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The Old English Catholic Homilies
The First Series
Aelfric
Harvard University Press, 2024

A contemporary edition and translation of one of the great monuments of Old English literary and religious culture.

The homilies of the monk Ælfric, written in the last decade of the tenth century, offer some of the most important prose writing in Old English. They convey mainstream Christian thought at the turn of the millennium, a distillation of the spiritual inheritance of the English Church before the Norman Conquest and during a time of monastic reform. The homilies cover a broad range of topics, from biblical exegesis to saints’ lives to general Christian history, with a strong focus on the Gospel reading at Mass, explained in language that laypeople could understand. Ælfric is famous for his lucid prose, which he later developed into a rhythmical and alliterative style that has often been likened to verse.

In his first series of Catholic Homilies, Ælfric drew on the works of Church Fathers such as Augustine, Gregory, and Bede to create forty sermons for use throughout the church year. This is the first complete translation of the Catholic Homilies since 1844, presented alongside the newly edited Old English text.

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Old English Ecotheology
The Exeter Book
Courtney Barajas
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book examines the impact of environmental crises on early medieval English theology and poetry. Like their modern counterparts, theologians at the turn of the first millennium understood the interconnectedness of the Earth community, and affirmed the independent subjectivity of other-than-humans. The author argues for the existence of a specific Old English ecotheology, and demonstrates the influence of that theology on contemporaneous poetry. Taking the Exeter Book as a microcosm of the poetic corpus, she explores the impact of early medieval apocalypticism and environmental anxiety on Old English wisdom poems, riddles, elegies, and saints’ lives.
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The Old English History of the World
An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius
Malcolm R. Godden
Harvard University Press, 2016
The Old English History of the World is a translation and adaptation of the Latin history known as the Seven Books of History against the Pagans, written by the Spanish cleric Paulus Orosius at the prompting of Saint Augustine after the sack of Rome in 410. To counter the pagan and republican narratives of Livy and other classical historians, Orosius created an account of the ancient world from a Christian and imperial viewpoint. His work was immensely popular throughout Europe in succeeding centuries, down to the end of the Middle Ages. Around the year 900, an Old English version was produced by an anonymous writer, possibly encouraged or inspired by King Alfred. The translator actively transformed Orosius’s narrative: cutting extraneous detail, adding explanations and dramatic speeches, and supplying a long section on the geography of the Germanic world. This volume offers a new edition and modern translation of an Anglo-Saxon perspective on the ancient world.
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Old English Legal Writings
Wulfstan
Harvard University Press, 2020
Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) was a powerful clergyman and the most influential political thinker of pre-Conquest England. An advocate for the rights and privileges of the Church, he authored the laws of King Aethelred and King Cnut in prose that combined the rhetorical flourishes of a master homilist with the language of law. Some works forged a distinctive style by adding rhythm and alliteration drawn from Old English poetry. In the midst of Viking invasions and cultural upheaval, Wulfstan articulated a complementary relationship between secular and ecclesiastical law that shaped the political world of eleventh-century England. He also pushed the clergy to return to the ideals of their profession. Old English Legal Writings is the first publication to bring together Wulfstan’s works on law, church governance, and political reform. When read together, they reveal the scope and originality of his thought as it lays out the mutual obligations of the church, the state, and the common people. This volume presents new editions of the Old English texts alongside new English translations.
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OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE IN ITS MANUSCRIPT CONTEXT
JOYCE T. LIONARONS
West Virginia University Press, 2004

In Old English Literature in its Manuscript Context, editor Joyce Tally Lionarons has developed a multifaceted collection examining the issues facing the textual transmission of Anglo-Saxon writings. Eight established scholars consider the ideas of textual identity, authorship and translation, and editorial standards and obligations. This work also features a scholarly exchange of ideas and photographs of the original Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, making this essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Old English literature. The essays published in this text were originally composed at an NEH summer seminar conducted by Paul Szarmach and Timothy Graham at the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1997.

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Old English Lives of Saints
Aelfric
Harvard University Press, 2019
Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, married virgins, aristocrats, kings, soldiers, and bishops—for a late Anglo-Saxon audience. At a turbulent time when England was under increasingly severe Viking attack, the examples of these saints modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance. The Lives also covers topics as diverse as the four kinds of war, the three orders of society, and whether the unjust can be exempt from eternal punishment. Aelfric intended this series to complement his Catholic Homilies, two important and widely disseminated collections used for preaching to lay people and clergy. The translation is presented alongside a new edition of Lives of Saints, for which all extant manuscripts have been collated afresh.
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Old English Lives of Saints
Aelfric
Harvard University Press, 2019
Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, married virgins, aristocrats, kings, soldiers, and bishops—for a late Anglo-Saxon audience. At a turbulent time when England was under increasingly severe Viking attack, the examples of these saints modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance. The Lives also covers topics as diverse as the four kinds of war, the three orders of society, and whether the unjust can be exempt from eternal punishment. Aelfric intended this series to complement his Catholic Homilies, two important and widely disseminated collections used for preaching to lay people and clergy. The translation is presented alongside a new edition of Lives of Saints, for which all extant manuscripts have been collated afresh.
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Old English Lives of Saints
Aelfric
Harvard University Press, 2019
Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, married virgins, aristocrats, kings, soldiers, and bishops—for a late Anglo-Saxon audience. At a turbulent time when England was under increasingly severe Viking attack, the examples of these saints modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance. The Lives also covers topics as diverse as the four kinds of war, the three orders of society, and whether the unjust can be exempt from eternal punishment. Aelfric intended this series to complement his Catholic Homilies, two important and widely disseminated collections used for preaching to lay people and clergy. The translation is presented alongside a new edition of Lives of Saints, for which all extant manuscripts have been collated afresh.
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The Old English Pastoral Care
R. D. Fulk
Harvard University Press, 2021

The Book of Pastoral Rule, or Liber regulae pastoralis, by Pope Gregory the Great—the pontiff responsible for the conversion of the English to Christianity beginning in 597—is a guide for aspiring bishops. Pope Gregory explains who ought and who ought not seek such a position and advises on what sort of spiritual guidance a bishop should provide to those under his direction.

The Old English Pastoral Care, a translation of Gregory’s treatise completed between 890 and 896, is described in a prefatory letter by King Alfred the Great as his own work, composed with the assistance of his bishops and chaplains. It appears to be the first of the Alfredian translations into Old English of Latin texts deemed necessary for the revitalization of the English Church, which had been ravaged by the depredations of Scandinavian invaders during the ninth century and by the decline of clerical competence in Latin.

This new edition and translation into modern English is the first to appear in a century and a half.

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The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting
A Critical Edition
Mary P. Richards
West Virginia University Press, 2014

Seasons for Fasting, a late Old English poem probably composed in the early eleventh century, focuses on proper fasting observances in England. This poem, composed in eight-line stanzas, survives only in a sixteenth-century transcript made by the antiquary Laurence Nowell. With its topics, vocabulary, sources, and style derived from those of contemporary ecclesiastical prose, it belongs to a school of late tenth/early eleventh century poetry that only now is coming to be recognized and defined.

The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting: A Critical Edition provides a new text and translation of the poem, accompanied by an extensive introduction, commentary, and glossary. The introduction includes analyses of the poem’s manuscript origins, sources, language, meter, style, and structure. The text is collated with all previous editions. The commentary elucidates points of grammar and style, and justifies all editorial decisions. The glossary covers every instance of each word in the poem.

Since its discovery among the papers of Laurence Nowell in 1934, the poem has had only four editions, two of the text with basic notes, and two in doctoral theses with more commentary and analysis. This new edition brings the latest resources on manuscript study, lexicon (through the Concordance and Dictionary of Old English A-G), poetics, and cultural milieu to bear on this fascinating poem. The apparatus, including the glossary, will allow fellow scholars to extend these findings through links to their own work.

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Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints
Mary Clayton
Harvard University Press, 2013

Religious piety has rarely been animated as vigorously as in Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Ranging from lyrical to dramatic to narrative, the individual poems show great inventiveness in reimagining perennial Christian topics. In different poems, for example, Christ expels Lucifer from heaven, resists the devil's temptation on earth, mounts the cross with zeal to face death, harrows hell at the urging of John the Baptist, appears in disguise to pilot a ship, and presides over the Last Judgment. Satan and the fallen angels lament their plight in a vividly imagined hell and plot against Christ and his saints.

In Andreas the poet relates, in language reminiscent of Beowulf, the tribulations of the apostles Andrew and Matthew in a city of cannibals. In The Vision of the Cross (also known as The Dream of the Rood), the cross speaks as a Germanic warrior intolerably torn between the imperative to protect his Lord and the duty to become his means of execution. In Guthlac A, an Anglo-Saxon warrior abandons his life of violence to do battle as a hermit against demons in the fens of Lincolnshire. As a collection these ten anonymous poems vividly demonstrate the extraordinary hybrid that emerges when traditional Germanic verse adapts itself to Christian themes.

Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints complements the saints' lives found in The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, DOML 23.

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The Old English Poems of Cynewulf
Cynewulf
Harvard University Press, 2013

The Old English poems attributed to Cynewulf, who flourished some time between the eighth and tenth centuries, are unusual because most vernacular poems in this period are anonymous. Other than the name, we have no biographical details of Cynewulf, not even the most basic facts of where or when he lived. Yet the poems themselves attest to a powerfully inventive imagination, deeply learned in Christian doctrine and traditional verse-craft.

Runic letters spelling out the name Cynewulf appear in four poems: Christ II (or The Ascension), Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene. To these a fifth can be added, Guthlac B, because of similarities in style and vocabulary, but any signature (if one ever existed) has been lost because its ending lines are missing. What characterizes Cynewulf’s poetry? He reveals an expert control of structure as shown from the changes he makes to his Latin sources. He has a flair for extended similes and dramatic dialogue. In Christ II, for example, the major events in Christ’s life are portrayed as vigorous leaps. In Juliana the force of the saint’s rhetoric utterly confounds a demon sent to torment her.

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Old English Psalms
Patrick P. O'Neill
Harvard University Press, 2016

The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or recited in private devotion by lay people. They were also translated into Old English, first in prose and later in verse. Sometime in the middle of the eleventh century, the prose and verse translations were brought together and organized in a complementary sequence in a manuscript now known as the Paris Psalter. The prose version, traditionally attributed to King Alfred (d. 899), combines literal translation with interpretative clarification. In contrast, the anonymous Old English verse translation composed during the tenth century approaches the psalms in a spirit of prayer and devotion. Despite their differences, both reflect earnest attempts to capture the literal meaning of the psalms.

The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time. With this translation readers encounter the beginnings and the continuation of a long tradition of psalm renderings in English.

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Old English Shorter Poems
Robert E. Bjork
Harvard University Press, 2014

The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalizing insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey. The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. “Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide,” reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature’s indifference to human suffering. Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith.

This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.

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Old English Shorter Poems
Christopher A. Jones
Harvard University Press, 2012

Alongside famous long works such as Beowulf, Old English poetry offers a large number of shorter compositions, many of them on explicitly Christian themes. This volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library presents twenty-nine of these shorter religious poems composed in Old and early Middle English between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Among the texts, which demonstrate the remarkable versatility of early English verse, are colorful allegories of the natural world, poems dedicated to Christian prayer and morality, and powerful meditations on death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

Previously edited in many different places and in some instances lacking accessible translations, many of these poems have remained little known outside scholarly circles. The present volume aims to offer this important body of texts to a wider audience by bringing them together in one collection and providing all of them with up-to-date translations and explanatory notes. An introduction sets the poems in their literary-historical contexts, which are further illustrated by two appendices, including the first complete modern English translation of the so-called Old English Benedictine Office.

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Old English Tradition
Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall
Edited by Lindy Brady
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

Old English Tradition contains eighteen new essays by leading scholars in the field of Old English literary studies. The collection is centered around five key areas of research—Old English poetics, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, codicology, and early Anglo-Saxon studies—on which the work of scholar J. R. Hall, the volume’s honorand, has been influential over the course of his career.  

The volume’s contents range from fresh insights on individual Old English poems such as The Wife’s Lament and Beowulf; new studies in Old English metrics and linguistics; codicological examinations of individual manuscripts; fresh editions of understudied texts; and innovative examinations of the role of early antiquarians in shaping the field of Old English literary studies as we know it today.

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Old Farm
A History
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013
One of the Midwest's best-loved authors tells the story of his land, from the last great glacier that dug out its valleys and formed its hills, to his own family's 40 year relationship with the beloved farm they call Roshara. In this quiet but epic tale, Apps describes the Native Americans who lived on the land for hundreds of years, tapping the maple trees and fishing the streams and lakes, as well as the first white settlers who tilled its sandy acres, plowing the native grasses that grew taller than their teams of oxen. For all their work, the farm proved tough to tame. Hardscrabble farming methods and hard luck often brought failure.
 
"From land that provided only a marginal living for its early owners, this place we call Roshara has provided much for my family and me," writes Apps. He and his wife and their children have cared for the farm not so much to make a living as to enhance their lives. Apps chronicles the family's efforts — always earnest, if sometimes ill-advised — to restore an old granary into living space, develop a productive vegetable garden, manage the woodlots, reestablish a prairie, and enjoy nature's sounds and silences. Breathtakingly beautiful color photographs by Apps's son, Steve (a professional photographer), highlight the ever-changing beauty of the land in every season and hint at the spiritual gifts that are the true bounty this family reaps from Roshara.
 
Central to Apps' work is his belief that the land is something to cherish and revere. Like Aldo Leopold before him, Apps sounds an inspirational call to readers to preserve wild and rural places, leaving them in better condition than we found them for future generations.
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Old Farm Country Cookbook
Recipes, Menus, and Memories
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
When Jerry Apps was growing up on a Wisconsin farm in the 1930s and 1940s, times were tough. Yet most folks living on farms had plenty to eat. Preparing food from scratch was just the way things were done, and people knew what was in their food and where it came from. Delicious meals were at the center of every family and social affair, whether it be a threshing-day dinner with all the neighbors, the end-of-school-year picnic, or just a hearty supper after chores were done. As Jerry writes, "For me food will always be associated with times of good eating, storytelling, laughter, and good-hearted fun."

Inspired by the dishes made by his mother, Eleanor, and featuring recipes found in her well-worn recipe box, Jerry and his daughter, Susan, take us on a culinary tour of life on the farm during the Depression and World War II. Seasoned with personal stories, menus, and family photos, Old Farm Country Cookbook recalls a time when electricity had not yet found its way to the farm, when making sauerkraut was a family endeavor, and when homemade ice cream tasted better than anything you could buy at the store.
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The Old Federal Road in Alabama
An Illustrated Guide
Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A concise illustrated guidebook for those wishing to explore and know more about the storied gateway that made possible Alabama's development
 
Forged through the territory of the Creek Nation by the United States federal government, the Federal Road was developed as a communication artery linking the east coast of the United States with Louisiana. Its creation amplified already tense relationships between the government, settlers, and the Creek Nation, culminating in the devastating Creek War of 1813–1814, and thereafter it became the primary avenue of immigration for thousands of Alabama settlers.

Central to understanding Alabama’s territorial and early statehood years, the Federal Road was both a physical and symbolic thoroughfare that cut a swath of shattering change through the land and cultures it traversed. The road revolutionized Alabama’s expansion, altering the course of its development by playing a significant role in sparking a cataclysmic war, facilitating unprecedented American immigration, and enabling an associated radical transformation of the land itself.

The first half of The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide offers a narrative history that includes brief accounts of the construction of the road, the experiences of historic travelers, and descriptions of major changes to the road over time. The authors vividly reconstruct the course of the road in detail and make use of a wealth of well-chosen illustrations. Along the way they give attention to the very terrain it traversed, bringing to life what traveling the road must have been like and illuminating its story in a way few others have ever attempted.

The second half of the volume is divided into three parts—Eastern, Central, and Southern—and serves as a modern traveler’s guide to the Federal Road. This section includes driving tours and maps, highlighting historical sites and surviving portions of the old road and how to visit them.
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Old Fields
Dynamics and Restoration of Abandoned Farmland
Edited by Viki A. Cramer and Richard J. Hobbs
Island Press, 2007
Land abandonment is increasing as human influence on the globe intensifies and various ecological, social, and economic factors conspire to force the cessation of agriculture and other forms of land management. The “old fields” that result from abandonment have been the subject of much study, yet few attempts have been made to examine the larger questions raised by old field dynamics.
 
Old Fields brings together leading experts from around the world to synthesize past and current work on old fields, providing an up-to-date perspective on the ecological dynamics of abandoned land. The book gives readers a broad understanding of why agricultural land is abandoned, the factors that determine the ecological recovery of old fields, and how this understanding contributes to theoretical and applied ecology.
 
Twelve case studies from diverse geographical and climatic areas—including Australian rainforest, Brazilian Amazonia, New Jersey piedmont, and South African renosterveld—offer a global perspective on the causes and results of land abandonment. Concluding chapters consider the similarities and differences among the case studies, examine them in the context of ecological concepts, and discuss their relevance to the growing field of restoration ecology.
 
Old Fields is the first book to draw together studies on old fields from both a theoretical and practical perspective. It represents an important contribution to the development of theory on old field dynamics and the practice of ecological restoration on abandoned farmland, and the broader implications of old field dynamics to ecology and restoration.
 
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Old Floating Cloud
Two Novellas
Can Xue
Northwestern University Press, 1991
Can Xue draws the reader into a world of the grotesque and the surreal, of uncertain spaces and indeterminate identities, of sexual menace and psychological disorientation. These novellas are about life in post-Mao China, but not the China of social realism or of Western fantasy. At the forefront of China's new literary trends, these two novellas--"Yellow Mud Street" and "Old Floating Cloud"--explore Chinese reality through images of the absurd, sudden and illogical juxtapositions, and the limitless transformations induced by a unique imagination.
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The Old Formalism
Character and Contemporary American Poetry
Jonathan Holden
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
Our appreciation of American poetry is as influenced by the personas presented in the poems as by public perception of the poets themselves. Emily Dickinson peeking from behind a doorway with large dark eyes is an indelible image superimposed over her spare, enigmatic poems. The grand gestures of Walt Whitman's voice have much to do with our reading of "Song of Myself." And we cannot hear "Mending Wall" or "Mowing" without thinking of the image of the rustic, sly farmer-poet that Robert Frost so carefully cultivated. The moral authority of the poet reveals itself through the poems as well, and it is crucial to the meaning of the poem, Holden argues, if art is to elevate life. Part 1 of The Old Formalism,"The Practice," is a close study of some of the conventions and developments in contemporary American poetry, with such topics as "sex and poetry" "rhetoricity," and "sensibility." Holden shows lucidly how character—or lack of it—is revealed in poetry. In "Personae," the second part, he gives a studied reading of a group of several admired poets, such as Richard Hugo, Mary Kinzie, Ted Kooser, and William Stafford. Holden uses biographical references and personal contacts with the poets to strengthen the notion of character revealed in poetry. This book takes a decided stand in the ongoing debate of the past two decades about the relationship of American poetry to American culture. In an age when image dominates word, and the business of poetry is nearly as celebrity-laden as Hollywood, Holden takes us past the media glitz, backstage where the poems are waiting to be read. Quite simply, in a clear, incisive manner, he teaches us how to read well again.
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The Old French Lives of Saint Agnes and Other Vernacular Versions of the Middle Ages
Alexander Joseph Denomy
Harvard University Press
This volume presents an edition of a hitherto unpublished Old French Life of Saint Agnes, ms. B.N. Fr. 1553, accompanied by a study of the language and dialect of the poem. It presents a mixture of Picard and Francian forms, and linguistic evidence points to the middle of the thirteenth century as the time of composition. The Introduction reviews the scholarship dealing with the origin and growth of the St. Agnes legend. Appendices present for the first time four other versions of the legend: another Old French version preserved in the Bibliotheque Inguimbertine, ms. 106; an Anglo-French version by Nicole Bozon, preserved in ms. Cotton, Domitian XI, of the British Museum; an Irish version, ms. 23L29 of the Royal Irish Academy; and two Old French prose versions. A further section of the book studies some eleven versions of the legend in the vernacular languages of mediaeval Western Europe. Philologists, hagiologists, and students of mediaeval literature will find this a work of unusual importance.
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The Old German Baptist Brethren
Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge
Charles D. Thompson Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Since arriving nearly 250 years ago in Franklin County, Virginia, German Baptists have maintained their faith and farms by relying on their tightly knit community for spiritual and economic support. Today, with their land and livelihoods threatened by the encroachment of neighboring communities, the construction of a new highway, and competition from corporate megafarms, the German Baptists find themselves forced to adjust.
 
Charles D. Thompson Jr.'s The Old German Baptist Brethren combines oral history with ethnography and archival research--as well as his own family ties to the Franklin County community--to tell the story of the Brethren's faith on the cusp of impending change. The book traces the transformation of their operations from frontier subsistence farms to cash-based enterprises, connecting this with the wider confluence of agriculture and faith in colonial America. Using extensive interviews, Thompson looks behind the scenes at how individuals interpret their own futures in farming, their hope for their faith, and how the failure of religiously motivated agriculture figures in the larger story of the American farmer.
 
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The Old Greek of Isaiah
An Analysis of Its Pluses and Minuses
Mirjam van der Vorm-Croughs
SBL Press, 2014

A concise study of a large number of examples of pluses and minus providing insight into translation from Hebrew to Greek

Van der Vorm-Croughs focuses this translation study on the processes leading to pluses and minuses including linguistic and stylistic aspects (i.e., cases in which elements have been added or omitted for the sake of a proper use of the Greek language), literary aspects (additions and omissions meant to embellish the Greek text), translation technical aspects (e.g., the avoidance of redundancy), and contextual and intertextual exegesis and harmonization. This work also covers the relation between the Greek Isaiah and its possible Hebrew Vorlage to try to determine which pluses and minuses may have been the result of the translator’s use of a different Hebrew text.

Features:

  • Eleven categories for the pluses and minuses of the Greek Isaiah
  • Examination of translation techniques and translator errors
  • Use of Joseph Ziegler’s critical edition
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Old Growth in a New World
A Pacific Northwest Icon Reexamined
Edited by Thomas A. Spies and Sally L. Duncan
Island Press, 2008
Old-growth forests represent a lofty ideal as much as an ecosystem—an icon of unspoiled nature, ecological stability, and pristine habitat. These iconic notions have actively altered the way society relates to old-growth forests, catalyzing major changes in policy and management. But how appropriate are those changes and how well do they really serve in reaching conservation goals?

Old Growth in a New World untangles the complexities of the old growth concept and the parallel complexity of old-growth policy and management. It brings together more than two dozen contributors—ecologists, economists, sociologists, managers, historians, silviculturists, environmentalists, timber producers, and philosophers—to offer a broad suite of perspectives on changes that have occurred in the valuing and management of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest over the past thirty years. The book

• introduces the issues and history of old-growth values and conservation in the Pacific Northwest;
• explores old growth through the ideas of leading ecologists and social scientists;
• addresses the implications for the future management of old-growth forests and considers how evolving science and social knowledge might be used to increase conservation effectiveness.

By confronting the complexity of the old-growth concept and associated policy and management challenges, Old Growth in a New World encourages productive discussion on the future of old growth in the Pacific Northwest and offers options for more effective approaches to conserving forest biodiversity.

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The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde
Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940
Edited by Sue Ann Prince
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 brings together the history and the critical reaction to the new developments in art and design, places them in the context of conservative yet innovative Chicago at the turn of the century, and explores the tensions between tradition and innovation. The individual essays present the best in specialized current research, yet one can clearly understand the impact of modernism on the broader intellectual and cultural life of the city. I eagerly await as cohesive and thorough an analysis of the subject for New York."—David Sokol, University of Chicago

"This is fresh and fascinating research about the ups and downs of modernism in Chicago, a city where art students reportedly once hung Matisse in effigy. Regional studies like this one broaden our understanding of how the art world has worked outside of New York and gives depth to a story we know too narrowly. Applause all the way around."—Wanda M. Corn, Stanford University
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Old Hatreds and Young Hopes
The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration
Alan B. Spitzer
Harvard University Press, 1971

After the defeat and exile of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, the political climate of France was one of seething unrest, intrigue, and dissent. A clandestine and conspiratorial movement known as the Carbonari, or Charbonnerie, arose in the early 1820's with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy of Louis XVIII. Modeling itself after the Italian Carbonari, this coalition of young French republicans--bonapartists, retired army officers, junior and non-commissioned officers, and leaders of the extreme liberal wing of the Chamber of Deputies--set up cells throughout France, hoping in particular to infiltrate vulnerable army units. Old Hatreds and Young Hopes follows the movement from its beginnings to its ultimate failure, from plots to trials.

Sources of information about secret societies and political conspiracies are always scattered and complex, and often unreliable. Spitzer demonstrates that the secrets of a conspiracy and its place in the broader history of a nation can nevertheless be brought to light by evaluating one kind of evidence against another, by checking and testing government sources, particularly police documents, against such other materials as the memoirs and letters of conspirators and contemporary journalistic accounts. His book is much more than the story of the conspirators. In showing why the conspiracy developed and how it was handled, the author has illuminated the workings of the politicalsystem of the Restoration--the structure and organization of its administration and political police and the operation of political justice in its courts. He also situates the French Carbonari in the history of secret societies and radical movements in the first half of the nineteenth century and works out links with similar groups in other countries.

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Old Heart Of Nevada
Ghost Towns And Mining Camps Of Elko County
Shawn Hall
University of Nevada Press, 1998

Elko County, in the old heart of Nevada, is rich in historic sites, many of them hitherto uncharted and some verging on disappearing. For the first time, historian Shawn Hall identifies and locates the ghost towns and old mining camps of Elko County and recounts their colorful histories. Following a guidebook format, Hall divides the county into five easily accessible regions, then lists the historic sites within each region and provides directions to reach them. He offers a brief history of each site as well as a description of its extant structures and their present condition. The result is a lively compilation of local history and mining and ranching lore that records the dramatic past of Nevada’s northeast corner, its pioneers and prospectors, its towns and mines, its outlaws, ranchers, merchants, mining concerns, and civic leaders. The book offers never-before available information about the old heart of Nevada and the people who settled there. It will be of enduring value to tourists and weekend explorers, historic preservationists, and all those interested in the history and artifacts of this region.

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The Old Land and the New
The Journals of Two Swiss Families in America in the 1820s
Robert H. Billigmeier and Fred Altschuler Picard, EditorsTranslated by Robert H. Billigmeier and Fred Altschuler PicardIllustrations by Hans Erni
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

The Old Land and the New was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

These are the journals in English translation of two early Swiss immigrants to America who provided an intriguing picture of life as they saw it in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The book is illustrated with sketches by the Swiss artist, Hans Erni.

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The Old Man
Yuri Trifonov
Northwestern University Press, 1999
The Old Man veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident in the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; suggesting this idealism may have been tainted in the first place. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance.
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An Old Man Remembering Birds
Michael Baughman
Oregon State University Press, 2021
In a series of short, engaging essays, Michael Baughman reflects on his lifelong fascination with birds—on his deck in southern Oregon, at the end of a shotgun, on the beaches of Hawaii and Baja California.

Birders are dedicated and passionate, and, like anglers, they all have their stories. But Baughman tells more than simple accounts of birds spotted in the field. He reflects on human-animal relations, why humans seek closeness with nature, how a dedicated birder can also be a dedicated hunter. He explores how environmental change has altered the rhythms of bird life: the ospreys that resurged after DDT was banned, the waxwings and juncos that appear rarely now as climate change takes a toll on bird populations. Baughman also describes encounters with wildfires and smoke and discusses how they shape the landscape and wildlife of contemporary Oregon.

In his eighty-plus years around birds, Michael Baughman has learned one immutable lesson: as long as you remain alive and human, the closer you get to birds, and the more time you spend among them, the more you love them.
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Old Masters
A Comedy
Thomas Bernhard
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger's plans to kill himself—gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with
art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating.

"Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books.

"Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner
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The Old Mine Road
Hine, C. G.
Rutgers University Press, 1963
The Old Mine Road, considered the first road in America designed for wheeled vehicles, was built three hundred years ago by Dutch settlers for access to the mines of the Minisink country. It began in Kingston, New York, wove through Sussex and Warren counties in New Jersey, and ended near the Delaware Water Gap. Many changes have taken place in these regions since C. G. Hine recorded his observations and printed The Old Mine Road for his friends in 1908. Bulldozers have obliterated much of what he saw as he took his readers along the length of the road, describing the natural beauty of the countryside and relating the history and legends linked with the road and the people who lived on its route. This new printing is a facsimile of the first 1908 edition. Henry Charlton Beck's introduction gives a publishing history of the book and provides a biographical sketch about Hine.
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Old Mobile Archaeology
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2005

An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.



 

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Old Mobile
Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711
Jay Higginbotham
University of Alabama Press, 1991

The highly praised, landmark history of the founding of Mobile

Commissioned to mark the 275th anniversary of the founding of the city of Mobile, Old Mobile is award-winning historian Jay Higginbotham’s definitive history of the origins of French settlement on Mobile Bay and the birth of the city.

Higginbotham’s narrative is replete with memorable characters, such as the LeMoyne brothers: Iberville, the aristocratic adventurer who abandoned the settlement and the younger Bienville, whose iron determination and Catholic faith sustained the community through its first hardscrabble years 26 miles upriver, a disastrous flood in 1711, and the community’s retreat to the city’s current location, nearer the French supply depot on Dauphin Island.

The majestic sweep of Higginbotham’s fascinating account also takes in early Mobile’s relations with neighboring European settlements, such as their meddling French neighbors in Louisana to the west and the Spanish in Pensacola to the east. Despite being rivals of a sort, Mobile and Pensacola became, of dire necessity, allies in survival. Higginbotham consulted a wealth of previously unpublished sources in the national archives of the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, England, Spain, and Cuba, creating an authoritative account never likely to be equaled. A copious bibliography, excellent illustrations and figures, tables of relevant statistics, and a detailed index round out this magisterial edition.

Scholars and readers interested in the founding of Alabama, the history of Gulf Coast settlements, the French colonial empire, or related subjects will find Old Mobile essential reading.

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Old Morals Small Continents
Philip F. O'Connor
University of Iowa Press

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Old Norse Mythology—Comparative Perspectives
Pernille Hermann
Harvard University Press, 2017

Old Norse mythology is elusive: it is the label used to describe the religious stories of the pre-Christian North, featuring such well-known gods as Odin and Thor, yet most of the narratives have come down to us in manuscripts from the Middle Ages mainly written by Christians. Our view of the stories as they were transmitted in oral form in the pre-Christian era is obscured.

To overcome these limitations, this book assembles comparisons from a range of theoretical and analytical perspectives—across media, cultures, and disciplines. Fifteen scholars from a wide range of fields examine the similarities of and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures. The differences and similarities within the Old Norse corpus itself are examined to tease out the hidden clues to the original stories.

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Old Orchard Farm
The Story of an Iowa Boyhood
Hugh Orchard
University of Iowa Press, 2010
“I have often wondered what city boys find to do for fun. All cluttered up with houses and laid out in streets with no horses or mules or dogs . . . it must be pretty dull.” That sums up Hugh Orchard’s philosophy—and makes Old Orchard Farm a delightful reading experience.
Return to an Iowa farm of the 1880s, seen through the impressionable eyes of a lively young boy. There in Des Moines County, not far from Burlington, Hugh Orchard grew up when the farm was the center of life in rural America. A broken binder was a major crisis. A violent prairie storm was a terrifying experience. A trip to the county seat town was a thrilling adventure.
There were peculiar neighbors, traveling peddlers, an excursion to the mill to grind wheat for bread, hunting expeditions for the prairie chicken and wild geese. Progressive farming in those bygone days meant that Hugh’s father had the first windmill, the first top buggy, and the first barbed wire fence. There was also the pricey purebred cow who refused to allow anyone to milk her. From these homely, everyday events, Orchard crafts engaging tales of long-ago days—when both America and agriculture were simple, innocent, and untroubled by the complexities of modern life.
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Old Paint
A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980
English, Peter C.
Rutgers University Press, 2001

In the early twentieth century lead had many domestic uses: in solder for cans, as a gasoline additive to prevent “knocking” in engines, in water pipes, and, most prominently, in interior paint prized for its durability and ability to hold color. Far from being the toxic hazard we recognize today, lead was a valuable commodity. However, by the end of the century, lead had largely disappeared from our environment as physicians discovered the threat it posed to children’s health and mental development.

Old Paint documents the history of lead-paint poisoning in the United States and the evolving responses of public health officials and the lead-paint industry to this hazard up to 1980, by which time lead had been banned from gasoline and paint. Peter C. English traces lead poisoning from a rare, but acute problem confined to a small group of children to the discovery by the end of the 1940s of the dangers of the crumbling lead-painted interiors of inner-city dwellings. He draws on a wide range of primary materials not only to illuminate our understanding of how this health hazard changed over time, but also to explore how diseases are constructed and evolve.

 

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Old People, New Lives
Community Creation in a Retirement Residence
Jennie Keith
University of Chicago Press, 1982
"An American anthropologist, Jennie Keith . . . went to live for twelve months in a French housing scheme for retired people and as a participant observer conducted a study in community creation. This book, in which she describes and analyses her experience, is a delight. It is scholarly and draws on a wide range of studies of similar residences and other collectives; it is also vivid, funny, sad and entertaining."—Marie Borland, British Journal of Social Work
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The Old Priest
Anthony Wallace
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they’ve been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor.  Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.
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Old Province of Quebec
Alfred Leroy Burt
University of Minnesota Press, 1933

Old Province of Quebec was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Old Puglia
A Cultural Companion to South-Eastern Italy
Desmond Seward and Susan Mountgarret
Haus Publishing, 2016
Apulia (or Puglia) is the heel of Italy, stretching down from the spur of the Italian boot. Its landscape is often very beautiful and it has wonderful old cities with Romanesque cathedrals, Gothic castles and a great wealth of Baroque architecture, together with 'rupestrian' churches that contain Byzantine frescoes. But, although far from inaccessible, until quite recently it was seldom visited by Anglo Saxons. Today, however, Apulia is becoming fashionable, 'an alternative to Tuscany'. It is featured on radio and television; travel supplements describe its beaches and its cooking, supermarkets stock Apulian wine, oil, bread and pasta. Yet almost nothing about the region has been published in English since the days of Norman Douglas and the Sitwells. One can find 'holiday histories' of Tuscany, but there is no popular introduction to Apulian history, not even in Italian. Our book, which grew out of what was originally intended as a travel book, has been written to fill the gap by providing a simple, readable account.
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The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I
The Complete Text
Alexis de Tocqueville
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.
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The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume II
Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon
Alexis de Tocqueville
University of Chicago Press, 2001
With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-best known for his classic Democracy in America— envisioned a multivolume philosophic study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume 1, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed."

Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in volume 2—in clear, up-to-date English—is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. Based on the new French edition of The Old Regime, most of the translated texts have never before appeared in English, and many of those that have appeared have been considerable altered. More than ever before, readers will be able to see how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville's thought.



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The Old Regular Baptists Of Central Appa
Brothers And Sisters In Hope
Howard Dorgan
University of Tennessee Press, 1989

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Old Riot, New Ranger
Captain Jack Dean, Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal
Bob Alexander
University of North Texas Press, 2018

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Old Sleuth's Freaky Female Detectives
From the Dime Novels
Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

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The Old South Frontier
Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819–1861
Donald P. Mcneilly
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
In this deeply researched and well-written study, Donald P. McNeilly examines how moderately wealthy planters and sons of planters immigrated into the virtually empty lands of Arkansas, seeking their fortune and to establish themselves as the leaders of a new planter aristocracy west of the Mississippi River. These men, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, and usually with slaves, sought the best land possible, cleared it, planted their crops, and erected crude houses and other buildings. Life was difficult for these would-be leaders of society and their families, and especially hard for the slaves who toiled to create fields in which they labored to produce a crop. McNeilly argues that by the time of Arkansas's statehood in 1836, planters and large farmers had secured a hold over their frontier home, and that between 1840 and the Civil War, planters solidified their hold on politics, economics, and society in Arkansas. The author takes a topical approach to the subject, with chapters on migration, slavery, non-planter whites, politics, and the secession crisis of 1860–1861. McNeilly offers a first-rate analysis of the creation of a white, cotton-based society in Arkansas, shedding light not only on the southern frontier, but also on the established Old South before the Civil War.
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OLD SOUTH, NEW SOUTH, OR DOWN SOUTH?
FLORIDA AND THE MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Edited by Irvin D. S. Winsboro
West Virginia University Press, 2009

How does a state, tarnished with a racist, violent history, emerge from the modern civil rights movement with a reputation for tolerance and progression? Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement exposes the image, illusion, and reality behind Florida’s hidden story of racial discrimination and violence. By exploring multiple perspectives on racially motivated events, such as black agency, political stonewalling, and racist assaults, this collection of nine essays reconceptualizes the civil rights legacy of the Sunshine State. Its dissection of local, isolated acts of rebellion reveals a strategic, political concealment of the once dominant, often overlooked, old south attitude towards race in Florida.

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The OLD STORY, WITH A DIFFERENCE
PICKWICK'S VISION
JULIAN WOLFREYS
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick’s Vision explores in radically different ways from most approaches to nineteenth-century studies the tropes and metaphors of vision in Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Julian Wolfreys provides a close reading of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and argues that this novel is an exemplary text for the re-consideration of concepts such as literature, history, the novel, and the whole notion of Victorian studies. True to the purpose of the Victorian Critical Interventions Series, Wolfreys challenges scholars to rethink the use of a canonical text in Victorian literature.

Challenging the commonplaces of historicist criticism, and demonstrating the need for a return to close reading, The Old Story, with a Difference presents a reading of the novel grounded in the twinned rigors of materialist historiography and theoretical inflections tending toward attentiveness to epistemological and linguistic concerns. Through such an orientation, Wolfreys unpacks the relation between the tropes of visuality and matters of memory, history, and the necessity of fiction to bear witness to the cultures, past and present, from which literature becomes generated and which it mediates. In doing so, he situates an argument for rethinking Dickens’ novel as the inaugural novel of Victorian fiction par excellence, in that novel’s efforts to remain open to the traces of the past in particular ways.

The Old Story, with a Difference holds profound implications for the study not only of Dickens’ works but Victorian literature and culture in general. Provocative and inventive, this ambitious analysis will challenge, goad, and invite the reader to return to acts of materialist reading informed by ethical and ideological urgency, rather than relapsing into the commonplaces of humanist cliché.

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The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality
Theoretical and Practical Essays from a South African P
Christo Lombaard
SBL Press, 2012

An engaging anthology that deals with both theory and practice

The emerging discipline of biblical spirituality considers how faith finds expression within the biblical texts and how modern expressions of faith interact with those texts. This volume represents Christo Lombaard’s reflective, analytical, and exegetical contributions to the field in order to explore how biblical texts mediate faith, both ancient and contemporary. It reflects on aspects of the interaction of faith and Scripture, critically approaching both dimensions.

Features:

  • Seven previously published papers drawn predominately from South African journals
  • Explorations of how biblical texts mediate faith
  • Close examination of the discipline of biblical spirituality as part of spirituality studies
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The Old Testament for Latter-day Saints
Douglas, Alex
Signature Books, 2023
In The Old Testament for Latter-day Saints, Alex Douglas explores the Old Testament from various perspectives: as a believer, a skeptic, a secular scholar, and a member of the Latter-day Saint community. He delves deep into biblical scholarship, incorporating insights from disciplines such as ancient Near Eastern archaeology and the rich mythic traditions of Israel’s neighboring cultures. By doing so, Douglas helps the reader appreciate the profound significance the Old Testament held for its earliest readers.

This book also explores the intriguing ways in which Latter-day Saints have interpreted and engaged with this ancient text and the author navigates their diverse interpretations of it. He examines how individuals have alternately embraced the Old Testament as myth or history, law or legend, wise counsel or sacred scripture. He shows where many traditional interpretations have come from, and offers many ways to encourage a more nuanced understanding of the text.

Drawing from a wealth of scholarly research and his own unique perspective, Douglas presents a compelling and multidimensional analysis of the Old Testament. However readers approach the text, this book sheds light on the complex nature of the Old Testament and its enduring relevance to the Latter-day Saint tradition.
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The Old Testament in Byzantium
Paul Magdalino
Harvard University Press, 2010
This volume contains selected papers from a December 2006 Dumbarton Oaks symposium that complemented an exhibition of early Bible manuscripts at the Freer Gallery and Sackler Gallery of Art titled "In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000." Speakers were invited to examine the use of the Greek Old Testament as a text, social practice, and cultural experience in the Byzantine Empire. Not only are reminiscences of the Old Testament ubiquitous in Byzantine literature and art, but the Byzantine people also revered and identified with Old Testament role models. The Old Testament connected Byzantium not only with its Christian neighbors but with Jewish and Muslim peoples as well. This widespread phenomenon has never received systematic investigation. The Old Testament in Byzantium considers the manifestations of the holy books in Byzantine manuscript illustration, architecture, and government, as well as in Jewish Bible translations and the construction of Muhammad's character.
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The Old Testament Manuscripts in the Freer Collection
Henry A. Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 1917
A publication of the Washington Manuscripts of Deuteronomy, Joshua, and the Psalms, The Old Testament Manuscripts in the Freer Collection offers copies of the relevant texts, an analysis of the materials used to create the manuscripts, the hands, and textual problems. Extensive plates of the manuscripts are included.
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Old Testament Narratives
Daniel Anlezark
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular. More than simple translations, they recast the familiar plots in daringly imaginative ways, from Satan's seductive pride (anticipating Milton), to a sympathetic yet tragic Eve, to Moses as a headstrong Germanic warrior-king, to the lyrical nature poetry in Azarias.

Whether or not the legendary Caedmon authored any of the poems in this volume, they represent traditional verse in all its vigor. Three of them survive as sequential epics in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The first, the Old English Genesis, recounts biblical history from creation and the apocryphal fall of the angels to the sacrifice of Isaac; Abraham emerges as the central figure struggling through exile toward a lasting covenant with God. The second, Exodus, follows Moses as he leads the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery and across the Red Sea. Both Abraham and Moses are transformed into martial heroes in the Anglo-Saxon mold. The last in the triad, Daniel, tells of the trials of the Jewish people in Babylonian exile up through Belshazzar's feast. Azarias, the final poem in this volume (found in an Exeter Cathedral manuscript), relates the apocryphal episode of the three youths in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

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The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL
Matthias Henze
SBL Press, 2019

A history of research that changed scholarly perceptions of early Judaism

This collection of essays by some of the most important scholars in the fields of early Judaism and Christianity celebrates fifty years of the study of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at the Society of Biblical Literature and the pioneering scholars who introduced the Pseudepigrapha to the Society. Since its early days as a breakfast meeting in 1969, the Pseudepigrapha Section has provided a forum for a rigorous discussion of these understudied texts and their relevance for Judaism and Christianity. Contributors recount the history of the section's beginnings, critically examine the vivid debates that shaped the discipline, and challenge future generations to expand the field in new interdisciplinary directions.

Features:

  • Reflections from early members of the Pseudepigrapha Group
  • Essays that examine a methodological shift from capturing and preserving traditions to exploring the intellectual and social world of Jewish antiquity
  • Evaluations of past interactions with adjacent fields and the larger academic world
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Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective
Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 1691, a Livonian peasant known as Old Thiess boldly announced before a district court that he was a werewolf. Yet far from being a diabolical monster, he insisted, he was one of the “hounds of God,” fierce guardians who battled sorcerers, witches, and even Satan to protect the fields, flocks, and humanity—a baffling claim that attracted the notice of the judges then and still commands attention from historians today.

In this book, eminent scholars Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln offer a uniquely comparative look at the trial and startling testimony of Old Thiess. They present the first English translation of the trial transcript, in which the man’s own voice can be heard, before turning to subsequent analyses of the event, which range from efforts to connect Old Thiess to shamanistic practices to the argument that he was reacting against cruel stereotypes of the “Livonian werewolf” a Germanic elite used to justify their rule over the Baltic peasantry. As Ginzburg and Lincoln debate their own and others’ perspectives, they also reflect on broader issues of historical theory, method, and politics. Part source text of the trial, part discussion of historians’ thoughts on the case, and part dialogue over the merits and perils of their different methodological approaches, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf opens up fresh insight into a remarkable historical occurrence and, through it, the very discipline of history itself.
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Old Times on the Upper Mississippi
Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863
George Byron Merrick
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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Old Town Road
Chris Molanphy
Duke University Press, 2023
In Old Town Road, Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built from an alternative rock sample, a hip-hop song in which nobody raps, a comical song that transcends novelty, and a queer anthem—Lil Nas X troubles the very idea of genre. Ultimately, Molanphy shows how “Old Town Road” channeled decades of Americana to point the way toward our cultural future.
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The Old Vero Site (8IR009)
One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 - 2017 Excavations
James M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings, and F. J. Vento
University of Utah Press, 2023
A century ago, the Old Vero Site was brought to prominence by Elias Sellards, who claimed that the human remains discovered there were contemporary with Pleistocene fauna. It was the first serious challenge to the belief, widely accepted until the Folsom discoveries in 1926, that humans had not entered Florida before the current Holocene geological epoch. The argument made by Sellards, that early human occupants of North America lived alongside late Ice Age animals, stirred enduring controversy. Recent construction near the site resulted in new archaeological work being completed from 2014 to 2017.
 
The Old Vero Site details the course of the recent re-excavations of the site while also summarizing the original excavations from a century ago. The volume lays out the sequence and results of the recent project, using new data to conclude that Sellards’s claims are not supported by the evidence. Adovasio, Hemmings, and Vento provide the data to settle the matter definitively: human remains at the site were intrusive from a later time horizon, as critics of the original work had vociferously argued.
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Old Wine
Phyllis Bottome
Northwestern University Press, 1998

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Old Wisdom In New World
Americanization
Paul David Numrich
University of Tennessee Press, 1999
Focusing on two well-established institutions—one in Chicago, the other in Los Angeles—Old Wisdom in the New World is the first systematic examination of the growing presence of Theravada Buddhist temples in the United States.

Paul David Numrich's socio-historical analysis highlights a number of classic Americanization themes of establishment, growth, and adaptation. These have surfaced, the author shows, in debates over the retention of Old World culture and language, the "problem" of the second generation, and the role of the laity in religious institutions. Going beyond such familiar themes, Numrich also uncovers the intriguing phenomenon of ethnically defined "parallel congregations" in these temples, as he reveals the ways in which Asian-immigrant Buddhists and American converts pursue substantively different expressions of the Theravada tradition under the direction of a shared clerical leadership, the resident monks.

In the author's view, these Theravada case studies underline the complexity of the present Americanization process. By examining the intersection of two important trends—the steady growth of Asian immigration and an increasing indigenous interest in new religious movements, especially those of Asian origin—this book points to some fascinating new directions for the study of religious and cultural diversity in the United States.
The Author: Paul David Numrich is a research associate in the Religion in Urban America Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Old Wives' Tales
Susan M. Dodd
University of Iowa Press, 1984

In these ten varied and keenly rendered tales, Susan Dodd explores the levels of the human heart by leading us through a gallery of feelings, insights, characters, and emotions. Whether writing about a 100-year-old woman in South America, a teenage suicide in Winnetka, a divorced couple meeting by chance, or a pair of lovers listening to the family on the other side of their apartment wall, Dodd places us in a world full of subdued conflict where bonds between loved ones and strangers are tested, broken, and sometimes renewed. Her themes range beyond the regional or contemporary, embracing those moments of loneliness and self-knowledge that confront us all. As the characters meet and separate, wonder and react, we travel with them, exploring the forms of our existence, and the substance of our hearts.

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The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014
This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who always has the last word.
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Old World
Fabienne Kanor
Seagull Books, 2024
Traversing heritage across three continents, this poignant coming-of-age novel chronicles the enduring presence of systemic racism and the resistance to it.

Born in Cameroon and raised in the suburbs of Paris, Nathan feels unmoored, as if he does not belong in France. His mother tells him about his great-grandfather who left Cameroon for New Orleans to seek his fortune shortly after World War II. Nathan travels there to search for the vestiges of his ancestor’s passage in America. To him, New Orleans is the promised land for the Black man.

However, renting a room in a shotgun house in the Tremé district, he discovers a different reality. This storied neighborhood testifies to the strength of a people who have survived slavery, segregation, and the struggle for civil rights with a strong sense of community. But the relentless inequities, capped by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, have taken a toll. As Nathan comes to understand this fraught history, he also plumbs his own past, including his sense of abandonment by his father in Cameroon. In this coming-of-age novel, Nathan is coming to be.

The evocative, poetic language of Fabienne Kanor’s novel confers a brutal beauty in incidents of violence and moments of joy, holding the reader in a constant state of tension. Peopled by flawed human beings trying to find their way and grow a life under the constant threat of violence, Old World chronicles the deep trauma and long-term effects of systemic racism in the United States and people’s efforts to rise above it.
 
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Old World, New Horizons
Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic Alliance
Edward Heath
Harvard University Press

The effort to achieve greater European unity has absorbed the interests and energies of a number of Europeans and Americans since the end of World War II. Edward Heath, who led Britain's earliest attempt to join the European Economic Community, first made this comprehensive statement of the philosophy and purpose behind the movement for European unity in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in March 1967. In discussing the future development of Europe, Mr. Heath considered factors relating to domestic and foreign politics, economics, and defense, presenting a complete picture of Europe and suggesting a course that might bring about a successful unity.

"The lectures," writes Mr. Heath in 1970, "...were an attempt to look behind the immediate headlines and examine in greater depth the stage which Europe had reached in its search for unity. I was particularly concerned to trace the development of the European Economic Community and to deduce from its history the direction of its future development. At the same time I examined Britain's attitude towards the EEC and how British aspirations in Europe fitted into a general concept of Britain's place in the world..."

"Much has happened since March 1967, but insofar as they concern Europe, events have in a curious way brought us full circle. Now, as in 1967, we in Europe are in the middle of a lively debate about our future. This debate has two main facets. It is partly a debate throughout our continent on the meaning and content of the search for European unity. It is partly a debate within Britain on the likelihood and wisdom of Britain's entry into the EEC and on the effect which such entry would have upon our future prosperity, security, and national identity."

Mr. Heath has updated the lectures in his introduction, although his lucid and intelligent analysis remains extremely far-sighted even in the context of subsequent political changes and events. His consideration of Europe's future is not merely theoretical--Mr. Heath speaks from the standpoint of one who has had direct and continuous practical experience with the problems of Europe. His frank recognition of Britain's loss of power in the world and his belief that through Europe his country may win new influence and play a new political role attest to his great insight. These lectures are thus an important political statement by one of Europe's outstanding leaders.

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Old Yukon
Tales, Trails, and Trials
James Wickersham
University of Alaska Press, 2009

In this humorous and upbeat memoir, James Wickersham describes his career as a pioneer judge and later as a congressional representative assigned to a vast, snow-covered district, extending over 300,000 square miles in the undeveloped Alaska Territory.  Wickersham’s many adventures include traveling by dogsled over hundreds of miles through snow-covered mountains; serving as judge for the trials of many famous outlaws in the midst of the gold strikes; and hunting, mining, and climbing in his local Alaska wilderness. Though he was instrumental in the early history of Alaska, and his legacy is evident throughout the state—for example, he named the city of Fairbanks—this is the first and only work to focus on Wickersham’s life during this pivotal time in Alaska’s history.

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Olde Clerkis Speche
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Implications of Authorial Recital
William A. Quinn
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
Olde Clerkis Speche affirms both the historical legitimacy and the interpretive benefits of reading Troilus and Criseyde as if the text were initially composed for Chaucer’s own recital before a familiar audience. Proposing a qualification rather than contradiction of the "persona" as a reading premise, Quinn revitalizes the interpretive context of Chaucer’s original performance milieu. The central five chapters offer a "close hearing" of the possible tonal strategies of each book of Troilus and Criseyde during actual recital. Particular attention is given to expressions now normally overlooked, phrasing that does not advance the modern reader’s appreciation of plot or character development or theme; such "filler" did, however, once offer Chaucer's own "reader response" (or ennaratio) during the recital event. These five chapters simultaneously evaluate the probability that Chaucer himself revised each recital installment for subsequent manuscript circulation. All together, these chapters provide a sustained case study of the interplay between the author's anticipations of recital presence and textual absence. Although this study does not pretend to detail an inaugural staging of Troilus and Criseyde , it does attend to the histrionic potential of Chaucer's own "speche/ In poetrie" (T&C V. 1854-5). The final chapter discusses how such a recital premise impacts several current controversies among Chaucerians, including the dating of Chaucer's individual acts of composition, the underlying assumptions regarding the "publication" of each text, the editorial imposition of punctuation on the manuscript record, and the poet’s increasing anxiety regarding his future absence from the reading event. Olde Clerkis Speche will be of interest to all readers of Chaucer as well as everyone interested in performance theory and the history of reading.
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Older and Wiser
New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century
Jean E. Rhodes
Harvard University Press, 2020

Youth mentoring programs must change in order to become truly effective. The world’s leading expert shows how.

Youth mentoring is among the most popular forms of volunteering in the world. But does it work? Does mentoring actually help young people succeed? In Older and Wiser, mentoring expert Jean Rhodes draws on more than thirty years of empirical research to survey the state of the field. Her conclusion is sobering: there is little evidence that most programs—even renowned, trusted, and long-established ones—are effective. But there is also much reason for hope.

Mentoring programs, Rhodes writes, do not focus on what young people need. Organizations typically prioritize building emotional bonds between mentors and mentees. But research makes clear that effective programs emphasize the development of specific social, emotional, and intellectual skills. Most mentoring programs are poorly suited to this effort because they rely overwhelmingly on volunteers, who rarely have the training necessary to teach these skills to young people. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all models of major mentoring organizations struggle to deal with the diverse backgrounds of mentees, the psychological effects of poverty on children, and increasingly hard limits to upward mobility in an unequal world.

Rhodes doesn’t think we should give up on mentoring—far from it. She shows that evidence-based approaches can in fact create meaningful change in young people’s lives. She also recommends encouraging “organic” mentorship opportunities—in schools, youth sports leagues, and community organizations.

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Older and Wiser
New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century
Jean E. Rhodes
Harvard University Press

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award

“This engaging and well-written book is a significant advance in our understanding of when and how mentoring matters…[It] lays the foundations for an approach to mentoring that is both rigorous and rich in new ideas.”
—Robert D. Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Rhodes forces us to slam the brakes on ineffective practices and improve an industry that is devoted to the potential of our nation’s children…The author’s concrete recommendations will create new pathways to opportunity for youth in greatest need.”
—Michael D. Smith, Executive Director, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance

“A powerful assessment of what is needed to best help young people today.”
—Pam Iorio, President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America

Youth mentoring is one of the most popular forms of volunteering in the world today, but does it work? Drawing on over thirty years of research and her own experience in the field, Jean Rhodes reveals that most mentoring programs fail to deliver what young people actually need. Many prioritize building emotional bonds between mentors and mentees. But research shows that effective programs go far beyond this, developing specific social, emotional, and intellectual skills.

Most mentoring programs rely on volunteers, who rarely have the training to teach these skills. Their one-size-fits-all models struggle to meet the diverse needs of mentees, and rarely take account of the psychological effects of poverty on children. Rhodes doesn’t think we should give up on mentoring—far from it. Instead, she recommends “organic” mentorship opportunities—in schools, youth sports leagues, and community organizations—and shares specific approaches that can spark meaningful change in young people’s lives.

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Older Veterans
Linking VA and Community Resources
Terrie Wetle, Ph.D.
Harvard University Press, 1984
The Veterans Administration has assumed a leadership role in the development of geriatric programs for older veterans, particularly those from World War II. Increased demands for VA care and for new services have led to an exploration of improved integration of VA and community resources. This book begins with an overview of geriatric care including the special illness behaviors of elders and the attitudes of their care providers, followed by a description of geriatric and extended care and the legislative mandate of the VA. Analysis of current patterns of utilization and descriptions of innovative programs for service coordination and case management lead to suggested options for improving integration of VA and non VA services. The book will be of great interest to policy makers, program planners, and service providers.
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The Oldest Cuisine in the World
Cooking in Mesopotamia
Jean Bottéro
University of Chicago Press, 2004

In this intriguing blend of the commonplace and the ancient, Jean Bottéro presents the first extensive look at the delectable secrets of Mesopotamia. Bottéro’s broad perspective takes us inside the religious rites, everyday rituals, attitudes and taboos, and even the detailed preparation techniques involving food and drink in Mesopotamian high culture during the second and third millennia BCE, as the Mesopotamians recorded them. 

Offering everything from translated recipes for pigeon and gazelle stews, the contents of medicinal teas and broths, and the origins of ingredients native to the region, this book reveals the cuisine of one of history’s most fascinating societies. Links to the modern world, along with incredible recreations of a rich, ancient culture through its cuisine, make Bottéro’s guide an entertaining and mesmerizing read.

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The Oldest Living Things in the World
Rachel Sussman
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.
 
Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present.  These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands.
 
Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.
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The Old-Time Saloon
Not Wet - Not Dry, Just History
George Ade
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Fancy a tipple? Then pull up a stool, raise a glass, and dip into this delightful paean to the grand old saloon days of yore. Written by Chicago-based journalist, playwright, and all-round wit George Ade in the waning years of Prohibition, The Old-Time Saloon is both a work of propaganda masquerading as “just history” and a hilarious exercise in nostalgia. Featuring original, vintage illustrations along with a new introduction and notes from Bill Savage, Ade's book takes us back to the long-gone men’s clubs of earlier days, when beer was a nickel, the pretzels were polished, and the sardines were free.
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Oldtown Folks
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harvard University Press

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Ole Evinrude and His Outboard Motor
Bob Jacobson
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2009

Wisconsin entrepreneur Ole Evinrude will inspire children in this addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers, where the story of Ole's invention, from drawing board to factory floor, is told in a reader-friendly format that includes historic images, a glossary of terms, and sidebars explaining how an outboard motor works.

Ole Evinrude was born in Norway in 1877 and immigrated to the United States when he was five years old. The Evinrude family settled in Wisconsin and began farming, but it was clear from a very young age that Ole would not follow the family tradition. Ole Evinrude was meant to work with boats.

Building an outboard motor was not easy, though - Ole suffered numerous mechanical and financial setbacks along the way. After years of hard work and persistence, the Evinrude motor company was founded and Ole's outboard motors were an instant hit around the world. Ole continued to improve the design of his motor and attracted other entrepreneurs to the area, making Wisconsin the center of the outboard motor industry for decades.

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Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook
Folk Music and Community on the Frontier
Amy M. Shaw
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Ole Hendricks was an immigrant both representative and exceptional—a true artistic talent who nevertheless lived a familiar immigrant experience. By day, he was a farmer. But at night, his fiddle lit up dance halls, bringing together all manner of neighbors in rural Minnesota. Each tune in his repertoire of waltzes, reels, polkas, quadrilles, and more were copied neatly into his commonplace book.
Such tunebooks, popular during the nineteenth century, rarely survive and are often overlooked by folk scholars in favor of commercially produced recordings, published sheet music, or oral tradition. Based on extensive historical and genealogical research, Amy Shaw presents a grounded picture of a musician, his family, and his community in the Upper Midwest, revealing much about music and dance in the area. This notable contribution to regional music and folklore includes more than one hundred of Ole's dance tunes, transcribed into modern musical notation for the first time. Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook will be valuable to readers and scholars interested in ethnomusicology and the Norwegian American immigrant experience.
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Olesha's "Envy"
A Critical Companion
Rimgaila Salys
Northwestern University Press, 1999
This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Envy, Yury Olesha's humorous look at the individual's struggle with an increasingly industrialized society. This companion acquaints the reader with the history, biographical context, critical reception, and interpretation problems related to the novel. It also helps the reader decipher the book's difficult features, including its shifting narrators and fluid boundaries between dream and reality.

In addition, this critical companion presents documents from the period pertaining to the novel, excerpts from Olesha's memoirs, and a listing of important criticism.
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Olga Tufnell's “Perfect Journey”
Letters and Photographs of an Archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean
Edited by John D.M. Green and Henry Ros
University College London, 2021
A fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era in Palestine.

Olga Tufnell was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s—a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. For the first time, this book presents Tufnell’s account of her experiences in her own words. Based largely on letters, the text is accompanied by dozens of photographs that shed light on her personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time. Introductory material by John D.M. Green and Ros Henry provides the social, historical, biographical, and archaeological context, as the letters offer new insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research in Palestine under the British Mandate. They provide insights into the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial framework within which they operated during turbulent times. This book will be an important resource for those studying the history of archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly for the sites of Qau el-Kebir, Tell Fara, Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). Moreover, Tufnell’s lively style makes this a fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era.
 
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Oligarchy in America
Power, Justice, and the Rule of the Few
Luke Winslow
University of Alabama Press, 2024

A fascinating survey of the history of political and economic ideas in the US that have led to an increasingly entrenched ultra-rich class of oligarchs

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Oligopoly and Technical Progress
Revised Edition
Paolo Sylos-Labini
Harvard University Press

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Olimpismo
The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean
Antonio Sotomayor
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
The Olympic Games are a phenomenon of unparalleled global proportions. This book examines the rich and complex involvement of Latin America and the Caribbean peoples with the Olympic Movement, serving as an effective medium to explore the making of this region. The nine essays here investigate the influence, struggles, and contributions of Latin American and Caribbean societies to the Olympic Movement. By delving into nationalist political movements, post-revolutionary diplomacy, decolonization struggles, gender and disability discourses, and more, they define how the nations of this region have shaped and been shaped by the Olympic Movement.
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Olive
A Global History
Fabrizia Lanza
Reaktion Books, 2011
Olives are at once a mythical food—bringing to mind scenes from ancient Rome and the Bible—and an everyday food, given the ubiquity of olive oil in contemporary diets. In this succinct and engaging history, Fabrizia Lanza traces the olive’s roots from antiquity, when olive oil was exalted for ritual purposes and used to anoint kings and athletes, to the sixteenth century, when Europeans brought the olive to the New World, to the present day, when, thanks to waves of immigration and the popularity of the healthy Mediterranean diet, the fruit has successfully conquered our palate.
 
Lanza describes the role that olive trees, olives, and their oil have played in myths, legends, and literature, as well as in the everyday lives of people living throughout the Mediterranean. Also included is a global selection of recipes featuring olives and olive oil that showcase the fruit’s culinary diversity. A concise appendix of popular olive varieties, organized by country, rounds out this informative account.
 
Featuring a wealth of historical detail, useful descriptions, and delicious recipes, this book will change how you think about that bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil you reach for out of habit and swirl into the pan.
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Oliver Heaviside
Maverick Mastermind of Electricity
Basil Mahon
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Legal Logic
Frederic R. Kellogg
University of Chicago Press, 2018
With Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Legal Logic, Frederic R. Kellogg examines the early diaries, reading, and writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935) to assess his contribution to both legal logic and general logical theory. Through discussions with his mentor Chauncey Wright and others, Holmes derived his theory from Francis Bacon’s empiricism, influenced by recent English debates over logic and scientific method, and Holmes’s critical response to John Stuart Mill’s 1843 A System of Logic

Conventional legal logic tends to focus on the role of judges in deciding cases. Holmes recognized input from outside the law—the importance of the social dimension of legal and logical induction: how opposing views of “many minds” may converge. Drawing on analogies from the natural sciences, Holmes came to understand law as an extended process of inquiry into recurring problems.

Rather than vagueness or contradiction in the meaning or application of rules, Holmes focused on the relation of novel or unanticipated facts to an underlying and emergent social problem. Where the meaning and extension of legal terms are disputed by opposing views and practices, it is not strictly a legal uncertainty, and it is a mistake to expect that judges alone can immediately resolve the larger issue.
 
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Olives
Poems
A.E. Stallings
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Finalist, 2012 NBCC Award in the Poetry category
Recipient, 2011 MacArthur Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship

A. E. Stallings has established herself as one of the best American poets of her generation. In addition to a lively dialogue with both the contemporary and ancient culture of her adopted homeland, Greece, this new collection features poems that, in her inimitable voice, address the joys and anxieties of marriage and motherhood. This collection builds on previous accomplishments with some longer poems and sequences of greater philosophical scope, such as “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia.” Stallings possesses the rare ability to craft precise poems that pulsate with deeply felt emotion. Like the olives of the title, the book embraces the bitter but savory fruits of the ancient tree, and the tears and sweetness we harvest in our temporary lives. These poems show Stallings in complete command of her talent, able to suggest the world in a word.

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Olivier Messiaen
Robert Sholl
Reaktion Books
Drawing on a range of sources and fields, the rich life story of this polymathic composer.
 
This groundbreaking biography offers fresh perspectives on the life, ideas, and music of French twentieth-century composer, organist, and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen. Drawing from previously unexplored sketches and archival material, the book seamlessly combines elements of biography, musicology, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics to present a nuanced perspective on Messiaen’s work. Robert Sholl explores the profound impact of Messiaen’s devout Catholicism, which found expression through his work as a church organist, his engagement with birdsong, his interaction with Surrealism, and his profound influence on major musical figures of the latter twentieth century. Unlike previous biographies, this book also considers the perspectives of Messiaen’s contemporaries and students, providing a comprehensive understanding of his life and artistic legacy.
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Ollie Miss
George Wylie Henderson
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Ollie Miss is a folk novel of Southern backwoods and rural, poor black life in Alabama's recent past. The novel serves as an important social record of a past society, time, and circumstance that would evolve into an era of social change, namely the civil rights movement. Ollie Miss is also a love story that speaks of personal loneliness and the need for fulfillment in a young black woman, poor and ignorant, and unattached. It is a story of Ollie Miss's personal struggle to "become" a person in her own right, to be independent, and to find some small measure of happiness in life.
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Ollie's First Year
Jonathan London
University of Alaska Press, 2014
It’s easy to find joy in a playful, agile creature that enjoys sliding on its belly. River otters are among the most adorable, charismatic animals in North America, and with a territory that spans the continent, they’re a far-reaching favorite. Ollie’s First Year is a lively wildlife adventure that captures the wonder and delight elicited by the playful otter.

The book follows Ollie the Otter through a year of new experiences, from swimming lessons to foraging practice, and through capers with his littermates. His budding knowledge of the world is put to the test when he is separated from his family and must travel through the forest alone. Luckily, a joyful reunion with his family awaits.

Longtime children’s book author Jonathan London and well-known Alaska illustrator Jon Van Zyle team up again to bring Ollie’s story to life with vibrant illustrations and text perfect for ages two to six. Notes about otter biology and habitat along with tips for keeping their environment safe will not only teach younger readers about wildlife but inspire them to protect it as well.
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The Olmec and Their Neighbors
Essays in Memory of Matthew W. Stirling
Elizabeth P. Benson
Harvard University Press, 1981
Twenty-one papers on the Olmec were written for this volume in tribute to Matthew W. Stirling, “pioneer archaeologist, ethnologist, and the discoverer of the Olmec civilization.”
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Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks
Karl A. Taube
Harvard University Press, 2004

Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Olmec portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It illustrates all thirty-nine Olmec art objects in color plates and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, amplified only slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. In addition to their aesthetic quality and artistic significance, the objects hold much information regarding the social worlds and religious and symbolic views of the people who made and used them before the arrival of Europeans in the New World.

This volume is the second in a series of catalogues that will treat objects in the Bliss Pre-Columbian Collection. The majority of the Olmec objects in the collection are made of jade, the most precious material for the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica from early times through the sixteenth century. Various items such as masks, statuettes, jewelry, and replicas of weapons and tools were used for ceremonial purposes and served as offerings.

Karl Taube brings his expertise on the lifeways and beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican peoples to his study of the Olmec objects in teh Bliss collection. His understanding of jade covers a broad range of knowledge from chemical compositions to geological sources to craft technology to the symbolic power of the green stone. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the role of jade as a powerful symbol of water, fertility, and particularly, of the maize plant which was the fundamental source of life and sustenance for the Olmec. The shiny green of the stone was analogous to the green growth of maize. This fundamental concept was elaborated in specific religious beliefs, many of which were continued and elaborated by later Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Maya. Karl Taube employs his substantial knowledge of Pre-Columbian cultures to explore and explicate Olmec symbolism in this catalogue.

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Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo
Kenneth Hirth
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo examines the specialized craft production, manufacturing, adoption, and spread of obsidian cutting tools at San Lorenzo, Mexico, the first major Olmec center to develop in the southern Gulf Coast region of Mesoamerica. Through the systematic analysis of this single commodity, Kenneth Hirth and Ann Cyphers reconstruct the importation of raw material and the on-site production and distribution of finished goods from a specialized workshop engaged in the manufacture of obsidian blades.
 
The obsidian blade was the cutting tool of choice across Mesoamerica and used in a wide range of activities, from domestic food preparation to institutional ritual activities. Hirth and Cyphers conducted a three-decade investigation of obsidian artifacts recovered at Puerto Malpica, the earliest known workshop, and seventy-six other sites on San Lorenzo Island, where these tools were manufactured for local and regional distribution. Evidence recovered from these excavations provides some of the first information on how early craft specialists operated and how the specialized technology used to manufacture obsidian blades spread across Mesoamerica. The authors use geochemical analyses to identify thirteen different sources for obsidian during San Lorenzo’s occupation. This volcanic glass, not locally available, was transported over great distances, arriving in nodular and finished blade form.
 
Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo offers a new way to analyze the Preclassic lithic economy—the procurement, production, distribution, and consumption of flaked stone tools—and shows how the study of lithics aids in developing a comprehensive picture of the internal structure and operation of Olmec economy. The book will be significant for Mesoamericanists as well as students and scholars interested in economy, lithic technology, and early complex societies.
 
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Olmec to Aztec
Settlement Patterns in the Ancient Gulf Lowlands
Barbara L. Stark
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Archaeological settlement patterns—the ways in which ancient people distributed themselves across a natural and cultural landscape—provide the central theme for this long-overdue update to our understanding of the Mexican Gulf lowlands Olmec to Aztec offers the only recent treatment of the region that considers its entire prehistory from the second millennium B.C. to A.D. 1519. The editors have assembled a distinguished group of international scholars, several of whom here provide the first widely available English-language account of ongoing research. Several studies present up-to-date syntheses of the archaeological record in their respective areas. Other chapters provide exciting new data and innovative insights into future directions in Gulf lowland archaeology. Olmec to Aztec is a crucial resource for archaeologists working in Mexico and other areas of Latin America. Its contributions help dispel long-standing misunderstandings about the prehistory of this region and also correct the sometimes overzealous manner in which cultural change within the Gulf lowlands has been attributed to external forces. This important book clearly demonstrates that the Gulf lowlands played a critical role in ancient Mesoamerica throughout the entirety of pre-Columbian history.
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Olonkho
Nurgun Botur the Swift
Platon Oyunski
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Olonkho is the general name for the entire Yakut heroic epic that consists of many long legends – one of the longest being ‘Nurgun Botur the Swift’ consisting of some 36,000 lines of verse, published here. Like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Finnish Kalevala, the Buryat Geser, and the Kirghiz Manas, the Yakut Olonkho is an epic of a very ancient origin dating back to the period – possibly as early as the eighth or ninth centuries – when the ancestors of the present-day Yakut peoples lived on their former homeland and closely communicated with the Turkic and Mongolian peoples living in the Altay and Sayan regions. As with all Olonkho stories the hero – in this story Nurgun Botur the Swift – and his tribe are heaven-born, hence his people are referred to as ‘Aiyy kin’ (the deity’s relatives). Naturally, too, on account of his vital role (in saving his people from destruction and oblivion by evil, many-legged, fire-breathing, one-armed, one legged Cyclops-type monsters – the Devil’s relatives representing all possible sins), he is depicted not only as strong, but also a handsome, remarkably athletic and incredibly brave and well-built man ‘as swift as an arrow’, but also with an uncontrollable temper when required.
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Olympian Odes. Pythian Odes
Pindar
Harvard University Press, 1997

The preeminent lyric poet of ancient Greece.

Of the Greek lyric poets, Pindar (ca. 518–438 BC) was “by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration” in Quintilian’s view; Horace judged him “sure to win Apollo’s laurels.” The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar’s poems survive complete. William H. Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar’s other poems.

Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths.

Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. His Loeb Pindar also contains a helpfully annotated edition and translation of significant fragments, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden songs, and dirges.

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front cover of Olympic Butter Gold
Olympic Butter Gold
Poems
Jonathan Moody
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Jonathan Moody grew up during the Golden Ages of hip-hop and listened to rap that was as adventurous and diverse as his military upbringing. When rap’s Golden Ages expired, the music’s innovativeness and variety diminished. Moody’s second book, Olympic Butter Gold, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, responds to Chuck D’s claim that "if there was a HIP-HOP or Rap Olympics, I really don’t think the United States would get Gold, Silver or Brass." From the poem "Opening Ceremony," in the voice of a heroin addict struggling to use Lady Liberty’s torch to cook "The American Dream," to "Dear 2Pac," an autobiographical account of teaching Tupac Shakur’s poetry to engage high school students indifferent to literature, Moody shares a worldview that is simultaneously apocalyptic and promising.

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front cover of Olympic Dreams
Olympic Dreams
China and Sports, 1895–2008
Xu Guoqi
Harvard University Press, 2008

Already the world has seen the political, economic, and cultural significance of hosting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—in policies instituted and altered, positions softened, projects undertaken. But will the Olympics make a lasting difference? This book approaches questions about the nature and future of China through the lens of sports—particularly as sports finds its utmost international expression in the Olympics.

Drawing on newly available archival sources to analyze a hundred-year perspective on sports in China, Olympic Dreams explores why the country became obsessed with Western sports at the turn of the twentieth century, and how it relates to China’s search for a national and international identity. Through case studies of ping-pong diplomacy and the Chinese handling of various sporting events, the book offers unexpected details and unusual insight into the patterns and processes of China’s foreign policymaking—insights that will help readers understand China’s interactions with the rest of the world.

Among the questions Xu Guoqi brings to the fore are: Why did Mao Zedong choose competitive ping-pong to manipulate world politics? How did the two-China issue nearly kill the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games? And why do the 2008 Olympics present Beijing with unprecedented dangers and opportunities? In exploring these questions, Xu brilliantly articulates a fresh and surprising perspective on China as an international sport superpower as well as a new “sick man of East Asia.” In Olympic Dreams, he presents an eloquent argument that in the deeply unsettled China of today, sport, as a focus of popular interest, has the capacity to bring about major social changes.

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