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A Russian-English Social Science Dictionary, Rev. ed.
R. E. F. Smith
Duke University Press, 1990
The aim of this dictionary is to provide an aid to the translation of Russian social science texts into English and a guide to the significance of words used in technical or special senses within this field for social scientists, historians, the business community, and government officials.
Since the original publication of this reference work in 1962, and especially over the past decade, the vocabulary of Soviet life has changed dramatically, reflecting the marked changes in Soviet society. The new material incorporated into this second edition—a result of a thorough scanning of the Soviet press and recent books in sociology, politics, economics, law, accounting, public administration, welfare, and education—addresses not only additional terminology but modification of meanings. R. E. F. Smith also takes into account the increasingly Western influence on Soviet vocabulary—from the advent of words such as “hippie” to the Western flavor of the language of planners and politicians.
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Russian-Ottoman Borderlands
The Eastern Question Reconsidered
Edited by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today.
            The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.
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Russians in Alaska
1732-1867
Lydia Black
University of Alaska Press, 2004
This definitive work, the crown jewel in the distinguished career of Russian America scholar Lydia T. Black, presents a comprehensive overview of the Russian presence in Alaska. Drawing on extensive archival research and employing documents only recently made available to scholars, Black shows how Russian expansion was the culmination of centuries of social and economic change.
Black’s work challenges the standard perspective on the Russian period in Alaska as a time of unbridled exploitation of Native inhabitants and natural resources. Without glossing over the harsher aspects of the period, Black acknowledges the complexity of relations between Russians and Native peoples.
She chronicles the lives of ordinary men and women—the merchants and naval officers, laborers and clergy—who established Russian outposts in Alaska. These early colonists carried with them the Orthodox faith and the Russian language; their legacy endures in architecture and place names from Baranof Island to the Pribilofs.
This deluxe volume features fold-out maps and color illustrations of rare paintings and sketches from Russian, American, Japanese, and European sources—many have never before been published. An invaluable source for historians and anthropologists, this accessible volume brings to life a dynamic period in Russian and Alaskan history. A tribute to Black’s life as a scholar and educator, Russians in Alaska will become a classic in the field.
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The Russians in Germany
A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949
Norman M. Naimark
Harvard University Press, 1995

In 1945, when the Red Army marched in, eastern Germany was not “occupied” but “liberated.” This, until the recent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is what passed for history in the German Democratic Republic. Now, making use of newly opened archives in Russia and Germany, Norman Naimark reveals what happened during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany from 1945 through 1949. His book offers a comprehensive look at Soviet policies in the occupied zone and their practical consequences for Germans and Russians alike—and, ultimately, for postwar Europe.

In rich and lucid detail, Naimark captures the mood and the daily reality of the occupation, the chaos and contradictions of a period marked by rape and repression, the plundering of factories, the exploitation of German science, and the rise of the East German police state. Never have these practices and their place in the overall Soviet strategy, particularly the political development of the zone, received such thorough treatment. Here we have our first clear view of how the Russians regarded the postwar settlement and the German question, how they made policy on issues from reparations to technology transfer to the acquisition of uranium, how they justified their goals, how they met them or failed, and how they changed eastern Germany in the process. The Russians in Germany also takes us deep into the politics of culture as Naimark explores the ways in which Soviet officers used film, theater, and education to foster the Bolshevization of the zone.

Unique in its broad, comparative approach to the Soviet military government in Germany, this book fills in a missing—and ultimately fascinating—chapter in the history of modern Europe.

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Russia's American Colony
S. Frederick Starr, ed.
Duke University Press, 1986
American, Canadian, and Soviet scholars gathered in Sitka under the auspices of the Kenan Institute to review and reinterpret the history of tsarist Russia's colonial outpost in Alaska. The result is this comprehensive examination of that history, which goes beyond the traditional concentration on political and diplomatic history by treating the economy, society, and culture of Alaska during the Russian period.
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Russia’s Capitalist Realism
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov
Vadim Shneyder
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language.

This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‑century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

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Russia's Factory Children
State, Society, and Law, 1800–1917
Boris B. Gorshkov
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
At the height of the Russian industrial revolution, legions of children toiled in factories, accounting for fifteen percent of the workforce. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, their numbers had been greatly reduced, thanks to legislation that sought to protect the welfare of children for the first time.

Russia's Factory Children presents the first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and profiles the laws that would establish children's labor rights.

In this compelling study, Boris B. Gorshkov examines the daily lives, working conditions, hours, wages, physical risks, and health dangers to children who labored in Russian factories. He also chronicles the evolving cultural mores that initially welcomed child labor practices but later shunned them.

Through extensive archival research, Gorshkov views the evolution of Russian child labor law as a reaction to the rise of industrialism and the increasing dangers of the workplace. Perhaps most remarkable is his revelation that activism, from the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and children themselves, led to the conciliation of legislators and marked a progressive shift that would impact Russian society in the early twentieth century and beyond.
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Russia's Hostile Measures
Understanding the Threat
Cohen
RAND Corporation, 2019
This report examines current Russian hostile measures in Europe and forecasts how Russia might threaten Europe using these measures over the next few years. This report observes that Russia has the most strategic interest in influencing western Europe, but it has the most leverage over countries of eastern Europe, and offers a range of recommendations for the U.S. government and for the U.S. Army on countering hostile measures.
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Russia's Legal Fictions
Harriet Murav
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Legal scholars and literary critics have shown the significance of storytelling, not only as part of the courtroom procedure, but as part of the very foundation of law. Russia's Legal Fictions examines the relationship between law, narrative and authority in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia.
The conflict between the Russian writer and the law is a well-known feature of Russian literary life in the past two centuries. With one exception, the authors discussed in this book--Sukhovo-Kobylin, Akhsharumov, Suvorin, and Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century and Solzhenitsyn and Siniavskii in the twentieth--were all put on trial. In Russia's Legal Fictions, Harriet Murav starts with the authors' own writings about their experience with law and explores the history of these Russian literary trials, including censorship, libel cases, and one case of murder, in their specific historical context, showing how particular aspects of the culture of the time relate to the case.
The book explores the specifically Russian literary and political conditions in which writers claim the authority not only as the authors of fiction but as lawgivers in the realm of the real, and in which the government turns to the realm of the literary to exercise its power. The author uses specific aspects of Russian culture, history and literature to consider broader theoretical questions about the relationship between law, narrative, and authority. Murav offers a history of the reception of the jury trial and the development of a professional bar in late Imperial Russia as well as an exploration of theories of criminality, sexuality, punishment, and rehabilitation in Imperial and Soviet Russia.
This book will be of interest to scholars of law and literature and Russian law, history and culture.
Harriet Murav is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, University of California at Davis.
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Russia's Military Interventions
Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts
Samuel Charap
RAND Corporation, 2021
Despite Russia’s relatively small global economic footprint, it has engaged in more interventions than any other U.S. competitor since the end of the Cold War. In this report, the authors assess when, where, and why Russia conducts military interventions by analyzing the 25 interventions that Russia has undertaken since 1991, including detailed case studies of the 2008 Russia-Georgia War and Moscow’s involvement in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
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Russia's New Fin de Siècle
Contemporary Culture between Past and Present
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Intellect Books, 2013
This volume investigates Russian culture at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia, and the United States exploring aspects of culture with regard to one overarching question: What is the impact of the Soviet discourse on contemporary culture. This question comes at a time when Russia is concerned with integrating itself into European arts and culture while enhancing its uniqueness through references to its Soviet past. Thus, contributions investigate the phenomenon of post-Soviet culture and try to define the relationship of contemporary art to the past.

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Russia's Rome
Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940
Judith E. Kalb
University of Wisconsin Press
A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by six writers—Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov—Judith E. Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the “Third Rome” was resurrected to create a Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity that endured even as the empire of the tsars declined and fell and a new state replaced it.
            Russia generally finds itself beyond the purview of studies concerned with the ongoing potency of the classical world in modern society. Slavists, for their part, have only recently begun to note the influence of classical civilization not only during Russia’s neo-classical eighteenth century but also during its modernist period. With its interdisciplinary scope, Russia’s Rome fills a gap in both Russian studies and scholarship on the classical tradition, providing valuable material for scholars of Russian culture and history, classicists, and readers interested in the classical heritage.
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Russia's Social Gospel
The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution
Daniel Scarborough
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
The late Russian Empire experienced rapid economic change, social dislocation, and multiple humanitarian crises, enduring two wars, two famines, and three revolutions. A “pastoral activism” took hold as parish clergymen led and organized the response of Russia’s Orthodox Christians to these traumatic events. In Russia’s Social Gospel, Daniel Scarborough considers the roles played by pastors in the closing decades of the failing tsarist empire and the explosive 1917 revolutions.
 
This volume draws upon extensive archival research to examine the effects of the pastoral movement on Russian society and the Orthodox Church. Scarborough argues that the social work of parish clergymen shifted the focus of Orthodox practice in Russia toward cooperative social activism as a devotional activity. He furthers our understanding of Russian Orthodoxy by illuminating the difficult position of parish priests, who were charged with both spiritual and secular responsibilities but were supported by neither church nor state. His nuanced look at the pastorate shows how social and historical traumas shifted perceptions of what being religious meant, in turn affecting how the Orthodox Church organized itself, and contributed to Russia’s modernization.
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Rust Belt Burlesque
The Softer Side of a Heavy Metal Town
Erin O’Brien
Ohio University Press, 2019

The performance art of burlesque, once a faded form, has made a comeback in the twenty-first century, and it has shimmied back to life with a vengeance in Cleveland. Thanks to fans and entrepreneurs, neo-burlesque has taken the stage—and it’s more inclusive, less seedy, and emphatically fun.

Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the mid-1800s to the present day, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio’s neo-burlesque comeback. The historical center of Cleveland burlesque was the iconic Roxy Theater on East Ninth Street. Here, in its twentieth-century heyday, famed dancers like Blaze Starr and comics like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello entertained both regulars and celebrity guests.

Erin O’Brien’s lively storytelling and Bob Perkoski’s color photos give readers a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today’s burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans. This is a show you won’t want to miss.

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Rustic Cubism
Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata
Bruce Adams
University of Chicago Press, 2004
In Rustic Cubism, Bruce Adams tells the fascinating story of Moly-Sabata, an art colony founded in the Rhône Valley during the height of French modernism by Cubist pioneer Albert Gleizes. Following his social and spiritual agenda of earthly labor and a Celtic-medievalist view of Christianity, Gleizes' disciples worked to fuse Cubism with a revival of ancient agrarian, artisanal traditions. The most important and committed member of this experimental commune was ceramicist Anne Dangar (1885-1951).

In part a gripping biography of this Australian expatriate, Rustic Cubism chronicles Dangar's personal battles and the tumult of the World War II era during her tempestuous tenure at Moly-Sabata. Dangar dedicated herself to the colony's aims by working in the region's village potteries, combining their vernacular elements with Gleizes' design methods to arrive at a type of rustic Cubism. Her work there would ultimately be rewarded; her pieces can today be found in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and many other museums.

Rustic Cubism places Dangar at the heart of Moly-Sabata's alternative art movement—one that, in its nostalgic present, attempted to construct a culture based on the distant past. Generously illustrated with photographs of the art and social milieu of the period, this captivating and original narrative makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of French modernism and early twentieth-century cultural politics as well as of the life of a most talented and intriguing female artist.
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The Rustic Style
Ernst Kris
Harvard University Press

Originating as a doctoral dissertation and first published in 1926, Ernst Kris’s The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design. This precocious study—by a young Viennese museum curator who would subsequently make his name as a leading psychoanalyst—was an attempt to define the character of late-sixteenth-century naturalism. It put scientific observation at the service of elite artistic production, and the result was an ambivalent blend of lifelike plasticity, organic texturing, and material richness in which the use of advanced technologies, such as life casting, deliberately blurred the boundary between products of natural processes and human craft. This hybrid aesthetic, which Kris described as the “rustic style,” was championed by the two main protagonists of his essay, the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer and the ceramist Bernard Palissy. It found a broader characteristic expression in the design of Renaissance grottos, where classical iconography and all’antica ornamentation often came to encode the environmental knowledge of the age.

This Ex Horto edition of The Rustic Style, accompanied by introductory essays by Robert Felfe and Anatole Tchikine, is made available in English for the first time in a masterly translation by Linda B. Parshall. A long overdue tribute to Kris’s pathbreaking scholarship, this lavishly illustrated book should appeal to anyone interested in the intersections of early modern art and natural history.

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Rus–Ukraine–Russia
Scenes from the Cultural History of Russian Religiosity
Martin C. Putna
Karolinum Press, 2018
An outspoken opponent of pro-Russian, authoritarian, and far-right streams in contemporary Czech society, Martin C. Putna received a great deal of media attention when he ironically dedicated the Czech edition of Rus–Ukraine–Russia to Miloš Zeman—the pro-Russian president of the Czech Republic. This sense of irony, combined with an extraordinary breadth of scholarly knowledge, infuses Putna’s book.

Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Rus–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an “alternative Russia.” Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by “little green men” in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.

Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.
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Ruta Tannenbaum
A Novel
Miljenko Jergovic
Northwestern University Press, 2011
The novel Ruta Tannenbaum is by prolific, award-winning Croatian author Miljenko Jergović. First published in 2006, the story illuminates life and society in Yugoslavia between the world wars. The title character was inspired by real-life figure Lea Deutsch, the now-forgotten Shirley Temple of Yugoslavia, who was murdered in the Holocaust.

Using their shared Jewish heritage as a starting point, Jergovic constructs a fictional family history populated by historical figures with the precocious Ruta at the center. Stephen Dickey’s translation masterfully captures Jergovic´’s colloquial yet deeply observed style, which animates the tangled and troubled history of persecution and war in Croatia.
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Rutgers Football
A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet
Pellowski, Michael J
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Thirteen seconds remaining, score tied at 25, fourth and seven for Rutgers at Louisville's 27. Against the third ranked team in the nation, on a perfect autumn evening, the Scarlet Knights stormed back from 18 down, with Coach Greg Schiano's vaunted defense shutting down Louisville's passing attack. As Jeremy Ito's kick cleared the uprights with seconds on the clock, the Scarlet Knights announced their arrival as one of the most fearsome teams in the nation.

Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet
is a richly illustrated history of one of the most storied programs in all of college football. From the first intercollegiate contest against Princeton in 1869, which started college football as we know it, through the years that Paul Robeson suited up for the team, the famous undefeated season of 1976, and right up to the Schiano era, former Scarlet Knight Michael Pellowski takes you on a fascinating journey that chronicles the highlights of the first 137 years of Rutgers football. He makes special mention of the Scarlet Knights who have gone on to successful careers in the NFL-Brian Leonard, Mike McMahon, L.J. Smith, Gary Brackett, Ray Lucas, Deron Cherry, among others-and includes a complete listing of letter winners.

Now, with the Empire State Building being lit red in the team's honor, and fans believing that a national championship is within reach, Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet provides the indispensable backstory for this team as it "chops" its way to future greatness.
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Rutgers since 1945
A History of the State University of New Jersey
Paul G. E. Clemens with an essay by Carla Yanni
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In the 1940s, Rutgers was a small liberal arts college for men. Today, it is a major public research university, a member of the Big Ten and of the prestigious Association of American Universities. In Rutgers since 1945, historian Paul G. E. Clemens chronicles this remarkable transition, with emphasis on the eras from the cold war, to the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s, to the growth of political identity on campus, and to the increasing commitment to big-time athletics, all just a few of the innumerable newsworthy elements that have driven Rutgers’s evolution. 
 
After exploring major events in Rutgers’s history from World War II to the present, Clemens moves to specific themes, including athletics, popular culture, student life, and campus dissent. Other chapters provide snapshots of campus life and activism, the school’s growing strength as a research institution, the impact of Title IX on opportunities for women student athletes, and the school’s public presence as reflected in its longstanding institutions. Rutgers since 1945 also features an illustrated architectural analysis, written by art historian Carla Yanni, of residence halls, which house more students than at any other college in the nation.
 
Throughout the volume, Clemens aims to be balanced, but he does not shy away from mentioning the many conflicts, crises, and tensions that have shaped the university. While the book focuses largely on the New Brunswick campus, attention is paid to the Camden and Newark campuses as well. Frequently broadening the lens, Clemens contextualizes the events at Rutgers in relation to American higher education overall, explaining which developments are unique and which are part of larger trends. In celebration of the university’s 250th anniversary, Rutgers since 1945 tells the story of the contemporary changes that have shaped one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the country.

 
Table of Contents
1    Becoming a State University: The Presidencies of Robert Clothier, Lewis Webster Jones, and Mason Gross
2    Rutgers Becomes a Research University: The Presidency of Edward J. Bloustein
3    Negotiating Excellence: The Presidencies of Francis L. Lawrence and Richard L. McCormick
4    Student Life
5    Residence Hall Architecture at Rutgers: Quadrangles, High-Rises, and the Changing Shape of Student Life, by Carla Yanni
6    Student Protest
7    Research at Rutgers
8    A Place Called Rutgers: Glee Club, Student Newspaper, Libraries, University Press, Art Galleries
9    Women’s Basketball
10  Athletic Policy
11  Epilogue

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Rutgers Then and Now
Two Centuries of Campus Development, A Historical and Photographic Odyssey
James W. Hughes
Rutgers University Press
Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. As it migrated from a parsonage in Somerville, to the New Brunswick-sited Sign of the Red Lion tavern, to stately Old Queens, and expanded northward along College Avenue, it would both compete and collaborate with the city that surrounded it for room to grow.

Rutgers, Then and Now tells this story, proceeding through ten sequential development phases of College Avenue and environs campus expansion—each with its own buildings and physical layouts—that took place over the course of 250 years. It delivers stunning photographic and historic documentation of the growth of the university, showing “what it was and appeared originally” versus “what it is and looks like today.” Among other in-depth analyses, the book compares the diminutive geographic scale of today’s historical College Avenue Campus—once the entirety of Rutgers—to the much larger-sized (in acreage) Busch Campus. Replete with more than 500 images, the book also considers the Rutgers campuses that might have been, examining plans that were changed or abandoned. Shedding light on the sacrifices and gifts that transformed a small college into a vital hub for research and beloved home for students, it explores how Rutgers grew to become a world-class university.

 
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Ruth
Guillem Viladot, Translated by P. Louise Johnson
Fum d'Estampa Press, 2022

How does someone experience things from the viewpoint of the other sex? It is this question that has led to Guillem Vildot’s creation of Ruth, the genre-defining story of a sex change told by the protagonist through a series of letters to an anonymous friend. Demonstrating the sentimental and intellectual intimacy of a man transitioning into a woman, Ruth describes a profound, touching process in which frustrations, ideas of liberty, and changes of identity are interwoven.

Without descending into easy morbidity or sensationalism, Viladot expresses his indignation at the limitations of both masculine and feminine sensibilities, while championing diversity of thought, love, liberty, and, most importantly, desire.

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Ruth Asawa
An Artist Takes Shape
Sam Nakahira
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
Brave, unconventional, and determined, Ruth Asawa let nothing stop her from living a life intertwined with art.

Renowned for her innovative wire sculptures, Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was a teenager in Southern California when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes. Asawa’s family had to abandon their farm, her father was incarcerated, and she and the rest of her family were sent to a concentration camp. Asawa nurtured her dreams of becoming an artist while imprisoned and eventually made her way to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

This graphic biography by Sam Nakahira, developed in consultation with Asawa’s youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, chronicles the genesis of Asawa as an artist—from the horror of Pearl Harbor to her transformative education at Black Mountain College to building a life in San Francisco, where she would further develop and refine her groundbreaking wire sculpture.

Asawa never sought fame, preferring to work on her own terms: for her, art and life were one. Featuring lively illustrations and photographs of Asawa’s work, this retelling of her young adult years demonstrates the power of making art.

Ages thirteen and up
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legacy of Dissent
Feminist Rhetoric and the Law
Katie L. Gibson
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A rhetorical analysis of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s feminist jurisprudence

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lifelong effort to reshape the language of American law has had profound consequences: she has shifted the rhetorical boundaries of jurisprudence on a wide range of fundamental issues from equal protection to reproductive rights. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ginsburg led a consequential attack on sexist law in the United States. By directly confronting the patriarchal voice of the law, she pointedly challenged an entrenched genre of legal language that silenced the voices and experiences of American women and undermined their status as equal citizens. On the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg continues to challenge the traditional scripts of legal discourse to insist on a progressive vision of the Constitution and to demand a more inclusive and democratic body of law.

This illuminating work examines Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s contributions in reshaping the rhetoric of the law (specifically through the lens of watershed cases in women’s rights) and describes her rhetorical contributions—beginning with her work in the 1970s as a lawyer and an advocate for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project through her tenure as a Supreme Court justice. Katie L. Gibson examines Ginsburg’s rhetoric to argue that she has dramatically shifted the boundaries of legal language. Gibson draws from rhetorical theory, critical legal theory, and feminist theory to describe the law as a rhetorical genre, arguing that Ginsburg’s jurisprudence can appropriately be understood as a direct challenge to the traditional rhetoric of the law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands as an incredibly important figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminism. While a growing number of admirers celebrate Justice Ginsburg’s voice of dissent today, Ginsburg’s rhetorical legacy reveals that she has long articulated a sharp and strategic voice of judicial dissent. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of her feminist legacy by detailing the unique contributions of her legal rhetoric.
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Ruth Benedict
Stranger in This Land
By Margaret M. Caffrey
University of Texas Press, 1989

Poet, anthropologist, feminist—Ruth Fulton Benedict was all of these and much more. Born into the last years of the Victorian era, she came of age during the Progressive years and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

As a Lyricist poet, Ruth Benedict helped define Modernism. As an anthropologist, she wrote the classic Patterns of Culture and at one point was considered the foremost anthropologist in the United States—the first woman ever to attain such status. She was an intellectual and an artist living in a time when women were not encouraged to be either. In this fascinating study, Margaret Caffrey attempts to place Benedict in the cultural matrix of her time and successfully shows the way in which Benedict was a product of and reacted to the era in which she lived.

Caffrey goes far beyond providing simple biographical material in this well-written interdisciplinary study. Based on exhaustive research, including access for the first time to the papers of Margaret Mead, Benedict's student and friend, Caffrey is able to put Benedict's life clearly in perspective. By identifying the family and educational influences that so sharply influenced Benedict's psychological makeup, the author also closely analyzes the currents of thought that were strong when Victorianism paralleled the Modernism that figured in Benedict's life work. The result is a richly detailed study of a gifted woman.

This important work will be of interest to students of Modernism, poetry, and women's studies, as well as to anthropologists.

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Ruth Hall and Other Writings by Fanny Fern
Edited by Joyce W Warren
Rutgers University Press, 1986
When Ruth Hall was originally published in 1855, it caused a sensation. In it, Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton) portrays a mid-nineteenth-century woman who realizes the American Dream solely on her own becoming the incarnation of the American individualist-regarded at that time as a role designed exclusively for men. Based on the author's life, the novel reflects her spirit of practical feminism-that a woman was only truly independent when she was financially independent.

Fanny Fern was one of the most popular American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, the first woman newspaper columnist in the United States, and the most highly paid newspaper writer of her day. This volume gathers together for the first time almost one hundred selections of her best work as a journalist. Writing on such taboo subjects as prostitution, venereal disease, divorce, and birth control, Fern stripped the façade of convention from some of society's most sacred institutions, targeting cant and hypocrisy, pretentiousness and pomp.

Fern portrays a mid-nineteenth century woman who becomes the incarnartion of the American individualist, something regarded as exclusively for men.

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A Ruth Suckow Omnibus
Ruth Suckow
University of Iowa Press, 1988

This collection of ten short stories and one novella reintroduces a superb regional writer whose fiction, though firmly planted in the soil of the Midwest, stretches in significance to include all human drama.

Despite her wide experience, Ruth Suckow became and remained a writer interested in small-town and small-city life. All her fiction contains deep and penetrating insights into the motivations of characters who are upheld by their dreams, memories of small-town childhoods, and the need to make sense of the contrast between past and present, idealism and practicality, conformity and individualism. These expressive, resonant stories will be welcomed by all new readers and by Ruth Suckow fans everywhere.

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Ruthless Criticism
New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History
William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Ruthless Criticism was first published in 1993. 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.

Ruthless Criticism offers perspectives and subjects largely outside traditional historiography. It broadens the concept of media history to include lesser-studied media, and offers alternative interpretations of traditional media.

This anthology of original research includes an array of scholarly and theoretical perspectives. Each addresses specific topic within a specific era. reflecting the diversity of U.S. mass media.

Solomon and McChesney begin by using critical theory and deconstruction to examine the meanings of print in the colonial era. Subsequent chapters study the media ecology of the antebellum press; the intense focus on profits of the post-Civil War mainstream press; gender images in the labor press; the diversity of political views within the working-class press; and the development of a commercial press in the black community.

The essays concerning the twentieth century focus on the rise of a culture industry and include studies on the origins of the broadcast ratings system and the commercial broadcast system and the commercial broadcast system, early television's portrayals of childhood, the televisions networks' close ties with the federal government, the government's key role in creating and developing the field of mass communication research, and teenage girls' popular culture from 1960–1968 as a formative influence on the feminist movement.

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Ruthless Hedonism
The American Reception of Matisse
John O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 1999
"Oh, do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I go to the theatre." These words were spoken by Matisse just before the Armory Show in 1913—a pivotal moment, after which his work was seen in America as an example of what should be admired or deplored in modern art.

In this ambitious study, John O'Brian argues that Matisse's sober presentations of himself were calculated to fit with the social constraints and ideological demands of the times. Matisse's strategy included cooperating with museums, cultivating private collectors, playing off dealers one against another, and reassuring the media that, whatever his reputation as an avant-gardist, the conduct of his life was solidly bourgeois.

Moving from the late 1920s, when Matisse's output was shedding its outlaw reputation, to the early 1950s, when his work was canonized, O'Brian shows how the way Matisse's work was viewed changed as attention shifted away from the seductiveness of his subject matter to the seductiveness of his paint. The art's resolute rejection of political concerns, its deployment of decorative design for visual satisfaction, and its representations of pleasure encouraged American audiences, who in the 1930s deemed the art disreputable, to celebrate its gratifications by the early years of the Cold War.

This intriguing, wide-ranging investigation of Matisse's self-promotion, America's uneasy embrace of modernism, and America's consumer culture and politics provides a rich context to Clement Greenberg's words published in the Nation in 1947: "Matisse's cold hedonism and ruthless exclusion of everything but the concrete, immediate sensation will in the future, once we are away from the present Zeitgeist, be better understood as the most profound mood of the first half of the twentieth century."
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Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
Alain Destexhe
Pluto Press, 1995

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Rwandan Women Rising
Swanee Hunt
Duke University Press, 2017
In the spring of 1994, the tiny African nation of Rwanda was ripped apart by a genocide that left nearly a million dead. Neighbors attacked neighbors. Family members turned against their own. After the violence subsided, Rwanda's women—drawn by the necessity of protecting their families—carved out unlikely new roles for themselves as visionary pioneers creating stability and reconciliation in genocide's wake. Today, 64 percent of the seats in Rwanda's elected house of Parliament are held by women, a number unrivaled by any other nation. 
 
While news of the Rwandan genocide reached all corners of the globe, the nation's recovery and the key role of women are less well known. In Rwandan Women Rising, Swanee Hunt shares the stories of some seventy women—heralded activists and unsung heroes alike—who overcame unfathomable brutality, unrecoverable loss, and unending challenges to rebuild Rwandan society. Hunt, who has worked with women leaders in sixty countries for over two decades, points out that Rwandan women did not seek the limelight or set out to build a movement; rather, they organized around common problems such as health care, housing, and poverty to serve the greater good. Their victories were usually in groups and wide ranging, addressing issues such as rape, equality in marriage, female entrepreneurship, reproductive rights, education for girls, and mental health. 
 
These women's accomplishments provide important lessons for policy makers and activists who are working toward equality elsewhere in Africa and other postconflict societies. Their stories, told in their own words via interviews woven throughout the book, demonstrate that the best way to reduce suffering and to prevent and end conflicts is to elevate the status of women throughout the world.
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Ryan Adams
Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown
By David Menconi
University of Texas Press, 2012

Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible character, one of the signature personalities of his generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown’s rocket ride to fame as the music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, and in Ryan Adams, he tells the inside story of the singer’s remarkable rise from hardscrabble origins to success with Whiskeytown, as well as Adams’s post-Whiskeytown self-reinvention as a solo act.

Menconi draws on early interviews with Adams, conversations with people close to him, and Adams’s extensive online postings to capture the creative ferment that produced some of Adams’s best music, including the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. He reveals that, from the start, Ryan Adams had an absolutely determined sense of purpose and unshakable confidence in his own worth. At the same time, his inability to hold anything back, whether emotions or torrents of songs, often made Adams his own worst enemy, and Menconi recalls the excesses that almost, but never quite, derailed his career. Ryan Adams is a fascinating, multifaceted portrait of the artist as a young man, almost famous and still inventing himself, writing songs in a blaze of passion.

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Rêvoir
Hélène Cixous
Seagull Books, 2024
A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history.

As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution.

Still uncertain, she flees to the country at the last moment, with her cats and her daughter, with her diaries and notebooks. What will she do here? Write? What will she write about? Can she write about the experience of being confined? She will write about her cats; every day she will observe their lives and take notes about how they cope with being housebound, and later, in the spring, with the outdoors.

Thucydides, Defoe, Camus, Kafka—she will compare her experiences with those of others who have been confined by malady or persecution. She will write of her mother, who fled impending disaster on many occasions and always kept a suitcase ready.

She too will endure. The important thing is to have a good death, surrounded by those she loves, not locked down in a hospital.
 
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The Rājyābhiṣeka Manual for the Coronation of King Bīrendra of Nepal (1975)
Introduction and Facsimile Edition
Michael Witzel
Harvard University Press
The Rājyābhiṣeka Manual for the Coronation of King Bīrendra of Nepal contains the only extensive coronation manual available for a Hindu king. It was used in the Rājyābhiṣeka rituals of King Bīrendra in February 1975. Long regarded as highly secret, it can now be presented, after the abolition of the monarchy in its entirety in 2008. This manual was checked and signed by the royal priests and religious advisors.
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