A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Using surveys of second generation immigrant adults in New York and Los Angeles, Origins and Destinations explains why second generation experiences differ across national origin groups and why immigrant offspring with the same national background often follow different trajectories. Inter-group disparities stem from contexts of both emigration and immigration. Origin countries differ in value orientations: immigrant parents transmit lessons learned in varying contexts of emigration to children raised in the U.S. A system of migration control sifts immigrants by legal status, generating a context of immigration that favors some groups over others. Both contexts matter: schooling is higher among immigrant children from more secular societies (South Korea) than among those from more religious countries (the Philippines). When immigrant groups enter the U.S. migration system through a welcoming door, as opposed to one that makes authorized status difficult to achieve, education propels immigrant children to better jobs.
Diversity is also evident among immigrant offspring whose parents stem from the same place. Immigrant children grow up with homeland connections, which can both hurt and harm: immigrant offspring get less schooling when a parent lives abroad, but more schooling if parents in the U.S. send money to relatives living abroad. Though all immigrants enter the U.S. as non-citizens, some instantly enjoy legal status, while others spend years in the shadows. Children born abroad, but raised in the U.S. are all everyday Americans, but only some have become de jure Americans, a difference yielding across-the-board positive effects, even among those who started out in the same country.
Disentangling the sources of diversity among today’s population of immigrant offspring, Origins and Destinations provides a compelling new framework for understanding the second generation that is transforming America.
For thousands of years, horror of the dead, superstition, and oppressive decrees prevented our ancestors from looking inside the human body; in ancient civilizations, diagnostics were based on imagination and theory, with only limited observation. So people developed suppositions about health and disease without knowing how the liver, heart, brain, and blood vessels looked or functioned. In tracing the history of medical imaging, Doby and Alker establish that it was not until the Renaissance and the detailed drawings of human anatomy by da Vinci and Vesalius that successful internal imaging of the human body was born.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Roentgen’s discovery of the X-ray provided the first miraculous look into the living body. From that instant, medical imaging developed at an ever-increasing pace, evolving to more recent discoveries in nuclear medicine, CT scanning, and ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging.
As Doby and Alker note, we can expect our efforts to be understood in the future only if we examine past events with an appreciation of the difficulties and challenges that faced our predecessors. Despite almost unbelievable advances in current medical technology, we must still rely on our own resources and common sense as human beings in understanding what technology can and cannot do for us.
A comprehensive set of appendixes pictorially depicting the history of imaging round out the volume.
Advocates have long contended that the associate degree nurse is vital to the American health care system. This study, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, confirms this view. In recent years the Foundation has invested more than $6.1 million in the development of the ADN, awarded by junior and community colleges. Many participants in the ADN projects for the Kellogg Foundation have noted that, despite the importance of the ADN and the controversy about its place in nursing education, the literature is scattered and hard to identity. The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education and the companion bibliography will provide much-needed information to educators, hospital and nursing administrators, nursing leaders, and public policy makers—all of whom must cope with the growing nursing shortage and increasingly difficult issues in health policy and administration.
When Europeans first visited California, they encountered one of the most culturally diverse regions of the New World. The coasts and ecologically richest areas were dotted with small polities which were supported not by horticulture but exclusively by hunting, fishing, and gathering, placing them among the more complex hunter-gatherer groups in the world.
The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom considers the Chumash, perhaps the most hierarchically organized of the California groups. It explores the final thousand years of coastal Chumash culture, which culminated in the complex society witnessed by the earliest Spanish explorers.
Chumash life was characterized by settled villages, massive production of prestige goods, sophisticated plank canoes, and extensive maritime exchange systems—features more characteristic of agricultural societies. Archaeological sites in the island Chumash area are exceptionally well preserved, permitting precise interpretations of both subtle and major changes in technologies, subsistence, prestige goods, and specialized shell and lithic industries. The data and interpretations presented here are the result of fifteen years of intensive investigation on the Channel Islands.
The eight case studies in this book -- each a synthesis of available knowledge about the origins of agriculture in a specific region of the globe -- enable scholars in diverse disciplines to examine humanity's transition to agricultural societies. Contributors include: Gary W. Crawford, Robin W. Dennell, and Jack R. Harlan.
Why do the United States and Canada have such divergent political cultures when they share one of the closest economic and cultural relationships in the world? Canadians and Americans consistently disagree over issues such as the separation of church and state, the responsibility of government for the welfare of everyone, the relationship between federal and subnational government, and the right to marry a same-sex partner or to own an assault rifle.
In this wide-ranging work, Jason Kaufman examines the North American political landscape to draw out the essential historical factors that underlie the countries’ differences. He discusses the earliest European colonies in North America and the Canadian reluctance to join the American Revolution. He compares land grants and colonial governance; territorial expansion and relations with native peoples; immigration and voting rights. But the key lies in the evolution and enforcement of jurisdictional law, which illuminates the way social relations and state power developed in the two countries.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to readers of sociology, politics, law, and history as well as to anyone interested in the relationship between the United States and Canada.
This book recounts the emergence of central banking Ideas and Institutions In this country—from the formation of the First Bank of the United States to the enactment of the Federal Reserve System. Focusing on the Intellectual and practical origins of monetary policy, Timberlake offers the first study on the political economy of central banking. He traces the Ideas that surrounded monetary events through records of congressional debates, documents of the House and Senate, and reports of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency. Almost none of this material has been used before as a method of analyzing monetary Institutions and their growth.
Timberlake's principal assumption is that these debates and government activities mirrored social norms. He corrects some traditional beliefs surrounding such monetary mysteries as the causes of the inflation of 1812-1815, the effects of the Specie Circular, and the decline of silver influence In the early 1890s. Economists, historians, lawyers, government policy makers, and politicians will welcome the new insights on the origins of central banking in the economic and political milieus of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
The roots of conservative Christian skepticism of international politics run deep. In this original work Markku Ruotsila artfully unearths the historical and theological origins of evangelical Christian thought on modern-day international organizations and U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the fierce debates over the first truly international body—the League of Nations.
After describing the rise of the Social Gospel movement that played a vital, foundational role in the movement toward a League of Nations, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism examines the arguments and tactics that the most influential confessional Christian congregations in the United States—dispensational millenialists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and, to a lesser extent, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Christian Restorationists—used to undermine domestic support for the proposed international body. Ruotsila recounts how these groups learned to co-opt less religious-minded politicians and organizations that were likewise opposed to the very concept of international multilateralism. In closely analyzing how the evangelical movement successfully harnessed political activism to sway U.S. foreign policy, he traces a direct path from the successful battle against the League to the fundamentalist-modernist clashes of the 1920s and the present-day debate over America's role in the world.
This exploration of why the United States ultimately rejected the League of Nations offers a lucid interpretation of the significant role that religion plays in U.S. policymaking both at home and abroad. Ruotsila's analysis will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of theology, religious studies, religion and politics, international relations, domestic policy, and U.S. and world history.
This book is a pioneering contribution to the history of the founding of the West German political system after the Second World War. The political cooperation between Catholics and Protestants that resulted in the formation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in occupied and early West Germany represented a significant change from a long history of hostility in confessional relations. Given that the CDU went on to dominate politics in West Germany well into the 1960s, Maria D. Mitchell argues that an understanding of what made this interconfessional party possible is crucial to an exploration of German history in the postwar period. She examines the political history of party formation as well as the religious beliefs and motivations that shaped the party's philosophy and positions. She provides an authoritative guide to the complex processes of maneuvering and negotiation that produced the CDU during 1945-46. The full range of political possibilities is discussed, including the suppressed alternatives to the Adenauer/Erhard axis that eventually defined the party's trajectory during the 1950s and the abortive Christian Socialism associated with Jacob Kaiser.
Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool.
This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.
Between 1995 and 2007, financial elites in more than a dozen western European countries engaged in a cross-border battle to create some twenty new stock markets, many of which were explicitly modeled on the American Nasdaq.
The resulting high-risk, high-reward markets facilitated wealth creation, rewarded venture capitalists, and drew major U.S. financial players to Europe. But they also chipped away at the European social compacts between national governments and citizens, opening the door of smaller company finance to the broad trend of marketization and its bounties, and further subjecting European households and family businesses to the rhythms of global capital.
Elliot Posner explores the causes of Europe’s emergence as a global financial power, addressing classic and new questions about the origins of markets and their relationship to politics and bureaucracy. In doing so, he attributes the surprising large-scale transformation of Europe’s capital markets to the rise of the European Union as a global political force. The effect of Europe’s financial ascendance will have major ramifications around the world, and Posner’s analysis will push market participants, policymakers, and academics to rethink the sources of financial change in Europe and beyond.
Though free verse became a dominant poetic mode only in the twentieth century, Kirby-Smith finds its roots in seventeenth-century England. Beginning his study with writers such as John Milton--who was considered by T. S. Eliot to be the greatest writer of free verse in English--the author places recent and divisive topics in poetics in context, showing them to be attenuated remnants of issues first broached hundreds of years ago.
The book seeks to establish a consensus on the nature of free verse, with reference to critics and poets including Pound, Eliot, Williams, Amy Lowell, Yvor Winters, and Hugh Kenner. Good free verse, argues Kirby-Smith, arises as a reaction to a well-established set of conventions. Likewise, The Origins of Free Verse goes against the conventions of existing poetic scholarship, offering an encompassing yet fresh--and controversial--literary history of free verse.
"At moments, this study is revelatory. . . . In its range and detail it offers a way of thinking about the history of English-language prosody which recognizes the importance of the poet's individual choices and undercuts our century's vanity. . . . Poetry is a learned art, and Kirby-Smith brings both insight and much learning to reading it." --Times Literary Supplement
"The best study of free verse I have seen. . . . The Origins of Free Verse is a book that all students of prosody will want to read. " --Harvard Review
". . . a witty and polemical account of the emergence and development of free verse." --Choice
H. T. Kirby-Smith is Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The domestication of the potato serves as the focus of Timothy Johns’s interdisciplinary study, which forges a bold synthesis of ethnobotany and chemical ecology. The Aymara of highland Bolivia have long used varieties of potato containing potentially toxic levels of glycoalkaloids, and Johns proposes that such plants can be eaten without harm owing to human genetic modification and cultural manipulation. Drawing on additional fieldwork in Africa, he considers the evolution of the human use of plants, the ways in which humans obtain foods from among the myriad poisonous and unpalatable plants in the environment, and the consequences of this history for understanding the basis of the human diet. A natural corollary to his investigation is the origin of medicine, since the properties of plants that make them unpalatable and toxic are the same properties that make them useful pharmacologically.
As our species has adapted to the use of plants, plants have become an essential part of our internal ecology. Recovering the ancient wisdom regarding our interaction with the environment preserves a fundamental part of our human heritage.
Originally published in hardcover as With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It: Chemical Ecology and the Origins of Human Diet and Medicine
This rigorous and up-to-date synthesis of current research and thought in igneous petrology explores the complex process of the generation and cooling of igneous rocks--those formed by solidification from a molten state, either intrusively, below the earth's crust, or extrusively as lava. Through the study of the mineral associations, compositions, and textures achieved in the formation of these rocks, Paul Hess traces the evolution of igneous rocks from site of origin to place of residency. He probes the clues that the distribution of igneous rocks provides for understanding plate tectonic processes. And he focuses on a number of unresolved problems critical to igneous petrology: the ultimate source rock of a magma; the location and process of melting; the collection of magma into large movable masses; the extraction of magma from its source and its emplacement onto the earth's crust; and the conditions of the crystallization and cooling of magma in its ultimate transformation into igneous rock.
This comprehensive work, which integrates geochemistry, tectonophysics, and planetary geology with classical igneous petrology, provides a solid introduction to physical processes and isotopic principles and applies these processes and principles consistently in the discussion of petrogenetic models for all the major types of igneous rocks. It is a stimulating resource for students and researchers in igneous petrology as well as for geologists in allied fields (geophysics, geochemistry, cosomochemistry, and metamorphic petrology).
Donald F. Stevens’ revisionist account challenges traditional historiography to examine the nature and origins of Mexico’s political instability. Turning to quantitative methods as a way of providing a framework for examining existing hypotheses concerning Mexico’s instability, the author dissects the relationship between instability and economic cycles; contradicts the notion that Mexico’s social elite could have increased political stability by becoming more active; and argues that the principal political fissures were not liberal vs. conservative but were among radical, moderate, and conservative.
Ultimately, Stevens maintains, the origins of that country’s instability are to be found in the contradictions between liberalism and Mexico’s traditional class structure, and the problems of creating an independent republic from colonial, monarchical, and authoritarian traditions.
In 1880 the Jewish community in Palestine encompassed some 20,000 Orthodox Jews; within sixty-five years it was transformed into a secular proto-state with well-developed political, military, and economic institutions, a vigorous Hebrew-language culture, and some 600,000 inhabitants. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History chronicles the making of modern Israel before statehood, providing in English the texts of original sources (many translated from Hebrew and other languages) accompanied by extensive introductions and commentaries from the volume editors.
This sourcebook assembles a diverse array of 62 documents, many of them unabridged, to convey the ferment, dissent, energy, and anxiety that permeated the Zionist project from its inception to the creation of the modern nation of Israel. Focusing primarily on social, economic, and cultural history rather than Zionist thought and diplomacy, the texts are organized in themed chapters. They present the views of Zionists from many political and religious camps, factory workers, farm women, militants, intellectuals promoting the Hebrew language and arts—as well as views of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. The volume includes important unabridged documents from the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict that are often cited but are rarely read in full. The editors, Eran Kaplan and Derek J. Penslar, provide both primary texts and informative notes and commentary, giving readers the opportunity to encounter voices from history and make judgments for themselves about matters of world-historical significance.
Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
"Thoughtful, well-organized, and lucidly written and reflects many years of painstaking research in different literatures."—Business Horizons
"The best analysis yet in English of the role of technology in Japan's emergence as a global economic power."—David J. Jeremy, Technology and Culture
"An important addition to Japanese economic history and the concept of creating relative advantage in trade."—Richard Rice, Journal of Asian Studies
"No other work in English approaches Christopher Howe's combination of a sweeping historical perspective with a comprehensive yet in-depth analysis of factors underlying Japan's pre-1940 economic 'miracle.' . . . [An] illuminating study."—Steven J. Ericson, American Historical Review
Modern political life emerged when liberal movements sought to establish elections, constitutions, free markets, and religious liberty. Yet liberalism even at its height faced strong and often successful opposition from conservatives. What explains why liberals overcame their opponents in some countries but not in others? This book compares successful and unsuccessful attempts to build liberal political parties and establish liberal regimes in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany from 1815 to World War I.
Andrew Gould argues that relations between states and churches set powerful conditions on any attempt at liberalization. Liberal movements that enhanced religious authority while reforming the state won clerical support and successfully built liberal institutions of government. Furthermore, liberal movements that organized peasant backing around religious issues founded or sustained mass movements to support liberal regimes.
Origins of Liberal Dominance offers striking new insights into the emergence of modern states and regimes. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, comparative historians, and those interested in comparative politics, regime change and state-building, democratization, religion and politics, and European politics.
Andrew C. Gould is Assistant Professor of Government and Kellogg Institute Fellow, University of Notre Dame.
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK
"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota
At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.
Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.
For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.
Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
Among others, de Steiguer examines works by Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Kenneth Boulding, Garrett Hardin, Herman Daly, and Arne Naess. He describes the growth of the environmental movement from 1962 to 1973 and explains a number of factors that led to a decline in environmental interest during the mid-1970s. He then reveals changes in environmental awareness in the 1980s and concludes with commentary on the movement through 2004. Updated and revised from The Age of Environmentalism, this expanded edition includes three new chapters on Stewart Udall, Roderick Nash, and E. F. Schumacher, as well as a new concluding chapter, bibliography, and updated material throughout. This primer on the history and development of environmental consciousness and the many modern scholars who have shaped the movement will be useful to students in all branches of environmental studies and philosophy, as well as biology, economics, and physics.
In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being.
A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.
The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.
The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that is traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country—1918-1939—and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles.
This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.
Charles E. Curran presents the first in-depth analysis of the origins of Catholic moral theology in the United States, focusing on three significant figures in the late nineteenth century and demonstrating that methodological pluralism and theological diversity existed in the Church even then.
Curran begins by tracing the historical development of moral theology, especially as presented in nineteenth-century manuals of moral theology, which offered a legal model of morality including a heavy emphasis on canon law. He then probes the different approaches and ideas of three important writers: Aloysius Sabetti, a Jesuit who was a typical, as well as the most influential, American manualist; Thomas J. Bouquillon, first chair of moral theology at Catholic University of America, a neoscholastic who criticized the manuals' approach as narrow and incomplete for failing to address principles, virtues, and the connection to systematic theology; and clerical educator John B. Hogan, a casuist who developed a more inductive and historically conscious methodology.
Curran describes how all three men dealt in different ways with the increasing role of authoritative teachings in moral theology from the Vatican. He also shows how they reflected their American context and the views of their own time on women and sexuality.
So little attention has been paid to the development of moral theology in this country that these authors are unknown to many scholars. Curran's book corrects this oversight and proposes that the ferment revealed in their writings offers important lessons for contemporary Catholic moral theology.
How is it that Czechoslovakia’s separation into two countries in 1993 was accomplished so peacefully—especially when compared with the experiences of its neighbors Russia and Yugoslavia? This book provides a sociological answer to this question—and an empirical explanation for the breakup of Czechoslovakia—by tracing the political processes begun in the Prague Spring of 1968.
Gil Eyal’s main argument is that Czechoslovakia’s breakup was caused by a struggle between two fractions of what sociologists call the “new class,” which consisted primarily of intellectuals and technocrats. Focusing on the process of polarization that created these two distinct political elites, Eyal shows how, in response to the events of the ill-fated Prague Spring, Czech and Slovak members of the “new class” embarked on divergent paths and developed radically different, even opposed, identities, worldviews, and interests. Unlike most accounts of postcommunist nationalist conflict, this book suggests that what bound together each of these fractions—and what differentiated each from the other—were not national identities and nationalist sentiments per se, but their distinctive visions of the social role of intellectuals.
Since Columbus first called the natives of the Americas “Indians,” the sources of their art and culture have been a puzzle. The strange mixture of objects of Asian appearance with those decidedly un-Asian has provided fuel for controversy between those who see the American cultures as products of diffusion and those who see them as independent inventions. Origins of Pre-Columbian Art cuts through this old dispute to provide a fresh look at ancient cultural history in the Americas and the Pacific basin.
Using evidence from archaeology, ethnology, and psychology, Terence Grieder suggests that contact between individuals across cultural borders is the root of both invention and diffusion. By tracing the spread of early symbolic techniques, materials, and designs from Europe and Asia to the lands of the Pacific and to the Americas, he displays the threads woven through humanity’s common cultural heritage.
While archaeology provides examples of ancient symbols, ethnology reveals widely separated modern peoples still using these symbols and giving them similar meanings. Mapping these patterns of use and meaning, the author describes three waves of migration from Asia to the Americas, each carrying its own cluster of ideas and the symbols that expressed them.
First Wave cultures focused on their environment and on the human body, inventing symbols that compared people and nature. Second Wave symbolism emphasized the center and the periphery: the village and the horizon; the tree or pole as world axis; and the world’s rim, where spirits exist. These cultures created masks to give form to those beings beyond the horizon. The heavens were finally incorporated into the system of symbols by Third Wave peoples, who named the celestial bodies as gods, treasured heaven-colored stones, and represented the world in pyramids.
Emphasizing the interpretation of art in its many forms, Grieder has found that such seemingly minor decorations as bark cloth clothing and tattoos have deep meaning. Ancient art, he argues, was the vehicle for ancient science, serving to express insights into biology, astronomy, and the natural world.
In Origins of Psychopathology, Horacio Fárega Jr. employs principles of evolutionary biology to better understand the significance of mental illness. He explores whether what psychiatry has categorized as mental disorders could have existed during earlier phases of human evolution. Fábrega approaches the prominent features of mental disorders as adaptive responses to the environment and life’s circumstances, which in turn can only be understood in the context of our evolutionary past. Taking his cue from theoretical issues raised by research into primate behavior and early hominid evolution, he poses the question: What, if any, aspects of mental illness are rooted in our evolution? Does mental illness occur in primates and other animals, and if so, what does this tell us about mental illness in human evolution? How has mental illness played an adaptive role? How has the development of language and higher cognitive functions affected characteristics of psychopathology? Fábrega synthesizes insights from both the clinical and the evolutionary points of view. This facet of psychopathology, which involves its origins and manifestations viewed across the expanse of human evolution, has, until now, been largely neglected in psychiatric education, theory, and practice.
The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
Vivid primary accounts of post-Civil War life by planters and freed slaves complement this study of the rise of southern sharecropping. Edward Royce employs both historical and sociological methods to probe the question of why slavery was replaced by sharecropping rather than by some other labor arrangement. His detailed analysis illuminates conflicts between labor and capital as one group struggles to preserve the plantation system while the other pursues a quest for land and autonomy.
Royce contends that southern sharecropping occurred through a "constriction of possibilities," that it was shaped by default rather than orchestrated by economic reconstruction by white landowners and black laborers.
Highlighting the conflict-ridden nature of the process of social change, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping includes rich descriptions of the plantation system and gang labor, the freed slaves' dream of forty acres and a mule, the black colonization movement, the Freedman's Bureau, and racial relations after the war.
In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.
The American Indian—origin, culture, and language—engaged the best minds of Europe from 1492 to 1729. Were the Indians the result of a co-creation? Were they descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel? Could they have emigrated from Carthage, Phoenicia, or Troy? All these and many other theories were proposed.
How could scholars account for the multiplicity of languages among the Indians, the differences in levels of culture? And how did the Indian arrive in America—by using as a bridge a now-lost continent or, as was later suggested by some persons in the light of an expanding knowledge of geography, by using the Bering Strait as a migratory route?
Most of the theories regarding the American Indian were first advanced in the sixteenth century. In this distinctive book Lee E. Huddleston looks carefully into those theories and proposals. From many research sources he weaves an historical account that engages the reader from the very first.
The two most influential men in an early-developing controversy over Indian origins were Joseph de Acosta and Gregorio García. Approaching the subject with restraint and with a critical eye, Acosta, in 1590, suggested that the presence of diverse animals in America indicated a land connection with the Old World. On the other hand, García accepted several theories as equally possible and presented each in the strongest possible light in his Origen de los indios of 1607.
The critical position of Acosta and the credulous stand of García were both developed in Spanish writing in the seventeenth century. The Acostans settled on an Asiatic derivation for the Indians; the Garcians continued to accept most sources as possible. The Garcian position triumphed in Spain, as was shown by the republication of García’s Origen in 1729 with considerable additions consistent within the original framework.
Outside of Spain, Acosta was the more influential of the two. His writings were critical in the thinking of such men as Joannes de Laet (who bested Grotius in their polemic on Indian origins), Georg Horn, and Samuel Purchas. By the end of the seventeenth century the Acostans of Northern Europe had begun to apply physical characteristics to the determination of Indian origins, and by the early eighteenth century these new criteria were beginning to place the question of Indian origins on a more nearly scientific level.
The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia examines this Prussian/German identity. It investigates the complex traditions of ideas, institutions, and social policy measures that lay at the root of the conservative Prussian welfare state. The examination of the ideas and policies of Prussian officials brings out a peculiar welfare state mentality of benevolence and patriarchal concern, pervaded by authoritarian streaks, that was unique in nineteenth-century Europe. In addition, the study analyzes the historiographical implications of the question of continuity and discontinuity in German history.
The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia is of interest to scholars and students of German history as well as to students of governmental social policy and of the workings of a welfare state.
Hermann Beck is Associate Professor of History, University of Miami.
The Murghad River delta, the site of ancient Margiana, was extensively settled during at least part of the Bronze Age, between 2200 and 1750 B.C. Oases in an otherwise desert region, settlements were situated along deltaic branches of the river or canals dug from those branches. Excavations at one of the largest and most complex of these sites, Gonur depe, have been ongoing for many years under the direction of Victor Sarianidi. During the 1988–89 field season, Fred Hiebert excavated part of Gonur in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkmenistan and the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow.
Published here, the results provide a key to understanding the large corpus of material of the Bactro-Margiana Archaeological Complex extracted over the past 30 years from this and neighboring sites of the Oxus civilization.
Hugh Agnew develops the argument that Czechoslovakia's celebrated national revival of the mid-eighteenth century has its intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and defined the nation's character and future development. He describes how intellectuals in eighteenth-century Bohemia and Moravia--the “patriotic intelligentsia”--used their discovery of pre-seventeenth-century history and literature to revive the antiquated Czech vernacular and cultivate a popular ethnic consciousness. Agnew also traces the significance of the intellectual influences of the wider Slavic world whereby Czech intellectuals redefined their ethnic and cultural heritage.
Origins of the Czech National Renascence contributes to a renewed interpretation of a crucial period in Czech history.
The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.
Greene examines the ways in which the Guomindang state planned and promoted scientific and technical development both in mainland China between 1927 and 1949 and on Taiwan after 1949. Using industrial science policy as a lens, she shows that the state, even during its most authoritarian periods, did not function as a monolithic entity. State planners were concerned with maximizing the use of Taiwan’s limited resources for industrial development. Political leaders, on the other hand, were most concerned with the state’s political survival. The developmental state emerged gradually as a result of the combined efforts of technocrats and outsiders, including academicians and foreign advisors. Only when the political leadership put its authority and weight behind the vision of these early planners did Taiwan’s developmental state fully come into being.
In Taiwan’s combination of technocratic expertise and political authoritarianism lie implications for our understanding of changes taking place in mainland China today.
The national forests are a major source of wood, water, minerals, forage, animal life and habitat, and wilderness. Yet questions of who controls and who benefits from the resources have posed problems and conflicts from the origins of the Forest Service to the present. Based on a 1991 Forest History Society conference, the essays collected here discuss a range of important topics surrounding our national forests, including the relationship between the federal and state systems that regulate the forests; the privately owned lands within the forests that are governed by federal statutes, state laws, and county ordinances; the ill-defined rights of those who lived on the land long before it was a national forest and were forced off the land; and the effect of early policymaking decisions made within the framework of the emerging Conservation Movement.
Contributors. Ron Arnold, Pamela A. Conners, Mary S. Culpin, Stanley Dempsey, Peter Gillis, Donn E. Headley, Robert L. Hendricks, Stephen Larrabee, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Dennis L. Lynch, Michael McCarthy, Char Miller, Joseph A. Miller, James Muhn, Kevin Palmer, Donald Pisani, John F. Reiger, William Rowley, Michael Ryan, William E. Shands, Harold K. Steen, Richard White, Gerald W. Williams
Beginning in October 1883 at the time of Treaty of Ancón terminating four years of warfare with Chile, Peru’s workers started a thirty-year effort to become an active and influential sector of society. They formed organizations, actively participated in the nation’s political life, engaged in industrial agitation—all revealing a growing class consciousness and an ability to compel both employers and governments to respond to their demands. Blanchard’s analysis and insights into the economic factors underlying Peru’s labor unrest also extends to labor developments and the modernization process throughout Latin America.
Verene takes as his departure point that Cassirer never wishes to argue Kant over Hegel. Instead he takes from each what he needs, realizing that philosophical idealism itself did not stop with Kant but developed to Hegel, and that much of what remains problematic in Kantian philosophy finds particular solutions in Hegel’s philosophy. Cassirer never replaces transcendental reflection with dialectical speculation, but he does transfer dialectic from a logic of illusion, that is, the form of thinking beyond experience as Kant conceives it in the Critique of Pure Reason, to a logic of consciousness as Hegel employs it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer rejects Kant’s thing-in-itself but he also rejects Hegel’s Absolute as well as Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung. Kant and Hegel remain the two main characters on his stage, but they are accompanied by a large secondary cast, with Goethe in the foreground. Cassirer not only contributes to Goethe scholarship, but in Goethe he finds crucial language to communicate his assertions. Verene introduces us to the originality of Cassirer’s philosophy so that we may find access to the riches it contains.
The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 represents the best in American, British, and Italian scholarship and offers a valuable and critical overview of the key problems of the emergence of the state in Europe. Some of the topics covered include the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states, the changing legal culture, the conflict between church and state, the forces shaping public finances, and the creation of the Italian League.
The eight essays in this collection originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Roberto Bizzocchi, Giorgio Chittolini, Trevor Dean, Riccardo Fubini, Elena Fasano Guarini, Aldo Mazzacane, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera. This volume will appeal to historians, historical sociologists, and historians of political thought.
When originally published in German in 1924, this volume was hailed as the first modern, comprehensive archaeological overview of an emerging area of the world. Yes, the Caribbean islands had long been known and owned, occupied, or traded among by the economically advanced nations of the world. However, the original inhabitants—as well as their artifacts, languages, and culture—had been treated by explorers and entrepreneurs alike as either slaves or hindrances to progress, and were used or eliminated. There was no publication that treated seriously the region and the peoples until this work. In the following ten years, additional pertinent publications emerged, along with a request to translate the original into Spanish. Based on those recent publications, Loven decided to update and reissue the work in English, which he thought to be the future international language of scholarship. This work is a classic, with enduring interpretations, broad geographic range, and an eager audience.
In the spring of 1846 James K. Polk announced that the Mexican Army had invaded United States territory and had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” This political rhetoric, as Glenn W. Price establishes in Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue, is part of the myth of American innocence. It represents the “internal contradiction between professed values and patterns of action,” perpetuated by American historical writing that emphasizes national consequences of the acquisition of foreign territory and minimizes both its international significance and the importance of the diplomatic and military methods used.
A conflict with Mexico, leading to territorial expansion of the United States, was not unwanted. California was Polk’s prime objective from the beginning of his administration, and this Mexican province was to be acquired by conquest in a war initiated on the Texas-Mexican border. To this end Polk sent several agents to Texas, but the man at the center of the war intrigue was Commodore Robert F. Stockton, independently wealthy, prominent in politics, and the head of great business enterprises.
Sufficient evidence exists to substantiate in every important particular the steps in Polk’s path of intrigue: his attempts to bribe Mexican officials; his efforts to encourage revolutionary forces in the Mexican provinces; his use of the threat of force to frighten Mexico into selling California; his attempt to initiate a war by proxy through the government of Texas and Anson Jones.
If Polk was unwilling to assume responsibility for aggressive war, Stockton was not; he arrived in Galveston with a squadron of naval vessels in May of 1845, prepared to finance an army of three thousand men from his personal funds to avoid the overt involvement of the government of the United States. But, says Price, for all the internationally dangerous implications of such a maneuver, the two men who played the chief roles in the war intrigue of 1845 are representative in their written and spoken expression of faith in American righteousness of action and in the American tradition of the divine mission.
Based on extensive research into the written and spoken words of the people who were involved, directly and indirectly, in the events, this analysis (which will be considered revisionist) of the origins of the War with Mexico is the result of the kind of objective approach to national history for which the author makes a plea in his preface and conclusion and in his interpretive comments throughout the work. The historian, Price believes, “has the extraordinary advantage of being able to examine mankind from that distance and elevation and detachment which so often reveals, as it is designed to reveal, the gulf between pretension and performance.”
Women workers and the revolutionary origins of the modern welfare state
In May 1790, the French National Assembly created spinning workshops (ateliers de filature) for thousands of unemployed women in Paris. These ateliers disclose new aspects of the process which transformed Old Regime charity into revolutionary welfare initiatives characterized by secularization, centralization, and entitlements based on citizenship. This study is the first to examine women and the welfare state in its formative period at a time when modern concepts of human rights were elaborated.
In The Origins of the Welfare State, Lisa DiCaprio reveals how the women working in the ateliers, municipal welfare officials, and the national government vied to define the meaning of revolutionary welfare throughout the Revolution. Presenting demands for improved wages and working conditions to a wide array of revolutionary officials, the women workers exercised their rights as "passive citizens" capaciously and shaped the meanings of work, welfare, and citizenship. Looking backward to the Old Regime and forward to the nineteenth century, this study explores the interventionist spirit that characterized liberalism in the eighteenth century and serves as a bridge to the history of entitlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The ñuu - the kingdoms of the famous Mixtec codices - are traced back through the Postclassic and Classic periods to their beginnings in the first states of the Terminal Formative, revealing their origin, evolution, and persistence through two cycles of growth and collapse. Challenging assumptions that the Mixtec were peripheral to better-known peoples such as the Aztecs or Maya, the book asserts that the ñuu were a major demographic and economic power in their own right.
Older explanations of multiregional or macroregional systems often portrayed civilizations as rising in a cradle or hearth and spreading outward. New macroregional studies show that civilizations are products of more complex interactions between regions, in which peripheries are not simply shaped by cores but by their interactions with multiple societies at varying distances from major centers. Origins of the Ñuu is a significant contribution to this emerging area of archaeological research.
Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise.
Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphaël Lemkin, who invented the term 'genocide', Docker guides us from the dawn of agricultural society, through classical civilisation to the present, showing that violence between groups has been integral to all periods of history.
This revealing book will be of great interest to those wishing to understand the roots of genocide and why it persists in the modern age.
Debate rages within the Catholic Church about the ethics of war and peace, but the simple question of why wars begin is too often neglected. Catholics’ assumptions about the causes of conflict are almost always drawn uncritically from international relations theory—a field dominated by liberalism, realism, and Marxism—which is not always consistent with Catholic theology.
In The Origins of War, Matthew A. Shadle examines several sources to better understand why war happens. His retrieval of biblical literature and the teachings of figures from church tradition sets the course for the book. Shadle then explores the growing awareness of historical consciousness within the Catholic tradition—the way beliefs and actions are shaped by time, place, and culture. He examines the work of contemporary Catholic thinkers like Pope John Paul II, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, Dorothy Day, Brian Hehir, and George Weigel. In the constructive part of the book, Shadle analyzes the movement within international relations theory known as constructivism—which proposes that war is largely governed by a set of socially constructed and cultural influences. Constructivism, Shadle claims, presents a way of interpreting international politics that is highly amenable to a Catholic worldview and can provide a new direction for the Christian vocation of peacemaking.
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world’s preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.
Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these and similar questions, four leading psychologists have spent their careers studying thousands of people, observing them as they’ve grown up and grown older. The result is unprecedented insight into what makes each of us who we are.
In The Origins of You, Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Richie Poulton share what they have learned about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child’s early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.
Painstaking and revelatory, the discoveries in The Origins of You promise to help schools, parents, and all people foster well-being and ameliorate or prevent developmental problems.
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
“Brings the groundbreaking research of the top developmental psychologists of the past quarter-century to a wider audience…A masterpiece!”—Dante Cicchetti, Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota
“Deliver[s] a flood of insights around the book’s central question: To what degree do our childhood personalities and behaviors predict our adult selves?”—Wall Street Journal
“One of the best and most important works of the last few years…Fascinating.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
Does childhood temperament predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is one’s health shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these questions, four leading psychologists dedicated their careers to studying thousands of people, observing them as they grew and emerging with unprecedented insight into what makes us who we are.
They found that human development is not subject to ironclad laws so much as a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction of one’s life. The early years do predict who we become, but they do so imperfectly. At once actionable and revelatory, The Origins of You is an invaluable guide for parents, teachers, and anyone working with or caring for children.
The least known of these species are perhaps best known to Alexander Skutch, who has studied birds in a Costa Rican tropical valley for more than half a century. In this fascinating book the first devoted exclusively to the icterids—he combines his own observations with those of other naturalists to provide a comparative natural history and biology of this remarkable family of birds. Devoting a separate chapter to each major group or genus, he delineates the outstanding characteristics of each and includes observations of little-studied tropical species such as caciques and oropendolas.
Orioles, Blackbirds, and Their Kin is an eminently readable natural history in the classic style. Enhanced by 31 scratchboard illustrations, this book will delight nature enthusiasts everywhere with its fascinating exposition of avian diversity. Because so much of the published information on the icterids is widely scattered, Skutch's painstaking compilation has created a valuable reference work that will provide students and researchers with a wealth of new insights into the tropical members of this New World family.
The glowing cloud in Orion's sword, the Orion Nebula is a thing of beauty in the night sky; it is also the closest center of massive star formation--a stellar nursery that reproduces the conditions in which our own Sun formed some 4.5 billion years ago. The study of the Orion Nebula, focused upon by ever more powerful telescopes from Galileo's time to our own, clarifies how stars are formed, and how we have come to understand the process. C. Robert O'Dell has spent a lifetime studying Orion, and in this book he explains what the Nebula is, how it shines, its role in giving birth to stars, and the insights it affords into how common (or rare) planet formation might be.
An account of astronomy's extended engagement with one remarkable celestial object, this book also tells the story of astronomy over the last four centuries. To help readers appreciate the Nebula and its secrets, O'Dell unfolds his tale chronologically, as astrophysical knowledge developed, and our knowledge of the Nebula and the night sky improved.
Because he served as chief scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope, O'Dell conveys a sense of continuity with his professional ancestors as he describes the construction of the world's most powerful observatory. The result is a rare insider's view of this observatory--and, from that unique perspective, an intimate observer's understanding of one of the sky's most instructive and magnificent objects.
Housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Library for over 150 years, this enigmatic masterpiece is perhaps the most magnificent yet enigmatic of the great Gothic psalters produced in East Anglia in the first half of the fourteenth century. Manuscript expert Frederica C. E. Law-Turner places the psalter within a wider historical context and then deciphers its lush illuminations—scenes that vary wildly in tone from the comic to the bawdy to the mythic. Full-color photographs illustrate the text’s many characters: falcons and hunting dogs at bay, kings and courtesans, and other animals dressed in human garb. Created over a period of decades by previously unrecognized scribes and artists, the Ormesby Psalter is an exceptional amalgam of medieval art and history. For scholars of medieval life, as well as art historians, this new study will be an invaluable resource.
Ornament as Crisis explores the ways in which the novels of Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) trilogy participate in and employ the history of architecture and architectural theory.
Beginning with the visual and architectural experiences of the figures in each novel, Sarah McGaughey analyzes the role of architecture in the trilogy as a whole, while discussing work by Broch’s contemporaries on architecture. She argues that The Sleepwalkers allows us to better understand how literature responds and contributes to social, theoretical, and spatial concepts of architecture. Ornament as Crisis guides readers through the spaces of Broch’s mdernist masterpiece and the architectural debates of his time.
Lively, well-written, and richly illustrated with color plates, Ornamentalism will appeal to scholars of the material past and social practice, and those interested in fashion studies, manners and morals, gender and sexuality, theater and performance.
A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel’s Ornaments find their myths in history and pop culture; they take their truths, but just as much their doubts, from the fallibility of what we remember and the desperation with which we struggle to reassemble it. Surreal, lyrical, madcap, they bring a faith, above all, in poetry. Which means in people and their bewildered hearts.
Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop—a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York’s 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called “the new thing” or “free jazz.” Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America’s most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world.
Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology, and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science, and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor, and shape life today.
Barry Keane's idiomatic and inventive verse translation brings to life this half-forgotten poetic account of a remarkable tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming oppression and allows Anna Stanislawska to take her place among the women poets of early modern Europe.
Written in 1685, Transaction or the Description of the Entire Life of an Orphan by Way of Plaintful Threnodies, often referred to as Orphan Girl, is a valuable, long-lost, seventeenth-century poetic text that documents women’s writing in the early modern period. In this autobiographical account, Anna Stanislawska speaks confessionally and unsparingly about her life, from her infancy to her widowhood and withdrawal from the world. Stanislawska was an incomparable memoirist, revealing the depths of her private life in a manner not to be matched until modern times. One Body with Two Souls Entwined brings together this spirited poetic account with an in-depth introductory and literary commentary by Barry Keane. Together the book offers a remarkable piece of scholarly, translational, and dramaturgical work and puts it in context amid the backdrop of Polish history.
A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphans Trains remains the definitive work on this little-known episode in American history.
As an "orphan train" crossed the country, it left part of its cargo at each stop, a few children in one small town and a few in another. Even though farmers needed many hands for labor, most of the small farm communities could not or would not take all of the children on the train. As the train moved to its next stop, those children not taken feared no one would ever want them.
Early immigration laws encouraged the poor of Europe to find new hope with new lives in the United States. But sometimes the immigrants exchanged a bad situation in their native country for an even worse one on the streets of New York and other industrial cities. As a result, the streets were filled with crowds of abandoned children that the police called "street arabs." Many New York citizens blamed the street arabs for crime and violence in the city and wanted them placed in orphan homes or prisons.
In 1853 a man by the name of Charles Loring Brace, along with other well-to-do men in New York City, founded the Children's Aid Society. The society planned to give food, lodging, and clothing to homeless children and provide educational and trade opportunities for them. But the number of children needing help was so large that the Children's Aid Society was unable to care for them, and Brace developed a plan to send many of the children to the rural Midwest by train. He was convinced that the children of the streets would find many benefits in rural America. In 1854 he persuaded the board of the society to send the first trainload of orphans west. With this, the orphan trains were born.
Cheap fares, the central location of the state, and numerous small farming towns along the railroad tracks made Missouri the perfect hub for the orphan trains, even though many areas of the state were still largely unsettled. Researchers have estimated that from 150,000 to 400,000 children were sent out on orphan trains, with perhaps as many as 100,000 being placed in Missouri.
Orphan Trains to Missouri documents the history of the children on those Orphan Trains--their struggles, their successes, and their failures. Touching stories of volunteers who oversaw the placement of the orphans as well as stories of the orphans themselves make this a rich record of American and midwestern history.
Building on the theoretical insights of Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Batten interweaves the discourses of psychoanalysis, economics, biography, sexuality, melancholy, value, and exchange to question accepted ideas of how Romantic poetry works. She asserts that poetic labor is in fact paradigmatic of the kinds of production—and the kinds of desire—that capitalist culture renders invisible. If symbolic exchange, in cash or in words, requires the surrender of a beloved object, if healthy mourning requires an orphan to “work through” emotional loss through the consolation of art or a love for the living, then the rebellious Romantic poet, Batten contends, possessed unique insight into the alternative authority of a poetic language that renounced a culture of denial. Batten urges that scholars move beyond critical approaches condemning allegedly regressive forms of pleasure, recognizing that they, too, are haunted by melancholic attachments to dead poets as they conduct their work.
The Orphaned Imagination will interest anyone concerned with the claims of the English Romantic poets to a distinctive, valuable form of knowledge and those who may wonder about the power of contemporary theory to illuminate a traditional field.
On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the collaborationist Vichy regime. Olivier Wieviorka offers a nuanced portrait of the individuals who determined the fate of France at this critical moment.
Pétain claimed to be saving France from ruin. The day of the vote has been described as a journée des dupes, the legislators so ignorant or fearful that they voted without a thought to the consequences. But Wieviorka shows that most of the deputies made a considered decision to vote for Pétain. He analyzes the factors, such as political culture and regional origins, that motivated the voting on both sides, and traces the men’s fates through the war.
Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans. He illuminates the complex moral issues inherent in accommodation and collaboration in a time of crisis.
Robert Finn's translation of Turkish author Nazli Eray's Orphée makes available to the English-language reader a rewriting of the myth from the perspective of Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Eray's surrealistic version takes place in a hot resort town in contemporary Turkey. The setting of an archaeological dig gives a connection to the past and literally to the underworld. Found in the dig is a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who proceeds to offer an unusual perspective on modern life and values through mysterious letters carried by a messenger pigeon. Eray also comments on modernity, as the city of Ankara emerges as a character in the novel's fantasy. Set in junta-ruled Turkey of the 1980s, the novel takes its place as a crucial slice of Turkish literary history.
Resonating with haunting references to the film Last Tango in Paris, the novel evolves as a mystery story with a humorous bent. Thus Eray illuminates her insatiable curiosity about other cultures, particularly those of the West. Finally, the style of the translation is simple and clear, with crisp dialogue. Sibel Erol, professor of Turkish literature at New York University, has written an introduction that places this fantastic plot in a literary context, as well as in understandable terms that relate to the reality of today's Turkey.
"Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift---the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings."
---James Longenbach
A highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation.
In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a "resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers." Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and "gifted" status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry.
Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, historical awareness, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.
The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. A large collection of recently discovered account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done much more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the remarkable value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period.
This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and also opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. At the same time they allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.
Theodor W. Adorno is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most prominent social theorists. Though best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno began his career as a composer and successful music critic.
Comprehensive and illuminating, Orpheus in the Underworld centers on Adorno’s concrete and immediate engagement with musical compositions and their interpretation in the concert hall and elsewhere. Here, Adorno registers his initial encounters with the compositions of the Second Viennese School, when he had yet to integrate them into a broad aesthetics of music. Complementarily essays on Bela Bartók, Jean Sibelius, and Kurt Weill afford insight into his understanding of composers who did not fit neatly into the dialectical schema propounded in the Philosophy of New Music. Additionally, essays on recording and broadcasting show Adorno engaging with these media in a spirit that is no less productive than polemical and focused as sharply on their potentialities as on their shortcomings.
Orpheus in the Underworld offers a captivating exploration of Adorno’s musical compositions, shedding new light on his understanding of influential composers and his critical perspectives on recording and broadcasting.
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Orphic Bend: Music and Innovative Poetics explores the impact of music on recent pioneering literary practices in the United States. Adopting the myth of Orpheus as its framework, Robert L. Zamsky argues that works by Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, John Taggart, Tracie Morris, and Nathaniel Mackey restage ancient debates over the relationship between poetry and music even as they develop work that often sharply diverges from traditional literary forms. Opening each chapter with a consideration of the orphic roots of lyric, Zamsky integrates contemporary debates over the prospects and limitations of humanism, the meaningfulness of gesture and performance, and the nature of knowledge with the poetics of the writers under consideration, grounding his analysis in close readings of their work.
The myth of Orpheus is used as a lens throughout the book, its different facets illuminating sometimes dramatically different aspects of the shared framework of poetry and music. In the case of Bernstein, for instance, Zamsky highlights Ezra Pound’s meditations on the relationship between poetry and music (the ground upon which Pound seeks to recapture the lost possibilities of the Renaissance) and Bernstein’s incisive critique of Pound. For her part, Morris emphasizes the performative power of spoken language, foregrounding the fact that all spoken language bears cultural, communal, and personal marks of the speaker, improving an ensemble self even within the most elemental features of language. Meanwhile, in Mackey’s work, the orphic voice of the poet powerfully reaches toward an order of knowledge in which poetry and music are nearly indecipherable from one another. In this sense, music and the musicality of poetic language are the gateways for Mackey’s Gnosticism, the mechanisms of initiation into a realm, not of secrets to be learned, but of visionary knowing that continuously unfolds.
The text explores a range of musical influences on the writers under consideration, from opera to different iterations of jazz, and underscores the variety of ways in which music informs their work. Many of these writers effectively present a theory of music in their invocations of it as an inspiration for, or as an analog to, poetic practice. Zamsky’s focus on poetry and music echoes important interdisciplinary studies on literary modernism, a period for which the importance of music to literary practice is well established and extends that discussion to the contemporary context. In doing so, Orphic Bend provides an important opportunity to consider both the specific legacy of modernism, and to situate contemporary writers in broader historical contexts.
The legend of the Destroying Angel of Mormondom was well established by the time of his death, of natural causes, in 1878. Travelers sang ballads about him as they gathered around their campfires at night. Mothers used his name to frighten children into obedience. He was accused of literally hundreds of murders, all in the name of the Mormon Church.
Yet behind all the myth was a man, a human being. Orrin Porter Rockwell believed in his prophet, Joseph Smith. He spent most of a year chained in an Independence dungeon for his belief, then walked across Missouri to Nauvoo, stumbling into Joseph’s house on Christmas Day. Joseph said to him then, “Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee,” and the legend was born.
Rockwell continued to serve the leaders of his church—as hunter, guide, messenger, scout, guerilla, emissary to the Indians, and lawman. He traveled thousands of miles, raised three families, accumulated land and wealth—and favorably impressed almost everyone who met him. But although he walked with presidents and generals, scholars and scoundrels, in a life lived at the center of many of the great events of the American frontier, he has remained an enigma, a source of continuing controversy.
Harold Schindler’s remarkable investigative skills led him into literally thousands of unlikely places in his search for the truth about Rockwell. Dale L. Morgan, one of the west’s foremost historians, called the first edition “…an impressive job of research, one of the most impressive in recent memory, in the Mormon field. Mr. Schindler has shown great energy and sagacity in dealing with a difficult, highly controversial subject; and he has also made maximum use of the latest scholarship and newly available archival resources.”
But the author was not satisfied until he had probed even more deeply, and this revised and enlarged second edition contains greatly expanded documentation as well as textual additions that flesh out the characters and events of this classic drama of early America.
Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects.
Author Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography.
Building a bridge between auteur and postmodern theories, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment.
Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.
In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. At a time when Manchu regulations made chastity the primary metaphor for obedience and social duty, filial discourse increasingly embraced the dramatic and passionate excesses associated with late-Ming chastity narratives.
Qing texts, especially those from the Jiangnan region, celebrate modes of filial piety that conflicted with the interests of the patriarchal family and the state. Analyzing filial narratives from a wide range of primary texts, including local gazetteers, autobiographical and biographical nianpu records, and fiction, Epstein shows the diversity of acts constituting exemplary filial piety. This context, Orthodox Passions argues, enables a radical rereading of the great novel of manners The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760), whose absence of filial affections and themes make it an outlier in the eighteenth-century sentimental landscape. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.
Reexamining religious culture in seventeenth-century New England, Janice Knight discovers a contest of rival factions within the Puritan orthodoxy. Arguing that two distinctive strains of Puritan piety emerged in England prior to the migration to America, Knight describes a split between rationalism and mysticism, between theologies based on God’s command and on God’s love. A strong countervoice, expressed by such American divines as John Cotton, John Davenport, and John Norton and the Englishmen Richard Sibbes and John Preston, articulated a theology rooted in Divine Benevolence rather than Almighty Power, substituting free testament for conditional covenant to describe God’s relationship to human beings.
Knight argues that the terms and content of orthodoxy itself were hotly contested in New England and that the dominance of rationalist preachers like Thomas Hooker and Peter Bulkeley has been overestimated by scholars. Establishing the English origins of the differences, Knight rereads the controversies of New England’s first decades as proof of a continuing conflict between the two religious ideologies. The Antinomian Controversy provides the focus for a new understanding of the volatile processes whereby orthodoxies are produced and contested. This book gives voice to this alternative piety within what is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England, and shows the political, social, and literary implications of those differences.
By mid-nineteenth century the movement for cultural and political self-determination of the Rumanians of Transylvania had attained a high degree of maturity and, at the same time, was entering a period of internal crisis. The Orthodox Church still stood at the center of national life, as it had for centuries, but now the paramount role of the clergy was effectively challenged by a dynamic class of lay intellectuals who were eager to set their people on a new, essentially secular, course to bring them abreast of the advanced nations of Europe.
The dominant figure of the period was Andreiu Şaguna, bishop and later metropolitan of the Rumanian Orthodox Church. Although he equaled the intellectuals in devotion to the national cause, he carried forward the venerable practices of ecclesiastical leadership and upheld the primacy of religion in the life of the nation. The tension he and the intellectuals created motivated Rumanian national development for nearly a quarter century.
The Rumanian experience has significance beyond the boundaries of Transylvania. Hitchins elucidates its connection to the complex process of national development that all the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy were undergoing, and suggests its relevance to contemporary Austrian policy toward national aspirations in general.
Sutherland airs out the odors, fetors, stenches, and reeks trapped in the pages of Orwell’s books. From Winston Smith’s apartment in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which “smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,” to the tantalizing aromas of concubine Ma Hla May’s hair in Burmese Days, with its “mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil, and jasmine,” Sutherland explores the scent narratives that abound in Orwell’s literary world. Along the way, he elucidates questions that have remained unanswered in previous biographies, addressing gaps that have kept the writer elusively from us. In doing so, Sutherland offers an entertaining but enriching look at one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and, moreover, an entirely new and sensuous way to approach literature: nose first.
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