The idea to compare the African American political experience across several levels of office first occurred to Nordin as he was researching Arthur W. Mitchell’s 1934 congressional campaign. The question of white voter support was of particular significance, as was whether the continuation of that support depended upon his avoiding minority issues in office. To begin answering these questions and others, Nordin compares the experiences of eleven African American politicians. Taken from across the country to ensure a wide sample and accurate depiction of the subject, the case studies examined include Tom Bradley, mayor of Los Angeles; David Dinkins, mayor of New York; Freeman Bosley Jr., mayor of St. Louis; Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts; Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois; Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia; and Representative J. C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma, among others. As Nordin analyzes these individuals and their contribution to the whole, he concludes that biracial elections in the United States have yet to progress beyond race.

From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama investigates the implications of race in politics, a highly relevant topic in today’s American society. It offers readers a chronological overview of the progress made over the last several decades as well as shows where there is room for growth in the political arena. By taking a pertinent topic for the era and placing it in the context of history, Nordin successfully chronicles the roles of race and race relations in American politics.

In this fascinating biography, Dennis S. Nordin chronicles the life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell, the first black Democrat to be elected to Congress. Although he is now one of history's forgotten figures, Mitchell was once almost as well known among black college students as Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Nordin, however, shows that Mitchell's achievements and thus his fame were the direct result of his dishonorable deeds.

Mitchell's life began humbly in rural Alabama in 1883. After a memorable boyhood, he studied briefly at Tuskegee Institute, which had a major effect on Mitchell's outlook. He went on to study law in Washington, D.C., and thereafter became involved in politics when the Republicans sent him to Chicago in 1928 to campaign for Herbert Hoover. Impressed by Chicago's ward system and patronage politics, he returned to the city and made a bid for a congressional seat, changing political parties in an effort to oust black Republican Congressman Oscar DePriest. To accomplish this, Mitchell resorted to "Uncle Tomming," ingratiating himself with the white bosses of the Chicago Machine.

Within five years a Machine nomination was in hand, and Mitchell found himself owing his political success and thus his loyalty to the Chicago Machine. Because he was under strict orders from Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly not to cause problems or be confrontational, Mitchell rarely, if ever, supported the interests of his constituents.

It was only in the later years of his political career that Mitchell began to show opposition to his Machine backing. He had been an opponent of the NAACP in his first years in Congress, but later became a strong supporter of an NAACP antilynching bill. In 1937, Mitchell sued three railroad companies for not offering equal treatment and accommodations for all passengers. The case went to the Supreme Court, which gave Mitchell a favorable ruling. As a result of these "confrontational" acts, the Chicago Machine quickly decided not to endorse Mitchell in the elections of 1942.

In his research, Nordin relies on such primary sources as manuscripts, newspapers, and court records, as well as information from interviews with Mitchell's friends, neighbors, colleagues, political rivals, and widow. Woven tightly together, these sources form a narrative that reveals a most complex and intriguing individual, a man whose political and moral views and acts were strongly linked to the goals of the great Chicago political Machine.

In the 1970s, the accepted environmental thinking was that overpopulation was destroying the earth. Prominent economists and environmentalists agreed that the only way to stem the tide was to impose restrictions on how we used resources, such as land, water, and fish, from either the free market or the government. This notion was upended by Elinor Ostrom, whose work to show that regular people could sustainably manage their community resources eventually won her the Nobel Prize. Ostrom’s revolutionary proposition fundamentally changed the way we think about environmental governance. 
 
In The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, author Erik Nordman brings to life Ostrom’s brilliant mind. Half a century ago, she was rejected from doctoral programs because she was a woman; in 2009, she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Her research challenged the long-held dogma championed by Garrett Hardin in his famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which argued that only market forces or government regulation can prevent the degradation of common pool resources. The concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons” was built on scarcity and the assumption that individuals only act out of self-interest. Ostrom’s research proved that people can and do act in collective interest, coming from a place of shared abundance. Ostrom’s ideas about common resources have played out around the world, from Maine lobster fisheries, to ancient waterways in Spain, to taxicabs in Nairobi. In writing The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, Nordman traveled extensively to interview community leaders and stakeholders who have spearheaded innovative resource-sharing systems, some new, some centuries old. Through expressing Ostrom’s ideas and research, he also reveals the remarkable story of her life.
 
Ostrom broke barriers at a time when women were regularly excluded from academia and her research challenged conventional thinking. Elinor Ostrom proved that regular people can come together to act sustainably—if we let them. This message of shared collective action is more relevant than ever for solving today’s most pressing environmental problems.

Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history.
      This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against the epochal break thesis in light of historical antecedents. Contributors discuss topics such as: science as a continuing epistemological enterprise; the decline of the individual scientist and the rise of communities; the intertwining of scientific and technological needs; links to prior practices and ways of thinking; the alleged divide between mode-1 and mode-2 research methods; the commodification of university science; and the shift from the scientific to a technological enterprise. Additionally, they examine the epochal break thesis using specific examples, including the transition from laboratory to real world experiments; the increased reliance on computer imaging; how analog and digital technologies condition behaviors that shape the object and beholder; the cultural significance of humanoid robots; the erosion of scientific quality in experimentation; and the effect of computers on prediction at the expense of explanation.
      Whether these events represent a historic break in scientific theory, practice, and methodology is disputed. What they do offer is an important occasion for philosophical analysis of the epistemic, institutional and moral questions affecting current and future scientific pursuits.

An updated edition of the definitive history of Scandinavia over the past five centuries

Despite certain distinctions and differences, the lands of Scandinavia, or Norden—Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands—are united by bonds of culture, language, and geography, and by a shared history that comes richly to life in this landmark work. Now in an expanded, updated edition, this authoritative chronicle of five centuries of Scandinavian history incorporates the geopolitical developments and momentous events that have marked the Nordic world in recent decades.

 

Scandinavia since 1500 situates the region’s political history within the traditional European chronology—in which the long “modern” period is subdivided into the Renaissance, early modern, modern, and contemporary. Within this framework, Byron J. Nordstrom traces the various ways in which economic, social, and cultural ideas and practices have come to Scandinavia from abroad, only to be modified and recast in a uniquely Nordic character. Long-unquestioned national mythologies come under Nordstrom's scrutiny, along with historical blind spots and erasures, as he ranges from canonical figures like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Christian IV of Denmark to the constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the resistance movements in World War II, and the Scandinavian welfare states, literary culture, and modern design. Expanded to include the nature and realities of the increasingly postindustrial economies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—including environmental concerns, integration with Europe, globalization, and immigration—Scandinavia since 1500 offers a comprehensive yet nuanced portrait of this unique region in all its political, diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural complexity.

 

 

Cover alt text: Bold white title and author name across breathtaking snowy landscape of sun-touched cliffs beside a waterway and scattering of homes.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, American kitchens had a welcome guest in “Aunt Sammy,” a creation of the US Department of Agriculture and its Bureau of Home Economics. Through the radio program Housekeeper’s Chat, Aunt Sammy gave lively advice on food preparation, household chores, parenting and children, and gender dynamics as she encouraged women to embrace the radio and a host of modern consumer household products. The recipes she shared were gathered, in 1927, into a cookbook that became a valuable household manual for tens of thousands of Americans.

Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes revives the famous cookbook and joins it with extensive excerpts from the accompanying radio broadcasts, providing a fascinating study of how a witty and charming fictionalized personae became one of the early celebrity chefs of the radio age.

The Provisions of War examines how soldiers, civilians, communities, and institutions have used food and its absence as both a destructive weapon and a unifying force in establishing governmental control and cultural cohesion during times of conflict. Historians as well as scholars of literature, regional studies, and religious studies problematize traditional geographic boundaries and periodization in this essay collection, analyzing various conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a foodways lens to reveal new insights about the parameters of armed interactions.

The subjects covered are as varied and inclusive as the perspectives offered—ranging from topics like military logistics and animal disease in colonial Africa, Indian vegetarian identity, and food in the counterinsurgency of the Malayan Emergency, to investigations of hunger in Egypt after World War I and American soldiers’ role in the making of US–Mexico borderlands. Taken together, the essays here demonstrate the role of food in shaping prewar political debates and postwar realities, revealing how dietary adjustments brought on by military campaigns reshape national and individual foodways and identities long after the cessation of hostilities

This volume in the Living with the Shore series provides practical and specific information on the status of the nation's coast and useful guidelines that enable residents, visitors, and investors to live with and enjoy the shore without costly and futile struggles against the forces of nature.

“The ultimate dino tour.”—Library Journal, Best Reference 2019

“Perhaps the easiest way to glimpse . . . all this new knowledge is to leaf through Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs. . . . One of the principal paleontologists of our time."—New York Review of Books

“A delight.”—Open Letters Review

“Possibly the best general audience dinosaur book of 2019.”—Paleoaerie

Dinosaurs have held sway over our imaginations since the discovery of their bones first shocked the world in the nineteenth century. From the monstrous beasts stalking Jurassic Park to the curiosities of the natural history museum, dinosaurs are creatures that unite young and old in awestruck wonder. Digging ever deeper into dinosaurs’ ancient past, science continues to unearth new knowledge about them and the world they inhabited, a fantastic time when the footprints of these behemoths marked the Earth that we humans now walk.

Who better to guide us through this ancient world than paleontologist Mark A. Norell? A world-renowned expert in paleontology, with a knowledge of dinosaurs as deep as the buried fossils they left behind, Norell is in charge of what is perhaps America’s most popular collection of dinosaur bones and fossils, the beloved displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In The World of Dinosaurs, he leads readers through a richly illustrated collection detailing the evolution of these ancient creatures. From the horns of the Protoceratops to the wings of the Archaeopteryx, readers are invited to explore profiles of dinosaurs along with hundreds of color photographs, sketches, maps, and other materials—all rooted in the latest scientific discoveries—sure to both capture the imagination and satisfy a prehistoric curiosity. The World of Dinosaurs presents an astonishing collection of knowledge in an immersive visual journey that will fascinate any fan of Earth’s ancient inhabitants.

Nobody knows how to tell a story like Bobby Norfolk, and here he tells his own life story. Norfolk grew up in hardscrabble neighborhoods of Saint Louis, Missouri, during the 1950s and 60s, sometimes walking to elementary school from an apartment his parents could not afford to heat. Lifting himself up by force of will and God-given talent, Norfolk defeated a childhood stutter to become a high school dramatist and later an exceptional college student. The path was never easy—and often frightening. With men of color being killed all-too-frequently in America, Norfolk sought a personal identity based upon talent and hard work, but also upon where safety and justice might be found. He tells these stories—some heartwarming or humorous, some frightful and treacherous—honestly, with a graceful mindfulness that all would do well to emulate.

Finalist for the 2020 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today. 

Redefines media history through Chicano film and television.

One of the most influential figures in ethnic media studies takes direct aim at how Chicano filmmaking has been represented in the history of media in the United States. Shot in America tackles seemingly intractable dilemmas involving the political and market functions of film and TV to provide a definitive response to the debates over cultural and racial identity that have embroiled media and cultural studies over the past two decades.

Noriega offers a compelling and detailed description of an enormous body of work by Chicano media makers against the backdrop of Chicano social movements, politics, and activism over a forty-year period—an extraordinary exposition of the civil rights movement, media reform activities, and public affairs programming that constitutes the prehistory of independent and minority cinemas.Noriega reveals the ways in which Chicano and other minority protests both emerged within and were regulated by the very institutions that excluded them. Shot in America is a study with broad implications for our understanding of cultural politics and the entertainment industries.

Rewrites Latin American film from the perspective of nationhood.

In the current "global" moment, the study of Latin American cinema has become insistently national—a phenomenon fully explored in this collection of essays by some of the most interesting and innovative scholars of media and Latin American culture working today.

The contributors to Visible Nations consider different national film and video histories in Latin America since the silent period. From the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and reception theory, among others, they consider the styles through which—and the ends toward which—the nation has been represented, desired, and contested in films, film industries, and alternative video work in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. The result is nothing less than a rewriting of Latin American film history. Contributors: Patricia Aufderheide, American U; Charles Ramírez Berg, U of Texas at Austin; Gilberto Moises Blasini; Julianne Burton-Carvajal, U of California, Santa Cruz; Seth Fein, Georgia State U; Claire F. Fox, Stanford U; Brian Goldfarb, U of Rochester; Ilene S. Goldman; Monica Hulsbus; Ana M. López, Tulane U; Kathleen Newman, U of Iowa; Laura Podalsky, Bowling Green State U; Harmony H. Wu.

The first in-depth treatment of Latino film and video.

This groundbreaking volume is the first to examine the range of Latino media arts, from independent feature production to documentary to experimental video. The essays explore the work of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Latino film and video artists and address avant-garde practices, queer media, and performance art as well as more conventional film and video representations.

Contributors to The Ethnic Eye provide close readings of a wide variety of films and videos, including Stand and Deliver, American Me, Bedhead, El Mariachi, Carmelita Tropicana, Improper Conduct, Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation, Border Brujo, Mérida Proscrita, and Spitfire. The essays are unified by a concern with the creation of a common ground for Latino media arts, one that is pan-ethnic rather than narrowly transcribed by race, ethnicity, or national heritage. The volume also provides the first in-depth treatment of such artists as Robert Rodriquez, Ela Troyano, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and Frances Salomé España. Eclectic in the range of media artists and works considered, The Ethnic Eye is unique in its inclusion of site-specific public art, as well as performance-based works. Contributors: Marcos Becquer; Charles Ramírez Berg, U of Texas; C. Ondine Chavoya; Marvin D’Lugo, Clark U; Claire F. Fox, Stanford U; Ilene S. Goldman; Carmen Huaco-Nuzum, U of California, Davis; Lillian Jiménez; Alisa Lebow; Scott MacDonald, Utica College; José Esteban Muñoz, New York U; Frances Negrón-Muntaner; Kathleen Newman, U of Iowa; Christopher Ortiz.

This reflection on colonial culture argues for an examination of “Indochina” as a fictive and mythic construct, a phantasmatic legacy of French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Panivong Norindr uses postcolonial theory to demonstrate how French imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. In this careful reading of architecture, film, and literature, Norindr lays bare the processes of fantasy, desire, and nostalgia constituent of French territorial aggression against Indochina.
Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, Norindr shows how the exhibition’s display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France’s cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism. He critiques the Surrealist counter-exposition mounted to oppose the imperialist aims of the Exposition Coloniale, and the Surrealist incorporation and appropriation of native artifacts in avant-garde works. According to Norindr, all serious attempts at interrogating French colonial involvement in Southeast Asia are threatened by discourse, images, representations, and myths that perpetuate the luminous aura of Indochina as a place of erotic fantasies and exotic adventures. Exploring the resilience of French nostalgia for Indochina in books and movies, the author examines work by Malraux, Duras, and Claudel, and the films Indochine, The Lover, and Dien Bien Phu.
Certain to impact across a range of disciplines, Phantasmatic Indochina will be of interest to those engaged in the study of the culture and history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, as well as specialists in the fields of French modernism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

The award-winning memoir of one woman’s struggles and triumphs to reclaim an identity she had lost.

This inspirational story of one girl’s search for a home is an engaging first-person narrative of life during the Great Depression and World War II. Readers and critics alike offer lavish praise for Norling’s graceful, simple prose and the heartbreaking, ultimately redemptive tale she shares.

A new collection of stories from celebrated Kentucky author Gurney Norman “A beautiful book” … “A remarkable, eye-opening set of stories” … “Brilliantly arranged” … “An exhilarating mirroring of consciousness itself” … “Grand and important, funny and heartbreaking” … “An act of grace” Allegiance is a brilliant and original set of stories by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman. Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream-of-consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life. Each story builds on what has come before, “prisms enlarging the effect of the whole …” The stories are humorous and heartbreaking, told mainly in the voice of Norman’s fictional narrator, Wilgus Collier. From his working-class childhood in the coalfields of Appalachia to the center of the 1960s counterculture and back again to Kentucky, Norman’s journey has been a life of many movements. This is a jacketed hardcover edition of Allegiance, featuring a foreword by poet Leatha Kendrick, an author’s note, and an original cover painting by Appalachian artist Pam Oldfield Meade. A selection of nonfiction pieces comprises the book’s epilogue. Published by Old Cove Press

A classic tale of heroism and revolution by celebrated Kentucky writer Gurney Norman. First published in 1975 as a spoken-word record, Gurney Norman’s classic folktale tells the story of resistance among “the folks” in a mythical “hill domain” ruled by an absurd but evil king. Told in mock-heroic language, the story employs satire, comic irony, regional speech, and “the voice of a storyteller,” as a fugitive hero, Jack, leads the people in revolt against an oppressive monarchy. Featuring cover art by eastern Kentucky artist Pam Oldfield Meade, this new edition of Ancient Creek includes four essays about the story by scholar Annalucia Accardo, writer Dee Davis, professor Kevin I. Eyster, and the late poet and scholar Jim Wayne Miller. Published in 2012 by Old Cove Press

What does it mean to have visual intuition? Can we gain geometrical knowledge by using visual reasoning? And if we can, is it because we have a faculty of intuition? In After Euclid, Jesse Norman reexamines the ancient and long-disregarded concept of visual reasoning and reasserts its potential as a formidable tool in our ability to grasp various kinds of geometrical knowledge. The first detailed philosophical case study of its kind, this text is essential reading for scholars in the fields of mathematics and philosophy.

Though much beloved and widely produced, Molière's satirical comedies pose a problem for those reading or staging his works today: how can a genre associated with biting caricature and castigation deliver engaging theater? Instead of simply dismissing social satire as a foundation for Molière's theater, as many have done, Larry F. Norman takes seriously Molière's claim that his satires are first and foremost effective theater.

Pairing close readings of Molière's comedies with insightful accounts of French social history and aesthetics, Norman shows how Molière conceived of satire as a "public mirror" provoking dynamic exchange and conflict with audience members obsessed with their own images. Drawing on these tensions, Molière portrays characters satirizing one another on stage, with their reactions providing dramatic conflict and propelling comic dialogue. By laying bare his society's system of imagining itself, Molière's satires both enthralled and enraged his original audience and provide us with a crucial key to the classical culture of representation.

The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world.

At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

A fleeting figure dressed in a white party dress roams the streets of southwest Chicago. A long-dead Iowa college student treads the staircase in an old building. A ghostly, plaid-shirted workman plays peek-a-boo with a ticket seller in a Minnesota theater. A phantom wolf prowls Ohio's Jackson and Pike Counties.

For decades, journalist Michael Norman has been tracking down spine-tingling tales that seem to arise from authentic incidents in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Haunted Heartland he offers more than eighty entertaining, eerie stories. Are they true in the world that we know, or only in a dark vale of twilight?

Grab a cozy blanket, light a few flickering candles, and enjoy the unnerving tales of Haunted Wisconsin. Gathered from personal interviews with credible eyewitnesses, on-site explorations, historical archives, newspaper reports, and other sources, these scores of reports date from Wisconsin’s early settlement days to recent inexplicable events.
    You’ll read about Wisconsin’s most famous haunted house, Summerwind; three Milwaukee men who encountered the beautiful ghost of National Avenue; a phantom basketball player; a spectral horse that signaled death in the pioneer era of the Wisconsin Dells; a poltergeist in St. Croix County who attracted a crowd of more than three hundred spectators; the Ridgeway Ghost who haunts the driftless valleys of southwestern Wisconsin; a swinging railroad lantern held by unseen hands; the Ghost Island of the Chippewa Flowage; and many others. Are ghosts real? That’s for you to decide!
    Now available in a Third Edition with updates and several new accounts, Haunted Wisconsin remains a favorite collection of unexplained midwestern tales, enjoyed by readers of all ages.

 
"Norris Norman has picked a very difficult subject for his book and has done wonders with it.  There is probably no more obscure part of the history of Arkansas than the period in which this book is situated, namely, the second decade of the nineteenth century. Mr. Norman makes it come alive in a very convincing way.  His main character, a French/Indian mixed-blood or metis, is carefully crafted and is ideally positioned to tell the tale of the New Madrid earthquake, the early White settlers of a newly-American Arkansas, and the daily lives of Indians and Europeans alike..."

-- Hon. Morris S. Arnold, author of Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas 1686-1836

Little Man chronicles the adventures of Amos, his mule and his dog as they settle with their family in northeastern Arkansas in the early 1800s. In these historically accurate tales, young Amos, his mule and his dog encounter the challenges of making a home and a living along the Little Sandy River. The climate, the river's seasonal changes of mood, moonshiners, wild hogs, and more contribute to the development of Amos into a grown man.

Throughout his life, maps have been a source of imagination and wonder for Christopher Norment. Mesmerized by them since the age of eight or nine, he found himself courted and seduced by maps, which served functional and allegorical roles in showing him worlds that he might come to know and helping him understand worlds that he had already explored.

Maps may have been the stuff of his dreams, but they sometimes drew him away from places where he should have remained firmly rooted. In the Memory of the Map explores the complex relationship among maps, memory, and experience—what might be called a “cartographical psychology” or “cartographical history.” Interweaving a personal narrative structured around a variety of maps, with stories about maps as told by scholars, poets, and fiction writers, this book provides a dazzlingly rich personal and intellectual account of what many of us take for granted.

A dialog between desire and the maps of his life, an exploration of the pleasures, utilitarian purposes, benefits, and character of maps, this rich and powerful personal narrative is the matrix in which Norment embeds an exploration of how maps function in all our lives. Page by page, readers will confront the aesthetics, mystery, function, power, and shortcomings of maps, causing them to reconsider the role that maps play in their lives.

Based on three seasons of field research in the Canadian Arctic, Christopher Norment's exquisitely crafted meditation on science and nature, wildness and civilization, is marked by bottomless prose, reflection on timeless questions, and keen observations of the world and our place in it. In an era increasingly marked by cutting-edge research at the cellular and molecular level, what is the role for scientists of sympathetic observation? What can patient waiting tell us about ourselves and our place in the world?

His family at home in the American Midwest, Norment spends months on end living in isolation in the Northwest Territories, studying the ecology of the Harris's Sparrow. Although the fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhardt wrote, "God is at home, we are in the far country," Norment argues that an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual "far country" can be found in the lives of animals and arctic wilderness. For Norment, "doing science" can lead to an enriched aesthetic and emotional connection to something beyond the self and a way to develop a sacred sense of place in a world that feels increasingly less welcoming, certain, and familiar. 

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastical world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. We can almost hear the clock sound from within a glass castle, taste the fire-breathing roast boar, and smell the rose water cascading in a miniature fountain. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among artists in many fields, as well as the participation of the audience.

A Feast for the Eyes is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christina Normore draws on an array of artworks, archival documents, chroniclers’ accounts, and cookbooks to re-create these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which banquets were staged. Feast participants, she shows, developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment.

Challenging modern assumptions about the nature of artistic production and reception, A Feast for the Eyes yields fresh insight into the long history of multimedia work and the complex relationships between spectacle and spectators.

Among Asian countries—where until recently documentary filmmaking was largely the domain of central governments—Japan was exceptional for the vigor of its nonfiction film industry. And yet, for all its aesthetic, historical, and political interest, the Japanese documentary remains little known and largely unstudied outside of Japan. This is the first English-language study of the subject, an enlightening close look at the first fifty years of documentary film theory and practice in Japan. Beginning with films made by foreigners in the nineteenth century and concluding with the first two films made after Japan’s surrender in 1945, Abé Mark Nornes moves from a “prehistory of the documentary,” through innovations of the proletarian film movement, to the hardening of style and conventions that started with the Manchurian Incident films and continued through the Pacific War. Nornes draws on a wide variety of archival sources—including Japanese studio records, secret police reports, government memos, letters, military tribunal testimonies, and more—to chart shifts in documentary style against developments in the history of modern Japan. Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program in Film and Video Studies.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life.

The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists.

Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall

Set in western equitorial Africa on the estate of a wealthy American businessman, The Unmentionables opens with a pugnacious monologue warning the audience to get out now, while they still have a chance to do something really fun, like watch cable television. For those who choose to stay despite the allure of TV, the play follows the intersecting lives of members of the local population with the various Americans who have come to "do good in the world": a young Christian missionary who brings both food and the New Testament to the local children (and whose predecessor met with a grisly fate); a disenchanted Hollywood actress in search of meaning but finding only brutality; and the aging businessman and his wife, a woman simply desperate for conversation. Over the course of one long night their humanitarian notions of themselves are called into question as they come up against the realities of money, politics, and power. As the events escalate from calm to crisis with shocking speed, the worth of one American life is measured against the worth of their so-called American values, as they become the agents of violence against one sixteen-year-old African boy.

Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law is a wholly rhetorical practice. In Reclaiming Truth, Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory.
Norris presents his case in a series of closely argued chapters that take issue with the relativist position. He attempts to rehabilitate the value of truth in philosophy of science by restoring a lost distinction between concept and metaphor and argues that theoretical discourse, so far from being an inconsequential activity, has very real consequences, particularly in ethics and politics. This debate has become skewed, he suggests, through the widespread and typically postmodern idea that truth-claims must always go along with a presumptive or authoritarian bid to silence opposing views. On the contrary, there is nothing as dogmatic—or as silencing—as a relativism that acknowledges no shared truth conditions for valid or responsible discourse. Norris also offers a timely reassessment of several thinkers—Althusser and Derrida among them—whose reception history has been distorted by the vagaries of short-term intellectual fashion.
Reclaiming Truth will be welcomed by readers concerned with the uses and abuses of theory at a time when such questions are in urgent need of sustained and serious debate.

Kathleen Norris has touched readers throughout America with her thoughtful and provocative memoirs of faith: Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She is equally admired for her poetry of engagement with the spiritual world and its landscapes. Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life.

 Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet.  Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.

The Middle of the World reflects Norris’s strong gifts as a storyteller and poet of place. The locales are New York City, where she formerly lived, and South Dakota west of the Missouri River, where she is business manager of a family farm that raises wheat, sunflowers, and Hereford cattle. “The poems are about these places,” she writes, “and the more or less imagined lives in them: and also about family and inheritance; it was inheritance that moved me to South Dakota. Some of the poems are about faith: my own ideas as well as the traditional religious faith that is a thread running through my family history, both enhancing lives and running them.”

This is one of the volumes in the series of ‘Afterlives’ of the Classics, which is being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute.

Plutarch’s writings have had a varied reception history from when he was writing in the second century BCE down to today. This volume starts from what may be a translation into the Syriac dialect of a lost Plutarch essay; continues with a tribute from a leading scholar of the later Byzantine period; and follows the centuries of sustained enthusiasm from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This period started once a translation into Latin had become available, and ended when scholars in the nineteenth century lowered Plutarch’s reputation as historian, biographer, philosopher, and stylist. By the end of the century, he came to symbolize in the eyes of Tolstoy precisely what history should not be. Both the causes of the decline and the later recovery of interest raise important new questions about how Plutarch should be assessed in the twenty-first century. This is one of the early volumes in the series of ‘Afterlives’ of the Classics, being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg.  

"The Anonymous Renaissance offers a paradigm-shifting look at print culture in early modern England. North demonstrates through sound historical discussions and readings that anonymity was one of the defining practices of Renaissance authorship. It is difficult to overstate the originality and importance of this new study."-Jennifer Summit, Stanford University

The Renaissance was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the Renaissance rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period.

The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, and yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author. In sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice.

Written with clarity and grace, The Anonymous Renaissance will fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.

Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination is a major intervention into discussions of Caribbean practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization.” Examining sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in the Caribbean, Michaeline A. Crichlow argues that creolization—culture-creating processes usually associated with plantation societies and with subordinate populations remaking the cultural forms of dominant groups—must be liberated from and expanded beyond plantations, and even beyond the black Atlantic, to include productions of “culture” wherever vulnerable populations live in situations of modern power inequalities, from regimes of colonialism to those of neoliberalism. Crichlow theorizes a concept of creolization that speaks to how individuals from historically marginalized groups refashion self, time, and place in multiple ways, from creating art to traveling in search of homes. Grounding her theory in the material realities of Caribbean peoples in the plantation era and the present, Crichlow contends that creolization and Creole subjectivity are constantly in flux, morphing in response to the changing conditions of modernity and creatively expressing a politics of place.

Engaging with the thought of Michel Foucault, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Achille Mbembe, Henri Lefebvre, Margaret Archer, Saskia Sassen, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Crichlow argues for understanding creolization as a continual creative remaking of past and present moments to shape the future. She draws on sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to illustrate how national histories are lived personally and how transnational experiences reshape individual lives and collective spaces. Critically extending Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, she describes how contemporary Caribbean subjects remake themselves in and beyond the Caribbean region, challenging, appropriating, and subverting older, localized forms of creolization. In this book, Crichlow offers a nuanced understanding of how Creole citizens of the Caribbean have negotiated modern economies of power.

Norton examines the enactment of liberal ideas in popular culture; in the possessions of ordinary people and the habits of everyday life. She sees liberalism as the common sense of the American people: a set of conventions unconsciously adhered to, a set of principles silently taken for granted.

The author ranges over a wide expanse of popular activities (e.g. wrestling, roller derby, lotteries, shopping sprees, and dining out), as well as conventional political topics (e.g., the Constitution, presidency, news media, and centrality of law). Yet the argument is pointed and probling, never shallow or superficial. Fred and Wilma Flintstone are as vital to the republic as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

"In discussions that range from the Constitution and the presidency to money and shopping, voting, lotteries, and survey research, Norton discerns and imaginatively invents possibilities that exceed recognized actualities and already approved opportunities."—Richard E. Flathman, American Political Science Review

"[S]timulating and stylish exploration of political theory, language, culture, and shopping at the mall . . . popular culture at its best, informed by history and theory, serious in purpose, yet witty and modest in tone."—Bernard Mergen, American Studies International

Journalism has long been a major factor in defining the opinions of Russia’s literate classes. Although women participated in nearly every aspect of the journalistic process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female editors, publishers, and writers have been consistently omitted from the history of journalism in Imperial Russia. An Improper Profession offers a more complete and accurate picture of this history by examining the work of these under-appreciated professionals and showing how their involvement helped to formulate public opinion.

In this collection, contributors explore how early women journalists contributed to changing cultural understandings of women’s roles, as well as how class and gender politics meshed in the work of particular individuals. They also examine how female journalists adapted to—or challenged—censorship as political structures in Russia shifted. Over the course of this volume, contributors discuss the attitudes of female Russian journalists toward socialism, Russian nationalism, anti-Semitism, women’s rights, and suffrage. Covering the period from the early 1800s to 1917, this collection includes essays that draw from archival as well as published materials and that range from biography to literary and historical analysis of journalistic diaries.

By disrupting conventional ideas about journalism and gender in late Imperial Russia, An Improper Profession should be of vital interest to scholars of women’s history, journalism, and Russian history.

Contributors. Linda Harriet Edmondson, June Pachuta Farris, Jehanne M Gheith, Adele Lindenmeyr, Carolyn Marks, Barbara T. Norton, Miranda Beaven Remnek, Christine Ruane, Rochelle Ruthchild, Mary Zirin

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.

While many disciplines contribute to environmental conservation, there is little successful integration of science and social values. Arguing that the central problem in conservation is a lack of effective communication, Bryan Norton shows in Sustainability how current linguistic resources discourage any shared, multidisciplinary public deliberation over environmental goals and policy. In response, Norton develops a new, interdisciplinary approach to defining sustainability—the cornerstone of environmental policy—using philosophical and linguistic analyses to create a nonideological vocabulary that can accommodate scientific and evaluative environmental discourse.

Emphasizing cooperation and adaptation through social learning, Norton provides a practical framework that encourages an experimental approach to language clarification and problem formulation, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to creating solutions. By moving beyond the scientific arena to acknowledge the importance of public discourse, Sustainability offers an entirely novel approach to environmentalism.

Sustainability is a nearly ubiquitous concept today, but can we ever imagine what it would be like for humans to live sustainably on the earth? No, says Bryan G. Norton in Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. One of the most trafficked terms in the press, on university campuses, and in the corridors of government, sustainability has risen to prominence as a buzzword before the many parties laying claim to it have come close to agreeing how to define it. But the term’s political currency urgently demands that we develop an understanding of this elusive concept.

While economists, philosophers, and ecologists argue about what in nature is valuable, and why, Norton here offers an action-oriented, pragmatic response to the disconnect between public and academic discourse around sustainability. Looking to the arenas in which decisions are made—and the problems that are driving these decisions—Norton reveals that the path to sustainability cannot be guided by fixed, utopian objectives projected into the future; sustainability will instead be achieved through experimentation, incremental learning, and adaptive management. Drawing inspiration from Aldo Leopold’s famed metaphor of “thinking like a mountain” for a spatially explicit, pluralistic approach to evaluating environmental change, Norton replaces theory-dependent definitions with a new decision-making process guided by deliberation and negotiation across science and philosophy, encompassing all stakeholders and activists and seeking to protect as many values as possible. Looking across scales to today’s global problems, Norton urges us to learn to think like a planet.

This book—beautifully photographed and engagingly written—introduces hardworking, resourceful men and women who represent an artisanal craft that has roots in Europe but has been a Wisconsin tradition since the 1850s. Wisconsin produces more than 600 varieties of cheese, from massive wheels of cheddar and swiss to bricks of brick and limburger, to such specialties as crescenza-stracchino and juustoleipa. These masters combine tradition, technology, artistry, and years of dedicated learning—in a profession that depends on fickle, living ingredients—to create the rich tastes and beautiful presentation of their skillfully crafted products.
    Certification as a Master Cheesemaker typically takes almost fifteen years. An applicant must hold a cheesemaking license for at least ten years, create one or two chosen varieties of cheese for at least five years, take more than two years of university courses, consent to constant testing of their cheese and evaluation of their plant, and pass grueling oral and written exams to be awarded the prestigious title.
    James Norton and Becca Dilley interviewed these dairy artisans, listened to their stories, tasted their cheeses, and explored the plants where they work. They offer here profiles of forty-three active Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin, as well as a glossary of cheesemaking terms, suggestions of operations that welcome visitors for tours, tasting notes and suggested food pairings, and tasty nuggets (shall we say curds?) of information on everything to do with cheese.

 

 

Winner, Best Midwest Regional Interest Book, Midwest Book Awards

Beyond an adrenaline ride or a chronicle of bravura heroics, this unflinching view of a Minneapolis firefighter reveals the significant toll of emergency response

In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead.

From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Norton documents the life of an emergency responder in Minneapolis: the harrowing, heartbreaking calls, from helping the sick and hurt, to reassuring the scared and nervous, to attempting desperate measures and providing final words. In the midst of the uncertainty, fear, and loss caused by the Covid pandemic, Norton and his crew responded to the scene of George Floyd’s murder. The social unrest and racial injustice Norton had observed for years exploded on the streets of Minneapolis, and he and his fellow firefighters faced the fires, the injured, and the anguish in the days and months that followed.

Norton brings brutally honest insight and grave social conscience to his account, presenting a rare insider’s perspective on the insidious role of sexism and machismo in his profession, as well as an intimate observer’s view of individuals trapped in dire circumstances and a society ill equipped to confront trauma and death. His thought-provoking, behind-the-scenes depiction of the work of first response and last resort starkly reveals the realities of humanity at its finest and its worst.

“The foundation has been laid for fully autonomous,” Elon Musk announced in 2016, when he assured the world that Tesla would have a driverless fleet on the road in 2017. “It’s twice as safe as a human, maybe better.” Promises of technofuturistic driving utopias have been ubiquitous wherever tech companies and carmakers meet.

In Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving, technology historian Peter Norton argues that driverless cars cannot be the safe, sustainable, and inclusive “mobility solutions” that tech companies and automakers are promising us. The salesmanship behind the driverless future is distracting us from investing in better ways to get around that we can implement now. Unlike autonomous vehicles, these alternatives are inexpensive, safe, sustainable, and inclusive.

Norton takes the reader on an engaging ride —from the GM Futurama exhibit to “smart” highways and vehicles—to show how we are once again being sold car dependency in the guise of mobility. He argues that we cannot see what tech companies are selling us except in the light of history. With driverless cars, we’re promised that new technology will solve the problems that car dependency gave us—zero crashes! zero emissions! zero congestion!  But these are the same promises that have kept us on a treadmill of car dependency for 80 years.

Autonorama is hopeful, advocating for wise, proven, humane mobility that we can invest in now, without waiting for technology that is forever just out of reach. Before intelligent systems, data, and technology can serve us, Norton suggests, we need wisdom. Rachel Carson warned us that when we seek technological solutions instead of ecological balance, we can make our problems worse. With this wisdom, Norton contends, we can meet our mobility needs with what we have right now.

Gravel and Hawk dwells on the physical and cultural landscapes of the Texarkana border region, an area of stark natural beauty and even starker manifestations of its human habitation: oil derricks and pump jacks, logging trucks, chicken houses, come-to-Jesus billboards, and greasy catfish joints, a patchwork of dying farm towns and ragtag municipalities laced together by county roads, state highways, and that treacherous, rust-hued slurry known as the Red River. Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.

New York has long been both America’s leading cultural center and its sports capital, with far more championship teams, intracity World Series, and major prizefights than any other city. Pro football’s “Greatest Game Ever Played” took place in New York, along with what was arguably history’s most significant boxing match, the 1938 title bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. As the nation’s most crowded city, basketball proved to be an ideal sport, and for many years it was the site of the country’s most prestigious college basketball tournament. New York boasts storied stadiums, arenas, and gymnasiums and is the home of one of the world’s two leading marathons as well as the Belmont Stakes, the third event in horse racing’s Triple Crown.

New York sportswriters also wield national influence and have done much to connect sports to larger social and cultural issues, and the vitality and distinctiveness of New York’s street games, its ethnic institutions, and its sports-centered restaurants and drinking establishments all contribute to the city’s uniqueness.

New York Sports collects the work of fourteen leading sport historians, providing new insight into the social and cultural history of America’s major metropolis and of the United States. These writers address the topics of changing conceptions of manhood and violence, leisure and social class, urban night life and entertainment, women and athletics, ethnicity and assimilation, and more.