing cross-cultural projects in locations as different as Russia, Japan, Cuba, and New York City, Thoron brings to her Merchant an immediacy that speaks directly to the present reckoning with race in America.  
 
This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era. 
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The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago
Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire
Robert E. Weems Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Born to enslaved parents, Anthony Overton became one of the leading African American entrepreneurs of the twentieth century. Overton's Chicago-based empire ranged from personal care products and media properties to insurance and finance. Yet, despite success and acclaim as the first business figure to win the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, Overton remains an enigma.

Robert E. Weems Jr. restores Overton to his rightful place in American business history. Dispelling stubborn myths, he traces Overton's rise from mentorship by Booker T. Washington, through early failures, to a fateful move to Chicago in 1911. There, Overton started a popular magazine aimed at African American women that helped him dramatically grow his cosmetics firm. Overton went on to become the first African American to head a major business conglomerate, only to lose significant parts of his businesses—and his public persona as ”the merchant prince of his race&#8221—in the Depression, before rebounding once again in the early 1940s.

Revealing and panoramic, The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago weaves the fascinating life story of an African American trailblazer through the eventful history of his times.

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Merchant Saint
The Church, the Market, and the First Lay Canonization
prudlo
St. Augustine's Press, 2024
Paul Voss and Donald Prudlo trace Western attitudes to money, merchants, and the market through 3,000 years of history. They focus their attention on one person in particular, Omobono of Cremona (1117–1197), as an axial figure in the wholesale reappraisal of the value of business, entrepreneurship, and white-collar work in Christian Europe. More precisely, Voss and Prudlo examine the evolution of the mentality of wealth and economics in the Catholic Church, beginning from the Scriptural disdain for material pursuits and moving to the eventually declared sainthood of Omobono, a lay merchant living amid the hectic rhythm of a life of business. As the authors note, "His story resonates today with an unexpected poignancy for the contribution it makes to the pressing issues of economic justice, free markets, work-life balance, the 'theology of work,' and Catholic history." The reconstruction of the socio-theological perspective of wealth is a fascinating contribution to contemporary attempts to reconcile culture, capitalism, and the common good. Omobono stands as the first lay individual proposed by the Catholic Church as a model of heroic virtue, and thought him commercial life came thereby also to be 'canonized' as a possible path to sanctity. 

Voss and Prudlo provide a rich resource for readers concerned with the proper aims and boundaries of a life in the world of commerce, the nature of work, the ethics of profit, the problem of money-lending, the virtues needed for moral capitalism, and the tension between otium and negotium. Voss and Prudlo have accumulated a veritable trove of primary text materials relating to the life of Omobono, and provide translations and commentary to complete their analysis. This fascinating account crosses the threshold of pure history and stimulates inquiry in the fields of philosophy, economics, and theology. 
 
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The Merchant. The Braggart Soldier. The Ghost. The Persian
Plautus
Harvard University Press, 2011

Funny happenings.

The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences ca. 205–184 BC, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and Molière to modern times. This third volume of a new Loeb edition of all twenty-one of Plautus’ extant comedies presents The Merchant, The Braggart Soldier, The Ghost, and The Persian with freshly edited texts, lively modern translations, introductions, and ample explanatory notes.

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The Merchant. The Braggart Warrior. The Haunted House. The Persian
Plautus
Harvard University Press

Plautus (Titus Maccius), born about 254 BCE at Sarsina in Umbria, went to Rome, engaged in work connected with the stage, lost his money in commerce, then turned to writing comedies.

Twenty-one plays by Plautus have survived (one is incomplete). The basis of all is a free translation from comedies by such writers as Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon. So we have Greek manners of Athens about 300–250 BCE transferred to the Roman stage of about 225–185, with Greek places, people, and customs, for popular amusement in a Latin city whose own culture was not yet developed and whose manners were more severe. To make his plays live for his audience, Plautus included many Roman details, especially concerning slavery, military affairs, and law, with some invention of his own, notably in management of metres. The resulting mixture is lively, genial and humorous, with good dialogue and vivid style. There are plays of intrigue (Two Bacchises, The Haunted House, Pseudolus); of intrigue with a recognition theme (The Captives, The Carthaginian, Curculio); plays which develop character (The Pot of Gold, Miles Gloriosus); others which turn on mistaken identity (accidental as in the Menaechmi; caused on purpose as in Amphitryon); plays of domestic life (The Merchant, Casina, both unpleasant; Trinummus, Stichus, both pleasant).

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plautus is in five volumes.

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Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut
Leila Tarazi Fawaz
Harvard University Press, 1983

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Merchants and Scholars
Essays in the History of Exploration and Trade
John Parker
University of Minnesota Press, 1965
Merchants and Scholars was first published in 1965. 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 of essays, collected in memory of James Ford Bell, reflects in some measure the broad scope and rich diversity of the James Ford Bell Collection of the University of Minnesota Library. All ten of the essays are based on or related to materials in the Bell collection.Founded by the late Mr. Bell, who was a prominent figure in the modern economic history of Minnesota, the collection had its origins in his interest in the commercial penetration of North America. As the collection developed, it became apparent that it would not be possible to study the merchants and explorers who came to North America apart from their contemporaries who probed South America, Africa, and Asia. The scope of the collection thus was expanded until it became worldwide, including the works of philosophers, geographers, navigators, merchants, and others who provided European readers with the knowledge they needed to enlarge their sphere of commerce.In an introduction, John Parker, former curator of the collection, explains the significance of the concept of the Bell collection to an understanding of history. He makes it clear that we cannot understand the reality of a world laced together by the bonds of commerce until we have learned how these bonds developed.The essays, which cover a wide range of subjects, show the interdependence of men of adventure and their scholarly contemporaries. Essays by Thomas Goldstein and Elisabeth Hirsch show that the scientists and humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were deeply concerned with geographic thought and new discoveries. David Quinn and Ward Barrett discuss economic undertakings by merchants of the Old World in the New, while Burton Stein and Paul Bamford deal with historic problems of economy in Asia and the Mediterranean, respectively. John Webb, Frank Gillis, and Ernst Abbe relate economic enterprise and exploration to the development of the cartography of Russia and Hudson Bay. Helen Wallis and O.H.K. Spate concern themselves with English and French interests in the southern oceans. In its publication of these studies the Bell collection continues the tradition of cooperation between the merchant and the scholar.
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Merchants' Daughters
Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China
Edited by Helen F. Siu
Hong Kong University Press, 2010
Historians and anthropologists have long been interested in South China where powerful lineages and gendered hierarchies are juxtaposed with unorthodox trading cultures, multi-ethnic colonial encounters, and market-driven consumption. The divergent paths taken by women in Hong Kong and Guangdong during thirty years of Maoist closure, and the post-reform cross-border fluidities have also gained analytical attention. This collection provides further theoretical application of a “regional construct” that appreciates process, transcends definitive powers of administrative borders, and brings out nuanced gender notions. An interdisciplinary team uses fine-grained historical and ethnographic materials to map out three crucial historical junctures in the evolution of South China, from late imperial to contemporary periods, that have significantly shaped the construction of gendered space. Stressing process and human agency, the volume uses women’s experiences to challenge dichotomous analytical perspectives on lineage patriarchy, colonial institutions, power, and social activism. For scholars of modern Hong Kong society, Merchants’ Daughters refocuses attention to cultural dynamics in the South China region of which Hong Kong is an integral part. For audiences generally interested in gender issues, this book illuminates the analytical importance of long historical periods in which layers of social, political, and economic activities intersected to constitute the complicated positioning of women.
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Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ch'ing China
Wellington K. K. Chan
Harvard University Press, 1977

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Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World
Kenneth G. Hirth
Harvard University Press, 2013
Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World examines the structure, scale, and complexity of economic systems in the pre-Hispanic Americas, with a focus on the central highlands of Mexico, the Maya Lowlands, and the central Andes. Civilization in each region was characterized by complex political and religious institutions, highly skilled craft production, and the long-distance movement of finished goods. Scholars have long focused on the differences in economic organization between these civilizations. Societies in the Mexican highlands are recognized as having a highly commercial economy centered around one of the world’s most complex market systems; those of the Maya region are characterized as having reciprocal exchange networks and periodic marketplaces that supplemented the dominant role of the palace; and those of the central Andes are recognized as having multiple forms of resource distribution, including household-to-household reciprocity, barter, environmental complementarity, and limited market exchange. Essays in this volume examine various dimensions of these ancient economies, including the presence of marketplaces, the operation of merchants (and other individuals) who exchanged and moved goods across space, the role of artisans who produced goods as part of their livelihood, and the trade and distribution networks through which goods were bought, sold, and exchanged.
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Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women
ITALIAN MIGRANTS IN URBAN AMERICA
Diane C. Vecchio
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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Merchants of Medicines
The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century
Zachary Dorner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.
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Merchants of Style
Art and Fashion After Warhol
Natasha Degen
Reaktion Books, 2023
Looking at Andy Warhol’s legacy as maker and muse, this book offers a critical examination of the coalescence of commerce and style.
 
Merchants of Style explores the accelerating convergence of art and fashion, looking at the interplay of artists and designers, and the role of institutions—both public and commercial—that have brought about this marriage of aesthetic industries. The book argues that one figure more than any other anticipated this moment: Andy Warhol. Beginning with an overview of art and fashion’s deeply entwined histories, and then picking up where Warhol left off, Merchants of Style tells the story of art’s emboldened forays into commerce and fashion’s growing embrace of art. As the two industries draw closer together than ever before, this book addresses urgent questions about what this union means and what the future holds.
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Merchants of Violence
An Inquiry into the Mafia and the Conditions of Sicily
Leopoldo Franchetti
Harvard University Press

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Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers
Criminalization, Economics, and the Transformation of the Maritime World (1200–1600)
Edited by Thomas Heebøll-Holm, Philipp Höhn, and Gregor Rohmann
Campus Verlag, 2019
Maritime history tends to draw stark lines between legal and illegal trading practices, with the naval and commercial vessels of sovereign states on one side and rogue pirates and smugglers on the other. This book reveals how, in the centuries before the emergence of the nation-state, maritime societies were shaped equally by both sanctioned and illicit trade—and that the line between the two was much less defined than it is now. The kind of high-seas activity now called piracy was often viewed in the early modern period as, at worst, a disruption of established distribution channels, but just often, it was viewed as simply another legitimate economic stream. Depending on one’s perspective, the same person could be seen as a bandit or an entrepreneur. Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers tells the story of how these individuals came to be labelled as criminals as a way to enforce the codified economic and political positions that arose from sustained European state-building between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Mercury
William Sheehan
Reaktion Books, 2018
The Sun may be a mass of incandescent gas, but in the plasmatic reaches of its solar winds spins another seemingly glowing (but relatively minute) orb. The last of the five naked-eye planets discovered in ancient times, Mercury has long been an elusive, enigmatic world. As seen from the Earth, it never emerges far from the Sun, and astronomers in the telescopic era found it challenging to work out basic data such as its rotation period, the inclination of its axis, and whether or not it possessed an atmosphere.

In this fully up-to-date and beautifully illustrated account, William Sheehan describes the growth of our knowledge of planet Mercury. From the puzzles it posed for early astronomers to radar studies in the 1960s, and from the first spacecraft fly-bys by the Mariner 10 probe in the 1970s to the latest images from the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) orbital mission between 2011 and 2015, Mercury has slowly been brought into clear focus. But although we have now mapped its surface in exquisite detail, revealing strange features like volcanic plains and water-ice deposits in craters near the poles, mysteries remain—such as why its core has the highest iron content of any body of the Solar System. Rather than growing duller on closer acquaintance, this most mercurial of planets continues to fascinate us, offering important clues to scientists as they seek to better understand the origin and evolution of the Earth.
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Mercury
Edited by Faith Vilas, Clark R. Chapman, and Mildred Shapley Matthews
University of Arizona Press, 1989
"At its best in synthesizing [current available] information to derive theories about the geological and tectonic histories of the planet ."—Science Books & Films

"This book is another in the excellent University of Arizona Space Science Series, each of which is based on a conference. . . .but goes far beyond a conference proceedings to present a comprehensive summary of current knowledge. . . .I recommend this book as a valuable compendium of current knowledge."—Pageoph

"This collection will be a most valuable addition to any research library."—Choice
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Mercury and the Making of California
Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890
Andrew Scott Johnston
University Press of Colorado, 2015
Mercury and the Making of California, Andrew Johnston’s multidisciplinary examination of the history and cultural landscapes of California’s mercury-mining industry, raises mercury to its rightful place alongside gold and silver in the development of the American West.

Gold and silver could not be refined without mercury; therefore, its production and use were vital to securing power and wealth in the West. The first industrialized mining in California, mercury mining had its own particular organization, structure, and built environments. These were formed within the Spanish Empire, subsequently transformed by British imperial ambitions, and eventually manipulated by American bankers and investors. In California mercury mining also depended on a workforce differentiated by race and ethnicity. The landscapes of work and camp and the relations among the many groups involved in the industry—Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, English, Irish, Cornish, American, and Chinese—form a crucial chapter in the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American West.

This pioneering study explicates the mutual structuring of the built environments of the mercury-mining industry and the emergence of California’s ethnic communities. Combining rich documentary sources with a close examination of the existing physical landscape, Johnston explores both the detail of everyday work and life in the mines and the larger economic and social structures in which mercury mining was enmeshed, revealing the significance of mercury mining for Western history.
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Mercy Mercy Me
Elena Georgiou
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
"The debut of a lucid, lusty new voice in American poetry. Honesty is her trademark, tempered by the rolling music of her voice. This book unveils the story of a vigorous soul's journey in and out of love. Whether her speaker is buying lunch at a falafel stand or bumping into the ghost of Marvin Gaye in a supermarket, Georgiou's zesty clarity prevails, sweetened by her impeccable ear and fired, as it always is, by her burning heart. A Cypriot by way of London, now happily a New Yorker, Georgiou fearlessly tackles the raw hungers of friendship and romance with a poetry of rare independence and vulnerability, sass, and sophistication."—Molly Peacock
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The Mercy of Eternity
A Memoir of Depression and Grace
Eric G. Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2010
In his best-selling book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Eric G. Wilson challenged our culture’s blindly insistent pursuit of happiness at all costs. In his harrowing yet ultimately hopeful memoir, The Mercy of Eternity, the author turns an unsparing eye on his own continuing struggle with bipolar depression and finds, within the very illness that causes so much suffering, the resources for hope, forgiveness, and love.

As a bright student-athlete on his way to West Point, Eric Wilson seemed to be well on the way to a fulfilling life. Yet he was haunted by overwhelming feelings of his deep insignificance. As he grew older, the traditional means of fulfillment—marriage and professional success—did nothing to assuage the descents into darkness and destructive behavior. Therapy and medication have offered some relief, but the birth of his daughter ultimately forces his hand. In some ways, the answer has been in front of him the whole time, for English professor Wilson finds in the literature of Coleridge, Blake, and others the lessons that depression might teach. When he comes upon “negative theology”—the school of thought that finds God in the “dark night of the soul”—Wilson discovers the framework for a radical call to forgive depression. 

Only by forgiving this capricious, impersonal force is Wilson able to find the grace to move beyond the cycles of destructive self-absorption.Wilson admits that he continues to struggle, but in facing his depression instead of trying to escape it, he finds wisdom and grace.

Beautifully and accessibly written, The Mercy of Eternity is a brief yet profound meditation on the largest question of life.
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Mercy Seat
Bruce Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Bruce Smith's new collection of poems presents a formidable vision of growing up "white male North American" in the fifties and sixties. With poems whose subjects range from football to politics to jazz, Mercy Seat is a book by a native son who has survived the brokenness of his country to sing a paradoxical new song for a new age.
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Mercy without End
Toward a More Inclusive Church
Lavina Fielding Anderson
Signature Books, 2020

These eighteen essays span more than thirty years of Lavina Fielding Anderson’s concerns about and reflections on issues of inclusiveness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including her own excommunication for “apostasy” in 1993, followed by twenty-five years of continued attendance at weekly LDS ward meetings. Written with a taste for irony and an eye for documentation, the essays are timeless snapshots of sometimes controversial issues, beginning with official resistance to professionally researched Mormon history in the 1980s. They underscore unanswered questions about gender equality and repeatedly call attention to areas in which the church does not live up to its better self. Compassionately and responsibly, it calls Anderson’s beloved religion back to its holiest nature.

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Mere and Easy
Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy
Edited by Jorge Lucero
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Collage making offers everyone from small children to trained artists the ability to express themselves through images. In this new Common Threads collection, Jorge Lucero draws on the archive of the journal Visual Arts Research to present articles focused on the place of collage in fine art and education. Guided by the twinned concepts of mereness --collage's reputation as a trifle--and easiness --the technique's accessibility to all--the authors explore how subversive, debased, and effortless the collage gesture can be. What emerges is in and of itself a collage, one that groups disparate scholarship into a whole that reveals how the technique may serve as a method of scholarship and as a wellspring of vibrant, even radical, pedagogical utility. Contributors: Michael Biggs, Ian Buchanan, Daniela Büchler, Paul Duncum, Charles R. Garoian, Kit Grauer, Anniina Suominen Guyas, Kathleen Keys, Jorge Lucero, Dan Nadaner, Ryan Patton, Janet N. Stevenson, Robert W. Sweeny, and Stuart Thompson.
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Mere Civility
Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration
Teresa M. Bejan
Harvard University Press, 2017

A New Statesman Best Book of the Year
A Church Times Book of the Year

We are facing a crisis of civility, a war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this virtue appears critical.

Most modern appeals to civility follow arguments by Hobbes or Locke by proposing to suppress disagreement or exclude views we deem “uncivil” for the sake of social harmony. By comparison, mere civility—a grudging conformity to norms of respectful behavior—as defended by Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, might seem minimal and unappealing. Yet Teresa Bejan argues that Williams’s outlook offers a promising path forward in confronting our own crisis, one that challenges our fundamental assumptions about what a tolerant—and civil—society should look like.

“Penetrating and sophisticated.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

“Would that more of us might learn to look into the past with such gravity and humility. We might end up with a more (or mere) civil society, yet.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

“A deeply admirable book: original, persuasive, witty, and eloquent.”
—Jacob T. Levy, Review of Politics

“A terrific book—learned, vigorous, and challenging.”
—Alison McQueen, Stanford University

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A Mere Kentucky of a Place
The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists
Keith Harper
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass region and proclaimed heaven to be “a mere Kentucky of a place.” The Commonwealth’s first Baptists certainly thought so as they began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association, widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association’s Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid honor code—with mixed results.

With a keen eye for human interest, Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the “New Eden” of Kentucky.

Ideal for course adoption in religious studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the Kentucky frontier.

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Meredith Nicholson
A Writing Life
Ralph D. Gray
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007
Meredith Nicholson stands as the most Hoosier of all Indiana writers, serving as an outspoken advocate for his state. Indiana literary historian Arthur S. Shumaker called Nicholson the “most rabid” of Indiana’s major authors. In addition to writing such national best-sellers as Zelda Dameron and The House of a Thousand Candles, his best-known work, Nicholson won praise as an insightful essayist, with his work published in such national magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic Monthly. "His inherent belief in democracy and democratic values, and his unapologetic patriotism permeate his essays," notes Gray, "some of which excoriated the Ku Klux Klan and upheld the rights and virtues of women, attitudes not always popular at the time."
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Merengue
Dominican Music and Dominican Identity
Paul Austerlitz
Temple University Press, 1997

Merengue—the quintessential Dominican dance music—has a long and complex history, both on the island and in the large immigrant community in New York City. In this ambitious work, Paul Austerlitz unravels the African and Iberian roots of merengue and traces its growth under dictator Rafael Trujillo and its renewed popularity as an international music.

Using extensive interviews as well as written commentaries, Austerlitz examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures. He tells the tale of merengue's political functions, and of its class and racial significance. He not only explores the various ethnic origins of this Ibero-African art form, but points out how some Dominicans have tried to deny its African roots.

In today's global society, mass culture often marks ethnic identity. Found throughout Dominican society, both at home and abroad, merengue is the prime marker of Dominican identity. By telling the story of this dance music, the author captures the meaning of mass and folk expression in contemporary ethnicity as well as the relationship between regional, national, and migrant culture and between rural/regional and urban/mass culture. Austerlitz also traces the impact of migration and global culture on the native music, itself already a vibrant intermixture of home-grown merengue forms.

From rural folk idiom to transnational mass music, merengue has had a long and colorful career. Its well-deserved popularity will make this book a must read for anyone interested in contemporary music; its complex history will make the book equally indispensable to anyone interested in cultural studies.

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Merger Games
The Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and the Rise and Fall of the Allegheny Healthcare System
Judith P. Swazey
Temple University Press, 2011

With deepening financial problems, Allegheny Heath, Education and Research Foundation filed for bankruptcy in 1998—in the midst of its landmark merger of The Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University. What resulted was another dire event in an escalating disaster. As civil and criminal investigations probed Allegheny's collapse, the survival of the medical school and other health sciences university schools, and the operation of the hospitals hung in the balance. Fortunately, a savior arrived in the form of Drexel University who used this opportunity to create its own medical school.

Merger Games is Judith Swazey's gripping account of this historic transaction. Based on extraordinarily detailed first-hand research and continuous inside access to the developments, this book clearly delineates who the players were and what this merger means for the future of medical education and institutional healthcare.

Merger Games is a definitive history of one of the most important academic medicine mergers in Philadelphia and the country, which happened at a time when medical care was becoming commodified in almost every state.

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Mergers and Acquisitions
Edited by Alan J. Auerbach
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Do mergers lead to financial instability? How are shareholders' interests best served? How significant a role do taxes play? What are the implications for the structure and concentration of industry? Mergers and Acquisitions, prepared in an nontechnical format, answers these and other questions that have arisen from the takeover boom that began in the mid-1980s.
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Mergers and Productivity
Edited by Steven N. Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Mergers and Productivity offers probing analyses of high-profile mergers in a variety of industries. Focusing on specific acquisitions, it illustrates the remarkable range of contingencies involved in any merger attempt. The authors clearly establish each merger's presumed objectives and the potential costs and benefits of the acquisition, and place it within the context of the broader industry. Striking conclusions that emerge from these case studies are that merger and acquisition activities were associated with technological or regulatory shocks, and that a merger's success or failure was dependent upon the acquirer's thorough understanding of the target, its corporate culture, and its workforce and wage structures prior to acquisition.

Sifting through a wealth of carefully gathered evidence, these papers capture the richness, the complexity, and the economic intangibles inherent in contemporary merger activity in a way that large-scale studies of mergers cannot.
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Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California
John A. Kastor
University of Michigan Press, 2003

If a teaching hospital loses funding, what is the next option?

Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California investigates the recent mergers of six of the nation's most respected teaching hospitals. The author explains the reasons why these institutions decided to change their governance and the factors that have allowed two of them to continue to operate while forcing the third to dissolve after only 23 months of operation.

The case studies contained within this book rely on an impressive amount of research. Notably, instead of citing only published articles and books, the author includes information from numerous, extensive personal interviews with key participants in the various mergers. With this research the author not only presents to the reader a picture of why these mergers came about, but also investigates how the organizations have fared since joining together. The mergers are analyzed and compared in order to identify various methods of merger formation as well as ways in which other newly formed hospitals might accomplish a variety of important goals.

Offering a spectacular account of some of the mergers that occurred in the health care field at the close of the twentieth century, these stories provide insight into academia's relationship with teaching hospitals and the challenges involved in bringing prestigious and powerful medical institutions together. The institutions discussed are Partners, the corporation which includes the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the union of the New York and Presbyterian hospitals in New York City, and the UCSF Stanford, the merged teaching hospitals of the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford. This book will particularly appeal to professionals and academics interested in medicine, business, and organizational studies.

John Kastor is Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. From 1984 to 1997, he was Theodore E. Woodward Professor of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Maryland and Chief of the Medical Service at the University of Maryland Hospital. Dr. Kastor is also the author of Arrhythmias.
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Meridian
Kathleen Jesme
Tupelo Press, 2012
A meditation on the death of a mother, Meridian measures the hours and reflects on how experience collapses and elongates time, creating a lens through which we can look at how we’re connected and separated. And the poet asks: Is music our best refusal to accede to the irrationality of death?
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The Meritocracy Quartet
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2011
Acclaimed writer Jeffrey Lewis is known for his deft portrayals of relatable figures from all walks of life. In The Meritocracy Quartet, his four interlinking novels—Meritocracy: A Love Story, The Conference of the Birds, Theme Song for an Old Show, and Adam the King—have been brought together for the first time into a single volume. Set against the backdrop of the changing American landscape over four decades, The Meritocracy Quartet is a testament to the country’s evolving personality.

The quartet follows Louie, a Yale graduate from a modest background with a gift for forging connections in high and low places. Beginning in the 1960s, as he documents a going-away party for a fellow Yalie on his way to Vietnam, and continuing through his spiritual encounters with a 1970s group of city misfits, his turn to television writing in the 1980s, and a tragic love story between two of his close friends in the 1990s, Louie chronicles not only his own personal struggles—his silent love for his best friend’s girl, his delicate relationship with an at-times absent father—but also the attitudes, events, and people that marked his generation. From the Vietnam War to George W. Bush, from television trends to the divide between the haves and have-nots, The Meritocracy Quartet is a moving witness to everything America had to offer in the latter portion of the twentieth century.
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The Merits of Women
Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
Moderata Fonte
University of Chicago Press, 2018
You would as well look for blood in a corpse as for the least shred of decency in a man . . .
 
Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . .
 
Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it’s ten o’clock when it’s in fact barely two . . .
 
A man without a woman is like a fly without a head . . .
 
These are but a small selection of the quips bandied about at this lively gathering of women. The broad topic at hand is the relative pros and cons of men, and the cases in point range from pick-up artists to locker-room talk, and from double standards to fragile masculinity.

Yet this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millenials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women—variously married, widowed, single, and betrothed—attending a respectable Venice garden party. Written in the early 1590s by Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of the Renaissance poet and writer Modesta Pozzo, this literary dialogue interrogates men and men’s treatment of women, and explores by contrast the virtues of singledom and female friendship. As the women diverge from their theme—discussing everything from astrology to the curative powers of plants and minerals—a remarkable group portrait of wisdom, wit, and erudition emerges.

A new introduction by translator Virginia Cox and foreword by Dacia Maraini situate The Merits of Women in its historical context, written as it was on the cusp of Shakespeare’s heyday, and straddling the centuries between the feminist works of Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. Elegantly presented for a general audience, this is a must-read for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike, not to mention the perfect subtle gift for any mansplaining friend who needs a refresher on the merits of women . . . and their superiority to men.
 
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Merle Haggard
The Running Kind
By David Cantwell
University of Texas Press, 2013

Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. He’s charted more than a hundred country hits, including thirty-eight number ones. He’s released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. In 2011 he was feted as a Kennedy Center Honoree. But until now, no one has taken an in-depth look at his career and body of work.

In Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, David Cantwell takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Covering the entire breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music, which helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including songs such as “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” “Working Man Blues,” “Kern River,” “White Line Fever,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “If We Make It through December,” among many more), Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions—most of all, the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed—that define not only Haggard’s music and public persona but the very heart of American culture.

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The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader
Philosophy and Painting
Edited and with an Introduction by Galen A. Johnson; Michael B. Smith, Translation Editor
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity
Jack Reynolds
Ohio University Press, 2005

While there have been many essays devoted to comparing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with that of Jacques Derrida, there has been no sustained book-length treatment of these two French philosophers. Additionally, many of the essays presuppose an oppositional relationship between them, and between phenomenology and deconstruction more generally.

Jack Reynolds systematically explores their relationship by analyzing each philosopher in terms of two important and related issues—embodiment and alterity. Focusing on areas with which they are not commonly associated (e.g., Derrida on the body and Merleau-Ponty on alterity) makes clear that their work cannot be adequately characterized in a strictly oppositional way. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity proposes the possibility of a Merleau-Ponty-inspired philosophy that does not so avowedly seek to extricate itself from phenomenology, but that also cannot easily be dismissed as simply another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. Reynolds argues that there are salient ethico-political reasons for choosing an alternative that accords greater attention to our embodied situation.

As the first full-length monograph comparing the philosophers, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida will interest scholars and students in European philosophy and teachers of courses dealing with deconstruction.

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The Merleau-Ponty Reader
Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine
Northwestern University Press, 2007
The first reader to offer a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908-1961) work, this selection collects in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical twentieth-century philosopher’s thought.

Arranged chronologically, the essays are grouped in three sections corresponding to the major periods of Merleau-Ponty’s work: First, the years prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, the early, existentialist period during which he wrote important works on the phenomenology of perception and the primacy of perception; second, the years of his work as professor of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne, a period especially concerned with language; and finally, his years as chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France, a time devoted to the articulation of a new ontology and philosophy of nature. The editors, who provide an interpretive introduction, also include previously unpublished working notes found in Merleau-Ponty’s papers after his death. Translations of all selections have been updated and several appear here in English for the first time.

By contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of art and politics within the overall development of his thought, this volume allows readers to see both the breadth of his contribution to twentieth-century philosophy and the convergence of the various strands of his reflection.
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Merleau-Ponty
Space, Place, Architecture
Patricia M. Locke
Ohio University Press, 2015

Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, now indispensable to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to architectural theory and practice is well established. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vibrant collection of original essays by twelve eminent philosophers who mine Merleau-Ponty’s work to consider how we live and create as profoundly spatial beings. The resulting collection is essential to philosophers and creative artists as well as those concerned with the pressing ethical issues of our time.

Each contributor presents a different facet of space, place, or architecture. These essays carve paths from Merleau-Ponty to other thinkers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, Ettinger, and Piaget. As the first collection devoted specifically to developing Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of place and architecture, this book will speak to philosophers interested in the problem of space, architectural theorists, and a wide range of others in the arts and design community.

Contributors: Nancy Barta-Smith, Edward S. Casey, Helen Fielding, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Randall Johnson, D. R. Koukal, Suzanne Cataldi Laba, Patricia M. Locke, Glen Mazis, Rachel McCann, David Morris, and Dorothea Olkowski.

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Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology
David Morris
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Winner of the 2020 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize in Phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology
shows how the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from its very beginnings, seeks to find sense or meaning within nature, and how this quest calls for and develops into a radically new ontology. 

David Morris first gives an illuminating analysis of sense, showing how it requires understanding nature as engendering new norms. He then presents innovative studies of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, revealing how these early works are oriented by the problem of sense and already lead to difficulties about nature, temporality, and ontology that preoccupy Merleau-Ponty's later work. Morris shows how resolving these difficulties requires seeking sense through its appearance in nature, prior to experience—ultimately leading to radically new concepts of nature, time, and philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology makes key issues in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy clear and accessible to a broad audience while also advancing original philosophical conclusions.
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Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision
A Proposal for the Completion of "The Visible and the Invisible"
Douglas Low
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. What exists of it is a mere beginning, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works as the basis for completion. Working from this material and the philosopher's own outline, Low presents how this important work would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.
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Merleau-Ponty's Ontology
Second Edition
M.C. Dillon
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Originally published in 1988, M.C. Dillon's classic study of Merleau-Ponty is now available in a revised second edition containing a new preface and a new chapter on "Truth in Art." Dillon's thesis is that Merleau-Ponty has developed the first genuine alternative to ontological dualism seen in Western philosophy. From his early work on the philosophical significance of the human body to his later ontology of flesh, Merleau-Ponty shows that the perennial problems growing out of dualistic conceptions of mind and body, subject and object, immanence and transcendence can be resolved within the framework of a new way of thinking based on the exemplar of the worldly embodiment of thought.
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Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
Ted Toadvine
Northwestern University Press, 2009

In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far better suited to the questions than other modern approaches, with their over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the natural sciences.

The book examines key moments in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature while roughly following the historical sequence of his major works. Toadvine begins by setting out an ontology of nature proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior. He takes up the theme of the expressive role of reflection in Phenomenology of Perception, as it negotiates the area between nature’s own "self-unfolding" and human subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "intertwining" and his account of space provide a transition to Toadvine’s study of the philosopher’s later work—in which the concept of "chiasm," the crossing or intertwining of sense and the sensible, forms the key to Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology—and ultimately to the relationship between humans and nature.

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The Mermaid’s Tale
Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things
Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan
Harvard University Press, 2009

Even after 150 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea—in which competition prevails—be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.

Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid’s Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.

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Merpeople
A Human History
Vaughn Scribner
Reaktion Books, 2024
A wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated history of mermaids and mermen from the classics to cosplay.

People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times “mermaiding” has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world. In Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and using 117 striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are—and always have been—everywhere.
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Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams
Rachel Hadas
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams is a collection that--as the title indicates--looks both outward and inward. It begins with essays on Greek poets from Homer to Ritsos, in which Rachel Hadas's knowledge of classical literature and her years in Greece richly inform the writing. The collection also includes a loving exploration of the work of poet James Merrill, who was a close personal friend of the author's.
The second half of the book combines explorations of various corners and horizons of the poetry scene, including neglected American poets and Hadas's thoughts on her own poetics and career. "Two Letters from New York" and "Tangled Web Sites" take bemused looks at literary or cultural landscapes. Hadas also looks inward: to dreams and dreamwork, to her dead mother's address book, to the emblematic drilling of a well in a country house. The range of selections includes essays, interviews, memoir, criticism, and a few of Hadas's own poems.
Rachel Hadas is the author of eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her most recent book is Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and an American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University.
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Merry Christmas!
Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday
Karal Ann Marling
Harvard University Press, 2000

It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus.

Viewing Christmas through the media of mass culture--engravings and lithographs, magazine fiction, pictorial ads, news photos, cards, and movies--Marling tells us how the beloved Christmas tree grew out of a much-reprinted image of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a decorated fir; how Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know; how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol borrowed from Washington Irving's imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England; and how the holiday, balancing between the private and public realms, conferred a central and defining role on women.

A celebration of the visual culture of the season, Merry Christmas! offers captivating evidence that Christmas in America is primarily a secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways.

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The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023
A modern translation that will appeal to new audiences.

In her translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Dipika Guha updates the language of Shakespeare’s comedy through the lens of our current moment. Guha maintains the humor at the heart of the play while making it accessible for both performers and audiences.

This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
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The Mertiyo Rathors of Merto, Rajasthan
Select Translations Bearing on the History of a Rajput Family, 1462–1660, Volumes 1–2
Richard Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, translators and annotators
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Me?tiyo Ra?ho?s of Me?to, Rajasthan is a treasure for scholars of Rajput history. Richard D. Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, whose contributions to Rajput studies are well known to specialists in the field, have given us a work of deep and exacting scholarship. It is the culmination of decades devoted to the study of Middle Marwari chronicles from Rajasthan. The sources translated here provide access to the fortunes of a branch of the Jodhpur royal family, and in doing so they illuminate the larger world of Rajputs in the middle period.
The Me?tiyo Ra?ho?s are significant for several reasons. Their story traces the emergence of a Rajput brotherhood into local prominence and follows the establishment of their kingdom on the eastern edge of Marva? as a defined territorial unit. The evolution of the Me?tiyos as a brotherhood passed through several clearly defined stages, including a relationship with the house of Jodhpur that ranged from mutual support among brothers to hostility and clear separation. A study of the Me?tiyos in this context provides a unique view of the formation of a strong and indpenedent Rajput cadet line, of the establishment and defense of a local territory, and of the internal relations among Rajput brotherhoods regarding issues of precedence, honor, patronage, and service.
The translations are accompanied by an extensive explanatory apparatus taking various forms, which includes a valuable essay on Rajput social organization, complete genealogies, and biographies of all the major personages of the chronicles.
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Merton College Library
Julia C. Walworth
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings, and its remarkable collection of manuscripts and rare books. However, a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval library down and replace it was only narrowly prevented. This brief history of Europe’s oldest surviving academic library begins with its origins in the thirteenth century, when a new type of community of scholars was first being set up, and follows through to the present day and its multiple functions as a working college library, a unique resource for researchers, and a delight for curious visitors.

​Drawing on the remarkable wealth of documentation in the college’s archives, this is the first history of the library to explore collections, buildings, readers, and staff across more than seven hundred years. The story is told in part through stunning color images that depict not only exceptional treasures but also the library furnishings and decorations, and which show manuscripts, books, bindings, and artifacts of different periods in their changing contexts. Featuring a historical timeline and a floor plan of the college, this book will be of interest to historians, alumni, and tourists alike.
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Mesa Verde National Park
Shadows of the Centuries, Revised Edition
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Originally published in 1988, Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries is an engaging and artfully illustrated history of an enigmatic assemblage of canyons and mesas tucked into the southwestern corner of Colorado. Duane A. Smith recounts the dramatic 1888 "discovery" of the cliff dwellings and other Anasazi ruins and the ensuing twenty-year campaign to preserve them. Smith also details the resulting creation of a national park in 1906 and assesses the impact of more recent developments - railroads and highways, air pollution, and the growing significance of tourism - on the park's financial and ecological vitality. This revised and completely redesigned edition includes more than 50 illustrations and will be enjoyed by readers interested in environmental, Western, and Colorado history.
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Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
Robert Darnton
Harvard University Press, 1968
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton, in his lively study of mesmerism and its relation to eighteenth-century radical political thought and popular scientific notions, provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.
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Mesmerized
Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
Alison Winter
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Across Victorian Britain, apparently reasonable people twisted into bizarre postures, called out in unknown languages, and placidly bore assaults that should have caused unbearable pain all while they were mesmerized. Alison Winter's fascinating cultural history traces the history of mesmerism in Victorian society. Mesmerized is both a social history of the age and a lively exploration of the contested territory between science and pseudo-science.

"Dazzling. . . . This splendid book . . . gives us a new form of historical understanding and a model for open and imaginative reading."—James R. Kinkaid, Boston Globe

"A landmark in the history of science scholarship."—John Sutherland, The Independent

"It is difficult to imagine the documentary side of the story being better done than by Winter's well-researched and generously illustrated study. . . . She is a lively and keen observer; and her book is a pleasure to read purely for its range of material and wealth of detail. . . . Fruitful and suggestive."—Daniel Karlin, Times Literary Supplement

"An ambitious, sweeping and fascinating historical study. . . . Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and well-illustrated."—Bernard Lightman, Washington Times
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Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful
Matthew Lippman
Four Way Books, 2020
This is the “Age of the Bullet,” Matthew Lippman writes in Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, days in which “bullets sprout other bullets in the bullet garden” and a caricature of a onesie-wearing president sucking on a pacifier appears on the cover of a national magazine. Lippman’s poems are wildly inventive yet grounded in the 21st-century dailyness of parenting and dinner parties and Dunkin Donuts, all of which serve as launch pads into perennial questions of mercy and trust. “I don’t care what you say about this city,” Lippman writes in the title poem whose images recall New York City in the days following 9/11: “We sit down together on the sidewalk / and we hold one another.” These are brash, beautiful poems, big-hearted in their tilt toward sentimentality and their yearning for something more, something better.
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Mesoamerica after the Decline of Teotihuacan AD 700-900
Richard A. Diehl
Harvard University Press, 1989

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The Mesoamerican Ballgame
Edited by Vernon L. Scarborough and David R. Wilcox
University of Arizona Press, 1991
The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.
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The Mesoamerican Codex Re-entangled
Production, Use and Re-use of Pre-colonial Documents
Ludo Snijders
Leiden University Press, 2017
This innovative work aims to piece together the cultural biography of Mesoamerica’s precolonial codices. Today, fewer than twenty manuscripts are all that remain of the Mesoamerican book-making tradition. These pictographic and hieroglyphic texts have often been researched according to their content, but such studies have ignored their nature as material objects. By tracing the paths these books have followed over the past five hundred years, Ludo Snijders offers fascinating insights into their production, use and reuse, destruction, rediscovery, and reinvention.
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Mesoamerican Experiences of Illness and Healing
Rebecca Dufendach, special issue editor
Duke University Press
The sixteenth-century encounter between Mesoamericans and Europeans resulted in a tremendous loss of life in indigenous communities and significantly impacted their health and healing strategies. Contributors to this special issue of Ethnohistory address how indigenous people experienced bodily health in the wake of this encounter. By exploring archival indigenous and Spanish-language documents, contributors address how bodily health was experienced in the wake of the European encounter and uncover transformations of health discourses and experiences of illness. They investigate eclectic healing practices and medical chants; changing notions of the causes of illnesses; and the language of cleansing ceremonies, bone-setting, midwifery, and maternal medicine.

Contributors. Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, Rebecca Dufendach, Servando Hinojosa, Timothy W. Knowlton, Gabrielle Vail, Edber Dzidz Yam
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Mesoamerican Healers
Edited by Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom
University of Texas Press, 2001

Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow.

Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.

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Mesoamerican Lithic Technology
Kenneth Hirth
University of Utah Press, 2003

Any overview of prehispanic society in the Americas would identify its obsidian core-blade production as a unique and highly inventive technology. Normally termed prismatic blades, these long, parallel-sided flakes are among the sharpest cutting tools ever produced by humans. Their standardized form permitted interchangeable use, and such blades became the cutting tool of choice throughout Mesoamerica between 600–800 B.C. Because considerable production skill is required, increased demand may have stimulated the appearance of craft specialists who played an integral role in Mesoamerican society. Some investigators have argued that control over obsidian also had a significant effect on the development and organization of chiefdom and state-level societies.

While researchers have long recognized the potential of obsidian studies, recent work has focused primarily on compositional analysis to reconstruct trade and distribution networks. Study of blade production has received much less attention, and many aspects of this highly evolved craft are still lost.

This volume seeks to identify current research questions in Mesoamerican lithic technology and to demonstrate that replication studies coupled with experimental research design are valuable analytical approaches to such questions.

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Mesoamerican Plazas
Arenas of Community and Power
Edited by Kenichiro Tsukamoto and Takeshi Inomata
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Until now, archaeological and historical studies of Mesoamerican plazas have been scarce compared to studies of the surrounding monumental architecture such as pyramidal temples and palaces. Many scholars have assumed that ancient Mesoamericans invested their labor, wealth, and symbolic value in pyramids and other prominent buildings, viewing plazas as by-products of these buildings. Even when researchers have recognized the potential significance of plazas, they have thought that plazas as vacant spaces could offer few clues about their cultural and political roles. Mesoamerican Plazas challenges both of these assumptions.
 
The primary question that has motivated the contributors is how Mesoamerican plazas became arenas for the creation and negotiation of social relations and values in a community. The thirteen contributions stress the significance of interplay between power relations and embodied practices set in specific historical and material settings, as outlined by practice theory and performance theory. This approach allows the contributors to explore broader anthropological issues, such as the negotiation of power relations, community making, and the constitution of political authorities.
 
Overall, the contributions establish that physical interactions among people in communal events were not the outcomes of political machinations held behind the scenes, but were the actual political processes through which people created, negotiated, and subverted social realities. If so, spacious plazas that were arguably designed for interactions among a large number of individuals must have also provided critical arenas for the constitution and transformation of society.
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Mesoamerican Ritual Economy
Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives
E. Christian Wells
University Press of Colorado, 2007
In Mesoamerican Ritual Economy, scholars examine the extent to which economic processes were driven by and integrated with religious ritual in ancient Mesoamerica. The contributors explore how traditional rituals - human blood sacrifice and self-mutilation, "flowery wars" and battling butterfly warriors, sumptuous feasting with chocolate and tamales, and fantastic funerary rites - intertwined with all sectors of the economy. Examining the interplay between well-established religious rites and market forces of raw material acquisition, production, circulation, and consumption, this volume effectively questions the idea that materialism alone motivates the production, exchange, and use of objects.

Exploring the intersection of spirituality and materiality, Mesoamerican Ritual Economy will be of interest to all scholars studying how worldview and belief motivate economic behavior. The authors consider a diverse set of Mesoamerican cultural patterns in order to investigate the ways in which ritual and economic practices influenced each other in the operation of communities, small-scale societies, and state-level polities. Contributors include: Sarah B. Barber, Frances F. Berdan, Karla L. Davis-Salazar, Barbara W. Fash, William L. Fash, Antonia E. Foias, Arthur A. Joyce, Brigitte Kovacevich, Ben A. Nelson, Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, Katherine A. Spielmann, John M. Watanabe, E. Christian Wells.
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Mesoamerican Writing Systems
A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 30th and 31st, 1971
Elizabeth P. Benson
Harvard University Press

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Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage
From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs
Davíd Carrasco
University Press of Colorado, 2000
For more than a millennium the great Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (c. 150 B.C.E. - 750 C.E.) has been imagined and reimagined by a host of subsequent cultures, including our own. Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage engages the subject of the unity and diversity of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica by focusing on the classic heritage of this ancient city. This new volume is the product of several years of research by members of Princeton University's Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project and Mexico's Proyecto Teotihuacán. Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives - including the history of religions, anthropology, archaeology, and art history - and a wealth of new data, Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage examines Teotihuacan's rippling influence across Mesoamerican time and space, including important patterns of continuity and change, and its relationships, both historical and symbolic, with Tenochtitlan, Cholula, and various Maya communities.

The contributors to Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage offer a wide range of individual interpretations, but they agree that Teotihuacan, more than any other pre-Hispanic center, was a paradigmatic source that formed the art and architecture, cosmology and ritual life, and conceptions of urbanism and political authority for significant parts of the Mesoamerican world. This great city achieved the prestige of being the site of the creation of the cosmos and of effective social and political space in Mesoamerica through its capacity to symbolize, perform, and export its imperial authority. These essays reveal the different ways in which Teotihuacan's classic heritage both fed and fed on the dynamic interactivity of the entire area. Whether or not a paradigm shift in Mesoamerican studies is taking place, certainly a new contextual understanding of Teotihuacan and the diversities and unities of Mesoamerica is emerging in these pages.

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Mesopotamia
Julian Reade
Harvard University Press, 1991

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Mesopotamia
Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods
Jean Bottéro
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Our ancestors, the Mesopotamians, invented writing and with it a new way of looking at the world. In this collection of essays, the French scholar Jean Bottero attempts to go back to the moment which marks the very beginning of history.

To give the reader some sense of how Mesopotamian civilization has been mediated and interpreted in its transmission through time, Bottero begins with an account of Assyriology, the discipline devoted to the ancient culture. This transmission, compounded with countless discoveries, would not have been possible without the surprising decipherment of the cuneiform writing system. Bottero also focuses on divination in the ancient world, contending that certain modes of worship in Mesopotamia, in their application of causality and proof, prefigure the "scientific mind."
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Mesquite Pods to Mezcal
10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines
Verónica Pérez Rodriguez, Shanti Morell-Hart, and Stacie M. King
University of Texas Press, 2024

New case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.

Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted, diets changed, and food became a stronger marker of identity. Examining the present, further studies document how traditional foodways persist and what they mean for contemporary Oaxacans, whether they are traveling ancient roads, working outside the region, or rebuilding after an earthquake. Together, the original case studies in this volume demonstrate how new methods and diverse theoretical approaches can come together to trace the development of a rich food tradition, one that is thriving today.

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Messa da Requiem
Critical Edition Study Score
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi is the first critical edition of the composer’s oeuvre. Together with his operas, the series presents his songs, his choral music and sacred pieces, and his string quartet and other instrumental works.

This edition of Messa da Requiem is based on Verdi’s autograph score and other original sources. The appendices include two pieces from the compositional history of the Requiem: an early version of the Libera me, composed in 1869 as part of a collaborative work planned as a memorial to Rossini; and the Liber scriptus, which in the original score of the Manzoni memorial Requiem was composed as a fugue for chorus. The introduction to the score traces the complex compositional and performance histories of the Requiem and discusses the work’s problems of instrumentation and notation, while the critical commentary gives a full description of the sources and an account of all editorial decisions.
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Messa da Requiem for the Anniversary of the Death of Manzoni, 22 May 1874
Giuseppe Verdi Edited by David Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Messa da Requiem is the fourth work to be published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. Following the strict requirements of the series, this edition is based on Verdi's autograph and other authentic sources, and has been reviewed by a distinguished editorial board—Philip Gossett (general editor), Julian Budden, Martin Chusid, Francesco Degrada, Ursula Günther, Giorgio Pestelli, and Pierluigi Petrobelli. It is available as a two-volume set: a full orchestral score and a critical commentary. The appendixes include two pieces from the compositional history of the Requiem: an early version of the Libera me, composed in 1869 as part of a collaborative work planned as a memorial to Rossini; and the Liber scriptus, which in the original score of the Manzoni memorial Requiem was composed as a fugue in G minor. The score, which has been beautifully bound and autographed, is printed on high-grade paper in an oversized format. The introduction to the score discusses the work's genesis, instrumentation, and problems of notation. The critical commentary, printed in a smaller format, discusses the editorial decisions and traces the complex compositional history of the Requiem.
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