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Operation Homecoming
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, Updated Edition
edited by Andrew Carroll
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.
 
“One of the chanted mantras of our time is, ‘But I support the troops.’ Terrific. Now read Operation Homecoming to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.”—Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal
 
“This anthology is the honest voice of war. . . . In the end, they are all one voice, a voice we must hear, and must not forget.”—Jeff Shaara
 
“These voices are stirring, chilling, and unforgettable.”—Bobbie Ann Mason
 
“[Captures] what journalists cannot, no matter how close they get—firsthand accounts from the warriors and the families they leave behind.”—Chicago Tribune
 
 
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Operation Valhalla
Writings on War, Weapons, and Media
Friedrich Kittler. Edited and translated by Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz
Duke University Press, 2021
Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.
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Operation Whisper
The Capture of Soviet Spies Morris and Lona Cohen
Barnes Carr
University Press of New England, 2016
Meet Morris and Lona Cohen, an ordinary-seeming couple living on a teacher’s salary in a nondescript building on the East Side of New York City. On a hot afternoon in the autumn of 1950, a trusted colleague knocked at their door, held up a finger for silence, then began scribbling a note: Go now. Leave the lights on, walk out, don’t look back. Born and raised in the Bronx and recruited to play football at Mississippi State, Morris Cohen fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and with the U.S. Army in World War II. He and his wife, Lona, were as American as football and fried chicken, but for one detail: they’d spent their entire adult lives stealing American military secrets for the Soviet Union. And not just any military secrets, but a complete working plan of the first atomic bomb, smuggled direct from Los Alamos to their Soviet handler in New York. Their associates Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who accomplished far less, had just been arrested, and the prosecutor wanted the death penalty. Did the Cohens wish to face the same fate? Federal agents were in the neighborhood, knocking on doors, getting close. So get out. Take nothing. Tell no one. In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the full, true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI’s nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies—an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends, and very good at their work. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.
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Operational Images
From the Visual to the Invisual
Jussi Parikka
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An in-depth look into the transformation of visual culture and digital aesthetics

 

First introduced by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the term operational images defines the expanding field of machine vision. In this study, media theorist Jussi Parikka develops Farocki’s initial concept by considering the extent to which operational images have pervaded today’s visual culture, outlining how data technologies continue to develop and disrupt our understanding of images beyond representation.

Charting the ways that operational images have been employed throughout a variety of fields and historical epochs, Parikka details their many roles as technologies of analysis, capture, measurement, diagramming, laboring, (machine) learning, identification, tracking, and destruction. He demonstrates how, though inextricable from issues of power and control, operational images extend their reach far beyond militaristic and colonial violence and into the realms of artificial intelligence, data, and numerous aspects of art, media, and everyday visual culture.

Serving as an extensive guide to a key concept in contemporary art, design, and media theory, Operational Images explores the implications of machine vision and the limits of human agency. Through a wealth of case studies highlighting the areas where imagery and data intersect, this book gives us unprecedented insight into the ever-evolving world of posthuman visuality.

Cover alt text: Satellite photo on which white title words appear in yellow boxes. Yellow lines connect the boxes.

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The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal
Edited by Willem Remmelink
Leiden University Press, 2018
Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan (now the Center for Military History of the National Institute for Defense Studies) published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War.
The present volume, The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal, volume 26 of the series, describes the Japanese Navy’s role in the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago—at that time the largest transoceanic landing operation in the military history of the world. It includes, among others, the first complete Japanese analysis of the Battle of the Java Sea, a much-debated battle that ended disastrously for the Allies and opened the way to Java for the Japanese.
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Ophrys
The Bee Orchids of Europe
Henrik Ærenlund Pedersen and Niels Faurholdt
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2007
"The genus Ophrys, the charismatic bee orchids and their relatives, are one of the most diverse and biologically fascinating groups of plants to be encountered in Europe, particularly the Mediterranean. 

Ophrys – the Bee Orchids of Europe is an easy to use, comprehensive introduction to the plants found in Europe. It can be used as a field guide (with keys, descriptions and numerous colour photographs) and a standard reference (with chapters on structure, biology, evolution and conservation).  The chapter by Richard Manuel gives ample guidelines for cultivation for growers, and is especially helpful for conservationists introducing plants back into the wild. 

The classification is based on a broad species concept, and offers an alternative to the finely split classifications of the genus that prevail in most recent field guides.

Finally, the chapter ‘recommended Ophrys excursions’ is ideal for planning field trips."
 
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The Opinions of Mankind
Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War
Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower
University of Missouri Press, 2011
During the Cold War, the Soviets were quick to publicize any incident of racial hostility in the United States. Since violence by white Americans against minorities was the perfect foil to America’s claim to be defenders of freedom, news of these occurrences was exploited to full advantage by the Russians. But how did the Soviets gain primary knowledge of race riots in small American towns? Certainly, the Soviets had reporters stationed stateside, in big cities like New York, but research reveals that the majority of their information came directly from U.S. media sources.

Throughout this period, the American press provided the foreign media with information about racially charged events in the United States. Such news coverage sometimes put Washington at a disadvantage, making it difficult for government officials to assuage foreign reactions to the injustices occurring on U.S. soil. Yet in other instances, the domestic press helped to promote favorable opinions abroad by articulating themes of racial progress. While still acknowledging racial abuses, these press spokesmen asserted that the situation in America was improving. Such paradoxical messages, both aiding and thwarting the efforts of the U.S. government, are the subject of The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War.

The study, by scholars Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, describes and analyzes the news discourse regarding U.S. racial issues from 1946 to 1965. The Opinions of Mankindnot only delves into the dissemination of race-related news to foreign outlets but also explores the impact foreign perceptions of domestic racism had on the U.S. government and its handling of foreign relations during the period. What emerges is an original, insightful contribution to Cold War studies. While other books examine race and foreign affairs during this period of American history, The Opinions of Mankind is the first to approach the subject from the standpoint of press coverage and its impact on world public opinion.

This exhaustively researched and compellingly written volume will appeal to media scholars, political historians, and general readers alike. By taking a unique approach to the study of this period, The Opinions of Mankind presents the workings behind the battles for public opinion that took place between 1946 and 1965.
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The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture
Expression, Art, and Politics in an Age of Addiction
Travis D. Stimeling
West Virginia University Press, 2020
The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. From the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia to the role of cough syrup in mumble rap, and from a queer Appalachian zine to protests against the Sackler family’s art-world philanthropy, the essays here explore the intersections of expressive culture, addiction, and recovery.

Written for an audience of people working on the front lines of the opioid crisis, the book is essential reading for social workers, addiction counselors, halfway house managers, and people with opioid use disorder. It will also appeal to the community of scholars interested in understanding how aesthetics shape our engagement with critical social issues, particularly in the fields of literary and film criticism, museum studies, and ethnomusicology.
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Opium and the Limits of Empire
Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850
David Anthony Bello
Harvard University Press, 2005

The British opium trade along China's seacoast has come to symbolize China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narrative, opium is the primary medium through which China encountered the economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Opium, however, was not a Sino-British problem confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, an empire-wide crisis, and its spread among an ethnically diverse populace created regionally and culturally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

This book examines the crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators. The study of prohibition also permits a more comprehensive and accurate observation of the economics and criminology of opium. The Qing drug traffic involved the domestic production, distribution, and consumption of opium. A balanced examination of the opium market and state anti-drug policy in terms of prohibition reveals the importance of the empire's landlocked western frontier regions, which were the domestic production centers, in what has previously been considered an essentially coastal problem.

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The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West
Diana L. Ahmad
University of Nevada Press, 2011

America’s current "war on drugs" is not the nation’s first. In the mid-nineteenth century, opium-smoking was decried as a major social and public health problem, especially in the West. Although China faced its own epidemic of opium addiction, only a very small minority of Chinese immigrants in America were actually involved in the opium business. It was in Anglo communities that the use of opium soon spread and this growing use was deemed a threat to the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit and to its growing mportance as a world economic and military power. The Opium Debate examines how the spread of opium-smoking fueled racism and created demands for the removal of the Chinese from American life. This meticulously researched study of the nineteenth-century drug-abuse crisis reveals the ways moral crusaders linked their antiopium rhetoric to already active demands for Chinese exclusion. Until this time, anti-Chinese propaganda had been dominated by protests against the economic and political impact of Chinese workers and the alleged role of Chinese women as prostitutes. The use of the drug by Anglos added another reason for demonizing Chinese immigrants. Ahmad describes the disparities between Anglo-American perceptions of Chinese immigrants and the somber realities of these people’s lives, especially the role that opium-smoking came to play in the Anglo-American community, mostly among middle- and upper-class women. The book offers a brilliant analysis of the evolution of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, plus important insights into the social history of the nineteenth-century West, the culture of American Victorianism, and the rhetoric of racism in American politics.
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Opium
Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
Harvard University Press, 2010

Known to the Greeks as opos or opion, as afiun in Persian and Arabic, and fuyung in Chinese, opium is at once a palliative and a poison. Its exotic origins, its literary associations, and the properties that are, often erroneously, attributed to it have ensured an ongoing air of mystery.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy reveals the long and fascinating history of a powerful and addictive drug and explores the changing fortunes of the modern-day illicit opium trade, especially in the remote regions of Asia. He answers key questions: Why have anti-drug policies failed despite four decades of increasing effort? And what are the shortcomings and limitations of forced eradication, alternative development, "silver bullets," and other quick fixes? In answering these questions, Chouvy draws upon geography, anthropology, politics, and development studies. He shows that the history of opium production is unexpectedly linked to the history of Afghanistan.

A compelling account of a narcotic as old as humanity, Opium offers powerful insights into the complex politics and economics of the poppy in the world today.

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Opium’s Long Shadow
From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control
Steffen Rimner
Harvard University Press, 2018

The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I.

Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage.

The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.

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Opium’s Orphans
The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs
P. E. Caquet
Reaktion Books, 2022
Upending all we know about the war on drugs, a history of the anti-narcotics movement’s origins, evolution, and questionable effectiveness.
 
Opium’s Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the “war on drugs.” A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span the globe. But has the war on drugs succeeded? As opioid deaths and cartel violence run rampant, contestation becomes more vocal, and marijuana is slated for legalization, Opium's Orphans proposes that it is time to go back to the drawing board.
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Oppenheimer Is Watching Me
A Memoir
Jeff Porter
University of Iowa Press
When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America’s atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation.
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Oppenheimer
The Tragic Intellect
Charles Thorpe
University of Chicago Press, 2007
At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making—and unmaking—of Oppenheimer’s wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture.
 
A stylish intellectual biography, Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer’s persona that coincided with changing attitudes toward science in society.
 
“This is an outstandingly well-researched book, a pleasure to read and distinguished by the high quality of its observations and judgments. It will be of special interest to scholars of modern history, but non-specialist readers will enjoy the clarity that Thorpe brings to common misunderstandings about his subject.”—Graham Farmelo, Times Higher Education Supplement
 
“A fascinating new perspective. . . . Thorpe’s book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind.”—Catherine Westfall, Nature
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Oppian. Colluthus. Tryphiodorus
Oppian. Colluthus. Tryphiodorus
Harvard University Press

Imperial Greek epos.

Oppian of Cilicia flourished in the latter half of the second century, and dedicated his Fishing (in five books) to Antoninus, presumably Marcus Aurelius. It deals with the habits and characteristics of fish as well as giving instructions for fishing: if not exactly poetical, it contains a great deal of curious information. The Chase, dedicated to Caracalla, is an inferior composition and may even be the work of a Syrian imitator. The first book gives an appreciation of the huntsman’s horses and hounds, the three remaining being devoted to the hunting of wild animals, from the lion to the hare. This edition is equipped with extensive zoological and ichthyological notes.

This volume also includes the extant work of two epic poets of Egypt who wrote in the second half of the fifth century under the influence of Nonnus. The Rape of Helen of Colluthus in 394 lines is a pleasant account of the Judgement of Paris and Helen’s elopement with him; Tryphiodorus (papyri reveal the correct spelling to be Triphiodorus) deals with The Taking of Troy in 691 lines, beginning with the Wooden Horse and ending with the sacrifice of Polyxena.

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Opportunity Denied
Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work
Branch, Enobong
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark—clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desirable jobs. Opportunity Denied is the first comprehensive look at changes in race, gender, and women’s work across time, comparing the labor force experiences of Black women to White women, Black men and White men. Enobong Hannah Branch merges empirical data with rich historical detail, offering an original overview of the evolution of Black women’s work.

From free Black women in 1860 to Black women in 2008, the experience of discrimination in seeking and keeping a job has been determinedly constant. Branch focuses on occupational segregation before 1970 and situates the findings of contemporary studies in a broad historical context, illustrating how inequality can grow and become entrenched over time through the institution of work.

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Opportunity in Crisis
Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China
Steven B. Miles
Harvard University Press

Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline.

The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China’s transition from empire to nation-state.

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Opportunity Lost
Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools
Marcus D. Pohlmann
University of Tennessee Press, 2009

In Opportunity Lost, Marcus D. Pohlmann examines the troubling issue of why Memphis city school students are underperforming at alarming rates. His provocative interdisciplinary analysis, combining both history and social science, examines the events before and after desegregation, compares a city school to an affluent suburban school to pinpoint imbalances, and offers critical assessments of various educational reforms.


In addition to his analysis of the problems, Pohlmann lays out educational reforms that run the gamut from early intervention and parental involvement to increasing teacher compensation, improving time utilization, and more. Pohlmann’s illuminating and original study has wide application for a problem that bedevils inner-city children everywhere and prevents the promise of equality from reaching all of our nation’s citizens.

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Opposing Ambitions
Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization
Sherryl Kleinman
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"Renewal" is a holistic health center run by baby boomers whose political ideals were shaped by the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Through interviews and observation, Sherryl Kleinman takes us inside Renewal and shows us how its members struggled to maintain a view of themselves as progressive and alternative even as they sought conventional legitimacy.

In Opposing Ambitions we meet the members of Renewal as individuals; learn about the differences in power, prestige, and respect they are accorded; why they talked endlessly about money; and how they related to each other. Kleinman shows how members' attempts to see themselves as unconventional, but also as serious operators of a legitimate health care organization, led them to act in ways that undermined their egalitarian goals. She draws out the lessons Renewal offers for understanding the problems women face in organizations, the failure of social movements to live up to their ideals, and how it is possible for progressives to avoid reproducing the inequalities they claim to oppose.
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Opposing Currents
The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America
Vivienne Bennett
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

This volume focuses on women in Latin America as stakeholders in water resources management. It makes their contributions to grassroots efforts more visible, explains why doing so is essential for effective public policy and planning in the water sector, and provides guidelines for future planning and project implementation.

After an in-depth review of gender and water management policies and issues in relation to domestic usage, irrigation, and sustainable development, the book provides a series of case studies prepared by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and activists. Covering countries throughout the hemisphere, and moving freely from impoverished neighborhoods to the conference rooms of international agencies, the book explores the various ways in which women are-and are not-involved in local water initiatives across Latin America. Insightful analyses reveal what these case studies imply for the success or failure of various regional efforts to improve water accessibility and usability, and suggest new ways of thinking about gender and the environment in the context of specific policies and practices.

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Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age
The Yellow Shirts in Thailand
Aim Sinpeng
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age is about why ordinary people in a democratizing state oppose democracy and how they leverage both traditional and social media to do so. Aim Sinpeng focuses on the people behind popular, large-scale antidemocratic movements that helped bring down democracy in 2006 and 2014 in Thailand. The yellow shirts (PAD—People’s Alliance for Democracy) that are the focus of the book are antidemocratic movements grown out of democratic periods in Thailand, but became the catalyst for the country’s democratic breakdown. Why, when, and how supporters of these movements mobilize offline and online to bring down democracy are some of the key questions that Sinpeng answers. While the book primarily uses a qualitative methodological approach, it also uses several quantitative tools to analyze social media data in the later chapters. This is one of few studies in the field of regime transition that focuses on antidemocratic mobilization and takes the role of social media seriously.

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Opposing Patriarchy
Women and the Law in Action in Pre-Unification Italy (1815–1865)
Sara Delmedico
University of London Press, 2021
Opposing Patriarchy explores women’s increasing political activism in nineteenth-century Italy. 

In Italy and beyond, the nineteenth century was a time of great political change. Shifts in state boundaries and socio-economic structures deeply affected the Italian political landscape, including the nation’s legal system. Many Italian women, who had lived within a strict patriarchal and hierarchical society, began to redefine their identities beyond the traditional domestic roles of daughter, wife, and mother. This volume charts that process by focusing on women’s attitudes towards the law and their interaction with the legal system. Sara Delmedico seeks to recover the forgotten voices and lives of those ordinary women who, in their everyday lives, reacted against the limitations and constraints imposed upon them by society and who refused to accept their status passively. As this volume shows, the women of the period understood the law, questioned obedience, challenged authority, and stood up for themselves. Even though they did not always achieve their goals, their actions contributed to shaping our present.
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Opposing Poetries
Part One: Issues and Institutions
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.
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Opposing Poetries
Part Two: Readings
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

In Volume Two, Lazer presents a series of sustained readings of important experimental texts. Included are the poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry. Lazer places these poets in the context of contemporary literary theory, and inspects both the successes and failures of said theory to interpret these works.
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Opposing Power
Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies
Elvin Ong
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Opposing Power argues that perceptions of regime vulnerability and mutual dependency by opposition elites shape the building of opposition alliances. When electoral autocracies are consistently dominant, opposition parties eschew fully fledged alliances. At best, they allocate only one candidate to contest against the incumbent in each subnational electoral district to avoid splitting the opposition vote. However, when multiple regime-debilitating events strike within a short period of time, thus pushing an incumbent to the precipice of power, opposition elites expect victory, accepting costly compromises to build alliances and seize power. Opposing Power shows how oppositions build these alliances through case study comparisons in East and Southeast Asia—between the Philippines and South Korea in the late 1980s, and between Malaysia and Singapore from 1965 to 2020.
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Opposing the Second Corps at Antietam
The Fight for the Confederate Left and Center on America's Bloodiest Day
Marion V. Armstrong, Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2016
With a tally of more than five thousand killed, twenty thousand wounded, and three thousand missing, the Battle of Antietam made September 17, 1862, the deadliest day of combat in American history. In Opposing the Second Corps at Antietam, Antietam scholar Marion V. Armstrong Jr. completes his magisterial study of Antietam begun in Unfurl Those Colors! by examining Robert E. Lee’s leadership at the climactic battle in the Confederate invasion of Union territory.
 
Eminent Civil War historians consider Antietam the turning point of the war. Hoping to maintain the initiative they had gained at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Confederate leaders looked to a stunning victory on Northern soil to sour Northern sentiment on the war as well as to coax European powers to recognize the fledgling Confederacy. Having examined McClellan’s command and role at Antietam in Unfurl Those Colors!, Armstrong now recounts in riveting detail Lee’s command decisions and their execution in the field, drawing on a superlative collection of first-person accounts by Confederate veterans to narrate the cataclysmic struggle between Lee and McClellan.
 
Armstrong sets the stage with a lively recap of the political and military events leading up to the early fall of 1862 and foreshadowing the conflagration to come on September 17. Each chapter then traces a critical section of the battle, the fight for the West Woods and the bloody engagement of the Sunken Road. Armstrong augments this collection with an exceptional set of maps, which will be valued by scholars, readers, and visitors to the battlefield. These unique maps delineate troop movements in intervals as brief as fifteen minutes, bringing to life the fluid, mutable lines that characterize the glory and horror of Antietam.
 
Either together with Unfurl Those Colors! or as a stand-alone account of the Confederate side of the battle, Opposing the Second Corps at Antietam provides the fullest possible understanding of the experience of Confederate soldiers at Antietam.
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Opposition and Intimidation
The Abortion Wars and Strategies of Political Harassment
Alesha E. Doan
University of Michigan Press, 2007

The abortion fight has long been a crucible of political tactics, with both sides employing strategies ranging from litigation to civil disobedience to outright violence. Anti-abortion activists have arguably been more tactically innovative than their pro-choice peers. Opposition and Intimidation looks at how their use of political harassment fits—or doesn't—with more conventional political efforts in the struggle over abortion.

Alesha Doan's insightful interviews and observations powerfully portray anti-abortion activists' relationship to the objects of their protest. Her portrait is augmented by thorough quantitative analysis of harassment's role within the movement's multitiered strategy—a strategy that Doan shows has forced a decline in the availability and popularity of abortions. Using her unique study of the anti-abortion movement as a model, Doan extends her findings to propose a novel and valuable theory of the new politics of harassment.

"An interesting and sophisticated account. Seamlessly weaves narrative and analysis, tying local action to national strategy. Explores uncharted territory in the abortion controversy and expands our understanding of political action."

—Deborah R. McFarlane, University of New Mexico

"For 40 years, abortion politics have been endlessly fascinating to American scholars and journalists alike because they generate unique political phenomena that challenge traditional theories of political behavior. In this book, Doan goes straight to the heart of the matter by describing, evaluating, and explaining one of the most characteristic and complex of these phenomena—political harassment. In a well-written narrative that weaves qualitative and quantitative data, she gives us the first scholarly look at this political tactic, whose relevance and use go well beyond American abortion politics."
—Chris Mooney, University of Illinois at Springfield

"The book contributes to political theory and knowledge by adding new empirical data gathered from interviews with those in the front lines of the struggle over abortion. The author refines and develops a category of unconventional political participation—political harassment of nongovernmental actors—and explains why it is particularly effective in undermining the rights of women seeking abortions, as well as the rights of abortion service providers."

—Nikki R. Van Hightower, Texas A&M University

Alesha E. Doan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.

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Oppositional Consciousness
The Subjective Roots of Social Protest
Edited by Jane J. Mansbridge and Aldon Morris
University of Chicago Press, 2001
How can human beings be induced to sacrifice their lives—even one minute of their lives-for the sake of their group? This question, central to understanding the dynamics of social movements, is at the heart of this collection of original essays. The book is the first to conceptualize and illustrate the complex patterns of negotiation, struggle, borrowing, and crafting that characterize what the editors term "oppositional consciousness"—an empowering mental state that prepares members of an oppressed group to undermine, reform, or overthrow a dominant system.

Each essay employs a recent historical case to demonstrate how oppositional consciousness actually worked in the experience of a subordinate group. Based on participant observation and interviews, chapters focus on the successful social movements of groups such as African Americans, people with disabilities, sexually harassed women, Chicano workers, and AIDS activists. Ultimately, Oppositional Consciousness sheds new light on the intricate mechanisms that drive the important social movements of our time.

Contributors: Naomi Braine, Sharon Groch, Fredrick C. Harris, Jane Mansbridge, Anna-Maria Marshall, Aldon Morris, Marc Simon Rodriguez, Brett C. Stockdill, Lori G. Waite
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The Optic of the State
Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil
Jens Andermann
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
The Optic of the State traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. As Jens Andermann reveals, the foundational visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived and implemented, but also disputed and contested, in a complex interplay between government, cultural, and scientific institutions and actors, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states.

The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate the political upheavals of the recent past and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The careful presentation of artifacts and spectacles was also aimed abroad in order to win the favor of European imperial powers and thereby acquire a competitive place in the nascent global economy of the late nineteenth century.
The Optic of the State offers a fascinating critique of the visual aspects of national mythology. It exposes how scientific and cultural institutions inscribed the state-form in time and space, thus presenting historical processes as natural “givens.”
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Optical Fibers and RF
A natural combination
Malcolm Romeiser
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
The optical fiber industry has experienced a period of consolidation and reorganization and is now poised for a new surge in growth. To take advantage of that growth, and to respond to the demand to use fiber more efficiently, designers need a better understanding of fiber optics. Taking the approach that optical fibers are an extension of RF-based communications, the author explains basic optical concepts, applications, and systems; the nature and performance characteristics of optical fibers; and optical sources, connectors and splices. Subsequent chapters explore current applications of fiber optic technology. Appropriate for use as a college text, this is an accessible and thorough treatment of fiber optics, without an intimidating amount of mathematical derivations.
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Optical MEMS for Chemical Analysis and Biomedicine
Hongrui Jiang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016
Optical MEMS are micro-electromechanical systems merged with micro-optics. They allow sensing or manipulating optical signals on a very small size scale using integrated mechanical, optical, and electrical systems and hold great promise specifically in biomedical applications, among others.
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Optical Play
Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture
Julia Bekman Chadaga
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Longlist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History 

Julia Bekman Chadaga’s ambitious study posits that glass—in its uses as a material and as captured in culture—is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon.

Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and the material’s associations with modernity, while illuminating the work of Lomonosov, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Eisenstein, among others. In particular, Chadaga explores the prominent role of glass in the discourse around Russia’s contentious relationship with the West—by turns admiring and antagonistic—as the nation crafted a vision for its own future. Chadaga returns throughout to the spectacular aspect of glass and shows how both the tendentious capacity and the playfulness of this material have shaped Russian culture.

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The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham Books IV–V
On Reflection and Images Seen by Reflection
Abdelhamid I. Sabra
University of London Press, 2023
Books four and five of a landmark seven-volume work of medieval scientific study of optics.

Ibn al-Haytham was perhaps the greatest mathematician and physicist of the medieval Arabic/Islamic world. The most famous book in which he applied his scientific method is his Optics, through which he dealt with both the mathematics of rays of light and the physical aspects of the eye in seven comprehensive books. His rethinking of the entire science of optics set the scene for the whole of the subsequent development of the subject, influencing figures such as William of Ockham, Kepler, Descartes, and Christaan Huygens. The immense work of editing, translating into English, and commenting on this work was undertaken by Abdelhamid I. Sabra. This English translation of Books IV–V was completed by Sabra just before his death in 2013 with an introduction and critical analysis. It has been extensively revised by Jan Hogendijk.
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Optimal Adaptive Control and Differential Games by Reinforcement Learning Principles
Draguna Vrabie
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2012
This book gives an exposition of recently developed approximate dynamic programming (ADP) techniques for decision and control in human engineered systems. ADP is a reinforcement machine learning technique that is motivated by learning mechanisms in biological and animal systems. It is connected from a theoretical point of view with both adaptive control and optimal control methods. The book shows how ADP can be used to design a family of adaptive optimal control algorithms that converge in real-time to optimal control solutions by measuring data along the system trajectories. Generally, in the current literature adaptive controllers and optimal controllers are two distinct methods for the design of automatic control systems. Traditional adaptive controllers learn online in real time how to control systems, but do not yield optimal performance. On the other hand, traditional optimal controllers must be designed offline using full knowledge of the systems dynamics. It is also shown how to use ADP methods to solve multi-player differential games online. Differential games have been shown to be important in H-infinity robust control for disturbance rejection, and in coordinating activities among multiple agents in networked teams. The focus of this book is on continuous-time systems, whose dynamical models can be derived directly from physical principles based on Hamiltonian or Lagrangian dynamics.
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Optimal Communication
Edited by Reinhard Blutner, Helen de Hoop and Petra Hendriks
CSLI, 2005
This volume explores how the effectiveness of communication is shaped by aspects of semantics and pragmatics such as compositionality, the role of the speaker and hearer, and the acquisition of meaning. Optimal Communication surveys recent research in the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and draws from optimality theory to argue that optimal meanings result from a compromise between competing constraints. Optimal Communication will be an invaluable resource for students in cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language semantics.
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Optimal Design Exploiting 3D Printing and Metamaterials
Paolo Di Barba
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
The key theme of this book is an exploration of how recent advances across three related scientific fields are intertwined - the developments in metamaterials, the automated optimal design of innovative electronic, electromagnetic and mechatronic devices, and 3D printing.
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Optimality-Theoretic Syntax
A Declarative Approach
Jonas Kuhn
CSLI, 2003
With this book, Jonas Kuhn greatly advances Optimality Theory (OT) by clarifying the significant choices in the design of a formally precise OT approach to syntax. Building on OT work that uses the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar (OT-LFG), Kuhn defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in a declarative, non-derivational way.

Along with the standard OT architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, Kuhn also formalizes parsing-based OT, and goes on to discuss possible combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.
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Optimised Radar Processors
A. Farina
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1987
This book is devoted to the description of optimum signal processing algorithms which can find useful applications in radar systems. The monograph collects about twenty papers written by the Editor and his colleagues. Structurally the collection of the papers is divided into four parts. The first describes the adaptive cancellation techniques of radar clutter; the second part addresses the challenging problem of finding the optimum detection schemes to deal with target and clutter signals having non-Gaussian probability density function, and any type of autocorrelation function. The third group of papers considers the problem of finding the optimum detection schemes for the case of netted multi-static radar systems. The last part is concerned with more general processing techniques used in radar systems for surveillance.
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Optimism at All Costs
Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama's America
Lessie B. Branch
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In the wake of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential victory, most Americans believed that race relations would improve. While many leaders rallied behind the first black president and the black community felt optimistic on the whole, statistics reveal a decline in black Americans' economic fortunes and a slower recovery from the recession in the years that followed.

Lessie B. Branch confronts the tension between black Americans' economic realities and the hope many felt for the future, looking at survey data alongside the rhetoric of leading black figures, including President Obama. This disparity has caused a dangerous resistance to social activism, as discourses of optimism privilege individual success over the need for collective action. Branch sees the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement as a constructive change in this dynamic. As Americans continue to grapple with complicated questions of race and progress in classrooms, in the media, and in legislatures, this short, provocative book will inform and enrich these important discussions.
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The Optimist
Poems
Joshua Mehigan
Ohio University Press, 2005

In Joshua Mehigan’s award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint.

The Optimist stares at contemporary darkness visible, a darkly lit tableau that erases the boundary between the world and the perceiving self. Whether narrative or lyric, dramatic or satirical, Mehigan’s poems explore death, desire, and change with a mixture of reason and compassion.

In choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote:

“The world is given its due in these poems, but its due is the subjective voice making ‘objective’ reality into the reality of art. To do this Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices—the echoes in The Optimist are, to name a few, of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell—to form with great integrity his own. It isn’t that Mehigan is concerned more with what’s outside himself than inside; nor merely that he travels the highway between the two with such humility and grace. It’s also that these voices, this great tradition, infuses his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder.”

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Optimizing Cyberdeterrence
A Comprehensive Strategy for Preventing Foreign Cyberattacks
Robert Mandel
Georgetown University Press, 2017

Cyberattacks are one of the greatest fears for governments and the private sector. The attacks come without warning and can be extremely costly and embarrassing.

Robert Mandel offers a unique and comprehensive strategic vision for how governments, in partnership with the private sector, can deter cyberattacks from both nonstate and state actors. Cyberdeterrence must be different from conventional military or nuclear deterrence, which are mainly based on dissuading an attack by forcing the aggressor to face unacceptable costs. In the cyber realm, where attributing a specific attack to a specific actor is extremely difficult, conventional deterrence principles are not enough. Mandel argues that cyberdeterrence must alter a potential attacker’s decision calculus by not only raising costs for the attacker but also by limiting the prospects for gain. Cyberdeterrence must also involve indirect unorthodox restraints, such as exposure to negative blowback and deceptive diversionary measures, and cross-domain measures rather than just retaliation in kind.

The book includes twelve twenty-first-century cyberattack case studies to draw insights into cyberdeterrence and determine the conditions under which it works most effectively. Mandel concludes by making recommendations for implementing cyberdeterrence and integrating it into broader national security policy. Cyber policy practitioners and scholars will gain valuable and current knowledge from this excellent study.

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Optimizing Structure in Context
Scrambling and Information Structure
Hye-Won Choi
CSLI, 1999
This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.
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Opting Out
Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite
Maya A. Beasley
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, such as science, engineering, information technology, and finance? A sophisticated study of racial disparity, Opting Out examines why some talented black undergraduates pursue lower-paying, lower-status careers despite being amply qualified for more prosperous ones.
 
To explore these issues, Maya A. Beasley conducted in-depth interviews with black and white juniors at two of the nation’s most elite universities, one public and one private. Beasley identifies a set of complex factors behind these students’ career aspirations, including the anticipation of discrimination in particular fields; the racial composition of classes, student groups, and teaching staff; student values; and the availability of opportunities to network. Ironically, Beasley also discovers, campus policies designed to enhance the academic and career potential of black students often reduce the diversity of their choices. Shedding new light on the root causes of racial inequality, Opting Out will be essential reading for parents, educators, students, scholars, and policymakers.
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Opting Out
Women Messing with Marriage around the World
Joanna Davidson
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.
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The Option of Urbanism
Investing in a New American Dream
Christopher B. Leinberger
Island Press, 2009
Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma.
 
Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.
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Optional Law
The Structure of Legal Entitlements
Ian Ayres
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Spurred by the advances in option theory that have been remaking financial and economic scholarship over the past thirty years, a revolution is taking shape in the way legal scholars conceptualize property and the way it is protected by the law. Ian Ayres's Optional Law explores how option theory is overthrowing many accepted wisdoms and producing tangible new tools for courts in deciding cases.
Ayres identifies flaws in the current system and shows how option theory can radically expand and improve the ways that lawmakers structure legal entitlements. An option-based system, Ayres shows, gives parties the option to purchase—or the option to sell—the relevant legal entitlement. Choosing to exercise a legal option forces decisionmakers to reveal information about their own valuation of the entitlement. And, as with auctions, entitlements in option-based law naturally flow to those who value them the most. Seeing legal entitlements through this lens suggests a variety of new entitlement structures from which lawmakers might choose. Optional Law provides a theory for determining which structure is likely to be most effective in harnessing parties' private information.
Proposing a practical approach to the foundational question of how to allocate and protect legal rights, Optional Law will be applauded by legal scholars and professionals who continue to seek new and better ways of fostering both equitable and efficient legal rules.
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Opulent Nosh
A Cookbook for Audacious Appetites
Ken Albala
University of Alabama Press

Foodie-scholar extraordinaire Ken Albala offers adventurous cooks a treasury of innovative recipes to transform noshing

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Or, Gone
Poems
Deborah Flanagan
Tupelo Press, 2015
Deborah Flanagan’s prizewinning new chapbook is populated by a menagerie of historic personages — celebrities and scientists, political and artistic luminaries, including George Washington, Houdini, Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, Francis Bacon, Casanova, and Lord Byron’s daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. Juggling voices as she romps among her personae, the poet revisits and revises our complicated connections to the past in ways orthodox history can’t possibly do: coding and decoding her stories while bursting out of the boxes into which we try to fit meaning.
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or, on being the other woman
Simone White
Duke University Press, 2022
In or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.
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Or Orwell
Writing and Democratic Socialism
Alex Woloch
Harvard University Press, 2016

There have been many studies of George Orwell’s life and work, but nothing quite like this book by Alex Woloch—an exuberant, revisionary account of Orwell’s writing.

“Good prose is like a window-pane,” Orwell famously avers. But what kind of literary criticism is possible, face-to-face with Orwell’s plain-style prose? Too often this style has been either dismissed by a seemingly more savvy critical theory, or held up as a reprimand against the enterprise of theory. In a series of unusually close and intensive readings—focused on the unstable event of writing itself—Woloch recovers the radical and experimental energies of Orwell’s prose. Against accounts that would quickly naturalize Orwell’s truthfulness or reduce his window-pane prose to bad faith, Woloch’s study bears down on a propulsive irony and formal restlessness that have always been intertwined with Orwell’s plain-style. Such restlessness, far from diluting Orwell’s democratic and socialist politics, is at its aesthetic and conceptual core.

The first half of Or Orwell ranges across his nonfiction prose, including new readings of “A Hanging,” The Road to Wigan Pier, and Inside the Whale. The second half develops an extended analysis of a single writing project: Orwell’s eighty “As I Please” newspaper columns, written for the Socialist weekly Tribune. Moving through multiple forms and genres, testing the limits of each, Orwell emerges in Woloch’s fine-grained account as a boldly unconventional writer and a central figure in twentieth-century literature and political thought.

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The Oracle and the Curse
A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War
Caleb Smith
Harvard University Press, 2013

Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown’s shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War.

In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law’s living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness.

Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.

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Oracles of Empire
Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750
David S. Shields
University of Chicago Press, 1990
This innovative look at previously neglected poetry in British America represents a major contribution to our understanding of early American culture. Spanning the period from the Glorious Revolution (1690) to the end of King George's War (1750), this study critically reconstitutes the literature of empire in the thirteen colonies, Canada, and the West Indies by investigating over 300 texts in mixed print and manuscript sources, including poems in pamphlets and newspapers.

British America's poetry of empire was dominated by three issues: mercantilism's promise that civilization and wealth would be transmitted from London to the provinces; the debate over the extent of metropolitan prerogatives in law and commerce when they obtruded upon provincial rights and interests; and the argument that Britain's imperium pelagi was an ethical empire, because it depended upon the morality of trade, while the empires of Spain and France were immoral empires because they were grounded upon conquest. In discussing these issues, Shields provides a virtual anthology of poems long lost to students of American literature.
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The Oral and Beyond
Doing Things with Words in Africa
Ruth Finnegan
University of Chicago Press, 2007
With her 1976 book Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language. Now, Finnegan has gathered and updated a selection of her best work on oral literature, performance, and the creative use of language in Africa, along with several new essays that broaden and extend her ideas.

The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature, revisiting issues of perennial contention, and highlighting some of the most interesting new ideas and approaches in the field. Exploring such fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field. At the same time, she propels the ethnography of language forward, bringing the techniques and knowledge developed through her fieldwork in Africa to bear on issues that transcend African studies and reach into the larger world of anthropology and beyond.
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Oral Arguments and Coalition Formation on the U.S. Supreme Court
A Deliberate Dialogue
Ryan C. Black, Timothy R. Johnson, and Justin Wedeking
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The U.S. Supreme Court, with its controlled, highly institutionalized decision-making practices, provides an ideal environment for studying coalition formation. The process begins during the oral argument stage, which provides the justices with their first opportunity to hear one another's attitudes and concerns specific to a case. This information gathering allows them eventually to form a coalition.

In order to uncover the workings of this process, the authors analyze oral argument transcripts from every case decided from 1998 through 2007 as well as the complete collection of notes kept during oral arguments by Justice Lewis F. Powell and Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Both justices clearly monitored their fellow justices' participation in the discussion and used their observations to craft opinions their colleagues would be likely to support. This study represents a major step forward in the understanding of coalition formation, which is a crucial aspect of many areas of political debate and decision making.

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Oral History
A Guide for Teachers (and Others)
By Thad Sitton, George L. Mehaffy, and O.L. Davis, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1983

More than a mode of gathering information about the past, oral history has become an international movement. Historians, folklorists, and other educational and religious groups now recognize the importance of preserving the recollections of people about the past. The recorded memories of famous and common folk alike provide a vital complement to textbook history, bringing the past to life through the stories of those who lived it.

Oral History is designed to introduce teachers, students, and interested individuals to the techniques, problems, and pleasures of collecting oral history. The authors, themselves experienced educators, examine the uses of oral history in the classroom, looking at a wide range of projects that have been attempted and focusing on those that have succeeded best.

Besides suggesting many possible projects, they discuss the necessary hardware and its use: recording equipment and procedures, interview outlines and preliminary research, photography and note-taking in the field, transcription and storage of information, legal forms, and more. For the teacher, the authors offer helpful advice on training students to be sensitive interviewers in both formal and informal situations.

How can oral histories collected in the classroom be put to use? The authors discuss their uses within the curriculum; in projects such as oral history archives, publications such as the popular Foxfire books, and other media productions; and in researching current community problems. Useful appendixes survey a variety of reference tools for the oral historian and describe in detail how a Foxfire-concept magazine may be developed.

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Oral History and Delinquency
The Rhetoric of Criminology
James Bennett
University of Chicago Press, 1981
From Henry Mayhew's classic study of Victorian slums to Studs Terkel's presentations of ordinary people in modern America, oral history has been used to call attention to social conditions. By analyzing the nature and circumstances of the production of such histories of delinquency, James Bennett argues that oral history is a rhetorical device, consciously chosen as such, and is to be understood in terms of its persuasive powers and aims. Bennett shows how oral or life histories of juvenile delinquents have been crucial in communicating the human traits of offenders within their social context, to attract interest in resources for programs to prevent delinquency. Although life history helped to establish the discipline of sociology, Bennett suggests concepts for understanding oral histories generated in many fields.
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Oral History and Public Memories
Paula Hamilton
Temple University Press, 2008
Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used "in public," they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past.  Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world.  Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education.  Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.
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Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West
Edited by Jessie L. Embry
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Nurses, show girls, housewives, farm workers, casino managers, and government inspectors—together these hard-working members of society contributed to the development of towns across the West. The essays in this volume show how oral history increases understanding of work and community in the twentieth century American West.

In many cases occupations brought people together in myriad ways. The Latino workers who picked lemons together in Southern California report that it was baseball and Cinco de Mayo Queen contests that united them. Mormons in Fort Collins, Colorado, say that building a church together bonded them together. In separate essays, African Americans and women describe how they fostered a sense of community in Las Vegas. Native Americans detail the “Indian economy” in Northern California.

As these essays demonstrate, the history of the American West is the story of small towns and big cities, places both isolated and heavily populated. It includes groups whose history has often been neglected. Sometimes, western history has mirrored the history of the nation; at other times, it has diverged in unique ways. Oral history adds a dimension that has often been missing in writing a comprehensive history of the West. Here an array of oral historians—including folklorists, librarians, and public historians—record what they have learned from people who have, in their own ways, made history.
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An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln
John G. Nicolay's Interviews and Essays
Edited by Michael Burlingame
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

John C. Nicolay, who had known Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, served as chief White House secretary from 1861 to 1865. Trained as a journalist, Nicolay had hoped to write a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860, a desire that was thwarted when an obscure young writer named William Dean Howells got the job. Years later, however, Nicolay fulfilled his ambition; with John Hay, he spent the years from 1872 to 1890 writing a monumental ten-volume biography of Lincoln.

In preparation for this task, Nicolay interviewed men who had known Lincoln both during his years in Springfield and later when he became the president of the United States. "When it came time to write their massive biography, however," Burlingame notes, "he and Hay made sparing use of the interviews" because they had become "skeptical about human memory." Nicolay and Hay also feared that Robert Todd Lincoln might censor material that reflected "poorly on Lincoln or his wife."

Nicolay had interviewed such Springfield friends as Lincoln’s first two law partners, John Todd Stuart and Stephen T. Logan. At the Illinois capital in June and July 1875, he talked to a number of others including Orville H. Browning, U.S. senator and Lincoln’s close friend and adviser for over thirty-five years, and Ozias M. Hatch, Lincoln’s political ally and Springfield neighbor. Four years later he returned briefly and spoke with John W. Bunn, a young political "insider" from Springfield at the time Lincoln was elected president, and once again with Hatch.

Browning shed new light on Lincoln’s courtship and marriage, telling Nicolay that Lincoln often told him "that he was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace" while in the White House. During their research, Nicolay and Hay also learned of Lincoln’s despondency and erratic behavior following his rejection by Matilda Edwards, and they were subsequently criticized by friends for suppressing the information. Burlingame argues that this open discussion of Lincoln’s depression of January 1841 is "perhaps the most startling new information in the Springfield interviews."

Briefer and more narrowly focused than the Springfield interviews, the Washington interviews deal with the formation of Lincoln’s cabinet, his relations with Congress, his behavior during the war, his humor, and his grief. In a reminiscence by Robert Todd Lincoln, for example, we learn of Lincoln’s despair at General Lee's escape after the Battle of Gettysburg: "I went into my father’s office ... and found him in [much] distress, his head leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when he raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face. Upon my asking the cause of his distress he told me that he had just received the information that Gen. Lee had succeeded in escaping across the Potomac river. . ."

To supplement these interviews, Burlingame has included Nicolay’s unpublished essays on Lincoln during the 1860 campaign and on Lincoln’s journey from Springfield to Washington in 1861, essay’s based on firsthand testimony.

[more]

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Oral History of the Yavapai
Mike Harrison and John Williams; Edited by Sigrid Khera and Carolina C. Butler
University of Arizona Press, 2015
In the 1970s, the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona came under threat by a dam construction project that, if approved, would potentially flood most of its 24,680 acres of land. As part of the effort to preserve the reservation, Mike Harrison and John Williams, two elders of the Yavapai tribe, sought to have their history recorded as they themselves knew it, as it had been passed down to them from generation to generation, so that the history of their people would not be lost to future generations. In March 1974, Arizona State University anthropologist Sigrid Khera first sat down with Harrison and Williams to begin recording and transcribing their oral history, a project that would continue through the summer of 1976 and beyond.

Although Harrison and Williams have since passed away, their voices shine through the pages of this book and the history of their people remains to be passed along and shared. Thanks to the efforts of Scottsdale, Arizona, resident and Orme Dam activist Carolina Butler, this important document is being made available to the public for the first time.

Oral History of the Yavapai offers a wide range of information regarding the Yavapai people, from creation beliefs to interpretations of historical events and people. Harrison and Williams not only relate their perspectives on the relationship between the “White people” and the Native American peoples of the Southwest, but they also share stories about prayers, songs, dreams, sacred places, and belief systems of the Yavapai.
[more]

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The Oral Palimpsest
Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics
Christos Tsagalis
Harvard University Press, 2008

Oral intertextuality is an innate feature of the web of myth, whose interrelated fabrics allow the audience of epic song to have access to an entire horizon of diverse variants of a story. The Oral Palimpsest argues that just as the erased text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternative versions in the act of producing the signs of their erasure.

In this light, "Homer" reflects the concerted effort to create a Panhellenic canon of epic song, through which we can still retrieve the poikilia (roughly, "dappled, embroidered variation") of various interwoven fabrics belonging to recognizable song-traditions or even older Indo-European strata.

[more]

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Oral Patterns of Performance
Story and Song
Barre Toelken
Utah State University Press, 2003

To many Native American cultures, songs and stories are dramatic enactments of reality, and words bring reality into existence. In this chapter from his award-winning book, The Anguish of Snails, Toelken thoughtfully approaches a number of stories from Native American traditions, discussing how narratives can be touchstones of shared values among closely associated traditional people and how songs and stories go far beyond an evening's entertainment or "lessons” about life. A traditional narrative can be a culturally structured way of thinking and of experiencing the patterns that make culture real.

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Oral Poetry
An Introduction
Paul Zumthor
University of Minnesota Press, 1990

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Oral Tradition and the Internet
Pathways of the Mind
John Miles Foley
University of Illinois Press, 2012
The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on "What?" but on "How do I get there?" In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways--not things--that matter.
 
To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a "morphing book," a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Doing nothing less fundamental than

challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail, Oral Tradition and the Internet shows readers that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative

worlds of media-technology out there--if only they are willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. This "brick-and-mortar" book exists as an extension of

The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the

dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology

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Oral Tradition as History
Jan M. Vansina
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

Jan Vansina’s 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina’s success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis.
     Now, Vansina—with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research—has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission and potential uses of oral material.

“Those embarking on the challenging adventure of historical fieldwork with an oral community will find the book a valuable companion, filled with good practical advice. Those who already have collected bodies of oral material, or who strive to interpret and analyze that collected by others, will be forced to subject their own methodological approaches to a critical reexamination in the light of Vansina’s thoughtful and provocative insights. . . . For the second time in a quarter of a century, we are profoundly in the debt of Jan Vansina.”—Research in African Literatures

“Oral Traditions as History is an essential addition to the basic literature of African history.”—American Historical Review

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Orange Alert
essays on poetry, art, and the architecture of silence
Kazim Ali
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Orange Alert is a poetic and yogic salvo across the bows of our defensive imperial posturing. Kazim Ali's essays leap deftly from homages to avant-garde artists (Yoko Ono, Agnes Martin, John Cage) to awestruck meditations on ancient architecture, from analyses of poets (Jane Cooper, Agha Shahid Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Lucille Clifton) to twitter aphorisms. Orange Alert is a revelation, a salve, an invitation to breathe again."
---Philip Metres, Associate Professor, Department of English, John Carroll University

"With their delicacy of attention and bold range of subjects, Kazim Ali's essays hold many quiet surprises. In each art he searches for insight and craft---the virtues of his own patient writing."
---Susan Stewart, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets; and Professor, Princeton University

"Kazim Ali's essays, like his poems, are alive with curiosity and humanity. . . . Orange Alert makes a compelling case for the necessity of poetry on a planet wracked by war and devastation."
---Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Kazim Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding.

In Orange Alert, Ali discusses poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Bhanu Kapil, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Samuel Beckett. He considers painters Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian, musicians Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono, and philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard. Ali links the poetic endeavor to such diverse texts as Moby-Dick, Battlestar Galactica, and Marilyn Buck's prison journals.

Ali discusses contemporary poetry in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television; film; and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook.

He shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture.

Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a memoir, Bright Felon: Autobiographyand Cities. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He has been a regular columnist for American Poetry Review.

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Orange Parades
The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control
Dominic Bryan
Pluto Press, 2000
In the first major study of the Protestant Loyalist Orange Order in Northern Ireland, Dominic Bryan provides a detailed ethnographic and historical study of Orange Order parades. He looks at the development of the parades, the history of disputes over the parades, the structure and politics of the Orange Order, the organisation of loyalist bands, the role of social class in Unionist politics – and the anthropology of ritual itself.
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The Orange Tree
Dong Li
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Debut collection of poems that weaves stories of family history, war, and migration.  
 
Dong Li’s The Orange Tree is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections.
 
Li’s lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time. Weaving through stories of people with little means, between wars and celebrations, over bridges and walls, and between trees and gardens, Li’s poems offer intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.
 
The Orange Tree is the recipient of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize for 2023.
 
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The Orange Trees of Marrakesh
Ibn Khaldun and the Science of Man
Stephen Frederic Dale
Harvard University Press, 2015

In his masterwork Muqaddimah, the Arab Muslim Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a Tunisian descendant of Andalusian scholars and officials in Seville, developed a method of evaluating historical evidence that allowed him to identify the underlying causes of events. His methodology was derived from Aristotelian notions of nature and causation, and he applied it to create a dialectical model that explained the cyclical rise and fall of North African dynasties. The Muqaddimah represents the world’s first example of structural history and historical sociology. Four centuries before the European Enlightenment, this work anticipated modern historiography and social science.

In Stephen F. Dale’s The Orange Trees of Marrakesh, Ibn Khaldun emerges as a cultured urban intellectual and professional religious judge who demanded his fellow Muslim historians abandon their worthless tradition of narrative historiography and instead base their works on a philosophically informed understanding of social organizations. His strikingly modern approach to historical research established him as the premodern world’s preeminent historical scholar. It also demonstrated his membership in an intellectual lineage that begins with Plato, Aristotle, and Galen; continues with the Greco-Muslim philosophers al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes; and is renewed with Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, and Durkheim.

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The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales from the Doctor’s Office
David Watts
University of Iowa Press
Western literature has had a long tradition of physician-writers. From Mikhail Bulgakov to William Carlos Williams to Richard Selzer to Ethan Canin, exposure to human beings at their most vulnerable has inspired fine writing. In his own inimitable and unpretentious style, David Watts is also a master storyteller. Whether recounting the decline and death of a dear friend or poking holes in the faulty logic of an insurance company underling, The Orange Wire Problem lays bare the nobility and weakness, generosity and churlishness of human nature.

With disarming candor and the audacity to admit that practicing medicine can be a crazy thing, Watts fills each page with riveting details, moving accounts, or belly-laughs.  As the stories in this work unfold, we are witness to the moral dilemmas and personal rewards of ministering to the sick. Whether the subject is the potential benefits of therapeutic deception or telling a child about death, Watts’s ear for the right word, the right tone, and the right detail never fails him.

From The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales from the Doctor’s Office:

We were lingering in the outer office. He mentioned again, no biopsy. I knew that. And I knew there would be no chemotherapy.
    Maybe it's like that Orange Wire Problem, I said.
    Yes exactly, he said, and four years from now when we're all sitting around the campfire we'll remember the Orange Wire Problem. . .
    And I thought to myself, my brother did that. Spoke of the time ahead as he was dying of lung cancer. Six months from now he had said, we'll be glad we did all those drug therapies—as if to speak of the future laid claim to the future.
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Oranges
A Global History
Clarissa Hyman
Reaktion Books, 2013
The tangy, juicy sweetness of oranges has made them a mainstay on our breakfast tables, as snacks, and even as healthy desserts. Indeed, oranges and orange juices are so ubiquitous nowadays that we take them for granted—but their journey to our supermarket shelves is a long and tantalizing story, as Clarissa Hyman reveals in Oranges. Following the orange from its origins in the Mediterranean world to the grocery produce section, Hyman illuminates the wide-ranging cultural resonance and culinary presence of the popular fruit.
 
Charting the arrival of bitter and sweet oranges in the Mediterranean, where they were seen as a gift from the gods, Hyman chronicles their dramatic voyage to the Americas and the impact they had on agriculture, garden design, and architecture along the way. She surveys the many varieties of oranges that now exist and analyzes their status as symbols of great wealth in art, an inspiration for poets and painters, and a source of natural health. Dealing with the practical complexities of orange cultivation, she details the challenges facing modern producers and consumers across the globe. Packed with delicious recipes and luscious photos, Oranges is a refreshing look at the king of citrus.
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Orations. Other Fragments
Cato
Harvard University Press, 2023

Ancient Rome’s original archconservative.

M. Porcius Cato (234–149 BC), one of the best-known figures of the middle Roman Republic, remains legendary for his political and military career, especially his staunch opposition to Carthage; his modest way of life; his integrity of character and austere morality; his literary works, composed in a style at once sophisticated and down-to-earth; his pithy sayings; and his drive to define and to champion Roman national character and traditions in the face of challenges from Greek culture. Cato’s legend derived to no small degree from his own distinctive and compelling self-presentation, which established a model later developed and elaborated by Cicero and by subsequent literary and historical authors for centuries to come.

This volume and its companion (LCL 551) join the Loeb edition of Cato’s only extant work, On Agriculture (LCL 283), by supplying all testimonia about, and all fragments by or attributed to Cato. Highlights are Origines, the first historical work attested in Latin, a history of Rome from its founding to the onset of the first Punic War, as well as the origins of major Italian cities; his orations, regarded as the beginning of Roman oratory; To His Son Marcus, which inaugurated a Roman tradition of didactic pieces addressed by fathers to their sons; Military Matters; the Poem on Morals; letters; commentaries on civil law; and memorable sayings.

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Orations, Volume I
Aelius Aristides
Harvard University Press, 2017

Meticulous eloquence.

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was among the most celebrated, versatile, and influential authors of the Second Sophistic era and an important figure in the transmission of Hellenism. Born to wealthy landowners in Mysia in AD 117, he studied in Athens and Pergamum and had begun a promising oratorical career when in the early 140s he fell chronically ill and retreated to the healing shrine of Asclepius in Pergamum. There he began to follow a lifelong series of dream revelations and instructions from the god that inspired the six autobiographical books of Sacred Tales, an invaluable record of both temple therapy and personal religious experience published in the 170s. By 147 Aristides was able to resume his public activities as a member of the landed and gubernatorial elite and to pursue a successful oratorical career. Based at his family estate in Smyrna, he traveled between bouts of illness and produced speeches and lectures for both public and private occasions, declamations on historical themes, polemical works, prose hymns, and essays on a wide variety of subjects, all of it displaying deep and creative familiarity with the classical literary heritage. He died between 180 and 185.

This edition of Aristides’ complete works offers fresh translations and texts based on the critical editions of Lenz-Behr (Orations 1–16) and Keil (Orations 17–53). Volume I contains the Panathenaic Oration, a historical appreciation of classical Athens and Aristides’ most influential work, and A Reply to Plato, the first of three essays taking issue with the attack on orators and oratory delivered in Plato’s Gorgias.

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Orations, Volume I
Orations 1–17 and 20: Olynthiacs. Philippics. Minor Public Orations
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume II
Aelius Aristides
Harvard University Press, 2017

Meticulous eloquence.

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was among the most celebrated, versatile, and influential authors of the Second Sophistic era and an important figure in the transmission of Hellenism. Born to wealthy landowners in Mysia in AD 117, he studied in Athens and Pergamum and had begun a promising oratorical career when in the early 140s he fell chronically ill and retreated to the healing shrine of Asclepius in Pergamum. There he began to follow a lifelong series of dream revelations and instructions from the god that inspired the six autobiographical books of Sacred Tales, an invaluable record of both temple therapy and personal religious experience published in the 170s. By 147 Aristides was able to resume his public activities as a member of the landed and gubernatorial elite and to pursue a successful oratorical career. Based at his family estate in Smyrna, he traveled between bouts of illness and produced speeches and lectures for both public and private occasions, declamations on historical themes, polemical works, prose hymns, and essays on a wide variety of subjects, all of it displaying deep and creative familiarity with the classical literary heritage. He died between 180 and 185.

This edition of Aristides’ complete works offers fresh translations and texts based on the critical editions of Lenz-Behr (Orations 1–16) and Keil (Orations 17–53). Volume II contains Oration 3 (In Defense of the Four) and Oration 4, (A Reply to Capito), which along with Oration 2 take issue with the attack on orators and oratory delivered in Plato’s Gorgias.

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Orations, Volume II
Orations 18–19: De Corona. De Falsa Legatione
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume III
Orations 21–26: Against Meidias. Against Androtion. Against Aristocrates. Against Timocrates. Against Aristogeiton
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume IV
Orations 27–40: Private Cases
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume V
Orations 41–49: Private Cases
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume VI
Orations 50–59: Private Cases. In Neaeram
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Orations, Volume VII
Orations 60–61: Funeral Speech. Erotic Essay. Exordia. Letters
Demosthenes
Harvard University Press

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.

Demosthenes (384–322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon’s rise to supremacy. We possess by him political speeches and law-court speeches composed for parties in private cases and political cases. His early reputation as the best of Greek orators rests on his steadfastness of purpose, his sincerity, his clear and pungent argument, and his severe control of language. In his law cases he is the advocate, in his political speeches a castigator not of his opponents but of their politics. Demosthenes gives us vivid pictures of public and private life of his time.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Demosthenes is in seven volumes.

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Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric
Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran bring together nine essays that explore change in both the theory and the practice of rhetoric in the nineteenth-century United States.

In their introductory essay, Clark and Halloran argue that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, rhetoric encompassed a neoclassical oratorical culture in which speakers articulated common values to establish consensual moral authority that directed community thought and action. As the century progressed, however, moral authority shifted from the civic realm to the professional, thus expanding participation in the community as it fragmented the community itself. Clark and Halloran argue that this shift was a transformation in which rhetoric was reconceived to meet changing cultural needs.

Part I examines the theories and practices of rhetoric that dominated at the beginning of the century. The essays in this section include "Edward Everett and Neoclassical Oratory in Genteel America" by Ronald F. Reid, "The Oratorical Poetic of Timothy Dwight" by Gregory Clark, "The Sermon as Public Discourse: Austin Phelps and the Conservative Homiletic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century America" by Russel Hirst, and "A Rhetoric of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America" by P. Joy Rouse.

Part 2 examines rhetorical changes in the culture that developed during that century. The essays include "The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: Elocution and the Private Learner" by Nan Johnson, "Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric" by Nicole Tonkovich, "Jane Addams and the Social Rhetoric of Democracy" by Catherine Peaden, "The Divergence of Purpose and Practice on the Chatauqua: Keith Vawter’s Self-Defense" by Frederick J.Antczak and Edith Siemers, and "The Rhetoric of Picturesque Scenery: A Nineteenth-Century Epideictic" by S. Michael Halloran.

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The Orator’s Education, Volume I
Books 1–2
Quintilian
Harvard University Press, 2001

A central work in the history of rhetoric.

Quintilian, born in Spain about AD 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world.

Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyzes the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures.

Donald Russell’s five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orator’s Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation that are fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to today’s manner of expression. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

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The Orator’s Education, Volume II
Books 3–5
Quintilian
Harvard University Press, 2001

A central work in the history of rhetoric.

Quintilian, born in Spain about AD 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world.

Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyzes the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures.

Donald Russell’s five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orator’s Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation that are fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to today’s manner of expression. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

[more]

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The Orator’s Education, Volume III
Books 6–8
Quintilian
Harvard University Press, 2001

A central work in the history of rhetoric.

Quintilian, born in Spain about AD 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world.

Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyzes the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures.

Donald Russell’s five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orator’s Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation that are fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to today’s manner of expression. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

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The Orator’s Education, Volume IV
Books 9–10
Quintilian
Harvard University Press, 2001

A central work in the history of rhetoric.

Quintilian, born in Spain about AD 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world.

Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyzes the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures.

Donald Russell’s five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orator’s Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation that are fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to today’s manner of expression. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

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The Orator’s Education, Volume V
Books 11–12
Quintilian
Harvard University Press, 2001

A central work in the history of rhetoric.

Quintilian, born in Spain about AD 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world.

Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyzes the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures.

Donald Russell’s five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orator’s Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation that are fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to today’s manner of expression. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

[more]

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Oratory in Native North America
William M. Clements
University of Arizona Press, 2002
In Euroamerican annals of contact with Native Americans, Indians have consistently been portrayed as master orators who demonstrate natural eloquence during treaty negotiations, councils, and religious ceremonies. Esteemed by early European commentators more than indigenous storytelling, oratory was in fact a way of establishing self-worth among Native Americans, and might even be viewed as their supreme literary achievement. William Clements now explores the reasons for the acclaim given to Native oratory. He examines in detail a wide range of source material representing cultures throughout North America, analyzing speeches made by Natives as recorded by whites, such as observations of treaty negotiations, accounts by travelers, missionaries' reports, captivity narratives, and soldiers' memoirs.

Here is a rich documentation of oratory dating from the earliest records: Benjamin Franklin's publication of treaty proceedings with the Six Nations of the Iroquois; the travel narratives of John Lawson, who visited Carolina Indians in the early 1700s; accounts of Jesuit missionary Pierre De Smet, who evangelized to Northern Plains Indians in the nineteenth century; and much more. The book also includes full texts of several orations. These texts are comprehensive documents that report not only the contents of the speeches but the entirety of the delivery: the textures, situations, and contexts that constitute oratorical events. While there are valid concerns about the reliability of early recorded oratory given the prejudices of those recording them, Clements points out that we must learn what we can from that record.

He extends the thread unwoven in his earlier study Native American Verbal Art to show that the long history of textualization of American Indian oral performance offers much that can reward the reader willing to scrutinize the entirety of the texts. By focusing on this one genre of verbal art, he shows us ways in which the sources are—and are not—valuable and what we must do to ascertain their value. Oratory in Native North America is a panoramic work that introduces readers to a vast history of Native speech while recognizing the limitations in premodern reporting. By guiding us through this labyrinth, Clements shows that with understanding we can gain significant insight not only into Native American culture but also into a rich storehouse of language and performance art.
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Orbit
Arthur Vogelsang
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant. That dilemma of human fertility and love facing ultimate destruction is orchestrated by the author’s provocative voice and coiled lines, which fondle and handle the reader’s heart and mind in a bright light. The book insists on connecting the three eras of human experience – Then, Now, and When – at every turn. Orbit continues the unique aesthetic of Vogelsang’s first five award-winning books through its “oddly direct original persona,” its “mind – prophetic, wild, loony,” its “language of surveillance and trembling,” and the poems’ ability “to find and magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously” (comments draw from other poets’ reviews.) Vogelsang’s new book Orbit is a dialogue between daily life and transcendent vision, insisting on the reality of each.
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Orbiting the Sun
Planets and Satellites of the Solar System
Fred L. Whipple
Harvard University Press, 1981

--Spokes and braids in the rings of Saturn
--Eddying currents around Jupiter's Great Red Spot
--Volcanic eruptions on the satellite Io


These are the images from Voyager that have made headlines and captured the public imagination. Now, a giant of twentieth century astronomy guides us on a literary voyage of discovery that retraces the steps of this and other recent space probes--Viking, Mariner, Pioneer, as well as Russian efforts--that have revolutionized our understanding of Earth's nearest neighbors. Every step of the way, Fred Whipple provides the basic foundation in astronomy that enables the reader to be not merely awed and entranced but thoroughly informed, with a solid and satisfying understanding of the workings of our solar system.

In a dazzling combination of text and illustrations, Orbiting the Sun offers vistas that rival science fiction:

--mountains on Mars twice the height of Everest
--thunderstorms and sulfuric acid clouds on Venus
--the possibility of liquid nitrogen oceans on Titan


But the author also explores in precise detail the tests carried out by the Viking Lander that with virtual certainty have ruled out the hope of finding life on Mars.

This completely revised and updated edition of Whipple's classic Earth, Moon, and Planets once again presents Earth within its planetary context. This view allows us to speculate on such provocative concepts as the connection between an asteroid collision and the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the most obvious enhancement of this new edition is the stunning photographs, that include the eerie panorama of the Martian landscape taken from the Viking Landers, the dramatic sweep of Saturn's thousand rings, and full color port raits of the Jovian moons--the battered face of Callisto, Europa with its web of thin scratches, the "superhighways" of Ganymede, and Io with its volcanic plumes.

Fred Whipple has introduced two generations of student and amateur astronomers to the wonders of the solar system. In Orbiting the Sun he will charm and inform an entirely new audience.

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An Orchard Invisible
A Natural History of Seeds
Jonathan Silvertown
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution. From the tiny sesame that we sprinkle on our bagels to the forty-five-pound double coconut borne by the coco de mer tree, seeds are a perpetual reminder of the complexity and diversity of life on earth. With An Orchard Invisible, Jonathan Silvertown presents the oft-ignored seed with the natural history it deserves, one nearly as varied and surprising as the earth’s flora itself.

Beginning with the evolution of the first seed plant from fernlike ancestors more than 360 million years ago, Silvertown carries his tale through epochs and around the globe. In a clear and engaging style, he delves into the science of seeds: How and why do some lie dormant for years on end? How did seeds evolve? The wide variety of uses that humans have developed for seeds of all sorts also receives a fascinating look, studded with examples, including foods, oils, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals. An able guide with an eye for the unusual, Silvertown is happy to take readers on unexpected—but always interesting—tangents, from Lyme disease to human color vision to the Salem witch trials. But he never lets us forget that the driving force behind the story of seeds—its theme, even—is evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new solutions to the challenges of life.

"I have great faith in a seed," Thoreau wrote. "Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." Written with a scientist’s knowledge and a gardener’s delight, An Orchard Invisible offers those wonders in a package that will be irresistible to science buffs and green thumbs alike.

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Orchestrating Public Opinion
How Music Persuades in Television Political Ads for US Presidential Campaigns, 1952-2016
Paul Christiansen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.
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Orchid
Dan Torre
Reaktion Books, 2023
A wide-ranging natural and cultural history of orchids.
 
Approximately eight percent of all the Earth’s flowering species are orchids. Known for their beautiful flowers, delicate forms, and sweet fragrances, orchids are unlike any other flower. Orchids have been contemplated by philosophers, celebrated by artists, and cultivated or even eaten by millions. They occupy our thoughts, stories, greenhouses, supermarkets, and homes. Orchid surveys all of this and more as Dan Torre explores the intriguing and multifaceted natural and cultural history of orchids.
 
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Orchid
A Cultural History
Jim Endersby
University of Chicago Press, 2016
At once delicate, exotic, and elegant, orchids are beloved for their singular, instantly recognizable beauty. Found in nearly every climate, the many species of orchid have carried symbolic weight in countless cultures over time. The ancient Greeks associated them with fertility and thought that parents who ingested orchid root tubers could control the sex of their child. During the Victorian era, orchids became deeply associated with romance and seduction. And in twentieth-century hard-boiled detective stories, they transformed into symbols of decadence, secrecy, and cunning. What is it about the orchid that has enthralled the imagination for so many centuries? And why do they still provoke so much wonder?
 
Following the stories of orchids throughout history, Jim Endersby divides our attraction to them into four key themes: science, empire, sex, and death. When it comes to empire, for instance, orchids are a prime example of the exotic riches sought by Europeans as they shaped their plans for colonization. He also reveals how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution became intimately entangled with the story of the orchid as he investigated their methods of cross-pollination. As he shows, orchids—perhaps because of their extraordinarily diverse colors, shapes, and sizes—have also bloomed repeatedly in films, novels, plays, and poems, from Shakespeare to science fiction, from thrillers to elaborate modernist novels.
 
Featuring many gorgeous illustrations from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Orchid: A Cultural History tells, for the first time, the extraordinary story of orchids and our prolific interest in them. It is an enchanting tale not only for gardeners and plant collectors, but anyone curious about the flower’s obsessive hold on the imagination in history, cinema, literature, and more.
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The Orchid House
Allfrey, Phyllis Shand
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love.
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Orchid of the Bayou
A Deaf Woman Faces Blindess
Cathryn Carroll
Gallaudet University Press, 2001

In graduating from Gallaudet University, finding a job in Washington, D.C., and starting a family with her college sweetheart, Kitty Fischer tacitly abandoned the Louisiana Cajun culture that had exposed her to little more than prejudice and misery as a child. Upon discovering that she suffered from Usher syndrome (a genetic condition that causes both deafness and blindness), however, Fischer began an unlikely journey toward reclaiming her heritage. She and Cathryn Carroll tell the story of her heroic struggle and cultural odyssey in Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindness.

“By this time Mama knew I was ‘not right,’” Fischer says of her early childhood. “She knew the real words for ‘not right,’ too, though she never said those words. I was deaf and dumb.” Initially Fischer’s parents turned to folk healers to try and “cure” their daughter’s deafness, but an aunt’s fortunate discovery of the Louisiana School for the Deaf would rescue Fischer from misunderstanding and introduce her to sign language and Deaf culture. She weathered the school’'s experiments with oralism and soon rose to the top of her class, ultimately leaving Louisiana for the academic promise of Gallaudet.

While in college, Fischer met and married her future husband, Lance, a Jewish Deaf man from Brooklyn, New York, and each landed jobs close to their alma mater. After the birth of their first child, however, Fischer could no longer ignore her increasing tunnel vision. Doctors quickly confirmed that Fischer had Usher syndrome.

While Fischer struggled to come to terms with her condition, the high incidence of Usher syndrome among Cajun people led her to re-examine her cultural roots. “Could I still be me, Catherine Hoffpauir Fischer, had I not been born of a mix that codes for Usher syndrome?” she asks. “To some extent, the history of my people explains the constitution of my genes and the way my life has unfolded.” Today Fischer prospers, enjoying her time with family and friends and celebrating the Deaf, Cajun, Blind, and Jewish cultures that populate her life. Her lively story will resonate with anyone who recognizes the arduous journey toward claiming an identity.

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The Orchids
Natural History and Classification
Robert Dressler
Harvard University Press, 1990

This lively examination of the structure, classification, evolution, and ecology of the Orchidaceae will appeal to anyone with an eye for beauty or a bent for natural history. It will provide professional biologists and amateur orchidists alike with a deeper understanding--and a thoroughly new classification--of this, the largest flowering family in the plant kingdom.

The book is richly illustrated, with 95 color photographs and 99 line drawings emphasizing orchid morphology. But in the context of serious orchidology, aesthetic richness is not a superficial vanity. It is the result of evolutionary processes that demand adaptation and reward diversity, and Dressler's exploration of these mechanisms demonstrates how well the orchids have met the challenge, with over 20,000 species, a geographical range from Sweden to Tierra del Fuego, and, at times, as many as 47 different species on a single tree. But both the orchids' success and their profligate beauty are grounded, in part, in their voluptuary nature, and one of Dressler's most engaging themes is the reproductive adaptations, worthy of a Renaissance courtesan, that orchids use to attract, deceive, and manipulate pollinating insects.

The orchid family is actively evolving, providing rich possibilities for comparative study. Yet no one, whether professional or amateur, could reasonably proceed without first addressing Robert Dressler's The Orchids. Its new classification alone, including pollination biology, phyletic trends, chromosome counts, and generic relationships, will stand as a watershed contribution to the field.

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front cover of Orchids of Madagascar Second Edition
Orchids of Madagascar Second Edition
Edited by Johan Hermans, Clare Hermans, David Du Puy, Phillip Cribb, and Jean Bosser
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2007

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Ordaining Women
Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations
Mark Chaves
Harvard University Press, 1997

Why does a denomination prohibiting women clergy support parishes run by women? Why does a denomination opt to ordain women when there are few women seeking to join that clergy? And why have some denominations ordained women so much earlier than others? In a revealing examination of the complex relationship among religion, social forces, and organizational structure, Ordaining Women draws examples and data from over 100 Christian denominations to explore the meaning of institutional rules about women's ordination.

Combining historical and sociological perspectives, Mark Chaves deftly shows that formal institutional rules about ordination often diverge from the actual roles of women and are best understood as symbolic gestures in favor of--or in opposition to--gender equality. Ordaining Women concludes that external pressures from the women's movement and ecumenical pressure expressed through interdenominational organizations such as the National Council of Churches influence ordination practices. At the same time, internal factors such as having a source of religious authority that is considered superior to modern principles of equal rights also explain why some denominations ordain women much earlier than others.

Surprisingly, "the Bible forbids it" does not account for policies even among fundamentalists and other biblical inerrantists. Chaves' historical and comparative approach offers a revealing analysis of how the internal denominational debates have changed over time, becoming more frequent, more politicized, and more contentious. The skillful delineation of forces affecting debates and policies about women's ordination makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of religious organizations and of gender equality.

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