The Osage Indians were a powerful group of Native Americans who lived along the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, now available in paper, shows how the Osage formed and maintained political, economic, and social control over a large portion of the central United States for more than 150 years.
On November 10, 1808, the American militia and the chiefs from the Little Osage and Big Osage nations celebrated. Fort Osage, built on a Missouri River bluff 250 miles west of St. Louis, was officially opened on that date, and the Osage Indians signed a treaty with the Americans written by Governor Meriwether Lewis.
Fort Osage, intended as a citadel for the opening of the great American West, was also to function as a trading post for the Osage Nation. It was President Jefferson's hope that Fort Osage and other fort-trading posts would not only keep peace on the frontier but would also begin a new era in relations between Native Americans and the United States. For a short time, the fort did provide the Osage with a place to trade their furs. It also offered them limited protection from the many other tribes who were their enemies. However, the Osage chiefs discovered very quickly that the fort was small consolation for the lands they had given up by signing the treaty.
In this well-written and very readable work, Kristie C. Wolferman traces the history of the Osage Nation from its origins to its forced departure from Missouri. She demonstrates the ways in which the Osage culture changed with each new encounter of the Osage with Europeans. The Osage had already experienced many contacts with the white man before Fort Osage came to be. They had encountered French trader-trappers, explorers, missionaries, Spanish administrators, and early settlers. Their lives had been changed by the influx of white disease, by the use of European trade goods and weapons, and by the political control of Spanish, French, and American governments. As a result, the Fort Osage experiment came too late to establish lasting good relations between the white men and the Indians.
The Osage in Missouri suggests that the white men could never understand the Osage way of life, nor the Osage the white men's way. But Osage culture, greatly altered by Europeans and Americans, would never be the same again. The Osage would be forced to sacrifice most of their traditions and beliefs, as well as their homeland, on the way to becoming "civilized."
Siouan peoples who migrated from the Atlantic coastal region and settled in the central portion of the North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans are now known as Osage. Because the Osage did not possess a written language, their myths and cultural traditions were handed down orally through many generations. With time, only those elements deemed vital were preserved in the stories, and many of these became highly stylized. The resulting verbal recitations of the proper life of an Osage—from genesis myths to body decoration, from star songs to child-naming rituals, from war party strategies to medicinal herbs—constitute this comprehensive volume.
Osage myths differ greatly from the myths of Western Civilization, most obviously in the absence of individual names. Instead, “younger brother,” “the messenger,” “Little Old Men,” or a clan name may serve as the allegorical embodiment of the central player. Individual heroic feats are also missing because group life took precedence over individual experience in Osage culture.
Supplementing the work of noted ethnographer Francis La Flesche who devoted most of his professional life to recording detailed descriptions of Osage rituals, Louis Burns’s unique position as a modern Osage—aware of the white culture’s expectations but steeped in the traditions himself is able to write from an insider’s perspective.
Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japan’s “merchant capital” in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center—the “Manchester of the East”—into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo’s. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the 1920s to the 1950s, a city that betrayed the workings of imperialism and asserted an urban identity alternative to—even subversive of—national identity.
Osaka Modern brings an appreciation of this imagined city’s emphatic locality to: popular novels by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, favorite son Oda Sakunosuke, and best-seller Yamasaki Toyoko; films by Toyoda Shirō and Kawashima Yūzō; and contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy. Its interdisciplinary approach creates intersections between Osaka and various theoretical concerns—everyday life, coloniality, masculinity, translation—to produce not only a fresh appreciation of key works of literature and cinema, but also a new focus for these widely-used critical approaches.
Although Oscar W. Underwood was considered a titan of his age, few American political figures have suffered such neglect as he. Except for his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 1924, his political career is largely forgotten even in Alabama. The one place in which Underwood is well remembered is in the folklore of Congress, where he is widely regarded as a great party leader who had mastered the rules perhaps as thoroughly as any member of Congress. This mastery, together with steady work, personal magnetism, and a willingness to compromise, made him effective as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in formulating a majority program after the Democrats seized control of the House in 1910. Pat Harrison, Underwood's lieutenant as minority leader, referred to Underwood as the "greatest natural parliamentarian, the greatest leader of a law-making body that I ever saw."
--from the Preface to Oscar W. Underwood: A Political Biography
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.
In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.
This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.
Nicholas Frankel presents a new and revisionary account of Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile on the European continent following his release from an English prison for the crime of “gross indecency” between men. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.
After two bitter years of solitary confinement, Frankel shows, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 determined to rebuild his life along lines that were continuous with the path he had followed before his conviction, unapologetic and even defiant about the crime for which he had been convicted. England had already done its worst. In Europe’s more tolerant atmosphere, he could begin to live openly and without hypocrisy.
Frankel overturns previous misunderstandings of Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the great love of his life, with whom he hoped to live permanently in Naples, following their secret and ill-fated elopement there. He describes how and why the two men were forced apart, as well as Wilde’s subsequent relations with a series of young men. Oscar Wilde pays close attention to Wilde’s final two important works, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, while detailing his nearly three-year residence in Paris. There, despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde attempted to rebuild himself as a man—and a man of letters.
Highly unorthodox, he courted controversy and was condemned for being a “sex guru.” His Oregon headquarters, Rajneeshpuram, proved to be a short-lived utopia that provoked antagonism and only added to his notoriety. But his ashram in Poona, India, continues to thrive, as do Osho centers in Europe and elsewhere. His adherents number in the thousands. His books have become bestsellers around the globe.
Osip Mandelstam, who died anonymously in a Siberian transit-camp in 1938, is now generally considered to be among the four or five greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. The essays in this volume, presented in an exceptionally scrupulous and true translation, were selected because they represent Mandelstam's major poetic themes and his thought on literature, language and culture, and the work and place of the poet. Mandelstam's views on literature are profound and original, and they are expressed in striking and dramatic, if sometimes difficult, prose. These essays deal with such topics as the poetic process and the relationship of poetry to politics, culture, the traditions of the past, and the demands of the present.
Sidney Monas's lively introduction to the work and life of Mandelstam combines the virtues of both the critical essay and detached scholarship. Keeping biographical detail to a minimum, Monas concentrates on the pattern that runs through the essays and lends them that coherence often noted in Mandelstam's poetry.
Osiris annually examines a particular topic in the history of science, bringing together experts in the field to consider multiple aspects of the time period, episode, or theme. Volume 22 explores the ways that twentieth-century political institutions and the human sciences in the western world attempted to understand and shape the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.
This newest annual edition of Osiris brings together a variety of scholars to consider a topic of increasing interest in the history of science: expertise. Focusing specifically on the role expertise has played in the support, legitimation, and growth of the state since early modern times, Expertise and the Early Modern State reveals how scientific expertise and practical knowledge were crucial to the construction of early modern empires and economies. The state, on the other hand, performed a similar function for scientists, giving them much of the status and resources they needed to further their work. A penetrating, multifaceted investigation, Osiris 25 will be required reading for historians of science and early modern political development.
“Climate is a rather elusive entity,” wrote Helmut Landsberg in 1950 as he sorted out some twenty or so competing definitions. This volume of Osiris explores the complexities in understanding what climate means from a historical perspective. The title of this volume, Klima, evokes its Greek origins, κλίμα, meaning an extended period encompassing vast layers of different kinds of meteorological information. The volume thus seeks not only to decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences, but also to re-visit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other “endemic” concerns. If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? The essays in this volume treat climate discourse as a framing device that makes explicit all social concerns arising from the anxiety over the sensible and latent experiences of living in an atmosphere of hunger and satiation, disease and health, poverty and wealth, isolation and community, angst and hope.
James Fleming is a historian of science and technology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, Maine. Vladimir Jankovic is a faculty member, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is a historian of atmospheric sciences, and has published in the history of meteorology, geography of environmental knowledge, and medical climatology.Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era.
How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation.
The volume contains essays by experts in fields extending from early modern arithmetic to contemporary robotics. Traversing a range of cases and arguments that connect politics, historical epistemology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence, the contributors collectively propose a novel vocabulary of concepts with which to think about how the history of science can contribute to understanding today’s world. Ultimately, Beyond Craft and Code reconfigures the historiography of science and technology to suggest a new way to approach the questions posed by an algorithmic culture—not only improving our understanding of algorithmic pasts and futures but also unlocking our ability to better govern our present.
Informal documents and remains of material culture, when analyzed properly, offer a unique window into the daily lives and workings of ancient civilizations. Published here in their archaeological context and with any relevant artifacts, the documents and inscriptions excavated recently in Egypt’s Western Desert represent a valuable addition to our meager documentation of the Bahriya Oasis in the first centuries CE.
This is the first comprehensive treatment of an archaeological dataset from the archaeological exploration of Bīr Shawīsh. Dating to around 400 CE, these primary historical sources include documentary texts written on ostraka, informal inscriptions on various ceramic objects, plus a group of incised lids. The core of the volume consists of an annotated edition and analytical indices. This is prefaced by the historical and archaeological context and is followed by a synthesis of selected issues inherent to the published material. The book includes appendices and pictures of all published objects. Doubling the number of texts and inscriptions published to date from the Small Oasis, this new corpus furthers our understanding of the economic, administrative, and social history of Late Antique Egypt.
The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade. As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open.
The (Other) American Traditions brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues? How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.
Contributors: Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F.C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren and Sandra A. Zagarell.
Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.
Adelaide Cromwell’s pioneering work explores race and the social caste system in an atypical northern environment over a period of two centuries. Based on scholarly sources, interviews, and questionnaires, the study identifies those blacks in Boston who exercised political, economic, and social leadership from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The central focus is a comparison of black and white upper-class women in the 1940s.
This rare look at a black social microcosm not located in the South is seminal and timely. Because it concludes at a critical period in American history, The Other Brahmins paints a colorful backdrop for evaluating subsequent changes in urban sociology and stratification. In a groundbreaking study, Cromwell effectively challenges the simplistic notions of hierarchy as they pertain to race.
Oildale native, Gerald Haslam, doesn’t like it when folks dismiss the Central Valley as boring and flat. In this collection of essays, he argues that it is California’s heartland and economic hub. In addition, the valley has produced a crop of gifted writers. These nineteen essays range from reminiscences of childhood and adolescence to a portrait of Mexican-Americans and their position in the Valley’s society to a moving essay about having the author’s aging father come to live with the family. Even if you have never lived in the Valley, reading this book will give you an entirely new perspective the next time you drive into it.
The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul.
Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang
Leo Steinberg’s classic Other Criteria comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” and the “flatbed picture plane” to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called “a tour de force of critical method,” is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns’s work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations.
“The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights—although the quality is very high and the insights are important—as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords.”
A scholar and activist tells the story of change makers operating within the Chinese Communist system, whose ideas of social action necessarily differ from those dominant in Western, liberal societies.
The Chinese government has increased digital censorship under Xi Jinping. Why? Because online activism works; it is perceived as a threat in halls of power. In The Other Digital China, Jing Wang, a scholar at MIT and an activist in China, shatters the view that citizens of nonliberal societies are either brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear. Instead, Wang shows the impact of a less confrontational kind of activism. Whereas Westerners tend to equate action with open criticism and street revolutions, Chinese activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society.
Many Chinese change makers practice nonconfrontational activism. They prefer to walk around obstacles rather than break through them, tactfully navigating between what is lawful and what is illegitimate. The Other Digital China describes this massive gray zone where NGOs, digital entrepreneurs, university students, IT companies like Tencent and Sina, and tech communities operate. They study the policy winds in Beijing, devising ways to press their case without antagonizing a regime where taboo terms fluctuate at different moments. What emerges is an ever-expanding networked activism on a grand scale. Under extreme ideological constraints, the majority of Chinese activists opt for neither revolution nor inertia. They share a mentality common in China: rules are meant to be bent, if not resisted.
Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another.
Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic arts and cuisine. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed.
As in Lévi-Strauss’s classic ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice of one of France’s most public intellectuals at its most personal.
A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars.
In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino-Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.
A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
This remarkable book by one of the great writers of the twentieth century includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Valéry, Wilde, Shaw, and Kafka. With extraordinary grace and erudition, he ranges in time, place, and subject from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Conrad, from ancient China to modern England, from world revolution to contemporary slang.
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