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Raising Their Voices
The Politics of Girls’ Anger
Lyn Mikel Brown
Harvard University Press, 1998

Two fourteen-year-old girls, fed up with the "Hooters" shirts worn by their male classmates, design their own rooster logo: "Cocks: Nothing to crow about." Seventeen-year-old April Schuldt, unmarried, pregnant, and cheated out of her election as homecoming queen by squeamish school administrators, disrupts a pep rally with a protest that engages the whole school.

Where are spirited girls like these in the popular accounts of teenage girlhood, that supposed wasteland of depression, low self-esteem, and passive victimhood? This book, filled with the voices of teenage girls, corrects the misperceptions that have crept into our picture of female adolescence. Based on the author's yearlong conversation with white junior-high and middle-school girls--from the working poor and the middle class--Raising Their Voices allows us to hear how girls adopt some expectations about gender but strenuously resist others, how they use traditionally feminine means to maintain their independence, and how they recognize and resist pressures to ignore their own needs and wishes.

With a psychologist's sensitivity and an anthropologist's attention to cultural variations, Lyn Brown makes provocative observations about individual differences in the girls' experiences and attitudes, and shows how their voices are shaped and constrained by class--with working-class girls more willing to be openly angry than their middle-class peers, and yet more likely to denigrate themselves and attribute their failures to personal weakness.

A compelling and timely corrective to conventional wisdom, this book attunes our hearing to the true voices of teenage girls: determined, confused, amusing, touching, feisty, and clear.

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Raising Your Kids Right
Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism
Abate, Michelle Ann
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Dr. Seuss's classic character the Lorax has delighted children for decades while passing along a powerful message about environmental responsibility. The book's young readers, and their parents, would likely be surprised by the emergence of a new character, Truax, a kindly logger created by a longtime employee of the wood products industry, who, not surprisingly, has a far different viewpoint to share. Yet the Truax character, and the book of the same name, is just one example of a growing genre of conservative-themed narratives for young readers spawned by the continuing strength of the American political right.

Highlighting the works of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, and others, Michelle Ann Abate brings together such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity. Raising Your Kids Right dispels lingering societal attitudes that narratives for young readers are unworthy of serious political study by examining a variety of texts that offer information, ideology, and even instructions on how to raise kids right, not just figuratively but politically.
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The Raj Quartet, Volume 1
The Jewel in the Crown
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 1976
No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule—"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"—as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, The Raj Quartet. The Jewel in the Crown opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence. On the night after the Indian Congress Party votes to support Ghandi, riots break out and an ambitious police sargeant arrests a young Indian for the alleged rape of the woman they both love.
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The Raj Quartet, Volume 2
The Day of the Scorpion
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In The Day of the Scorpion, Scott draws us deeper in to his epic of India at the close of World War II. With force and subtlety, he recreates both private ambition and perversity, and the politics of an entire subcontinent at a turning point in history.

As the scorpian, encircled by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, so does the British raj hasten its own destruction when threatened by the flames of Indian independence. Brutal repression and imprisonment of India's leaders cannot still the cry for home rule. And in the midst of chaos, the English Laytons withdraw from a world they no longer know to seek solace in denial, drink, and madness.
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The Raj Quartet, Volume 3
The Towers of Silence
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 1998
India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas; the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick, Susan Layton's future husband.
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The Raj Quartet, Volume 4
A Division of Spoils
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 1998
After exploiting India's divisions for years, the British depart in such haste that no one is prepared for the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947. The twilight of the raj turns bloody. Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, A Division of the Spoils illuminates one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India.
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Rakes of the Old Court
A Novel
Mateiu Caragiale, Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.
 
Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.
 
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Rakugo
The Popular Narrative Art of Japan
Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki
Harvard University Press, 1990

After the disruptions of World War II and the immediate postwar period, Japan has seen a renaissance of rakugo storytelling. There are now about 260 performers (hanashika) in Tokyo and 130 in Osaka-Kyoto. Morioka and Sasaki provide a complete picture of this humorous genre, including translations of representative stories in which a single performer brings to life, through conventional gestures and characteristic speech, the interactions of various Japanese types. This work traces the origins of rakugo back to Buddhist tales of the eighth and ninth centuries and describes changes through the years that eventuated in a refined art of stage performance in the mid-nineteenth century.

The rakugo theatre (yose), its stage and theatrical properties, the training of hanashika, profiles of some eminent professionals, and the motifs that inform the repertoire of rakugo stories are all described in detail and made vivid through copious illustration. Appended to the text are lists of the main hanashika houses, the rakugo text collections published since the mid-Meiji period, the titles of individual rakugo pieces, and an exhaustive annotated bibliography.

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The Ralliement in French Politics, 1890–1898
Alexander Sedgwick
Harvard University Press
Alexander Sedgwick presents an intensive examination of the political problems confronting French Royalists, Catholics, and conservative Republicans in their attempt to form a conservative party, within the framework of the Republic, in the decade dominated by the Panama Scandal and the Dreyfus Affair. Basing his analysis on unpublished papers and contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, and reviews often neglected in studies of the period, the author demonstrates that the failure of the movement can be traced to endemic French political attitudes, and that the Ralliement has significant historical implications which have not been generally recognized.
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Rallying Cries
Eric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1977
Called "the theater conscience of our times," Eric Bentley has been both a leading critic and a playwright. Rallying Cries presents three of his best known works: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, successfully staged around the world and on television; The Recantation of Galileo Galilei; and the controversial From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate, a work initially rejected as insufficiently Christian by its commissioning theater but then successfully produced in New York at the Actors Studio and American Jewish Theater.
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Ralph Adams Cram
An Architect's Four Quests
Douglass Shand-Tucci
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Following in the footsteps of Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900, Douglass Shand-Tucci's widely praised portrait of Ralph Adams Cram's early years, this volume tells the story of Cram's later career as one of America's leading cultural figures and most accomplished architects.

With his partner Bertram Goodhue, Cram won a number of important commissions, beginning with the West Point competition in 1903. Although an increasingly bitter rivalry with Goodhue would lead to the dissolution of their partnership in 1912, Cram had already begun to strike out on his own. Supervising architect at Princeton, consulting architect at Wellesley, and head of the MIT School of Architecture, he would also design most of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the campus of Rice University, as well as important church and collegiate structures throughout the country. By the 1920s Cram had become a household name, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

A complex man, Cram was a leading figure in what Shand-Tucci calls "a full-fledged homosexual monastery" in England, while at the same time married to Elizabeth Read. Their relationship was a complicated one, the effect of which on his children and his career is explored fully in this book. So too is his work as a religious leader and social theorist.

Shand-Tucci traces the influence on Cram of such disparate figures as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Phillips Brooks, Henry Adams, and Ayn Rand. He divides Cram's career into four lifelong "quests": medieval, modernist, American, and ecumenical. Some quests may have failed, but in each he left a considerable legacy, ultimately transforming the visual image of American Christianity in the twentieth century.

Handsomely illustrated with over 130 photographs and drawings and eight pages of color plates, Ralph Adams Cram can be read on its own or in conjunction with Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900. Together, the two volumes complete what the Christian Century has described as a "superbly researched and captivating biography."
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Ralph Ayres' Cookery Book
Edited by Jane Jakeman
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2006
Every day at noon in the dining hall of New College, Oxford in the 1770s, a feast was laid for students and the dons, clad in white waistcoats and wigs. They sat down to cod with oysters, ham, fowls, boiled beef, rabbits smothered with onions, mutton, veal collops, pork griskins, New College Puddings, mince pies, and roots (vegetables). That was only the first course. For the second course, they were served roast turkey, a haunch of venison, a brace of woodcocks, snipes, veal olives, trifle, blancmange, stewed pippins, and preserved quinces. Ralph Ayres was the genius behind this daily repast, and his choice recipes are chronicled here in Ralph Ayres' Cookery Book.

If you've ever wondered what a London Wigg was or why plum cake does not actually contain plums, Ralph Ayres' Cookery Book will prove to be a most rewarding collection. Here the details of sumptuous British meals are meticulously presented, as is their larger context in the history of cooking. Recipes for such famous dishes as Quaking Pudding, Oxford Sausages, Damson Preserve, and other savory English delights fill the pages. Some, such as the famous New College Pudding, are still used today. The volume is beautifully produced, featuring a wealth of full-color botanical illustrations and elegant script reproduced from the original text, and also includes an informative foreword by Bodleian emeritus  librarian David Vaisey.

A captivating glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century food and the culture of academia's apex, Ralph Ayres' Cookery Book is a valuable and engaging historical chronicle of British cuisine. It will appeal to social and culinary historians, as well as to the many lovers of griskin and collops.
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Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America
Timothy Parrish
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Ralph Ellison has long been admired as the author of one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man. Yet he has also been dismissed by some critics as a writer who only published one major work of fiction and a black intellectual out of touch with his times. In this book, Timothy Parrish offers a fundamentally different assessment of Ellison's legacy, describing him as the most important American writer since William Faulkner and someone whose political and cultural achievements have not been fully recognized.

Embracing jazz artist Wynton Marsalis's characterization of Ellison as the unacknowledged "political theorist" of the civil rights movement, Parrish argues that the defining event of Ellison's career was not Invisible Man but the 1954 Supreme Court decision that set his country on the road to racial integration. In Parrish's view, no other American intellectual, black or white, better grasped the cultural implications of the new era than Ellison did; no other major American writer has been so misunderstood.

Drawing on Ellison's recently published "unfinished" novel, newly released archival materials, and unpublished correspondence, Parrish provides a sustained reconsideration of the writer's crucial friendships with Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward to show how his life was dedicated to creating an American society in which all could participate equally. By resituating Ellison's career in the historical context of its making, Parrish challenges the premises that distorted the writer's reception in his own lifetime to make the case for Ellison as the essential visionary of post–Civil War America.
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Ralph Ellison
The Next Fifty Years, Volume 23
Ronald A. T. Judy and Jonathan Arac, eds.
Duke University Press
While Ralph Ellison is perhaps best known for his novel Invisible Man, he was also a significant twentieth-century intellectual, having authored numerous essays and papers that shaped thought on subjects from jazz to liberalism. Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years gathers outstanding scholars in the fields of American and African American studies to engage Ellison’s theoretical and critical writings.

Several essays in this collection focus on an area of Ellison’s thinking that has yet to be adequately scrutinized—his study of, and writing about, music, specifically jazz and the blues. Although not a systematic philosopher of music, Ellison exhibited the seriousness and rigor associated with the critical musical writings of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said. Other essays in this special issue examine salient questions raised by Ellison’s work, including the nature of the connection between the novel and the democratic mind, Vietnam and the crisis of liberal society, and the problematic of modernism and freedom. Ralph Ellison addresses the ways in which Ellison’s writings about art were also efforts to think about and discuss political agency.

Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Kevin Bell, Adam Gussow, Ronald A. T. Judy, Robert O’Meally, Donald E. Pease, Barry Shank, Hortense Spillers, Kenneth Warren, Alexander G. Weheliye, John Wright

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Ralph J. Bunche
Selected Speeches and Writings
Charles P. Henry, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings is the only collection currently available of speeches and writings many unpublished and previously unavailable of one of this century's foremost African-American political and intellectual leaders.
Bunche was a pioneer in every sense of the word. The first black American to hold a doctorate in political science, Bunche established the political science department at Howard University and co-founded the National Negro Congress. He served as the first African- American section head in the Office of Strategic Services and later moved to the State Department. He played a major part in the delegation that established the United Nations and, when he retired as Under Secretary General, was the highest- ranking black in that organization. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and thus became the first black Nobel laureate.
Bunche's thinking and writing was broad, ranging from the political left to the center. Early works flirt with socialist or even Bolshevist ideas, while later works maintained that a flawed American democracy was better than an impending threat of Nazi-influenced fascism. Bunche was one of the first African Americans to do academic work in Africa, forcing him to think through notions of colonialism and class that would influence his work at the United Nations. Although his passion for peace and civil rights never faltered, his relationship with American black movements vascillated from an early embrace of radicalism to a significant distancing during the mid-sixties to a final rapprochement during the last years of his life. A monumental contribution, Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings reasserts the thinking of a great American whose views are entirely relevant to a generation still striving for the world Bunche envisioned.
Charles P. Henry is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the book:
"I abhor racism as a dangerous virus, whether it is spread by white or black peoples. I seek total integration, which to me means the Negro taking his place in the very mainstream of American life . . . . My ancestors have contributed very much to the development of this country and therefore I have a vested interest in it that I intend to realize and protect."
"It seems painfully clear to me that there is no possibility in the affluent, highly industrialized and technological white-majority American society for anyone to be at once black, separate and equal."
"The colonial system in its modern version, implicitly arrogant and self-serving, was instituted and perpetuated chiefly by self-righteous and superior- minded Europeans. Its positive achievements notwithstanding, colonialism's evil legacies will bedevil the world for years to come."
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Ralph Johnson Bunche
Public Intellectual and Nobel Peace Laureate
Edited by Beverly Lindsay; Foreword by John Hope Franklin
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-71) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost diplomats and intellectuals. In the wake of centennial celebrations of his birth, leading scholars and diplomats assess Bunche’s historical importance and enduring impact on higher education, public policy, and international politics. Their essays reveal not only the breadth of Bunche’s influence, such as his United Nations work to broker peace during times of civil war in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but also the depth of his intellectual perspectives on race, civil rights, higher education, and international law. Probing his publications, speeches, and public policy initiatives, the volume offers telling insights into the critical roles of universities, public intellectuals, and diplomats in working together to find solutions to domestic and international problems through public and scholarly engagement. In this way, the volume highlights the very connections that Bunche exhibited as an academic, intellectual, and diplomat.

Contributors include Lorenzo DuBois Baber, John Hope Franklin, Jonathan Scott Holloway, Charles P. Henry, Ben Keppel, Beverly Lindsay, Princeton Lyman, Edwin Smith, and Hanes Walton Jr.

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Ralph W. Yarborough, the People's Senator
By Patrick L. Cox
University of Texas Press, 2002

Semifinalist, 22nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 2002
Finalist, Spur Award in western nonfiction biography, Western Writers of America, 2002

Revered by many Texans and other Americans as "the People's Senator," Ralph Webster Yarborough (1903-1996) fought for "the little people" in a political career that places him in the ranks of the most influential leaders in Texas history. The only U. S. Senator representing a former Confederate state to vote for every significant piece of modern civil rights legislation, Yarborough became a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the areas of education, environmental preservation, and health care. In doing so, he played a major role in the social and economic modernization of Texas and the American South. He often defied conventional political wisdom with his stands against powerful political interests and with his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet to this day, his admirers speak of Yarborough as an inspiration for public service and a model of political independence and integrity.

This biography offers the first in-depth look at the life and career of Ralph Yarborough. Patrick L. Cox draws on Yarborough's personal and professional papers, as well as on extensive interviews with the Senator and his associates, to follow Yarborough from his formative years in East Texas through his legal and judicial career in the 1930s, decorated military service in World War II, unsuccessful campaigns for Texas governor in the 1950s, distinguished tenure in the United States Senate from 1957 to 1970, and return to legal practice through the 1980s.

Although Yarborough's liberal politics set him at odds with most of the Texas power brokers of his time, including Lyndon Johnson, his accomplishments have become part of the national fabric. Medicare recipients, beneficiaries of the Cold War G. I. Bill, and even beachcombers on Padre Island National Seashore all share in the lasting legacy of Senator Ralph Yarborough.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson - American Writers 41
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Josephine Miles
University of Minnesota Press, 1964

Ralph Waldo Emerson - American Writers 41 was first published in 1964. 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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Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Major Poetry
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 2015

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, like its companion prose volume, presents a selection of definitively edited texts drawn chiefly from the multivolume Collected Works. Accompanying each poem is a headnote prepared by Albert von Frank for the student and general reader, which serves as an entryway to the poem, offering critical and historical contexts. Detailed annotations provide further guidance.

A master of the essay form, a philosopher of moods and self-reliance, and the central figure in the American romantic movement, Emerson makes many claims on our attention. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry reminds us exactly why his poetry also matters and why he remains one of our most important theoreticians of verse. Emerson saw his poetry and philosophy as coordinate ways of seeing the world. “It is not metres,” he once declared, “but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

All the major poems published in Emerson’s lifetime—chosen from Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876) as well as uncollected poems—are represented here. Also included in an appendix is the first selection ever made of the poems and poetic fragments that Emerson addressed to his first wife, Ellen, during their courtship and marriage and concluding with the anguish of bereavement following her death on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Major Prose
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 2015

Upon its completion, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971–2013) was hailed as a major achievement of scholarship and textual editing. Drawing from the ten volumes of the Collected Works, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have gathered some of Emerson’s most memorable prose published during his lifetime and under his direct supervision. The editors have enhanced those selections with additional writings to produce the only anthology that represents in a single volume the full range of Emerson’s written and spoken prose genres—sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—that took on their public life in the pulpit or lecture hall, or on the printed page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose demonstrates the remarkable scope of Emerson’s interests, from science, literature, art, philosophy, natural history, and religion to pressing social issues such as slavery and women’s rights, to the character of his contemporaries, including Lincoln and Thoreau. Emerson’s classic essays Nature, “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience” complement his less familiar but no less vital texts, including the deeply heterodox sermon on “The Lord’s Supper,” which effectively announced his resignation from the ministry, and late essays on “American Civilization,” “Character,” and “Works and Days.” Edited according to the most rigorous modern standards, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose provides an authoritative compendium of writings by one of America’s most significant literary figures and public intellectuals.

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The Ramapo Mountain People
Cohen, David Steven
Rutgers University Press, 1986
Northwest of Manhattan where the New York-New Jersey boundary crosses the tree-covered ridges and hollows ridges and hollows of the Ramapo Mountains there is a group of about 1,500 racially mixed people who have long been referred to by journalists and historians as the "Jackson Whites."

In a study combining tee disciplines of anthropology, sociology, folklore, and history, David Cohen found that the old stories about these people were legends, not history.

He found no reliable evidence that their ancestors were Tuscarora Indians, Hessian deserters from the British army, escaped slaves, and British and West Indian prostitutes imported by a sea captain named Jackson for the pleasure of British soldiers occupying Manhattan during the War for Independence.

David Cohen lived among the Ramapo Mountain People for a year, conducting genealogical research into church records, deeds, wills, and inventories in county courthouses and libraries. He established that their ancestors included free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey.

In describing his findings and his experiences, Professor Cohen shows how their racially mixed ancestry, their special family and kinship system, and their intergroup attitudes and folkways distinguish and socially isolate these people as a separate racial group today, despite modern communications and transportation and their proximity to New York City.

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Ramblin' on My Mind
New Perspectives on the Blues
Edited by David Evans
University of Illinois Press, 2007

This compilation of essays takes the study of the blues to a welcome new level. Distinguished scholars and well-established writers from such diverse backgrounds as musicology, anthropology, musicianship, and folklore join together to examine blues as literature, music, personal expression, and cultural product. Ramblin' on My Mind contains pieces on Ella Fitzgerald, Son House, and Robert Johnson; on the styles of vaudeville, solo guitar, and zydeco; on a comparison of blues and African music; on blues nicknames; and on lyric themes of disillusionment.

Contributors are Lynn Abbott, James Bennighof, Katharine Cartwright, Andrew M. Cohen, David Evans, Bob Groom, Elliott Hurwitt, Gerhard Kubik, John Minton, Luigi Monge, and Doug Seroff.

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Rambling On
An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab
Bohumil Hrabal
Karolinum Press, 2016
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal’s Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.
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Rambling On
An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab
Bohumil Hrabal
Karolinum Press, 2014
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal’s Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.
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Ramesses III
The Life and Times of Egypt's Last Hero
Edited by Eric H. Cline and David O'Connor
University of Michigan Press, 2012
In the tumultuous and vivid history of New Kingdom Egypt, Ramesses III's reign was prosperous and culturally rich. He fended off attacks by the "Sea Peoples" and others who threatened the state, he built the great temple of Medinet Habu, and he left wonderfully complete documents describing contemporary social structure and the economy. Amazingly, we even have an account from a contemporary judicial document that describes events leading to Ramesses III's assassination. This edited collection presents a detailed and informative look at the life, career, and world of one of Egypt's most important pharaohs, providing insight both on his reign and its aftermath and on the study of the political and cultural history of ancient Egypt.

This collection offers the best new scholarship on Ramesses III, with contributions from Christopher J. Eyre; Ogden Goelet, Jr.; Peter W. Haider; Carolyn R. Higginbotham; Kenneth A. Kitchen; Bojana Mojsov; Steven R. Snape; Emily Teeter; and James M. Weinstein, as well as from David O'Connor and Eric H. Cline. It will be of interest to those with an informed amateur's interest in Egyptology as well as to scholars of Egyptian and biblical archaeology.

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Ramona Memories
Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California
Dydia DeLyser
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The most important woman in the history of southern California never lived. The eponymous heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 novel Ramona, a half-Indian beauty raised on a wealthy Mexican rancho, nonetheless left an indelible imprint on southern California's landscape. Within a year of its publication, landmarks identified with Ramona's fictional life - her birthplace, her home, the site of her wedding, and her grave - became important, even canonical parts of a visit to southern California. One could take the Ramona freeway to town, cook like Ramona, and smell like Ramona. The novel's romanticized version of California's Hispanic past also inspired films, songs, musical instruments, jewelry, clothes, beer, wine, canned goods, collectibles, and a play that still draws thirty thousand people annually. Although historians and other writers have acknowledged Ramona's importance in the shaping of southern California's regional identity, there has never been an in-depth study of the origins and evolution of the "Ramona Myth" itself - until now. In Ramona Memories, Dydia DeLyser traces the myth's emergence within the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist industry. DeLyser explores the establishment of tourist attractions by fans of the novel. She details the stories of individual Ramona enthusiasts who, guided by numerous travel books and articles, wove the text of the novel and its lavishly described locations into their own lives, from pilgrimages to either of the two ranchos acclaimed as Ramona's home to Ramona-themed luncheons and hopeful honeymoon visits to the Wishing Well at her marriage place. Based on more than a decade of meticulous research, Ramona Memories reveals how a fiction - and the real places and products that it inspired - helped to make an idealized past visible, permeating southern California's social memory.
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Rampant Women
Suffragists Right Assembly
Linda J. Lumsden
University of Tennessee Press, 1997
Dr. Linda J. Lumsden analyzes the First Amendment components of the women's suffrage movement, in particular their right to assembly as they organized pageants, parades, open air meetings and public demonstrations. The book opens with a woman-centered essay on the freedom of expression before the 20th century. The first chapter describes the heroism it took for women in the 19th century to gather in mass meetings, delegations and conventions. Chapter 2 explores Open-Air campaigns; Chapter 3 on petitioning as a political tool. Chapter 4 is on parades, starting with the first suffrage parades in 1908 (New York City; Boone, Iowa; and Oakland, California) and ending with the last one in 1917. Pageants are featured in chapter 5, and the chapter 6 is on picketing. The concluding chapter develops her position that suffrage assemblies provided the leverage for later protestors who sought a public arena to decry their political dissent. Four appendices then follow: a list of suffrage organizations; prominent suffragists in the 1910s; a chronology of major events in the U.S. suffrage movement; and, finally a list of when and where women won the vote. There is a brief mention of the 1913 suffrage paraders in Louisville, but generally the book focuses on states other than Kentucky.
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Ramparts of Resistance
Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back
Sheila Cohen
Pluto Press, 2006
Ramparts of Resistance examines the experience of British and U.S. workers during the last three decades to offer a broad analysis of the need for a new independent politics of trade unionism. Recent years have seen great changes in the trade union movement, from waves of strikes in the 1970s to a battery of employer and state onslaughts, culminating in the anti-union legislation of the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at grassroots labor struggles, Sheila Cohen explores issues of reformism, trade union democracy, and the political meaning of ordinary workplace resistance, and puts forward ideas for change. Ramparts of Resistance examines the failure of the union movement to rise to the neoliberal challenge and calls for a new politics of independent unionism and an explicitly class-based renewal of "workers' power." Coming at a time when union activity and membership involvement continues despite the odds, this book is an inspiring guide to the direction that unionism should take.
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R&D, Education, and Productivity
A Retrospective
Zvi Griliches
Harvard University Press, 2000

Zvi Griliches was a modern master of empirical economics. In this short book, he recounts what he and others have learned about the sources of economic growth. This book conveys the way he tackled research problems. For Griliches, economic theorizing without measurement is merely the fashioning of parables, but measurement without theory is blind. Judgment enables one to strike the right balance.

The book begins with economists' first attempts to measure productivity growth systematically in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s these efforts culminated in a startling puzzle. The growth of measured inputs like labor and capital explained only a fraction of the growth of national output. Economists called this phenomenon "efficiency" or "technical change" or "the residual." However, Griliches observes that the most accurate name was a "measure of our ignorance." What explained the rest of economic growth quickly became one of the most important questions in economics.

Over the next thirty years, Griliches and his colleagues and students looked for various components of the residual in education (the formation of human capital), investment (the formation of physical capital), and research and development. In 1973, after the oil price shocks, productivity growth slowed and the residual almost disappeared. Since the shocks were a short-term phenomenon, they could not account for the slowdown. A main focus of this book is therefore the puzzle of the productivity slowdown and how to date it and how to explain it.

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Ramsay Macdonald
Kevin Morgan
Haus Publishing, 2006
The Labour party's first Prime Minister
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Ramsey
The Lives of an English Fenland Town, 1200–1600
Anne Reiber DeWindt
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
In a vividly detailed study of the small English market town of Ramsey, the authors examine the inner life of this fascinating community from the twelfth century to the end of the sixteenth century.
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The Ramseys at Swan Pond
The Archaeology and History of an East Tennessee Farm
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
The Ramsey House was built in 1797 for Col. Francis Alexander Ramsey, a prominent early settler of East Tennessee who, along with his two sons J. G. M. Ramsey and William B. A. Ramsey, shaped the physical and cultural landscape of what would become Knox county and Knoxville, Tennessee. The one-hundred-acre homestead, referred to by Colonel Ramsey as Swan Pond, contained the Ramsey home as well as other outbuildings and slave quarters. In 1952, the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee purchased the tract of land, and the Ramsey House is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Charles H. Faulkner began archaeological investigations at the Ramsey House in 1985 and concluded his work with his retirement from the University of Tennessee's anthropology department in 2005. During his tenure with the Ramsey House Archaeological Project, Faulkner and his team of scholars and students unearthed the prehistory of Native American occupation at Swan Pond, several outbuilding and early home foundation features yielding evidence of extensive early renovations to the Ramsey House and surrounding Swan Pond, and a multitude of ceramics and other artifacts left behind by the Ramsey family and other tenants ranging in dates from the late 1700s to the 1950s. Faulkner's research presented in The Ramseys at Swan Pond reveals not only the material culture and family lifeways of early wealth in East Tennessee, but chronicles the occupation of a homestead that would become pivotal to the development of early Knoxville and Knox County and offers insights into the responsibilities Ramsey and his family undertook in order to tame an early American frontier.

Faulkner provides the reader a complete overview of the excavations, and emphasizes the importance of historic research within the discipline of archaeology in his introduction. The Ramseys at Swan Pond will be of interest to anyone studying historic archeology, the early American frontier, and Tennessee history.

Charles H. Faulkner is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. He is the author/editor of The Prehistoric Native American Art of Mud Glyph Cave, The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery, Rock Art of the Eastern Woodlands, and numerous other essays.
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Ramus, Method and Decay of Dialogue
From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
Walter S.J.Ong
Harvard University Press

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Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
Walter J. Ong, S.J.
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher, Peter Ramus (1515-72) is best known for his attack on Aristotelian logic, his radical pedagogical theories, and his new interpretation for the canon of rhetoric. His work, published in Latin and translated into many languages, has influenced the study of Renaissance literature, rhetoric, education, logic, and—more recently—media studies.

Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book—with a new foreword by Adrian Johns—is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history.
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Ranch Wife
Jo Jeffers; Foreword by Katherine Jensen
University of Arizona Press, 1993
When Jo Jeffers was a young girl suffering from asthma, she promised herself, "When I grow up, if I ever do, I shall go to Arizona and be a cowboy." She did both, and Ranch Wife tells the story of her life as wife and partner of a rancher in the high country of northeastern Arizona. Here she describes the routines of ranch life and vividly recalls the dust storms, plagues, and other hazards that challenged the young city-bred woman. It offers readers not only an insider's view of a working ranch but also an appreciation of how ranchers' wives help sustain such a rugged enterprise.
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Rancher Archaeologist
A Career in Two Different Worlds
George Frison
University of Utah Press, 2014
Sometimes childhood events can shape a person’s destiny. Such was the case for George Frison. His father’s accidental death meant that Frison was raised by his grandparents, thus experiencing life on a ranch instead of the small town childhood he otherwise would have had. The wealth of prehistoric artifacts on the ranch caught his attention. Eventually, this interest prompted him to change his life’s course at age thirty-seven. 
     In this memoir, Frison shares his life’s work and his atypical journey from rancher to professor and archaeologist. Herding cattle, chopping watering holes in sub-zero weather, and guiding hunters in the fall were very different than teaching classes, performing laboratory work, and attending faculty and committee meetings in air-conditioned buildings. But his practical and observational experience around both domestic and wild animals proved a valuable asset to his research. His knowledge of specific animal behaviors gave insight to his studies of the Paleoindians of the northern plains as he sought to understand how their stone tools were used most effectively for hunting and how bison jumps, mammoth kills, and sheep traps actually worked. Frison’s careful research and strong involvement in the scholarly and organizational aspects of archaeology made him influential not only as an authority on the prehistory of the northern plains but also as a leader in Wyoming archaeology and Northern American archaeology at large.
     This book will appeal to both the professional and the lay reader with interests in archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, plains history, animal science, hunting, or game management. Frison’s shift from ranching into the academic world of archaeology serves as a reminder that you are never too old to change your life. 
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Ranchero Revolt
The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero
By Ian Jacobs
University of Texas Press, 1982

The Mexican Revolution has most often been characterized as the revolt of the oppressed rural masses against the conservative regime of Porfirio Díaz. In Ranchero Revolt Ian Jacobs challenges this populist interpretation of the Revolution by exploring the crucial role played by the rural middle class—rancheros—in the organization and final victory of the Revolution.

Jacobs focuses on the Revolution as it developed in Guerrero, the rebellious Mexican state still frequently at odds with central authority. His is the first account in English of the genesis and development of the Revolution in this important Mexican state and the first detailed history in any language of Guerrero in the period 1876 to 1940.

Stressing as it does the conservative tendencies of the Revolution in Mexico, Ranchero Revolt is a major contribution to revisionist history. It is a striking example of the trend toward local and regional studies of Mexican history that are transforming much of the conventional wisdom about modern Mexico.

Among these studies, however, Ranchero Revolt is unusual in its chronological scope, embracing not only the origins and military struggle of the Revolution but also the emergence of a new revolutionary state in the 1920s and 1930s. Especially valuable are Jacobs' descriptions of the agrarian developments that preceded and followed the Revolution; the vagaries of local factions; and the process of political centralization that took place first under Díaz and later under the revolutionary regimes.

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Rancheros in Chicagoacán
Language and Identity in a Transnational Community
By Marcia Farr
University of Texas Press, 2006

Rancheros hold a distinct place in the culture and social hierarchy of Mexico, falling between the indigenous (Indian) rural Mexicans and the more educated city-dwelling Mexicans. In addition to making up an estimated twenty percent of the population of Mexico, rancheros may comprise the majority of Mexican immigrants to the United States. Although often mestizo (mixed race), rancheros generally identify as non-indigenous, and many identify primarily with the Spanish side of their heritage. They are active seekers of opportunity, and hence very mobile. Rancheros emphasize progress and a self-assertive individualism that contrasts starkly with the common portrayal of rural Mexicans as communal and publicly deferential to social superiors.

Marcia Farr studied, over the course of fifteen years, a transnational community of Mexican ranchero families living both in Chicago and in their village-of-origin in Michoacán, Mexico. For this ethnolinguistic portrait, she focuses on three culturally salient styles of speaking that characterize rancheros: franqueza (candid, frank speech); respeto (respectful speech); and relajo (humorous, disruptive language that allows artful verbal critique of the social order maintained through respeto). She studies the construction of local identity through a community's daily talk, and provides the first book-length examination of language and identity in transnational Mexicans.

In addition, Farr includes information on the history of rancheros in Mexico, available for the first time in English, as well as an analysis of the racial discourse of rancheros within the context of the history of race and ethnicity in Mexico and the United States. This work provides groundbreaking insight into the lives of rancheros, particularly as seen from their own perspectives.

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Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest
Species of Capital
Nathan F. Sayre
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Ranching is as much a part of the West as its wide-open spaces. The mystique of rugged individualism has sustained this activity well past the frontier era and has influenced how we view—and value—those open lands.

Nathan Sayre now takes a close look at how the ranching ideal has come into play in the conversion of a large tract of Arizona rangeland from private ranch to National Wildlife Refuge. He tells how the Buenos Aires Ranch, a working operation for a hundred years, became not only a rallying point for multiple agendas in the "rangeland conflict" after its conversion to a wildlife refuge but also an expression of the larger shift from agricultural to urban economies in the Southwest since World War II.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought the Buenos Aires Ranch in 1985, removed all livestock, and attempted to restore the land to its "original" grassland in order to protect an endangered species, the masked bobwhite quail. Sayre examines the history of the ranch and the bobwhite together, exploring the interplay of social, economic, and ecological issues to show how ranchers and their cattle altered the land—for better or worse—during a century of ranching and how the masked bobwhite became a symbol for environmentalists who believe that the removal of cattle benefits rangelands and wildlife.

Sayre evaluates both sides of the Buenos Aires controversy—from ranching's impact on the environment to environmentalism's sometimes misguided efforts at restoration—to address the complex and contradictory roles of ranching, endangered species conservation, and urbanization in the social and environmental transformation of the West. He focuses on three dimensions of the Buenos Aires story: the land and its inhabitants, both human and animal; the role of government agencies in shaping range and wildlife management; and the various species of capital—economic, symbolic, and bureaucratic—that have structured the activities of ranchers, environmentalists, and government officials.

The creation of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge has been a symbolic victory for environmentalists, but it comes at the cost of implicitly legitimizing the ongoing fragmentation and suburbanization of Arizona's still-wild rangelands. Sayre reveals how the polarized politics of "the rangeland conflict" have bound the Fish and Wildlife Service to a narrow, ineffectual management strategy on the Buenos Aires, with greater attention paid to increasing tourism from birdwatchers than to the complex challenge of restoring the masked bobwhite and its habitat. His findings show that the urban boom of the late twentieth century echoed the cattle boom of a century before—capitalizing on land rather than grass, humans rather than cattle—in a book that will serve as a model for restoration efforts in any environment.
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Ranching West of the 100th Meridian
Culture, Ecology, and Economics
Edited by Richard L. Knight, Wendell C. Gilgert, and Ed Marston
Island Press, 2002

Recommended by The Nature Conservancy magazine.

Ranching West of the 100th Meridian offers a literary and thought-provoking look at ranching and its role in the changing West. The book's lyrical and deeply felt narratives, combined with fresh information and analysis, offer a poignant and enlightening consideration of ranchers' ecological commitments to the land, their cultural commitments to American society, and the economic role ranching plays in sustainable food production and the protection of biodiversity.

The book begins with writings that bring to life the culture of ranching, including the fading reality of families living and working together on their land generation after generation. The middle section offers an understanding of the ecology of ranching, from issues of overgrazing and watershed damage to the concept that grazing animals can actually help restore degraded land. The final section addresses the economics of ranching in the face of declining commodity prices and rising land values brought by the increasing suburbanization of the West. Among the contributors are Paul Starrs, Linda Hasselstrom, Bob Budd, Drummond Hadley, Mark Brunson, Wayne Elmore, Allan Savory, Luther Propst, and Bill Weeks.

Livestock ranching in the West has been attacked from all sides -- by environmentalists who see cattle as a scourge upon the land, by fiscal conservatives who consider the leasing of grazing rights to be a massive federal handout program, and by developers who covet intact ranches for subdivisions and shopping centers. The authors acknowledge that, if done wrong, ranching clearly has the capacity to hurt the land. But if done right, it has the power to restore ecological integrity to Western lands that have been too-long neglected. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian makes a unique and impassioned contribution to the ongoing debate on the future of the New West.

 
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Rancière's Sentiments
Davide Panagia
Duke University Press, 2018
In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.
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RAND Review
January-February 2017
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2017
This issue highlights ways that RAND researchers on the ground in Uganda are having a measurable impact on the lives of men and women struggling with HIV and depression. The issue also features a tribute to the late economist Charles Wolf Jr.
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RAND Review
January-February 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
The cover story on the "Internet of Bodies" highlights the perils of devices that track personal health data and provide medical treatment. Other columns explore vaccine hesitancy, the high price of insulin in the U.S., and social justice in America.
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RAND Review
January-February 2022
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2022
The cover story highlights the risks of geoengineering—the large-scale manipulation of environmental processes to control climate. The Q&A with Jacqueline Burns sheds light on how her military experience informs her approach to research and analysis.
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RAND Review
July-August 2016
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2016
This issue highlights the stress of military deployments and resilience of military families; RAND research on cybercrime, network defense, and data breaches; the 40th anniversary of RAND’s landmark Health Insurance Experiment; and more.
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RAND Review
July-August 2017
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2017
This issue highlights recent RAND research on the prevalence and burden of chronic health conditions; on the economic benefits of U.S. overseas security commitments; and on what RAND is doing to anticipate emerging global security challenges.
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RAND Review
July-August 2018
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2018
This issue spotlights RAND’s Gun Policy in America initiative and RAND’s evaluation of Housing for Health, a Los Angeles County program that has moved some of its most chronically homeless and vulnerable residents into permanent housing.
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RAND Review
July-August 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
One feature highlights how researchers apply an equity lens to projects on environmental racism, incarcerated parents, and the lives of Black service members; a second describes interventions to address disparities in infant mortality rates.
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RAND Review
March-April 2017
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2017
This issue highlights RAND research on the significant toll that poor sleep takes on society; ways to maximize benefits of investments in electricity infrastructure; social determinants of health; and RAND’s new office in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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RAND Review
March-April 2018
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2018
This issue features a Q&A with Michael Rich, Soledad O’Brien, and Francis Fukuyama on the perils of truth decay, and a story on the trend toward unretirement among U.S. workers. The Voices column features Gulrez Shah Azhar on environmental refugees.
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RAND Review
March-April 2019
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2019
This issue explores resilience and adaptation strategies researchers can pursue to address the impacts of climate change; security challenges posed by artificial intelligence and the speed at which technology is transforming society; and more.
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RAND Review
March-April 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
The cover story highlights research on improving the police response to homelessness; a second feature focuses on the millions of caregivers who provide support services to chronically ill loved ones but are not integrated into health care teams.
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RAND Review
March-April 2022
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2022
The cover story describes a yearlong study of a group of military veterans experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles. Other features examine the global digital skills gap and the magnitude and sources of disagreement among gun policy experts.
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RAND Review
May-June 2017
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2017
This issue highlights recent RAND research on suicide prevention; on the scope of the humanitarian and security crisis in the Mediterranean region; and on what RAND is doing to improve the security and well-being of people throughout the Middle East.
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RAND Review
May-June 2018
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2018
This issue features research on preventing child abuse and neglect and improving outcomes for children in the U.S. child-welfare system; a look back on RAND’s 70 years of innovation; and an exploration of the human side of artificial intelligence.
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RAND Review
May-June 2019
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2019
This issue describes RAND research efforts to help schoolkids suffering from trauma; to help health care providers get better, more meaningful feedback; and to use technology to improve the lives of displaced people throughout the world.
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RAND Review
May-June 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
The cover story highlights the value of invention, analyzing the economic and social impacts of winners of the Lemelson-MIT Prize. A second feature focuses on human rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs in China and what we know from satellite images.
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RAND Review
November-December 2016
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2016
This issue highlights the policy issues facing the next U.S. president; the problem of food, energy, and water scarcity throughout the world; and the connection between violence against women and murder.
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RAND Review
November-December 2017
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2017
This issue highlights recent RAND research on post-9/11 military caregivers; RAND-Lex, a computer program built at RAND that can analyze huge data sets of text; and the implications of climate change on Arctic cooperation.
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RAND Review
November-December 2019
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2019
This issue spotlights research on veteran suicide; liability implications of driverless cars; and new approaches to improving the post-incarceration experience. The Giving column highlights a million-dollar gift to fund research on homeless veterans.
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RAND Review
November-December 2020
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2020
Features explore the challenge of delivering effective treatments for veterans with co-occuring disorders; teachers, students, and the importance of civic responsibility in present-day America; and teaching and learning in the age of COVID-19.
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RAND Review
November-December 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
The cover story highlights how RAND is helping to redefine high-quality care for service members with a TBI or PTSD. The Q&A with two Marines who work at RAND sheds light on how their military service informs their research and analysis.
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RAND Review
September-October 2016
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2016
This issue highlights transgender personnel in the U.S. military; promising evidence on personalized learning in U.S. classrooms; a Q&A on gaming and public policy; excerpts from John Lewis’ Pardee RAND commencement address, and more.
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RAND Review
September-October 2018
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2018
This issue spotlights RAND’s research on social and emotional learning; workforce development in Appalachia; and the effects of marijuana ads on adolescents and young adults.
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RAND Review
September-October 2019
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2019
This issue spotlights a wargame designed for young women interested in national security; ethics in scientific research, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning; and community citizen science.
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RAND Review
September-October 2020
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2020
Feature stories explore how Pardee RAND is shaping the future of public policy through its Faculty Leaders Program; the safety and sustainability of the U.S. blood supply; and how telemedicine is changing the delivery of health care.
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RAND Review
September-October 2021
The RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2021
The cover story highlights strategies to mitigate homegrown terrorism and ideologically inspired violence in the U.S. A second feature describes Costa Rica’s ambitious decarbonization plan and its implications for nations around the world.
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Randolph Bourne - American Writers 60
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Sherman Paul
University of Minnesota Press, 1966

Randolph Bourne - American Writers 60 was first published in 1966. 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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Random Notes on Red China, 1936-1945
Edgar Snow
Harvard University Press

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Random Other Stuff
Zeph Bizkirk
Midway Plaisance Press, 2018

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Randomly Moving Particles
Poems
Andrew Motion
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration,and current British and American politics. It is a clarifying action and reaction between terra and solar system, mundanity and possibility, taking us from the grit of road surfaces to the distant glimpses of satellites. The final poem, “How Do the Dead Walk,”combines mythic reach with acute observation of the familiar, in order to address issues of contemporary violence. It is altogether more dreamlike, even in its tangibly military moments, grasping as it does at phantoms and intermediate plains.Andrew Motion’s expansive new poetry collection is direct in its emotional appeal and ambitious in its scope, all while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.
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Randomness
Deborah J. Bennett
Harvard University Press, 1998

From the ancients’ first readings of the innards of birds to your neighbor’s last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put itself into the hands of chance. Today life itself may be at stake when probability comes into play—in the chance of a false negative in a medical test, in the reliability of DNA findings as legal evidence, or in the likelihood of passing on a deadly congenital disease—yet as few people as ever understand the odds. This book is aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability so daunting in our own day.

To acquire a (correct) intuition of chance is not easy to begin with, and moving from an intuitive sense to a formal notion of probability presents further problems. Author Deborah Bennett traces the path this process takes in an individual trying to come to grips with concepts of uncertainty and fairness, and also charts the parallel path by which societies have developed ideas about chance. Why, from ancient to modern times, have people resorted to chance in making decisions? Is a decision made by random choice “fair”? What role has gambling played in our understanding of chance? Why do some individuals and societies refuse to accept randomness at all? If understanding randomness is so important to probabilistic thinking, why do the experts disagree about what it really is? And why are our intuitions about chance almost always dead wrong?

Anyone who has puzzled over a probability conundrum is struck by the paradoxes and counterintuitive results that occur at a relatively simple level. Why this should be, and how it has been the case through the ages, for bumblers and brilliant mathematicians alike, is the entertaining and enlightening lesson of Randomness.

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Randy Wood
The Lore of the Luthier
Daniel Wile
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

In the 1960s and 1970s, Randy Wood was a forerunner in the vintage instrument industry. Known as the instrument repairman to the stars, the list of Wood’s clients reads like a Hall of Fame roster: Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins, Emmylou Harris, Billy Gibbons, Bill Monroe, Keith Richards, Roy Acuff, Ricky Skaggs, and Hank Williams Jr. . . . to name a few. In Randy Wood: The Lore of the Luthier, Daniel Wile traces the life and work of a man who quietly influenced a hidden history of bluegrass and country music.

In his twenties, Wood vowed to avoid complacency in his work. What started simply as a quest to find fulfillment turned into a career that has shaped a generation of musicians, professional and amateur alike. Through his incredible gift for lutherie, Wood brought cherished pre-WWII instruments back to life, many of which were considered beyond repair. He crafted his own instruments as well, based on what he learned from vintage instruments, and these instruments found their way into the hands of some of the most renowned musicians, thanks in part to Wood’s strategic location in Nashville during the resurgence of country music in the 1970s. Humble, unassuming, and unfazed by the presence of celebrities, Wood has spent his life devoted to building and repairing stringed instruments.

Wood also built community. After tiring of big-city Nashville, he retreated to the Georgia coast, where his home shop became a hub of bluegrass activity. He eventually opened a new shop near Savannah, where a new generation of friends and strangers can come in, visit, and pick a little. Randy’s stories, complemented with those of his friends and family, create a compelling picture of a modest man with a talent for his craft, a genuine care for people, and the courage to follow his passion.

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The Range of Yiddish
A Catalog of an Exhibition from the Yiddish Collection of the Harvard College Library
Marion Aptroot and Jeremy Dauber
Harvard University Press
The facsimiles of Yiddish documents and title pages reproduced in this volume, their captions, and the accompanying introductory essays are a succinct introduction to Yiddish culture. They cover religion, education and daily life, politics, Yiddish literature, history, and scholarship, Yiddish theater, and the Yiddish press, as reflected in materials printed over the last 400 years.
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The Ranger Ideal Volume 1
Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1823-1861
Darren L. Ivey
University of North Texas Press, 2017

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The Ranger Ideal Volume 2
Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1874-1930
Darren L. Ivey
University of North Texas Press, 2018

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The Ranger Ideal Volume 3
Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1898-1987
Darren L. Ivey
University of North Texas Press, 2021

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Rank
Aaron McCollough
University of Iowa Press, 2015
“I guess an iceflow came through / to take the road,” writes Aaron McCollough in Rank, a richly strange sequence of poems in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in vibrant and shifting ways. “I can only guess that would / destroy these remains slowly,” McCollough continues. Indeed, Rank seeks to recover sources of imaginative meaning from the unsettled remnants of lyric tradition, seeking out possibilities for belief and sustenance in the echoes of lapsed poetic speech and song.

In language that is dense, allusive, by turns trancelike and mordantly funny, McCollough descends into the ranks of disintegrating organic life and finds elemental processes of regeneration underway, “ivy suckers climbing / the knock kneed craning bridge / to that bright food.” This is work that emerges in the aftermath of declining systems of hierarchy and order, a site marked by the overlapping of occult practices and postmodern physics, tense meditation, and economic anonymity. McCollough gives rise to a voice that is as much vegetative as human, as deeply embedded in the loam of cultural memory as it is new, original, and lavishly daring.
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Rank-and-File Rebels
Theories of Power and Change in the 2018 Education Strikes
Erin Dyke
University Press of Colorado, 2024
In spring 2018, a wave of rank-and-file rebellion swept schools across the south and southwest United States, among other places. Educators in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona pushed their trade unions, school boards, and school administrations to shut schools down to increase wages, halt rising healthcare costs, and restore public education funding. Despite stringent anti-union labor laws, rank-and-file educators organized on the periphery and sometimes beyond their reticent state unions to take direct action, contributing to a resurgence in educator uprisings across the US and the globe. Rank-and-File Rebels explores and historicizes the spring 2018 “red” state strikes, offering insights into the racial, gendered, and political contexts of educators’ organizing in the lead-up to, during, and soon after the strikes. Through interviews with strike organizers across four states as well as the authors’ own experiences in education labor organizing, this book analyzes theories of power and change, approaches to unionism, and the significance of solidarity and social justice union approaches in contemporary educator labor movements.
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The Ransom of the Soul
Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity
Peter Brown
Harvard University Press, 2015

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Tablet Book of the Year

Marking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of medieval society in the West.

“[An] extraordinary new book…Prodigiously original—an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential…Peter Brown’s subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity.”
—G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books

“Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century…Brown shows brilliantly in this book how the future life of Christians beyond the grave was influenced in particular by money.
—A. N. Wilson, The Spectator

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Rap Music and Street Consciousness
Cheryl L. Keyes
University of Illinois Press, 2002

In this first musicological history of rap music, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre's history from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dancehall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture. 

Rap music, according to Keyes, addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousness. Her analysis draws on music, lives, politics, and interests of figures ranging from Afrika Bambaataa, the "godfather of hip-hop," to early artists like Grandmaster Flash, to crossover pioneers like LL Cool J, De La Soul, and Public Enemy, to megastars like Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. At the same time, Keyes delves into the impact of the rapper-turned mogul phenomenon, the rise of Death Row Records, and the East Coast-West Coast tensions of the Nineties.

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Rape, Agency, and Carceral Solutions
From Criminal Justice to Social Justice
Leland G. Spencer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Winner of the 2023 National Communication Association's American Studies Division Outstanding Book Award
News media and popular culture in the United States have produced a conventional narrative of the outcomes of sexual abuse: someone perpetrates sexual violence, goes to trial, and is then punished with prison time. Survivors recede into the background, becoming minor characters in their own stories as intrepid prosecutors, police officers, and investigators gather evidence and build a case.

Leland G. Spencer explains how the stories we tell about sexual assault serve to reinforce rape culture, privileging criminal punishment over social justice and community-based responses to sexual violence. Examining a broad range of popular media, including news coverage of the Brock Turner case, Naomi Iizuka’s popular play Good Kids, the television program Criminal Minds, and the book turned television show 13 Reasons Why, Spencer demonstrates how these representations shore up the carceral state, perpetuate rape myths, blame victims, and excuse those who harm. While increased discussion about sexual violence represents feminist progress, these narratives assume that policing and prosecution are the only means of achieving justice, sidelining other potential avenues for confronting perpetrators and supporting victims.

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Rape and Writing in the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre
Patricia Francis Cholakian
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), the sister of the French king François I, composed the Heptaméron as a complex collection of seventy-two novellas, creating one of the first examples of realistic, psychological fiction in French literature. These novellas, framed by debates among ten storytellers, all noble lords and ladies, reveal the author’s desire to depart from the purely masculine voice of the age.

Cholakian contends that this Renaissance text is characterized by feminine writing. She reads the text as the product of the author’s personal experience. Beginning her study with the rape narrative in the autobiographical novella 4, she examines how the Heptaméron interacts with male literary traditions and narrative conventions about gender relations. She analyzes such words as rape, and honor, noting how they are defined differently by men and women and how these differences in perception affect the development of both plot and character.

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Rape at the Opera
Staging Sexual Violence
Margaret Cormier
University of Michigan Press, 2024
The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas. When performed uncritically, the misogyny, racism, and other ideologies present in many of these works clash with modern sensibilities. In Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier argues that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage. Where some directors explicitly respond to contemporary dialogues about sexual violence, others utilize sexual violence as a surefire way to titillate, to shock, and to generate press for a new production.

Drawing on archival footage as well as attendance at live events, Cormier analyzes productions of canonic operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, La forza del destino, Un ballo in maschera, Salome, and Turandot. In doing so, Cormier highlights the dynamism of twenty-first-century opera performance practice with regard to sexual violence, establishes methods to evaluate representations of sexual violence on the opera stage, and reframes the primary responsibility of opera critics and creators as being not to opera composers and librettists but to the public.
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Rape by the Numbers
Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence
Ethan Czuy Levine
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape” are central for raising awareness. Yet such scientific facts often become points of controversy, particularly as conservative scholars and public figures attempt to discredit feminist activists. Rape by the Numbers explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences. Scientific projects may determine who counts as a potential victim/survivor or aggressor in a range of contexts, shaping research agendas as well as state policy, anti-violence programming and services, and public perceptions. Social processes within the study of rape determine which knowledges count as credible science, and thus who may count as an expert in academic and public contexts.
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Rape in Chicago
Race, Myth, and the Courts
Dawn Rae Flood
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Spanning a period of four tumultuous decades from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s, this study reassesses the ways in which Chicagoans negotiated the extraordinary challenges of rape, as either victims or accused perpetrators. Drawing on extensive trial testimony, government reports, and media coverage, Dawn Rae Flood examines how individual men and women, particularly African Americans, understood and challenged rape myths and claimed their right to be protected as American citizens--protected by the State against violence, and protected from the State's prejudicial investigations and interrogations. Flood shows how defense strategies, evolving in concert with changes in the broader cultural and legal environment, challenged assumptions about black criminality while continuing to deploy racist and sexist stereotypes against the victims. Thoughtfully combining legal studies, medical history, and personal accounts, Flood pays special attention to how medical evidence was considered in rape cases and how victim-patients were treated by hospital personnel. She also analyzes medical testimony in modern rape trials, tracing the evolution of contemporary "rape kit" procedures as shaped by legal requirements, trial strategies, feminist reform efforts, and women's experiences.
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Rape Of Clarissa
Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson
Terry Eagleton
University of Minnesota Press, 1982

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The Rape of Mesopotamia
Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
Lawrence Rothfield
University of Chicago Press, 2009

On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the five years since that day, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human heritage is incalculable.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield answers the complicated question of how this wholesale thievery was allowed to occur. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that led to the invading forces’ utter indifference to the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage.

Bringing his story up to the present, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

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Raphael and the Antique
Claudia La Malfa
Reaktion Books, 2019
The Renaissance artist Raphael is known for his extraordinary frescoes, his sublime Madonnas, devotional altarpieces, architectural designs, and his inventive designs for prints and tapestries. It was his use of ancient Roman art—the sculptures, the marble reliefs, the wall-paintings, and the stuccoes—and architecture—the temples, the palaces, and the theaters—as well as the churches and mosaics of early-Christian Rome, that formed his much-admired classical style.

In Raphael and the Antique, Claudia La Malfa gives a full account of Raphael’s prodigious career, from central Italy when he was seventeen years old, to Perugia, Siena, and Florence, where he first met with Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Rome where he became one of the most feted artists of the Renaissance. This book brings to light Raphael’s reinvention of classical models, his draftsmanship, and his concept of art—ideas he pursued and was still striving to perfect at the time of his death in 1520 at the young age of thirty-seven.
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Raphael Pumpelly
Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age
Peggy Champlin
University of Alabama Press, 1994
The biography of Raphael Pumpelly, a transitional figure in a period of rapid change
 
Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age provides an excellent opportunity to look at the development of the profession of geology during the years spanned by his career, from 1860 to the early twentieth century. In this period, the practical applications of geology to resource development were of major importance, but geologists were also investigating new subjects, such as petrology, geomorphology, glaciology, and structural geology. These investigations resulted in an explosion of knowledge in these areas and in the growth of subdisciplines. Pumpelly did research in these fields but like others of his generation did not limit himself to any one of them; he remained a generalist in a time of increasing specialization, a transitional figure in a period of rapid change.
 
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Raphael Semmes
The Philosophical Mariner
Warren F. Spencer
University of Alabama Press, 1997

In this first, full-scale biography that relies on Semmes's private papers, unpublished diaries, and correspondence, Spencer has produced a well-balanced and comprehensive account of the man, as well as the naval officer.


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Raptor
Andrew Feld
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Raptor, the second book by the author of the widely praised Citizen, is a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our ancient poetic, mythic, and scientific fascination with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, and falcons. Drawing extensively on his own experience working at a raptor rehabilitation center, along with a variety of sources ranging from medieval texts on falconry to the latest conservation studies of raptor anatomy and habitat, Andrew Feld shows these killing birds to be mirrors for humanity, as indicator species, and as highly charged figures for the intersection of that which we call “wild” and that which we think of as domesticated or domestic—and how these opposed terms apply to the imperiled natural world, to our human social relations, and to our most private, interior selves. In these poems, Feld does not shy away from either the damaging world or “the new, more comprehensive view / damage affords” in its aftermath.
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Raptor
A Journey through Birds
James Macdonald Lockhart
University of Chicago Press, 2017
From the merlin to the golden eagle, the goshawk to the honey buzzard, James Macdonald Lockhart’s stunning debut is a quest of beak, talon, wing, and sky. On its surface, Raptor is a journey across the British Isles in search of fifteen species of birds of prey, but as Lockhart seeks out these elusive predators, his quest becomes so much more: an incomparably elegant elegy on the beauty of the British landscape and, through the birds, a journey toward understanding an awesome power at the heart of the natural world—a power that is majestic and frightening in its strength, but also fragile.

Taking as his guide the nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist and artist William MacGillivray, Lockhart loosely follows the historical trail forged by MacGillivray as he ventured from Aberdeen to London filling his pockets with plants and writing and illustrating the canonical A History of British Birds. Linking his journey to that of his muse, Lockhart shares his own encounters with raptors ranging from the scarce osprey to the successfully reintroduced red kite, a species once protected by medieval royal statute, revealing with poetic immediacy the extraordinary behaviors of these birds and the extreme environments they call home.

Creatures both worshipped and reviled, raptors have a talon-hold on the human heart and imagination. With his book, Lockhart unravels these complicated ties in a work by turns reverent and euphoric—an interweaving of history, travel, and nature writing at its best. A hymn to wanderers, to the land and to the sky, and especially to the birds, Raptor soars.
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Raptors in Your Pocket
A Guide to Great Plains Birds of Prey
Dana Gardner
University of Iowa Press, 2006
This newest addition to Iowa's successful series of laminated guides is a welcome aid to identifying the many challenging raptors of the Great Plains, from northern Minnesota to northern Texas. Illustrator Dana Gardner has created fourteen panels showing twenty-six species perched and in flight with complete plumage variations---dark phases, light phases, and juvenile and adult male and female forms. The text also includes length and wingspan, common and scientific names, and status such as common resident or winter visitor.Raptors are notoriously hard to identify, and Gardner has worked hard to make this guide useful for beginning birders as well as those more experienced in the field. Keep Raptors in Your Pocket in your car or backpack---or pocket!---during spring and fall migration and summer nesting season for help in identifying such relatively common species as the light and dark forms of the red-tailed hawk, the male and female merlin and American kestrel, and the juvenile, intermediate, and adult forms of the Swainson's hawk as well as such uncommon visitors as white-tailed, swallow-tailed, and Mississippi kites.
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The Raptors of Arizona
Edited by Richard L. Glinski, with full-color illustrations by Richard Sloan
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Thousands of birdwatchers come to Arizona each year seeking rare or intriguing species, and for those watching the skies the additional sighting of a bird of prey is a reward in itself. The Grand Canyon state boasts the most dramatic assortment of raptors in North America: hawks, eagles, falcons, kites, and owls, plus vultures and condors. Here can be found nearly all the raptor species of the continental United States and also established populations of species associated with Mexico, such as the Gray Hawk, Common Black-Hawk, Zone-tailed Hawk, and Whiskered Screech-Owl.

Arizona's raptors are found in an unrivaled diversity of habitats, from saguaro cactus forests where tiny Elf Owls nest to the Vermilion Cliffs, where the gigantic California Condor was introduced in 1996. Yet many species live in habitats that are now jeopardized by degradation or development, making an understanding and appreciation of raptors crucial to their survival.

The Raptors of Arizona brings together the knowledge and insights of 29 raptor and wildlife authorities who provide original information and syntheses on Arizona's 42 raptor species, with an emphasis on aspects of their natural history in Arizona. A chapter on each bird includes its description, a range map, and information on its distribution, habitat, life history, and status. Additional chapters cover conservation, habitats, where and when to watch raptors, and the sport of falconry. The book is enhanced by 42 full-color illustrations by Richard Sloan, one of the premier wildlife artists in North America, whose paintings were commissioned by the Arizona Wildlife Foundation specifically for this project. Co-published with the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
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The Raptors of Iowa
James F. Landenberger, Dean M. Roosa, Jon W. Stravers, Bruce Ehresman, Rich Patterson
University of Iowa Press, 2013
This long-awaited collection of James Landenberger’s paintings of Iowa birds of prey presents thirty-two full-page, full-color species, from the common turkey vulture to the red-shouldered hawk of Mississippi River woodlands to the little northern saw-whet owl. Four naturalists who have devoted their lives to conserving wilderness habitats and species have written essays to complement the paintings.

Thanks to state and federal laws and a shift in public attitude, birds of prey are no longer seen as incarnations of ferocity but as creatures superbly attuned to their lives and surroundings. Although Iowa unfortunately leads the way in the amount of wildlife habitat that has been destroyed, conservation organizations and state agencies have also led the way toward successful raptor restoration projects, among them a roadside nest box program for the American kestrel, a project to restore peregrine falcons to their historic eyries, and a relocation program that should ensure a sustainable population of ospreys. The recent spectacular recovery of the bald eagle, whose nests had vanished from the state for seventy years, is particularly encouraging.

There can be no substitute for seeing thousands of broad-winged hawks soaring high overhead during migration, a great horned owl perching in silhouette at dusk, or a Cooper’s hawk plunging toward its prey along the roadside. But Jim Landenberger’s meticulously detailed paintings go a long way toward conveying the remarkable beauty of the American kestrel and other falcons, the grace of the swallow-tailed kite, the immaculate mystery of the snowy owl and its fellow owls, the glistening head feathers of an adult bald eagle, and the piercing defiance so characteristic of our larger hawks. 
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Rapture & the Big Bam
Poems (Snowbound Chapbook Award)
Matt Donovan
Tupelo Press, 2017
With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan’s new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. He summons figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, and to offer evidence for what creation can cost. As “each day lurches us toward … / things dying, things newborn,” the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.
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Rare and Commonplace Flowers
The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares
Oliveira, Carmen
Rutgers University Press, 2003

A Stonewall Honor Book of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table​

Rare and Commonplace Flowers—a Brazilian bestseller—tells the story of two women. Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, sought artistic inspiration in Brazil. There she met and fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained Brazilian architect. This dual biography—brilliantly researched, and written in a lively, novelistic style—follows their relationship from 1951 to 1967, the time when the two lived together in Brazil. The fact that these two women had an intimate relationship caused an uproar when it first came to public notice.

The relationship started out happily, yet ended tragically. In 1961, Soares became increasingly obsessed with building and administering Flamengo Park, Rio de Janeiro’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park. Though she had been the driving force behind the park’s inception, the ultimate credit that was due her was stripped away because of petty politics and chicanery. As Soares’s career declined and Bishop’s flourished, their relationship crumbled.

Rare and Commonplace Flowers is a tale of two artists and two cultures, offering unique perspectives on both women and their work. Carmen L. Oliveira provides an unparalleled level of detail and insight, due to both her familiarity with Brazil as well as her access to the country’s artistic elite, many of whom had a direct connection with Bishop and Soares. Rare pictures of the two artists and their home bring this unique story to life.

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Rare and Wonderful
Treasures from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Kate Diston and Zoë Simmons
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2018
Since its foundation in 1860, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has become a key center for scientific study, its much-loved building an icon for visitors from around the world. The museum now holds more than seven million scientific specimens, including five million insects, half a million fossil specimens, and half a million zoological specimens. It also holds an extensive collection of archival material relating to important naturalists such as Charles Darwin, William Jones, and James Charles Dale.
            This lavishly illustrated book features highlights from the collections, ranging from David Livingstone’s tsetse fly specimens to Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur, and from crabs collected by Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle to the iconic Dodo, the only soft tissue specimen of the species in existence. Also featured are the first described dinosaur bones, found in a small Oxfordshire village, the Red Lady of Paviland (who was in fact a man who lived 29,000 years ago), and a meteorite from the planet Mars.
            Each item tells a unique story about natural history, the history of science, collecting, or the museum itself. Rare & Wonderful offers unique insight into the extraordinary wealth of information and fascinating tales that can be gleaned from these collections.
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Rare Books and Special Collections
Sidney E. Berger
American Library Association, 2014


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