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Right-Wing Authoritarianism
Bob Altemeyer
University of Manitoba Press, 1981

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Rigoberta Menchu Controversy
Arturo Arias
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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Rigoletto
Critical Edition Study Score
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“I complain bitterly of the editions of my last operas, made with such little care, and filled with an infinite number of errors.”—Giuseppe Verdi
 
The University of Chicago Press, in collaboration with Casa Ricordi, has undertaken to publish the first critical edition of the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi. The series, based exclusively on original sources, is the only one to present authentic versions of all of the composer’s works; together with his operas, the critical edition presents his songs, his choral music and sacred pieces, and his string quartet and other instrumental works.
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi will be an invaluable standard reference work—a necessary acquisition for all music libraries and a joy to own for all lovers of opera. The new series of study scores presents an adaptation of each critical edition that provides scholars with an affordable and portable option for exploring Verdi’s oeuvre. The study scores have been designed to distinguish editors’ marks from Verdi’s own notations while remaining clear enough for use in performance. The introduction to each score discusses the work’s sources, composition, and performance history, as well as performance practices, instrumentation, and problems of notation. The newest editions of the study scores examine two of Verdi’s three-act operas: La traviata and Rigoletto.
 
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Rigoletto
Melodramma in Three Acts by Francesco Maria Piave
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 1983
The University of Chicago Press, in collaboration with Casa Ricordi of Milan, has undertaken to publish the first critical edition of the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi. The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, the only edition based exclusively on original sources and the only one to present authentic versions of all the composer's works, will include each of Verdi's twenty-eight operas (all versions), his sacred music, songs, chamber music, and juvenilia. The series begins with the definitive version of Rigoletto.

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Rijksmuseum
The Building, the Collection and the Outdoor Gallery
Edited by Cees W. de Jong and Patrick Spijkerman
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Few art collections in the world can rival that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Built in 1885, the iconic museum holds more than a million works, with a particular focus on Dutch masters—its collection of works by Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Rembrandt are unparalleled.

The museum recently reopened after a ten-year renovation that cost more than $400 million, and the result is stunning: never before has the Rijksmuseum’s collection been displayed so well. This book offers a lavishly illustrated chronicle of both the collection and the building that houses it. Though nothing can replace an actual trip to the Rijksmuseum—as the more than two million annual visitors can attest—this book comes as close as possible, taking art lovers on a virtual tour of the greatest masterworks of Western art in a building that is brilliantly designed to show them at their best. 
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Rilke's Russia
A Cultural Encounter
Anna A. Tavis
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Anna A. Tavis explores the important of Russia in shaping Rilke's aesthetics. Rilke's two trips to Russia at the turn of the century, made in the company of Lou Andreas-Salome, led to connections with Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Maxim Gorky. Tavis uses letters, poems, and fiction to trace Rilke's actual and symbolic encounters with Russian culture and its prose masters between 1898 and 1926.
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Rilke's Venice
Birgit Haustedt
Haus Publishing, 2019
For the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, travel was not only integral to his work, it was a way of life. Venice stands out as a location of particular importance to Rilke, and he visited the city ten times between 1897 and 1920. This city has inspired countless writers and artists, but Rilke, both enthralled and provoked by it, reveals a striking and deeply felt love for the city. He was as eager to explore the city’s underbelly, its deserted shipyards and back alleys, as he was to experience its iconic sights of St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace. Staying in both simple guesthouses and the grand palaces of his patrons, Rilke would walk prodigiously. His contemporary Stefan Zweig commented that “knowing every last corner and depth of the city was his passion” and Rilke himself said his walking allowed him to “grasp the whole breadth of the city.”

In eleven walks, Birgit Haustedt guides readers through Venice following the poet’s footsteps. Haustedt invites us to look on the beloved sights of the city through Rilke’s eyes, offering a new vision of this famed destination. Rilke’s Venice provides new insight into one of the finest and most widely recognized writers of the twentieth century. It also acts as a literary travel companion and guidebook to Venice, offering eleven detailed maps of walks through the city.
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Rim Country Exodus
A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making
Daniel J. Herman
University of Arizona Press, 2012

Winner Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award

For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment in Arizona known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Now Daniel Herman offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal.

Herman examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars. But while most tribal histories stay within the borders of the reservation, Herman also chronicles how Indians who left the reservation helped build a modern state with dams, hydroelectricity, roads, and bridges. With thoughtful detail and incisive analysis, Herman discusses the complex web of interactions between Apache, Yavapai, and Anglos that surround every aspect of the story.

Rim Country Exodus is part of a new movement in Western history emphasizing survival rather than disappearance. Just as important, this is one of the first in-depth studies of the West that examines race as it was lived. Race was formulated, Herman argues, not only through colonial and scientific discourses, but also through day-to-day interactions between Indians, agents, and settlers. Rim Country Exodus offers an important new perspective on the making of the West.

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Rim to River
Looking into the Heart of Arizona
Tom Zoellner
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains.

Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.
 
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Rimbaud and Jim Morrison
The Rebel as Poet
Wallace Fowlie
Duke University Press, 1994
"The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of all the senses."—Rimbaud

In 1968 Jim Morrison, founder and lead singer of the rock band the Doors, wrote to Wallace Fowlie, a scholar of French literature and a professor at Duke University. Morrison thanked Fowlie for producing an English translation of the complete poems of Rimbaud. He needed the translation, he said, because, "I don’t read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me." Fourteen years later, when Fowlie first heard the music of the Doors, he recognized the influence of Rimbaud in Morrison’s lyrics.

In Rimbaud and Jim Morrison Fowlie, a master of the form of the memoir, reconstructs the lives of the two youthful poets from a personal perspective. In their twinned stories he discovers an uncanny symmetry, a pattern far richer than the simple truth that both led lives full of adventure and both made poetry of their thirst for the liberation of the self. The result is an engaging account of the connections between an exceptional French symbolist who gave up writing poetry at the age of twenty, died young, and whose poems are still avidly read to this day, and an American rock musician whose brief career ignited an entire generation and has continued to fascinate millions around the world in the twenty years since his death in Paris. In this dual portrait, Fowlie gives us a glimpse of the affinities and resemblances between European literary traditions and American rock music and youth culture in the late twentieth century.

A personal meditation on two unusual, yet emblematic, cultural figures, this book also stands as a summary of a noted scholar’s lifelong reflections on creative artists.

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Rimbaud
COMPLETE WORKS, SELECTED LETTERS
Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud
University of Chicago Press, 1967
Wallace Fowlie's prose translations accompany the original French texts in this, the first complete bilingual edition of Rimbaud's work in prose and poetry.

"This handsome edition, which makes France's most remarkable poet readily available in the U.S., may well be a literary landmark comparable to Baudelaire's introduction of Edgar Allan Poe in France a century earlier."—Anna Balakian, New York Times Book Review
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Rimbaud
Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition
Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose.

The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius—among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works.

Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, Rimbaud remains the most authoritative—and now, completely up-to-date—edition of the young master's entire poetic ouvre.
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Rimbaud
The Cost of Genius
Neal Oxenhandler
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Living during the chaotic period between the end of the Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic, Arthur Rimbaud would become the genius of French literary modernism, surpassing even Baudelaire. But at what cost? In his poems and letters he reveals the devastating rigors of his relationships with others as well as his power as creator and thinker. Neal Oxenhandler employs psychocritical strategies to penetrate the secrets of a man who was one of the greatest literary figures of his century. For each poem Rimbaud wrote he paid a price in suffering, in jealousy, and in misunderstanding. Eventually the price for his gift rose so high that he had no alternative except to abandon poetry while still in his mid-twenties.
 
Rimbaud: The Cost of Genius analyzes twenty-one major poems, showing the poet’s development during the ten years (1869–1879), when he was actively writing. It offers new solutions to the “joke” or “trick” poems, such as “H” and “Conte.” It also deals with the poet’s confinement in the Babylone barracks during the Commune, envisioned in the enigmatic poem, “Le Coeur du pitre.” In the last chapter, Oxenhandler studies how sublimation is achieved in “Une Saison en enfer” through the rhetorical trope of chiasmus.
 
The book concludes with a personal “Appendix” that seeks to penetrate the mystery surrounding Rimbaud’s death in the Conception Hospital in Marseilles on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven.
 
 
 
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Rimbaud’s Theatre of the Self
James Lawler
Harvard University Press, 1992

In a new interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry--in France and elsewhere--James Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art.

A drama emerges in Lawler's urbane and resourceful reading. The thinking, feeling, acting Drunken Boat is an early theatrical projection of the poet's self; the Inventor, the Memorialist, and the Ingénu assume distinct roles in his later verse. It is, however, in Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer that Rimbaud enacts most powerfully his grandiose dreams. Here the poet becomes Self Creator, Self-Critic, Self-Ironist; he takes the parts of Floodmaker, Oriental Storyteller, Dreamer, Lover; and he recounts his descent into Hell in the guise of a Confessor.

In delineating and exploring the poet's "theatre of the self" Lawler shows us the tragic lucidity and the dramatic coherence of Rimbaud's work.

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Rimsky-Korsakov's Harmonic Theory
Practical Manual of Harmony, Its Sources, History, and Traditions
Larisa P. Jackson
University of North Texas Press, 2022

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Ring Lardner - American Writers 49
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Otto Friedrich
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

Ring Lardner - American Writers 49 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.

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Ring of Liberation
Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira
J. Lowell Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Based on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation, Ring of Liberation offers both an in-depth description of capoeira—a complex Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines feats of great strength and athleticism with music and poetry—and a pioneering synthetic approach to the analysis of complex cultural performance.

Capoeira originated in early slave culture and is practiced widely today by urban Brazilians and others. At once game, sport, mock combat, and ritualized performance, it involves two players who dance and "battle" within a ring of musicians and singers. Stunning physical performances combine with music and poetry in a form as expressive in movement as it is in word.

J. Lowell Lewis explores the convergence of form and content in capoeira. The many components and characteristics of this elaborate black art form—for example, competing genre frameworks and the necessary fusion of multiple modes of expression—demand, Lewis feels, to be given "body" as well as "voice." In response, he uses Peircean semiotics and recent work in discourse and performance theory to map the connections between physical, musical, and linguistic play in capoeira and to reflect on the general relations between semiotic systems and the creation and recording of cultural meaning.
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Ring of Seasons
Iceland--Its Culture and History
Terry G. Lacy
University of Michigan Press, 2000
A remote island with a rich and ancient literature. A land of hot springs and volcanoes. A country with an extraordinary history, a challenging geography and a vibrant contemporary culture. A land of ice.
In Ring of Seasons, Terry Lacy--an American who has lived in Iceland for twenty-four years-- brings both the perspective of the outsider and the familiar eye of the long-term resident to this delightful exploration of all facets of Iceland, past and present. She conveys her story with a skillful interlacing of history, religion, politics, and culture to paint a vivid picture of the way Icelanders live today as members of a wealthy society still very dependent upon nature--from a reliance on her icy waters to support an international fishing industry to a watchful cohabitation with the volcanoes that both destroy villages and create new islands.
This is a book for all who have been charmed by reading the Norse sagas, for all those intrigued by the country that can claim the oldest living democracy. It is an excellent introduction for anyone planning to visit Iceland and a delightful read for all those who do their exploration from the comfort of an armchair.
Terry G. Lacy is an American currently residing in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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Ring Shout, Wheel About
The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery
Katrina D. Thompson
University of Illinois Press, 2014

In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved.

As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion.

Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.

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Ringer
Poems
Rebecca Lehmann
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Winner, 2018 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 2020 Housatonic Book Awards

Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.
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Ringlingville USA
The Stupendous Story of Seven Siblings and Their Stunning Circus Success
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004

The Ringling Brothers began their business under the most modest of circumstances and through hard work, business savvy, and some luck created the largest, most famous circus in the world. They became wealthy men, one 50 cent admission ticket at a time.

Ringlingville USA chronicles the brothers' journey from immigrant poverty to enduring glory as the kings of the circus world. The Ringlings and their circus were last studied in depth over four decades ago. Now, for the first time, the brothers' detailed financial records and personal correspondence are available to researchers. Jerry Apps weaves together that information with newspaper accounts, oral histories, colorful anecdotes, and stunning circus ephemera and photos, many never before been published, to illuminate the importance of the Ringlings' accomplishments. He describes how the Ringling Brothers confronted the challenges of taxation, war, economic pressure, changing technology, and personal sorrows to find their place in history. The brothers emerge as complex characters whose ambition, imagination, and pure hucksterism fueled the phenomenon that was the Ringling Brothers' Circus.
 

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Rings with Minimum Condition
By Emil Artin, Cecil J. Nesbitt, Robert M. Thrall
University of Michigan Press, 1946
Dealing with algebraic ring theory, this book was written for mathematicians who are familiar with groups, rings, fields, and their properties. Concepts such as vector spaces, matrix representations, simple rings, and semisimple rings are considered.
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Rio as Method
Collective Resistance for a New Generation
Paul Amar, editor
Duke University Press, 2024
Rio as Method provides a new set of lenses for apprehending and transforming the world at critical junctures. Challenging trends that position global South scholars as research informants or objects, this Rio de Janeiro-based network of scholars, activists, attorneys, and political leaders center their Brazilian megacity as a globally-relevant source for transformational worldmaking insights. Presenting this volume as a handbook and manifesto for energizing public engagement and direct action, more than forty contributors reconceive method as a politics of knowledge production that animates new ways of being, seeing and doing politics. They draw on lessons from the city’s intersecting religious, feminist, queer, Black, Indigenous, and urbanist movements to examine issues ranging from state violence, urban marginalization, and moral panic to anticorruption efforts, paramilitary policing, sex work, and mutual aid. Rethinking theoretical and collaborative research methods, Rio as Method models theories of decolonial analysis and concepts of collective resistance that can be taken up by scholar-activists anywhere.

Contributors. Rosiane Rodrigues de Almeida, Tamires Maria Alves, Paul Amar, Marcelo Caetano Andreoli, Beatriz Bissio, Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, Fernando Brancoli, Thayane Brêtas, Victoria Broadus, Fatima Cecchetto, Leonard Cortana, Marcos Coutinho, Monica Cunha, Luiz Henrique Eloy Amado, Marielle Franco, Cristiane Gomes Julião, Benjamin Lessing, Roberto Kant de Lima, Amanda De Lisio, Bryan McCann, Flávia Medeiros, Ana Paula Mendes de Miranda, Sean T. Mitchell, Rodrigo Monteiro, Vitória Moreira, Jacqueline de Oliveira Muniz, Laura Rebecca Murray, Cesar Pinheiro Teixeira, Osmundo Pinho, Paulo Pinto, María Victoria Pita, João Gabriel Rabello Sodré, Luciane Rocha, Marcos Alexandre dos Santos Albuquerque, Ana Paula da Silva, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Soraya Simões, Indianare Siqueira, José Claudio Souza Alves, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Leonardo Vieira Silva
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The Rio de Janeiro Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader traces the history, culture, and politics of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the voices, images, and experiences of those who have made the city's history. It outlines Rio's transformation from a hardscrabble colonial outpost and strategic port into an economic, cultural, and entertainment capital of the modern world. The volume contains a wealth of primary sources, many of which appear here in English for the first time. A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. The definitive English-language resource on the city, The Rio de Janeiro Reader presents the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.
 
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Rio del Norte
People of Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to Pueblo Revolt
Carroll L. Riley
University of Utah Press, 1995

Rio del Norte chronicles the upper Rio Grande region and its divers peoples across twelve thousand years of continuous history. Based on the most up-to-date historical and archaeological research, Rio del Norte is a tour de force, highlighting the unbroken history of the upper Rio Grande.

Beginning with the mammoth hunters of eleven millennia ago, Carroll Riley adeptly eaves the threads of twelve thousand years of continuous history through the introduction of agriculture, the rise of the Basketmaker-Pueblo (Anasazi) people, and the extraordinary "quickening" that occurred along the Rio Grande and its tributaries as the Anasazi era ended.

At that time large towns appeared, some holding several thousand people who practiced irrigation-based agriculture, maintained complex social and political organizations, and had a rich artistry. This "golden age" was continuing when Spaniards contacted, then colonized and missionized the region. In 1680 the Pueblos joined in a powerful record and ousted the invaders. Although the Spanish returned, the Pueblos have maintained important parts of their cultural heritage to the present.

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Riot
Mary Casanova
University of Minnesota Press, 2014


Based on actual events from 1989 in International Falls, Minnesota, Riot tells the story of sixth-grader Bryan, whose family becomes stressed when nonunion labor “rats” are hired by the local paper mill, leaving his father, a union worker, angry and out of a job. Tension erupts into daily fights at school and nightly acts of vandalism with no solution in sight. Already torn between his parents’ opposing viewpoints on how to handle the escalating situation, Bryan’s growing feelings for the daughter of a nonunion worker only complicate matters.

Bryan tries to understand the turmoil affecting his home and his town, but it is becomes harder and harder to separate his friends from his enemies. And when he witnesses a violent act that implicates his father, he must wrestle with family loyalty and telling the truth.

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Riot and Great Anger
Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Joan Fitzpatrick Dean
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
    Under the strict rule of twentieth century Irish censorship, creators of novels, films, and most periodicals found no option but to submit and conform to standards.  Stage productions, however, escaped official censorship. The theater became a "public space"—a place to air cultural confrontations between Church and State, individual and community, and "freedom of the theatre" versus the audience’s right to disagree.
    Joan FitzPatrick Dean’s Riot and Great Anger suggests that while there was no state censorship in early-twentieth-century Ireland, the theater often evoked heated responses from theatergoers, sometimes resulting in riots and the public denunciation of playwrights and artists. Dean examines the plays that provoked these controversies, the degree to which they were "censored" by the audience or actors, and the range of responses from both the press and the courts. She addresses familiar pieces such as those of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Sean O’Casey, as well as the works of less known playwrights such as George Birmingham. Dean’s original research meticulously analyzes Ireland’s great theatrical tradition, both on the stage and off, concluding that the public responses to these controversial productions reveal a country that, at century’s end as at its beginning, was pluralistic, heterogeneous, and complex.  
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Riot and Rebellion in Mexico
The Making of a Race War Paradigm
Ana Sabau
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section

Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system.


Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country.

Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.

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The Riot Report and the News
How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America
Thomas J. Hrach
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
On July 28, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of unrest in urban black communities during the 1960s. Chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., the commission ominously warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." And it aimed its sharpest criticism at the mainstream media, concluding: "The press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and a white perspective." Major news media responded by expanding and diversifying their coverage of black communities and increasing the number of African Americans in their newsrooms.

Although much has been written about the Kerner Commission, the analysis has focused primarily on its affect on the American press. In The Riot Report and the News, Thomas J. Hrach instead explores how the commission came to its conclusions, in order to understand why and how its report served as a catalyst for change. Hrach finds that such government criticism of the media can have a long-term and positive influence on the nation, an insight that remains important as the news continues to struggle with how to cover issues of race.
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Riot Report and the News
How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America
Hrach Thomas J
University of Massachusetts Press

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Riotous Deathscapes
Hugo ka Canham
Duke University Press, 2023
In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community’s resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. Canham shows that Mpondo theory is grounded in and develops in relation to the natural world, where the river and hill are key sites of being and resistance. Central too, is the interface between ancestors and the living, in which life and death become a continuity and a boundlessness that white supremacy and neoliberalism cannot interdict. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient
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Riotous Flesh
Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America
April R. Haynes
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death. Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals.

As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.
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Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810
John Bohstedt
Harvard University Press, 1983

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Rip Ford’s Texas
By John Salmon Ford
University of Texas Press, 1963

The Republic of Texas was still in its first exultation over independence when John Salmon "Rip" Ford arrived from South Carolina in June of 1836. Ford stayed to participate in virtually every major event in Texas history during the next sixty years. Doctor, lawyer, surveyor, newspaper reporter, elected representative, and above all, soldier and Indian fighter, Ford sat down in his old age to record the events of the turbulent years through which he had lived. Stephen Oates has edited Ford's memoirs to produce a clear and vigorous personal history of Texas.

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Riparian Ecosystem Recovery in Arid Lands
Strategies and References
Mark K. Briggs
University of Arizona Press, 1996
Riparian ecosystems are declining throughout the southwestern United States, where many have disappeared completely; yet progress toward checking their decline has been marginal, and the results of only a few recovery projects have been evaluated. In this guidebook, Mark K. Briggs has filled this gap in riparian conservation literature. Based on his experiences gleaned from evaluating the results of many riparian rehabilitation projects, Briggs presents these results in a manner that biologists, hydrologists, government planners, resource managers, and other concerned citizens can immediately apply toward developing site-specific recovery strategies.

The book opens with a review of watershed characteristics and an examination of drainage systems, then proceeds to determining the causes of riparian decline. It introduces five factors that have a significant effect on the results of riparian rehabilitation--natural regeneration, water availability, channel stability, direct impacts such as livestock grazing and recreational activities, and soil salinity--and offers case studies that demonstrate how revegetation has been used both effectively and ineffectively.

It also discusses strategies other than revegetation that may be effective in improving the ecological condition of a site. Many of the strategies presented are also relevant to nonarid climates and to urban areas. By emphasizing evaluation of riparian ecosystems, so that the causes of degradation can be understood, and by offering general approaches that can be tailored to specific situations, Riparian Ecosystem Recovery in Arid Lands takes a holistic approach to riparian recovery that will enable users to better judge whether recovery expenditures are likely to produce desired results. An unprecedented work, it will substantially add to efforts across the Southwest and elsewhere to restore these unique and priceless ecosystems.

CONTENTS
1 An Overview: Background on Riparian Ecosystems / Lessons Learned from Past Riparian Recovery Efforts / An Evaluation Strategy / Defining Some Important Terms
2 Considering the Damaged Riparian Area from a Watershed Perspective: Case Study 1: Rincon Creek / Taking Advantage of Available Information / Getting to Know the Watershed / Getting to Know the Stream
3 Impacts within the Riparian Zone: Livestock / Case Study 2: Sheepshead Spring / Recreation / Competition from Nonnative Species / Wildlife
4 Natural Recovery in Riparian Ecosystems: Case Study 3: Aravaipa Creek / Factors Influencing Natural Recovery / Case Study 4: McEuen Seep / Autoecology of Selected Southwestern Riparian Tree Species / Case Study 5: Boulder Creek
5 Water Availability: Case Study 6: Box Bar / How Groundwater Decline Occurs / Evaluating Groundwater Conditions / Revegetating Riparian Ecosystems Characterized by Groundwater Decline
6 The Drainageway: Channel Instability and Riparian Ecosystems / Case Study 7: Babocomari River / Channel Dynamics / Strategies for Evaluating Channel Stability / Developing Recovery Projects along Unstable Alluvial Stream Channels
7 Soil Salinity and Riparian Ecosystems: Effects of Soil Salinity on Plant Growth / The Soil Survey / Soil Salinity and Revegetation
8 Developing the Recovery Plan: Developing Project Objectives / Selecting the Best Site / Local, State, and Federal Permit Requirements / Identifying Model Areas / Critical Components of the Recovery Plan / Community Involvement / Demonstration Sites / Postproject Evaluation and Monitoring
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Ripe
Essays
Negesti Kaudo
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
“A deeply intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls and women.” —Kirkus (starred review)
LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022


“Emotional range without consequence,” Negesti Kaudo writes in her debut collection, Ripe, is a privilege of whiteness. In these essays, she fights back, exhorting readers to follow her through fury, grief, love, and hope as she confronts what it means to own her Blackness and her body in contemporary America. A scathing and nuanced cultural critic, she disentangles intersections of race, class, pop culture, size, sexuality, and more in spaces where she always seems to be either too Black or not Black enough. From attending private school as a poor Black student to the evolution of her hair routine to being fat and sexual when society says she should be neither, Kaudo overlooks nothing as she names the ways that white America simultaneously denigrates and steals Black culture. Most of all, she writes against the idea that a Black woman’s anger makes her an “angry Black woman,” claiming full emotional range as her birthright and as a tool against injustice on her quest to find herself no matter how uncomfortable the journey.
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Ripe for Revolution
Building Socialism in the Third World
Jeremy Friedman
Harvard University Press, 2021

A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

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Ripple Effects
How We're Loving Our Lakes to Death
Ted J. Rulseh
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Lakes are among the Upper Midwest’s greatest treasures and most valuable natural resources. The Great Lakes define the region, and thousands of smaller lakes offer peace, joy, and recreation to millions. And yet, in large part because of the numbers of people who enjoy the local waterways, the lakes of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota face numerous challenges. Invasive species, pollution, defective septic systems, inadequate shoreland zoning laws, and climate change are present and increasingly existential threats. We are, quite possibly, loving our lakes to death.

In his engaging and conversational style, Ted Rulseh details each of these challenges and proposes achievable solutions. He draws on personal experience, interviews, academic research, and government reports to describe the state of the lakes, the stresses they are under, and avenues to successful lakeside living for a sustainable future. Ripple Effects will be a go-to source for all who love lakes and who advocate for their protection; its driving question is summed up by one of Rulseh’s interviewees: “We love this lake. What can we do to keep it healthy?”
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Ripples in Spacetime
Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy
Govert Schilling
Harvard University Press, 2017

It has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century: the detection of gravitational waves. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime nearly a hundred years ago, but they were never perceived directly until now. Decades in the making, this momentous discovery has given scientists a new understanding of the cataclysmic events that shape the universe and a new confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein’s project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe’s structure and origin.

The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world’s largest scientific endeavors. Govert Schilling takes readers to sites where these stories unfolded—including Japan’s KAGRA detector, Chile’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the South Pole’s BICEP detectors, and the United States’ LIGO labs. He explains the seeming impossibility of developing technologies sensitive enough to detect waves from two colliding black holes in the very distant universe, and describes the astounding precision of the LIGO detectors. Along the way Schilling clarifies concepts such as general relativity, neutron stars, and the big bang using language that readers with little scientific background can grasp.

Ripples in Spacetime provides a window into the next frontiers of astronomy, weaving far-reaching predictions and discoveries into a gripping story of human ambition and perseverance.

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Ripples in Spacetime
Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy, With a New Afterword
Govert Schilling
Harvard University Press, 2019

A Physics Today Best Book of the Year
A Forbes “For the Physics and Astronomy Lover in Your Life” Selection


“Succinct, accessible, and remarkably timely… This book is a rare find.”
Physics Today

“Belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in learning the scientific, historical, and personal stories behind some of the most incredible scientific advances of the 21st century.”
Forbes

The detection of gravitational waves has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime over a hundred years ago, but they were only recently perceived directly for the first time. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein’s project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe’s structure and origin.

“Schilling’s deliciously nerdy grand tour takes us through compelling backstory, current research, and future expectations.”
Nature

“A lively and readable account… Schilling underlines that this discovery is the opening of a new window on the universe, the beginning of a new branch of science.”
—Graham Farmelo, The Guardian

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Ripples of Hope
How Ordinary People Resist Repression Without Violence
Robert M. Press
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
In Ripples of Hope, Robert M. Press tells the stories of mothers, students, teachers, journalists, attorneys, and manyothers who courageously stood up for freedom and human rights against repressive rulers “ and who helped bring about change through primarily nonviolent means. Global in application and focusing on Kenya, Liberia and Sierra Leone, this tribute to the strength of the human spirit also breaks new ground in social movement theories, showing how people on their own or in small groups can make a difference.
[more]

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Ripples of the Universe
Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona
Susannah Crockford
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class.

Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both “raise their vibration” and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.
 
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Risalo
Shah Abdul Latif
Harvard University Press, 2018

The greatest classic of Sindhi literature presented here in an authoritative and vivid modern English translation.

Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo is acknowledged across Pakistan and the wider diaspora as the greatest classic of Sindhi literature. In this collection of short Sufi verses, originally composed for musical performance, the poet creates a vast imaginative world of interlocking references to traditional Islamic themes of mystical and divine love and the scenery, society, and legends of the Sindh region.

Latif (1689–1752), a contemporary of the Panjabi poet Bullhe Shah, belonged to the class of Sufi saints whose shrines remain prominent features of the Sindhi landscape. The Risalo reflects Latif’s profound engagement with the fundamental literature of Islam as well as his openness to varied local traditions, including notable poems praising the spiritual devotion of local Hindu yogis.

This edition presents, alongside the original text in the Sindhi Naskh script, the first translation of the Risalo into modern English prose, offering a new readership access to the writings of one of the masters of Sufi poetry.

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The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom
Steven D. Smith
Harvard University Press, 2014

Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven D. Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. He makes the case that the American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and freedom of conscience.

Smith maintains that the distinctive American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Rather than upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.

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The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494
Raymond de Roover
Harvard University Press
The close connection between the fortunes of the Medici Bank and the political, economic, and cultural events of the 15th century make this book a major contribution to Renaissance studies. Raymond de Roover discusses the Bank's structure, prefiguring the modern holding company, and its techniques, including double-entry bookkeeping, cartel agreements, and cost accounting, as well as its relations with the Church. Relating his analysis to the culture of the time, the author makes significant use of new material, and takes full advantage of the recently discovered secret account books of the Medici Bank.
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The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State
Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner
University of Wisconsin Press
Zaire, apparently strong and stable under Presdident Mobutu in the early 1970s, was bankrupt and discredited by the end of that decade, beset by hyperinflation and mass corruption, the populace forced into abject poverty. Why and how, in a new african state strategically located in Central Africa and rich in mineral resources, did this happen? How did the Zairian state become a “parasitic predator” upon its own people?
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The Rise and Demise of the Myth of the Rus’ Land
Charles J. Halperin
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.
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The Rise and Evolution of Meiji Japan
Considered a doyen of Meiji studies, particularly in the field of the newspaper press in Japan, former journalist Jim Huffman and emeritus professor of History at Wittenberg University, was recently honoured (2017) with the Distinguished Service Award by the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), marking his outstanding scholarship and service in the field of Asian Studies. He has also received three Fulbright Awards and was the recipient of the Ohio Academy of History’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
onsidered a doyen of Meiji studies, particularly in the field of the newspaper press in Japan, former journalist Jim Huffman and H. Orth Hirt Professor of History [Emeritus] at Wittenberg University, was recently honoured (2017) with the Distinguished Service Award by the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), marking his outstanding scholarship and service in the field of Asian Studies. Huffman is the author of eight acclaimed books, including Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan, A Yankee in Meiji Japan : The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House, Japan: A History in Documents and most recently Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. Supported by an introductory mini memoir, this collection of Huffman’s writings comprises thirty journal papers and scholarly essays, thematically structured under (1) Media, (2) Society, Culture and Environment, and (3) Democracy, Government and Nationalism. Part 4 offers a selection from his portfolio of book reviews. The Rise and Evolution of Meiji Japan provides a valuable one-stop access to the scholarship of Jim Huffman that both complements and enhances his existing published works.
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The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law
Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s
Masumi Izumi
Temple University Press, 2019

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.

Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. 

Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.

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The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System
Detroit, 1907-81, Second Edition
Jeffrey Mirel
University of Michigan Press, 1999

Detroit's public school system, lauded as a model for the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, has become one of the city's most conspicuous failures. Jeffrey Mirel draws on Detroit's experience to offer a new interpretation of urban educational decline in the twentieth century, suggesting specific answers to what ails America's public schools and how public education can be improved.

Jeffrey Mirel has won two prestigious book awards for The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Stanford University and the American Educational Research Association awarded the book the 1994-95 "Outstanding Book Award" stating, "Mirel's documentation and interpretations serve as valuable and refreshing commentary on the current status of urban education, and by extension, all American education and society. . . . The book is admirably written with touches of drama, pathos, and hope." The American Educational Studies Association awarded Mirel the 1994 "Critics' Choice Award" for his outstanding contribution to Educational Studies.

This new paperback edition includes a comprehensive epilogue focusing on recent events in Detroit educational reform. Detailing the formation and rapid collapse of a campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s to radically restructure the Detroit public schools, Mirel's new analysis of this experiment illuminates both the persistence of historical trends in the school district and the possibilities for change.

Jeffrey Mirel is David L Angus Collegiate Professor of Education, University of Michigan.

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The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
Eric P. Kaufmann
Harvard University Press, 2004

As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a “culture war” within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation’s ethnic composition.

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

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The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life
Roger Owen
Harvard University Press, 2012

The monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.

Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.

Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the “Arab demonstration effect,” whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa.

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The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life
With a New Afterword
Roger Owen
Harvard University Press, 2014

The monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.

Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.

Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the “Arab demonstration effect,” whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa.

[more]

front cover of The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931
The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931
Per Anders Rudling
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014
Modern Belarusian nationalism emerged in the early twentieth century during a dramatic period that included a mass exodus, multiple occupations, seven years of warfare, and the partition of the Belarusian lands. In this original history, Per Anders Rudling traces the evolution of modern Belarusian nationalism from its origins in late imperial Russia to the early 1930s.

The revolution of 1905 opened a window of opportunity, and debates swirled around definitions of ethnic, racial, or cultural belonging. By March of 1918, a small group of nationalists had declared the formation of a Belarusian People’s Republic (BNR), with territories based on ethnographic claims. Less than a year later, the Soviets claimed roughly the same area for a Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Belarusian statehood was declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920. In 1921, the treaty of Riga officially divided the Belarusian lands between Poland and the Soviet Union. Polish authorities subjected Western Belarus to policies of assimilation, alienating much of the population. At the same time, the Soviet establishment of Belarusian-language cultural and educational institutions in Eastern Belarus stimulated national activism in Western Belarus. Sporadic partisan warfare against Polish authorities occurred until the mid-1920s, with Lithuanian and Soviet support. On both sides of the border, Belarusian activists engaged in a process of mythmaking and national mobilization. By 1926, Belarusian political activism had peaked, but then waned when coups d’états brought authoritarian rule to Poland and Lithuania. The year 1927 saw a crackdown on the Western Belarusian national movement, and in Eastern Belarus, Stalin’s consolidation of power led to a brutal transformation of society and the uprooting of Belarusian national communists.

As a small group of elites, Belarusian nationalists had been dependent on German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Soviet sponsors since 1915. The geopolitical rivalry provided opportunities, but also liabilities. After 1926, maneuvering this complex and progressively hostile landscape became difficult. Support from Kaunas and Moscow for the Western Belarusian nationalists attracted the interest of the Polish authorities, and the increasingly autonomous republican institutions in Minsk became a concern for the central government in the Kremlin.

As Rudling shows, Belarus was a historic battleground that served as a political tool, borderland, and buffer zone between greater powers. Nationalism arrived late, was limited to a relatively small elite, and was suppressed in its early stages. The tumultuous process, however, established the idea of Belarusian statehood, left behind a modern foundation myth, and bequeathed the institutional framework of a proto-state, all of which resurfaced as building blocks for national consolidation when Belarus gained independence in 1991.
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The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture
Jared Gardner
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Jared Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines early magazines and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal and presented a porous distinction between author and reader, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader.
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The Rise and Fall of French Social Theory
Veronique Mottier
Harvard University Press

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The Rise and Fall of Intelligence
An International Security History
Michael Warner
Georgetown University Press, 2014

This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond.

During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events.

Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the book examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders.

The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.

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The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709-1876
Central Asia in the Global Age
Scott C. Levi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
This book analyzes how Central Asians actively engaged with the rapidly globalizing world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In presenting the first English-language history of the Khanate of Khoqand (1709–1876), Scott C. Levi examines the rise of that extraordinarily dynamic state in the Ferghana Valley. Levi reveals the many ways in which the Khanate’s integration with globalizing forces shaped political, economic, demographic, and environmental developments in the region, and he illustrates how these same forces contributed to the downfall of Khoqand.
            To demonstrate the major historical significance of this vibrant state and region, too often relegated to the periphery of early modern Eurasian history, Levi applies a “connected history” methodology showing in great detail how Central Asians actively influenced policies among their larger imperial neighbors—notably tsarist Russia and Qing China. This original study will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience, including scholars and students of Central Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and world history, as well as the study of comparative empire and the history of globalization.
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The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature
John Whittier Treat
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood.
 
Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.
 
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The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade
Samantha Barbas
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyer—a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.

Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.
 
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The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism
David M. Kotz
Harvard University Press, 2014

The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.

Kotz analyzes the reasons for the rise of free-market ideas, policies, and institutions beginning around 1980. He shows how the neoliberal capitalism that resulted was able to produce a series of long although tepid economic expansions, punctuated by relatively brief recessions, as well as a low rate of inflation. This created the impression of a “Great Moderation.” However, the very same factors that promoted long expansions and low inflation—growing inequality, an increasingly risk-seeking financial sector, and a series of large asset bubbles—were not only objectionable in themselves but also put the economy on an unsustainable trajectory. Kotz interprets the current push for austerity as an attempt to deepen and preserve neoliberal capitalism. However, both economic theory and history suggest that neither austerity measures nor other policy adjustments can bring another period of stable economic expansion. Kotz considers several possible directions of economic restructuring, concluding that significant economic change is likely in the years ahead.

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The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism
With a New Preface
David M. Kotz
Harvard University Press, 2017

The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.

“Kotz’s book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of
stages in the history of capitalism.”
—Edwin Dickens, Science & Society

“Whereas [others] suggest that the downfall of the postwar system in Europe and the United States is the result of the triumph of ideas, Kotz argues persuasively that it is actually the result of the exercise of power by those who benefit from the capitalist economic organization of society. The analysis and evidence he brings to bear in support of the role of power exercised by business and political leaders is a most valuable aspect of this book—one among many important contributions to our knowledge that makes it worthwhile.”
—Michael Meeropol, Challenge

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The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism
Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves
University of Illinois Press, 2016
For decades, amateurism defined the ideals undergirding the Olympic movement. No more. Today's Games present athletes who enjoy open corporate sponsorship and unabashedly compete for lucrative commercial endorsements.
 
Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves analyze how this astonishing transformation took place. Drawing on Olympic archives and a wealth of research across media, the authors examine how an elite--white, wealthy, often Anglo-Saxon--controlled and shaped an enormously powerful myth of amateurism. The myth assumed an air of naturalness that made it seem unassailable and, not incidentally, served those in power. Llewellyn and Gleaves trace professionalism's inroads into the Olympics from tragic figures like Jim Thorpe through the shamateur era of under-the-table cash and state-supported athletes. As they show, the increasing acceptability of professionals went hand-in-hand with the Games becoming a for-profit international spectacle. Yet the myth of amateurism's purity remained a potent force, influencing how people around the globe imagined and understood sport.
 
Timely and vivid with details, The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism is the first book-length examination of the movement's foundational ideal.
 
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The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors
Jacqueline de Romilly
University of Michigan Press, 1991

The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors is a masterful survey of the manner in which Greek historians, from Herodotus to Polybius, explained the conditions of a state’s success and the dangers of power.  Both the differences and the similarities among the major authors’ ideas are carefully analyzed: the changing notions of excess, or hybris; the common stress on public morality; and the value of goodwill and union.

The first woman to be elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the first woman to hold a professorship at the College de France, Jacqueline de Romilly has serves as director of the Department of Greek at the Sorbonne and had lectured at numerous universities and institutions of learning around the world.  The author or editor of numerous volumes concerning Thucydides, Jacqueline de Romilly has in recent years become increasingly interested in the history of moral and political ideas.

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The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press
Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox
Gerald Horne
University of Illinois Press, 2017
For nearly fifty years, the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP) fought racism at home and grew into an international news organization abroad. At its head stood founder Claude Barnett, one of the most influential African Americans of his day and a gifted, if unofficial, diplomat who forged links with figures as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Nixon.

Gerald Horne weaves Barnett's fascinating life story through a groundbreaking history of the ANP, including its deep dedication to Pan-Africanism. An activist force in journalism, Barnett also helped send doctors and teachers to Africa, advised African governments, gave priority to foreign newsgathering, and saw the African American struggle in global terms. Yet Horne also confronts Barnett's contradictions. A member of the African American elite, Barnett's sympathies with black aspirations often clashed with his ethics and a powerful desire to join the upper echelons of business and government. In the end, Barnett's activist success undid his work. Horne traces the dramatic story of the ANP's collapse as the mainstream press, retreating from Jim Crow, finally covered black issues and hired African American journalists.

Revelatory and entertaining, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press tells the story of a forgotten pioneer and the ambitious black institution he created.

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Rise and Fall of the Confederacy
The Memoir of Senator Williamson S. Oldham, CSA
Edited & Intro by Clayton E. Jewett
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Williamson S. Oldham was a shrewd and candid observer of the Civil War scene. Representing the always contrary and suspicious Texans in the Confederate Senate, he was a major opponent of President Jefferson Davis and spoke out vehemently against conscription—which he considered an abusive violation of individual rights—and against military interference in the cotton trade.
Oldham’s memoir provides a firsthand look at the Civil War from the perspective of a government insider. In it, he sheds light on such topics as military strategy, foreign relations, taxes, and conflicts between state officials and the Confederate government. Perhaps more important, his travels between Texas and Richmond—both during and after the war—allowed him to observe the many changes taking place in the South, and he made note of both the general sentiment of citizens and the effect of political and military measures on the country.
Throughout the memoir, Oldham consistently stresses the centrality of politics to a society and the necessity of legislating for the will of the people even in times of war. In assessing the Confederacy’s defeat, he points not to military causes but to Congress’s giving in to the will of the president and military leaders rather than ruling for and representing the people.
Clayton E. Jewett has edited and annotated Oldham’s memoir to produce the only fully edited publication of this important document, significantly expanded here over any version previously published. His introduction helps clarify Oldham’s position on many of the topics he discusses, making the memoir accessible to scholar and Civil War buff alike, while his annotations reflect his deep knowledge of the intrigue of wartime political life in both Texas and Richmond.
Oldham’s memoir offers important new insight into not only political leadership and conflicts in a young nation but also the question of why the South lost the Civil War, dispelling many myths about the defeat and bolstering interpretations of the Confederacy’s decline that point more to political than to military causes. Rise and Fall of the Confederacy is one of the major political and social documents of the Confederacy and will be a boon to all scholars of the Civil War era.
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Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race
The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America
By Marilyn Grace Miller
University of Texas Press, 2004

Latin America is characterized by a uniquely rich history of cultural and racial mixtures known collectively as mestizaje. These mixtures reflect the influences of indigenous peoples from Latin America, Europeans, and Africans, and spawn a fascinating and often volatile blend of cultural practices and products. Yet no scholarly study to date has provided an articulate context for fully appreciating and exploring the profound effects of distinct local invocations of syncretism and hybridity. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race fills this void by charting the history of Latin America's experience of mestizaje through the prisms of literature, the visual and performing arts, social commentary, and music.

In accessible, jargon-free prose, Marilyn Grace Miller brings to life the varied perspectives of a vast region in a tour that stretches from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. She explores the repercussions of mestizo identity in the United States and reveals the key moments in the story of Latin America's cult of synthesis. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race examines the inextricable links between aesthetics and politics, and unravels the threads of colonialism woven throughout national narratives in which mestizos serve as primary protagonists.

Illuminating the ways in which regional engagements with mestizaje represent contentious sites of nation building and racial politics, Miller uncovers a rich and multivalent self-portrait of Latin America's diverse populations.

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The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution
Edited by T. C. W. Blanning
University of Chicago Press, 1996
During the past twenty-five years, the historiography of the French Revolution has experienced a revolution of its own. Utilizing developments in such areas as anthropology and critical theory, scholars have begun to ask new questions and to devise new ways of understanding the period.

The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution is a collection of seventeen pathbreaking articles which originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Keith Michael Baker, Suzanne Desan, Bill Edmonds, François Furet, Vivian R. Gruder, Paul Hanson, James N. Hood, Lynn Hunt, David Lansky, Colin Lucas, John Markoff, Mona Ozouf, Alison Patrick, Jeremy D. Popkin, William H. Sewell, Jr., Theda Skocpol, Timothy Tackett, and Dale Van Kley. In addition, a substantial introduction by the editor discusses the evolution of the history of the period and how the individual contributors have shaped the debate.

This volume not only chronicles the rise and fall of the French Revolution but also introduces the reader to the different approaches being employed by the most eminent historians working in the field. The result is a volume on the French Revolution that offers a compelling combination of information and opinion, narrative and interpretation.
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The Rise and Fall of the International Organization of Journalists Based in Prague 1946–2016
Useful Recollections Part III
Kaarle Nordenstreng
Karolinum Press, 2021
In this book, Finnish scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng provides a unique account of the Prague-based International Organization of Journalists, a group that was at one time the world’s largest media association. The IOJ expanded from a postwar fraternity of professional journalists in twenty countries to a truly global organization that had its hand in running journalism schools, a publishing house, a conference service, and a number of commercial enterprises in Czechoslovakia. Though the Cold War kept most Western journalists’ unions isolated from the organization, the IOJ was a major player in Communist Eastern Europe--at its peak in the late 1980s, the IOJ counted 300,000 journalists as members. Nordenstreng--who served as president of the IOJ for fourteen years--illuminates this exciting and little-explored chapter in the history of postwar Europe, from the rise of the Iron Curtain through the post-Soviet 1990s. He enlivens his firsthand account with personal testimonies from former IOJ members and a wealth of previously unpublished internal documents.
 
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The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870
By John Hoyt Williams
University of Texas Press, 1979

Paraguay plays a very small role in the modern world, but for part of the nineteenth century it was a significant regional force. Between 1800 and 1865 it changed from an imperial backwater into a dynamic, dictator-led, financially sound nation. Then came the terrible War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1870 Paraguay had virtually been destroyed.

John Hoyt Williams re-creates the era’s people, places, and events in rich detail and a vigorous style, but this is much more than a mere narrative. His archival research in Paraguay and several other countries enables him to offer new facts and interpretations, correct a number of misapprehensions, and explode a few myths.

He also provides the clearest, most objective portraits available of the three extraordinary men who ruled Paraguay during this time: Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, “El Supremo”; Carlos Antonio López, “the Corpulent Despot”; and López’s flamboyant son Francisco Solano López. Discussions of social, economic, and cultural conditions round out a masterly account of a remarkable historical period.

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The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas
James D. Ross
University of Tennessee Press, 2018

Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union’s rank and file.

Drawing on a rich trove of letters that STFU members wrote to union leaders, government officials, and others, Ross shows that internal divisions were just as significant—if not more so—as outside causes in the union’s ultimate failure. Most important, the STFU’s fatal flaw was the yawning gap between the worldviews of its leadership and those of its members. Ross describes how, early on, STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell promoted the union as one involving many voices—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord—but later pushed a more simplified narrative of a few people doing most of the union’s work. Struck by this significant change, Ross explores what the actual goals of the rank and file were and what union membership meant to them. “While the white leaders may have expressed a commitment to racial justice, white members often did not,” he writes. “While the union’s socialist and communist leaders may have hoped for cooperative land ownership, the members often did not.” Above all, the poor farmers who made up the membership wanted their immediate needs for food and shelter met, and they wanted to own their own land and thus determine their own futures. Moreover, while the leadership often took its inspiration from Marx, the membership’s worldview was shaped by fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christianity.

In portraying such tensions and how they factored into the union’s implosion, Ross not only offers a more nuanced view of the STFU, he also makes a powerful new contribution to our understanding of the Depression-era South.

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The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State
Asbjorn Wahl
Pluto Press, 2012

In an age of government imposed austerity, and after 30 years of neo-liberal restructuring, the future of the welfare state looks increasingly uncertain. Asbjørn Wahl offers an accessible analysis of the situation across Europe, identifies the most important challenges and presents practical proposals for combating the assault on welfare.

Wahl argues that the welfare state should be seen as the result of a class compromise forged in the 20th century, which means that it cannot easily be exported internationally. He considers the enormous shifts in power relations and the profound internal changes to the welfare state which have occurred during the neo-liberal era, pointing to the paradigm shift that the welfare state is going through. This is illustrated by the shift from welfare to workfare and increased top-down control.

As well as being a fascinating study in its own right that will appeal to students of economics and politics, The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State also points to an alternative way forward for the trade union movement based on concrete examples of struggles and alliance-building.

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The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers
Cooperatives, Market Regulation, and Free Enterprise
Paul Earl
University of Manitoba Press, 2019

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Rise and Shine
The Monica Abbott Story
Monica Abbott
University of Tennessee Press, 2023

When she was in fifth grade, Monica Abbott declared that she would one day become an Olympic athlete. In the decades that would follow, her prediction would prove stunningly true, as she would not only compete in the Games but go on to claim two Silver Medals as pitcher for Team USA softball.

In her twenty-plus years as a professional athlete, Abbott has set a high standard of firsts and achievements—but her talents and tenacity have not only shattered records but have also created new possibilities for female athletes everywhere. In Rise and Shine, Abbott chronicles significant lessons and experiences from her childhood, her University of Tennessee and professional softball years, her time in the Olympics, and beyond. Throughout the book, she shares insights cultivated on her journey, offering them to readers of all ages and skill sets to consider as they endeavor to bring their lives into contact with their dreams.

How do we set goals yet unseen? How do we thrive even while overcoming obstacles? And perhaps most importantly, how do we turn our successes into advantages for others? With a foreword by world-renowned tennis icon Billie Jean King, Rise and Shine is more than a record of medals and firsts; it is the story of making dreams come true and of lifting others with you as you rise.

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Rise of a Japanese Chinatown
Yokohama, 1894–1972
Eric C. Han
Harvard University Press, 2014

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown is the first English-language monograph on the history of a Chinese immigrant community in Japan. It focuses on the transformations of that population in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. Eric C. Han narrates the paradoxical story of how, during periods of war and peace, Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state.

This study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the construction of Chinese and Japanese identities and on Chinese migration and settlement. Using local newspapers, Chinese and Japanese government records, memoirs, and conversations with Yokohama residents, it retells the familiar story of Chinese nation building in the context of Sino-Japanese relations. But it builds on existing works by directing attention as well to non-elite Yokohama Chinese, those who sheltered revolutionary activists and served as an audience for their nationalist messages. Han also highlights contradictions between national and local identifications of these Chinese, who self-identified as Yokohama-ites (hamakko) without claiming Japaneseness or denying their Chineseness. Their historical role in Yokohama’s richly diverse cosmopolitan past can offer insight into a future, more inclusive Japan.

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The Rise of AI
Implications and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Libraries
Sandy Hervieux
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2022
Librarians are uniquely positioned to rise to the challenge that artificial intelligence (AI) presents to the field. Libraries and their like have existed for millennia; they progress with society, altering and adapting their services to meet the information needs of their communities.
 
The Rise of AI collects projects, collaborations, and future uses from academic librarians who have begun to embrace AI in their work. In three parts—User Services, Collections and Discovery, and Toward Future Applications—it explores:
  • machine translation
  • creating incubation spaces
  • robotics
  • combining information literacy initiatives with AI literacy
  • fostering partnerships with other on-campus groups
  • integrating AI technology into collections to enhance discoverability
  • using AI to refine metadata for images, articles, and theses
  • machine learning
 
The Rise of AI introduces implications and applications of artificial intelligence in academic libraries and hopes to provoke conversations and inspire new ways of engaging with the technology. As the discussion surrounding ethics, bias, and privacy in AI continues to grow, librarians will be called to make informed decisions and position themselves as leaders in this discourse.
 
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The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States
Revolution or Evolution?
By Megan Mullen
University of Texas Press, 2003

Winner, McGannon Communications Research Award, 2004

In 1971, the Sloan Commission on Cable Communications likened the ongoing developments in cable television to the first uses of movable type and the invention of the telephone. Cable's proponents in the late 1960s and early 1970s hoped it would eventually remedy all the perceived ills of broadcast television, including lowest-common-denominator programming, inability to serve the needs of local audiences, and failure to recognize the needs of cultural minorities. Yet a quarter century after the "blue sky" era, cable television programming closely resembled, and indeed depended upon, broadcast television programming. Whatever happened to the Sloan Commission's "revolution now in sight"?

In this book, Megan Mullen examines the first half-century of cable television to understand why cable never achieved its promise as a radically different means of communication. Using textual analysis and oral, archival, and regulatory history, she chronicles and analyzes cable programming developments in the United States during three critical stages of the medium's history: the early community antenna (CATV) years (1948-1967), the optimistic "blue sky" years (1968-1975), and the early satellite years (1976-1995). This history clearly reveals how cable's roots as a retransmitter of broadcast signals, the regulatory constraints that stymied innovation, and the economic success of cable as an outlet for broadcast or broadcast-type programs all combined to defeat most utopian visions for cable programming.

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The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics
Presidential Elections of the 1980s
Martin P. Wattenberg
Harvard University Press, 1991

Every presidential election since 1964 has been won by the candidate backed by the most united party; yet as party unity has become more important to voting decisions, it has also become increasingly difficult to achieve. In his latest book, Martin Wattenberg offers an in-depth interpretation of the presidential elections of the 1980s, illuminating current theories of political behavior and how they operate in today's candidate-centered politics.

Wattenberg investigates the impact that political parties' declining relevance has had on presidential politics. As the parties' ability to polarize opinion weakened and voters were set politically adrift, the candidates themselves had to fill the power vacuum. Interestingly, as the candidates have become more prominent, their popularity has spiraled downward. Wattenberg's national survey data debunks the notion of Reagan as the "teflon president;' demonstrating that many negative judgments stuck to Reagan's public image throughout the 1980s, particularly the criticisms of his conservative policies.

The author's intricate analysis shows that many people were torn between candidates whose policies they preferred and those who they thought would produce the best results, and these contradictory attitudes were primarily resolved in favor of Reagan and Bush.

This book is not only the successor volume to the author's widely used book on American parties, it is also a controversial and thought-provoking commentary on American parties, politics, and representative government.

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The Rise of Cantonese Opera
Wing Chung Ng
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Defined by its distinct performance style, stage practices, and regional and dialect based identities, Cantonese opera originated as a traditional art form performed by itinerant companies in temple courtyards and rural market fairs.
 
In the early 1900s, however, Cantonese opera began to capture mass audiences in the commercial theaters of Hong Kong and Guangzhou--a transformation that changed it forever. Wing Chung Ng charts Cantonese opera's confrontations with state power, nationalist discourses, and its challenge to the ascendancy of Peking opera as the country's preeminent "national theatre." Mining vivid oral histories and heretofore untapped archival sources, Ng relates how Cantonese opera evolved from a fundamentally rural tradition into urbanized entertainment distinguished by a reliance on capitalization and celebrity performers. He also expands his analysis to the transnational level, showing how waves of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia and North America further re-shaped Cantonese opera into a vibrant part of the ethnic Chinese social life and cultural landscape in the many corners of a sprawling diaspora.
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The Rise of Central Banks
State Power in Financial Capitalism
Leon Wansleben
Harvard University Press, 2022

A bold history of the rise of central banks, showing how institutions designed to steady the ship of global finance have instead become as destabilizing as they are dominant.

While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and consequences of central banks’ increasing clout over economic policy.

Many commentators argue that ideas drove change, indicating a shift in the 1970s from Keynesianism to monetarism, concerned with controlling inflation. Others point to the stagflation crises, which put capitalists and workers at loggerheads. Capitalists won, the story goes, then pushed deregulation and disinflation by redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks. Both approaches are helpful, but they share a weakness. Abstracting from the evolving practices of central banking, they provide inaccurate accounts of recent policy changes and fail to explain how we arrived at the current era of easy money and excessive finance.

By comparing developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, Leon Wansleben finds that central bankers’ own policy innovations were an important ingredient of change. These innovations allowed central bankers to use privileged relationships with expanding financial markets to govern the economy. But by relying on markets, central banks fostered excessive credit growth and cultivated an unsustainable version of capitalism. Through extensive archival work and numerous interviews, Wansleben sheds new light on the agency of bureaucrats and calls upon society and elected leaders to direct these actors’ efforts to more progressive goals.

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The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920-1929
Christopher Robert Reed
University of Illinois Press, 2014
During the Roaring '20s, African Americans rapidly transformed their Chicago into a "black metropolis." In this book, Christopher Robert Reed describes the rise of African Americans in Chicago's political economy, bringing to life the fleeting vibrancy of this dynamic period of racial consciousness and solidarity.
 
Reed shows how African Americans rapidly transformed Chicago and achieved political and economic recognition by building on the massive population growth after the Great Migration from the South, the entry of a significant working class into the city's industrial work force, and the proliferation of black churches. Mapping out the labor issues and the struggle for control of black politics and black business, Reed offers an unromanticized view of the entrepreneurial efforts of black migrants, reassessing previous accounts such as St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's 1945 study Black Metropolis.
 
Utilizing a wide range of historical data, The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 delineates a web of dynamic social forces to shed light on black businesses and the establishment of a black professional class. The exquisitely researched volume draws on fictional and nonfictional accounts of the era, black community guides, mainstream and community newspapers, contemporary scholars and activists, and personal interviews.
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The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy
Minqi Li
Pluto Press, 2008
China's increasing power in the global economy is destabilizing the established system. This book analyses the possible historical trajectories of China and the capitalist world-economy in the twenty-first century.

Minqi Li examines the future global prospects from the perspectives of Marxism, world-system theories, and ecological limits to growth. He argues that China is likely to exacerbate many of the major contradictions of world capitalism, which could lead to the demise of the existing world-system.

This is an essential text for students of political economy, economics and global politics.
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The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy
Edward N. Luttwak
Harvard University Press, 2012

As the rest of the world worries about what a future might look like under Chinese supremacy, Edward Luttwak worries about China’s own future prospects. Applying the logic of strategy for which he is well known, Luttwak argues that the most populous nation on Earth—and its second largest economy—may be headed for a fall.

For any country whose rising strength cannot go unnoticed, the universal logic of strategy allows only military or economic growth. But China is pursuing both goals simultaneously. Its military buildup and assertive foreign policy have already stirred up resistance among its neighbors, just three of whom—India, Japan, and Vietnam—together exceed China in population and wealth. Unless China’s leaders check their own ambitions, a host of countries, which are already forming tacit military coalitions, will start to impose economic restrictions as well.

Chinese leaders will find it difficult to choose between pursuing economic prosperity and increasing China’s military strength. Such a change would be hard to explain to public opinion. Moreover, Chinese leaders would have to end their reliance on ancient strategic texts such as Sun Tzu’s Art of War. While these guides might have helped in diplomatic and military conflicts within China itself, their tactics—such as deliberately provoking crises to force negotiations—turned China’s neighbors into foes. To avoid arousing the world’s enmity further, Luttwak advises, Chinese leaders would be wise to pursue a more sustainable course of economic growth combined with increasing military and diplomatic restraint.

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RISE OF CITY 1878 1898
ARTHUR MEIER SCHLESINGER
The Ohio State University Press, 1999

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The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism
The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment
Antti Lepistö
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In the years following the election of Donald Trump—a victory that hinged on the votes of white Midwesterners who were both geographically and culturally distant from the media’s coastal concentrations—there has been a flurry of investigation into the politics of the so-called “common man.” The notion that the salt-of-the-earth purity implied by this appellation is best understood by conservative politicians is no recent development, though. As Antti Lepistö shows in his timely and erudite book, the intellectual wellsprings of conservative “common sense” discourse are both older and more transnational than has been thought.

In considering the luminaries of American neoconservative thought—among them Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson, and Francis Fukuyama—Lepistö argues that the centrality of their conception of the common man accounts for the enduring power and influence of their thought. Intriguingly, Lepistö locates the roots of this conception in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, revealing how leading neoconservatives weaponized the ideas of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume to denounce postwar liberal elites, educational authorities, and social reformers. Their reconfiguration of Scottish Enlightenment ideas ultimately gave rise to a defining force in modern conservative politics: the common sense of the common man. Whether twenty-first-century politicians who invoke the grievances of “the people” are conscious of this unusual lineage or not, Lepistö explains both the persistence of the trope and the complicity of some conservative thinkers with the Trump regime.
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The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World
The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812
Scott Eastman
University of Alabama Press, 2015
In March 1812, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution in the Hispanic world, a document that became known as the Cádiz Constitution of 1812.
 
The 1812 Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Europe, and this collection of essays explores how its enduring legacy not only shaped the history of state-building, elections, and municipal governance in Iberian America, but also affected national identities and citizenship as well as the development of race and gender in the region.
 
A bold blueprint for governing a global, heterogeneous monarchy, the Constitution represented a rupture with Spain’s Antiguo Régimen (Old Regime) in numerous ways—in the limits it placed on the previously autocratic Bourbon monarchs, in the admission to its governing bodies of deputies from Spain’s American viceroyalties as equals, and in its framers’ vociferous debate over the status of castas (those of mixed ancestry) and slaves. The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World covers these issues and adopts a transatlantic perspective that recovers the voices of those who created a vibrant political culture accessible to commoners and elite alike.
 
The bicentenary of the Constitution of 1812 offered scholars an excellent moment to reexamine the form and role of constitutions across the Spanish-speaking world. Constitutionalism remains a topic of intense debate in Latin America, while contemporary Spain itself continues to seek ways to balance a strong central government with centripetal forces in its regions, notably the Basque and Catalan provinces. The multifaceted essays compiled here by Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea both shed new light on the early, liberal Hispanic societies and show how the legacies of those societies shape modern Spain and Latin America.
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Rise Of Fashion
A Reader
Daniel Leonhard Purdy
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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The Rise of Guardian Democracy
The Supreme Court's Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845-1969
Ward E. Y. Elliott
Harvard University Press, 1974

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The Rise of Jonas Olsen
A Norwegian Immigrant’s Saga
Johannes Wist
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The road to riches for the hero of this sweeping historical novel ends up being rockier than he initially expects. Norwegian immigrant Jonas Olsen arrives in late nineteenth-century Minneapolis with little money and less English. He quickly learns to reinvent himself—from laboring in sewer construction to building a successful dry goods business, from losing everything in a banking collapse to settling the Red River Valley. While an eminently likable character, Jonas can also be ruthless in his ambition to find success in America. 

The Rise of Jonas Olsen is at once an immigrant novel, business novel, political novel, and a western, offering a rich and panoramic view of Scandinavian immigrant life in the Upper Midwest. Wist combines realism and satire to depict the role Norwegian Americans played in the economic, political, and cultural life of the Upper Midwest. 

Originally published serially in the Norwegian-language newspaper the Decorah Posten in the 1920s, The Rise of Jonas Olsen illustrates an immigrant’s struggle to preserve his identity and heritage while striving to become fully accepted as an American. 

Johannes B. Wist (1864–1923) was a journalist and editor of the Decorah Posten from 1900 to 1923. 

Orm Øverland is professor of American literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the author of The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America and Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930

Todd W. Nichol is editor of the Norwegian-American Historical Association publication program. 

Published in cooperation with the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
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The Rise of Mental Health Nursing
A History of Psychiatric Care in Dutch Asylums, 1890-1920
Geertje Boschma
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Geertje Boschma's complex study examines issues from the rise of scientific psychiatry and the emergence of mental health nursing to the social relationships of class, gender, and religion that structured asylum care in the Netherlands around 1900. Drawing on the archival collections of four Dutch asylums, Boschma highlights the gendered nature of mental health nursing politics, and captures the contradictory realities of hospital-oriented asylum care, both illustrating the social complexity of the care of the mentally ill and offering an important addition to the history of European psychiatry.
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The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
David E. Fishman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture explores the transformation of Yiddish from a low-status vernacular to the medium of a complex modern culture.  David Fishman examines the efforts of east European Jews to establish their linguistic distinctiveness as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora.  Fishman considers the roots of modern Yiddish culture in social and political conditions in Imperial Tsarist and inter-war Poland, and its relationship to Zionism and Bundism. In so doing, Fishman argues that Yiddish culture enveloped all socioeconomic classes, not just the proletarian base, and considers the emergence, at the turn of the century, of a pro-Yiddish intelligentsia and a Yiddishist movement.

As Fishman points out, the rise of Yiddishism was not without controversy. Some believed that the rise of Yiddish represented a shift away from a religious-dominated culture to a completely secular, European one; a Jewish nation held together by language, rather than by land or religious content. Others hoped that Yiddish culture would inherit the moral and national values of the Jewish religious tradition, and that to achieve this result, the Bible and Midrash would need to exist in modern Yiddish translation. Modern Yiddish culture developed in the midst of these opposing concepts.

Fishman follows the rise of the culture to its apex, the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925, and concludes with the dramatic story of the individual efforts that preserved the books and papers of YIVO during the destruction and annihilation of World War II and in postwar Soviet Lithuania.  The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, like those efforts, preserves the cultural heritage of east European Jews with thorough research and fresh insights.

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The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa
The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873–1964
Robert I. Rotberg
Harvard University Press

This first comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of the political development of two of the newly formed nations of Central Africa presents the full story of the successful efforts of the people of Malawi and Zambia to achieve self-government. Following a detailed examination of the impact of British colonial rule, the author provides a new interpretation of the earliest demonstrations of native discontent and he explains how the forces of protest found expression through proto-political parties and the formation of religious sects and millennial movements. He also interprets the objectives and tactics of the ruling white settlers in their abortive effort to establish the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Basing his analysis on archival and other primary sources, including interviews with leading figures, Robert Rotberg traces the origins of the full-fledged political parties in both countries and describes the early congresses which were to become the dominant movements during the struggle for independence in Central Africa. He ends with an analysis of that struggle, bringing the story to its successful conclusion in late 1964. A postscript discusses the important changes of 1965.

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The Rise of Nerd Politics
Digital Activism and Political Change
John Postill
Pluto Press, 2018
The recent irruption of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Snowden and other tech-savvy actors onto the global political stage raises urgent questions about the impact of digital activism on political systems around the world. The Rise of Nerd Politics is an anthropological exploration of the role that such actors play in sparking new processes of political change in the digital age.
 
Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in Spain, Indonesia and Malaysia--as well as empirical examples from the United States, Iceland, Taiwan and further afield--Postill tracks the rise of technology "nerds" as a new transnational class of political brokers with growing influence. The book identifies and explores four domains of "nerd politics" that have experienced a dramatic expansion since 2010: digital rights, data activism, social protest, and institutional politics.
 
A lively and engaging intervention at the conjuncture of anthropology, media studies, and sociology, this book offers a pertinent reflection on the future of political change in the digital age.
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The Rise of Newport’s Catholics
From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders
John F. Quinn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Nineteenth-century New England was a hostile place for Catholics. In Massachusetts a mob torched a convent; in Maine a priest was tarred and feathered; and Rhode Island elected an anti-Catholic Know Nothing governor. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common.

Newport was different. It was a religiously diverse and tolerant city that welcomed Catholic French troops during the American Revolution. Later, as it became the favored summer retreat for America’s Protestant social elite, Irish Catholics arrived to work in construction jobs, the tourist economy, and the grand Gilded Age cottages. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholic community was flourishing. Moneyed Catholics acquired their own mansions, an Irish Catholic was mayor, and prominent Protestants were helping Catholic neighbors establish new schools and churches. In this deeply researched study, John F. Quinn delves into this rich Catholic history to discover why nineteenth-century Newport was particularly religiously tolerant and accepting.

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The Rise of Nuclear Fear
Spencer R. Weart
Harvard University Press, 2012

After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.

Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.

Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

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The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
Revised Edition
Peter Pulzer
Harvard University Press, 1988
To understand the twentieth century, we must know the nineteenth. It was then that an ancient prejudice was forged into a modern political weapon. How and why this happened is shown in this classic study by Peter Pulzer, first published in 1964 and now reprinted with a new Introduction by the author.
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The Rise of Respectable Society
A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900
F. M. L. Thompson
Harvard University Press, 1988

One of England’s grand masters of history provides a clear and persuasive interpretation of the creation of “respectable society” in Victorian Britain. Integrating a vast amount of research previously hidden in obscure or academic journals, he covers not only the economy, social structure, and patterns of authority, but also marriage and the family, childhood, homes and houses, work and play.

By 1900 the structure of British society had become more orderly and well-defined than it had been in the 1830s and 1840s, but the result, F. M. L. Thompson shows, was fragmentation into a multiplicity of sections or classes with differing standards and notions of respectability. Each group operated its own social controls, based on what it considered acceptable or unacceptable conduct. This “internalized and diversified” respectability was not the cohesive force its middle-class and evangelical proponents had envisioned. The Victorian experience thus bequeathed structural problems, identity problems, and authority problems to the twentieth century, with which Britain is grappling.

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The Rise of Rome
From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars
Kathryn Lomas
Harvard University Press, 2018

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome, the historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs the diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come.

Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging.

In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood.

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The Rise of Roosevelt University
Presidential Reflections
Theodore L. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Underscoring professional and educational issues pertinent to higher learning at universities across the country, Theodore L. Gross’ s memoir of his years in academia chronicles his successful fourteen-year presidency at Chicago’ s Roosevelt University, a period of leadership that resulted in an upsurge of fund-raising, sharp increases in enrollment and endowment, and the transformation of an urban campus into a metropolitan university.

 

Beginning with a description of his childhood and adolescent education and experiences, Gross recalls his years as a faculty member and academic administrator at the City College of New York from 1958 to 1978, when the college was moving from selective admissions to open enrollment. He also served in administrative positions at Penn State University and SUNY Purchase before accepting the Roosevelt presidency in 1988. Focusing on the tension between the promise of open admissions and aspirations of academic excellence, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections relates Gross’ s perceptions of the failure of open admissions at CCNY and his resolution to learn from those mistakes while at Roosevelt.

           

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations, essays, university documents, and other archival materials and research, Gross re-creates the highs and lows of his quest to make Roosevelt distinctive. His strategic plan included the appointment of senior executives and deans, the creation of a performing arts conservatory, the development of an educational alliance with other universities, online instruction, an honors program, a Chicago School of Real Estate, an MBA for Chinese students, the Partners in Corporate Education program, and the implementation of a second comprehensive campus. He describes the creation of the Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg and the realization of Roosevelt as a metropolitan university, creating a vivid portrait of the suburban culture, the educational context of large community colleges throughout the northwest suburbs, the development of a community advisory board that helped secure funds, and the improved morale of faculty and administration.

 

Gross’ s fund-raising efforts increased the endowment from $3 million to $33 million, and a capital campaign surpassed the goal of $45 million. In this volume, he describes meetings with major donors, the successes and failures of contributions, and the development of greater alumni support in the context of fund-raising throughout Chicago. He also analyzes the highly publicized legal dispute between the Auditorium Theatre Council and Roosevelt University over ownership of the world renowned theatre, pointing out how the case epitomizes issues that all universities confront: the university’ s need to control its entities, detrimental publicity, sectional and regional conflicts, and a split in the arts community. Throughout this narrative, Gross juxtaposes his personal life and professional career, dramatizing how the two are related.

 

More than a retelling of anecdotes and statistics, the volume provides a rare perspective on the intersection of higher education and politics in Chicago. Gross analyzes the different public and private universities in the city and in surrounding Cook County to describe their relationships with ethnicity, religion, class, and with city hall. He also covers the Daley political machine’ s influence on higher education, the politics of university governance, the spectacular growth of the western suburbs, and city versus suburban identities.

 

A personal road map of the development of higher education through the post– World War II decades, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections mirrors the social climate that affected the country’ s universities at large, from the open admissions policies and student rebellions of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, to the urban blight and suburban sprawl of the ’ 80s, to the strategic planning and expansion of the ’ 90s and the new century. The result is a captivating account of the issues involved in presidential transition and leadership, the strategic development of metropolitan universities, and the future role of Roosevelt and similar institutions.  

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