The journals of 1835–1838, perhaps the richest Ralph Waldo Emerson had yet written, cover the pivotal years when he brought to Concord his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, published Nature (1836), and wrote “The American Scholar” (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). As he turned from the pulpit to the lecture platform in the 1830’s, the journals became more and more repository for the substance of future lectures; his annual winter series, particularly those dealing with The Philosophy of History, in 1836–1837, and Human Culture, in 1837–1838, were drawn largely from materials contained in this volume.
Along with lecture material, the journals of these years include Emerson’s notes on his extensive reading, expressions of his griefs and joys, and his perennial reflections on man and his relation to nature and the divine. The birth of his son Waldo in October of 1836 compensated perhaps for the death of his beloved brother Charles the previous May. New friendships with Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and especially Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson called “the highest genius of the time”) replaced to a degree the close intellectual companionship he had enjoyed with Charles.
Printed here for the first time are the complete texts of these journals. They reveal the continuity of Emerson’s development and add to the understanding both of his thought and of his methods of literary composition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of essays appeared in 1844, when he was forty-one. It includes eight essays—“The Poet,” “Experience,” “Character,” “Manners,” “Gifts,” “Nature,” “Politics,” and “Nominalist and Realist”—and one address, the much misunderstood “New England Reformers.” Essays: Second Series has a lightness of tone and an irony absent from the earlier writings, but it is no less memorable: “a sermon to me,” Carlyle wrote, “a real word.”
The present edition, drawing on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last forty years, incorporates all the textual changes Emerson made or demonstrably intended to make after 1844. It records variant wordings and recounts the development of the text before and after publication. A list of parallel passages makes it possible to trace Emerson’s extensive use of material from his journals, notebooks, and lectures. Endnotes provide information about people, events, and now-obscure terms. A brief historical introduction places the book in the context of the years during which it was written, the time of Brook Farm, The Dial, and the death of Emerson’s five year-old son.
Historical Introduction and Notes by Joseph Slater
Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr
Textual Introduction and Apparatus by Jean Ferguson Carr
Some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s finest and most famous essays, such as “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,” and “The Over-Soul,” appeared in his Essays of 1841, published when he was thirty-seven years old. Preceded by the slim volume Nature, it was his first full-length book.
The present edition provides for the first time an authoritative text of the Essays, together with an introduction, notes, and supplementary material of great value for the study of Emerson’s creative processes. A list of hundreds of parallel passages in his earlier journals and lectures makes it possible to examine in detail how he drew upon those manuscripts (now published), especially the voluminous journals, as grist for the twelve essays. His subsequent alterations of the essays, particularly in the revised edition of 1847, give evidence of the evolution of his thought and style at this stage of his career. While the text incorporates his revisions, so as to represent his final intention, the earlier versions are given at the end of the book.
Introduction and Notes by Joseph Slater
Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr
In 1849 Ralph Waldo Emerson collected in one volume all of his published work he thought worthy of preservation that had not been contained in the two series of Essays (1841, 1844) and the Poems (1847). Included were the essay Nature (1836); four orations, “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” and two others; and five lectures which had appeared in The Dial.
As the first volume of a projected new Collected Works, this edition of Nature, Addresses, and Lectures now provides for the first time a definitive text based on collation of all editions in which Emerson might have had a hand, together with a wholly new introduction and extensive notes. The recently published Journals and Lectures from this period help bring to this volume a fresh perspective on the first and formative stage of Emerson’s career as a public figure and man of letters.
Introduction and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson
The journals from 1854 to 1861 show the ripeness of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought overshadowed by the gravest problem of his time—slavery. In addition to completing English Traits (1856) and Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote many of the lectures and articles that made up his next book, Society and Solitude. He also contributed often to The Atlantic Monthly after helping to found that magazine in 1857. Throughout these years he extended his strenuous trips as a lyceum lecturer, crossing and recrossing the frozen Mississippi several times each winter. In Concord, he continued his omnivorous reading, his beloved walks, and his friendships with Alcott, Channing, and Thoreau, but at home or away he saw America’s future darkening daily. In 1856, Emerson wrote to his brother William, “But what times are these, & how they make our studies impertinent, & even ourselves the same! I am looking into the map to see where I shall go with my children when Boston & Massachusetts surrender to the slave-trade.”
Influenced by events such as the murder of New England men in bloody Kansas and the assault on Charles Sumner in the U.S. Congress in 1856, by a growing friendship with Theodore Parker, and by John Brown’s visits to Concord in 1857 and 1859, Emerson became one of the most notable speakers against slavery. He armed himself for his emergence from the study by marshalling his thoughts on liberty as he would have ranged his thoughts on any other topic. Notebook WO Liberty, rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1964, collects his ideas on slavery and human liberty. Probably begun in 1854 it contains drafts or records of seven antislavery speeches, including his major antislavery address, “American Slavery,” first given in January, 1855. These notebooks and journals bring the philosopher of "the infinitude of the private man" to January 1861 and the brink of war.
Famous first as a lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson molded his books on the rostrum. Yet relatively few of his hundreds of lectures have ever been published. Now, in a projected series of three volumes of which this is the first, the complete surviving lectures of Emerson’s earlier years are made available. In a readable and critical text, these volumes will establish an important step in Emerson’s creative process—that which lies between the notes jotted down in the journals and the finished text of the essays as prepared for print.
The lectures, more sustained and organized than the journals and fresher and more direct than the essays, represent the vital missing middle panel in the total picture of Emerson’s literary achievement. It is in the early lectures, fruits of those vigorous and formative years, that we find the first ordering of his journal thoughts. To see his mind at its most sustained activity in these crucial few years when he was first exploring his own proper world of thought and growing with a sense of “power and hope,” we need above all to have the complete, original texts of the lectures.
For the years covered by this volume, all passages later published elsewhere by Emerson and others are included together with much new material. The lectures are the immediate source of much in his essays, whose composition cannot be understood without them. As important in their own right as either journals or essays, the lectures also have a coordinate interest and should be studied with the other two forms of his writing.
This volume contains among others the lectures on Science, Biography, and English Literature. The editors have supplied extensive textual and informational notes, invaluable for an intelligent reading of material originally intended for oral communication.
The notable link between Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals and his essays is formed by the lectures that reflected his developing views on issues of his time. This second volume of a welcome edition of the early lectures follows the earlier experimental series of lectures and presents the works of Emerson the now professional lecturer who revealed to his audience central ideas and themes which later crystallized into Essays, First Series.
“The Philosophy of History,” a series of 12 lectures, explores the nature of man in his society, past and present, and singles out the individual as the center of society and history. A second series of 10 lectures on “Human Culture” begins with the duty and the right of the individual to cultivate his powers and proceeds to consider various means by which this cultivation can be accomplished. The occasional “Address on Education,” which Emerson delivered between these two series, may be seen as a link between them.
Of the twenty-three lectures in this volume, only three have been previously published. The lectures have been reproduced from Emerson’s manuscripts, approximating as nearly as possible the original version read by the author to his audience.
Roman Catholic moral theology is the point of departure for this multifaceted exploration of the challenge of allocating scarce medical resources.
The volume begins its exploration of discerning moral limits to modern high-technology medicine with a consensus statement born of the conversations among its contributors. The seventeen essays use the example of critical care, because it offers one of the few areas in medicine where there are good clinical predictive measures regarding the likelihood of survival. As a result, the health care industry can with increasing accuracy predict the probability of saving lives—and at what cost.
Because critical care involves hard choices in the face of finitude, it invites profound questions about the meaning of life, the nature of a good death, and distributive justice. For those who identify the prize of human life as immortality, the question arises as to how much effort should be invested in marginally postponing death. In a secular culture that presumes that individuals live only once, and briefly, there is an often-unacknowledged moral imperative to employ any means necessary to postpone death. The conflict between the free choice of individuals and various aspirations to equality compounds the challenge of controlling medical costs while also offering high-tech care to those who want its possible benefits. It forces society to confront anew notions of ordinary versus extraordinary, and proportionate versus disproportionate, treatment in a highly technologically structured social context.
This cluster of discussions is enriched by five essays from Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Protestant perspectives. Written by premier scholars from the United States and abroad, these essays will be valuable reading for students and scholars of bioethics and Christian moral theology.
Blue Ridge tacos, kimchi with soup beans and cornbread, family stories hiding in cookbook marginalia, African American mountain gardens—this wide-ranging anthology considers all these and more. Diverse contributors show us that contemporary Appalachian tables and the stories they hold offer new ways into understanding past, present, and future American food practices. The poets, scholars, fiction writers, journalists, and food professionals in these pages show us that what we eat gives a beautifully full picture of Appalachia, where it’s been, and where it’s going.
Contributors: Courtney Balestier, Jessie Blackburn, Karida L. Brown, Danille Elise Christensen, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Michael Croley, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Robert Gipe, Suronda Gonzalez, Emily Hilliard, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Abigail Huggins, Erica Abrams Locklear, Ronni Lundy, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Mann, Daniel S. Margolies, William Schumann, Lora E. Smith, Emily Wallace, Crystal Wilkinson
In the volume’s introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that postmodernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their “contemporaneity,” a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri’s analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor’s argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss’s defense of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay’s characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume’s centerpiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.
Contributors: Monica Amor, Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Geeta Kapur, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Zoe Leonard, Lev Manovich, James Meyer, Gao Minglu, Helen Molesworth, Antonio Negri, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Nikos Papastergiadis, Colin Richards, Suely Rolnik, Terry Smith, McKenzie Wark
Comparing various European and American historiographies from the past two hundred years, Gendering Historiography provides insights into the establishment and cultivation of gendered power relations in different societies and outlines the devastating effects that exclusionary practices can have on each national canon. This detailed and revealing book will change the face of history writing, bringing overlooked and previously excluded histories back into modern historiography.
Passing Lines seeks to stimulate dialogue on the role of sexuality and sexual orientation in immigration to the U.S. from Latin America and the Caribbean. The book looks at the complexities, inconsistencies, and paradoxes of immigration from the point of view of both academics and practitioners in the field.
Passing Lines takes a close look at the debates that surround eyewitness testimony, expertise, and advocacy regarding immigration and sexuality, bringing together work by scholars, activists, and others from both sides of the border.
Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to André Gide and Marcel Proust. He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors—including Wilde, Gide, and Proust—who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself. Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault’s oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault’s famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt’s thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.
Learning the details of others' sex lives is the most enticing of guilty pleasures. We measure our own practices against the "normalcy" that sex surveys seek to capture. Special interest groups use or attack survey findings (such as the claim that 10% of Americans are gay) for their own ends. Indeed, we all have some stake in these surveys, be it self-justification, recrimination, or curiosity--and this testifies to their significance in our culture.
Kiss and Tell chronicles the history of sex surveys in the United States over a century of changing social and sexual mores. Julia Ericksen and Sally Steffen reveal that the survey questions asked, more than the answers elicited, expose and shape the popular image of appropriate sexuality. We can learn as much about the history and practice of sexuality by looking at surveyors' changing concerns as we can by reading the results of their surveys. The authors show how surveys have reflected societal anxieties about adolescent development, teen sex and promiscuity, and AIDS, and have been employed in efforts to preserve marriage and to control women's sexuality.
Kiss and Tell is an important examination of the role of social science in shaping American sexual patterns. Revealing how surveys of sexual behavior help create the issues they purport merely to describe, it reminds us how malleable and imperfect our knowledge of sexual behavior is.
Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes.
There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-three poets featured include Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forché, Aracelis Girmay, Donald Hall, Juan Felipe Herrera, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Ocean Vuong, Bruce Weigl, and Eleanor Wilner. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or synagogue, the rage inflicted on women everywhere. They testify to poverty: the waitress surviving on leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act.
However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at the airport; another walks through the city and sees her immigrant past in the immigrant present; another declaims a musical manifesto after the hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a demonstration in the street, shouting in an ecstasy of defiance. The poets take back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.
Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools.
Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from “first-tier” schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school’s ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials.
Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools’ career service departments. Because graduates’ job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students.
The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school’s rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.
Turning to literature, contributors consider Gloria Anzaldúa’s view of the borderlands as a mystic vision and the ways that Chicana writers invoke religious symbols and rhetoric to articulate a moral vision highlighting social injustice. They investigate the role of healing, looking at it in relation to both the Latino Pentecostal movement and the practice of the curanderismo tradition in East Los Angeles. Delving into to popular culture, they reflect on Luis Valdez’s video drama La Pastorela: “The Shepherds’ Play,” the spirituality of Chicana art, and the religious overtones of the reverence for the slain Tejana music star Selena. This volume signals the vibrancy and diversity of the practices, arts, traditions, and spiritualities that reflect and inform Mexican American religion.
Contributors: Rudy V. Busto, Davíd Carrasco, Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Gastón Espinosa, Richard R. Flores, Mario T. García, María Herrera-Sobek, Luís D. León, Ellen McCracken, Stephen R. Lloyd-Moffett, Laura E. Pérez, Roberto Lint Saragena, Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Kay Turner
Essential classroom resource for New Testament courses
In this book, a group of international scholars go in detail to explain how the author of the Gospel of John uses a variety of narrative strategies to best tell his story. More than a commentary, this book offers a glimpse at the way an ancient author created and used narrative features such as genre, character, style, persuasion, and even time and space to shape a dramatic story of the life of Jesus.
Features:
This first-ever volume to comprehensively explore President Abraham Lincoln’s ties to the American West brings together a variety of scholars and experts who offer a fascinating look at the sixteenth president’s lasting legacy in the territory beyond the Mississippi River. Editor Richard W. Etulain’s extensive introductory essay treats these western connections from Lincoln’s early reactions to Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War in the 1840s, through the 1850s, and during his presidency, providing a framework for the nine essays that follow.
Each of these essays offers compelling insight into the many facets of Lincoln’s often complex interactions with the American West. Included in this collection are a provocative examination of Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War; a discussion of the president’s antislavery politics as applied to the new arena of the West; new perspectives on Lincoln’s views regarding the Thirteenth Amendment and his reluctance regarding the admission of Nevada to the Union; a fresh look at the impact of the Radical Republicans on Lincoln’s patronage and appointments in the West; and discussion of Lincoln’s favorable treatment of New Mexico and Arizona, primarily Southern and Democratic areas, in an effort to garner their loyalty to the Union. Also analyzed is “The Tribe of Abraham”—Lincoln’s less-than-competent appointments in Washington Territory made on the basis of political friendship—and the ways in which Lincoln’s political friends in the Western Territories influenced his western policies. Other essays look at Lincoln’s dealings with the Mormons of Utah, who supported the president in exchange for his tolerance, and American Indians, whose relations with the government suffered as the president’s attention was consumed by the crisis of the Civil War.
In addition to these illuminating discussions, Etulain includes a detailed bibliographical essay, complete with examinations of previous interpretations and topics needing further research, as well as an extensive list of resources for more information on Lincoln's ties west of the Mississippi. Loaded with a wealth of information and fresh historical perspectives, Lincoln Looks West explores yet another intriguing dimension to this dynamic leader and to the history of the American West.
Contributors:
Richard W. Etulain
Michael S. Green
Robert W. Johannsen
Deren Earl Kellogg
Mark E. Neely Jr.
David A. Nichols
Earl S. Pomeroy
Larry Schweikart
Vincent G. Tegeder
Paul M. Zall
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.
The history of biology is populated by numerous model species or organisms. But few vertebrate groups have aided evolutionary and ecological research more than the live-bearing fishes of the family Poeciliidae. Found throughout tropical and subtropical waters, poeciliids exhibit a fascinating variety of reproductive specializations, including viviparity, matrotrophy, unisexual reproduction, and alternative mating strategies, making them ideal models for research on patterns and processes in ecology, behavior, and evolution.
Ecology and Evolution of Poeciliid Fishes is a much-needed overview of the scientific potential and understanding of these live-bearing fishes. Chapters by leading researchers take up a wide range of topics, including the evolution of unisexual reproduction, life in extreme environments, life-history evolution, and genetics. Designed to provide a single and highly approachable reference, Ecology and Evolution of Poeciliid Fishes will appeal to students and specialists interested in all aspects of evolutionary ecology.
A beautifully produced companion volume to the public television documentary The Appalachians fills the void in information about the region, offering a rich portrait of its history and its legacy in music, literature, and film. The text includes essays by some of Appalachia’s most respected scholars and journalists; excerpts from never-before-published diaries and journals; firsthand recollections from native Appalachians including Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, and Ralph Stanley; indigenous song lyrics and poetry; and oral histories from common folk whose roots run strong and deep. The book also includes more than one hundred illustrations, both archival and newly created. Here is a wondrous book celebrating a unique and valuable heritage.
The Negev, first published in 1971, told the story of some twenty years of study of southern Israel’s desert. It synthesized the findings of botanists, geologists, soil scientists, agronomists, archaeologists, historians, and engineers and told how the applications of their work produced an agricultural surplus in this forbiddingly dry, hot region.
Now Michael Evenari has amplified the book with data from another decade of work. He describes the efforts at a new farm at Wadi Mashash, extends the weather data another ten years, presents further work on the adaptations of plants and animals to desert conditions, and takes a much deeper look at the historical precedents for the method of runoff agriculture, which has made the desert bloom.
In the 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever. Pretty People examines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as the nation itself was signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.
Such actors as Denzel Washington, Andy Garcia, Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and Antonio Banderas became bona fide movie stars who carried major films to amazing box-office success. Five of the decade’s top ten films were opened by three women—Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Whoopi Goldberg. “Chick flick” entered the lexicon as Leonardo DiCaprio became the “King of the World,” ushering in the cult of the mega celebrity. Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise defined screen masculinity as stark contrasts between “the regular guy” and “the intense guy” while the roles of Michael Douglas exemplified the endangered “Average White Male.” A fascinating composite portrait of 1990s Hollywood and its stars, this collection marks the changes to stardom and society at century’s end.
"Tell 'em I'm a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice," Bill Monroe said. Known as the Father of Bluegrass Music, Monroe pioneered a whole new category of music and inspired generations of musicians and fans. Yet from his founding of the original bluegrass band through six decades of performing, he remained an enigmatic figure, a compelling mixture of fierce intensity, homespun modesty, and musical integrity.
Determined to play the mandolin in a way it had never been played before, Monroe distinguished himself in the mid-1930s with the Monroe Brothers then began forming his own band, the Blue Grass Boys, in 1938. By the mid-1940s other bands were copying his sound, and a new style, bluegrass music, was born. While country music moved toward electrification, Monroe maintained his acoustic ensemble and developed his "high, lonesome sound," performing nearly up to his death in 1996.
In this eclectic, richly illustrated reader, former Blue Grass Boy Tom Ewing gathers the most significant and illuminating of the many articles that have been written about Monroe. Through the writings of nearly sixty observers, interviewers, admirers, folklorists, and other scholars, along with Ewing's astute commentary, The Bill Monroe Reader offers a multifaceted view of one of the most influential country musicians of the twentieth century.
Lively, heartfelt, and informative, The Bill Monroe Reader is a fitting tribute to the man and the musician who transformed the traditional music of western Kentucky into an international sensation.
Eyerman utilizes theories of social drama and cultural trauma to evaluate the reactions to and effects of the murder. A social drama is triggered by a public transgression of taken-for-granted norms; one that threatens the collective identity of a society may develop into a cultural trauma. Eyerman contends that the assassination of Theo van Gogh quickly became a cultural trauma because it resonated powerfully with the postwar psyche of the Netherlands. As part of his analysis of the murder and reactions to it, he discusses significant aspects of twentieth-century Dutch history, including the country’s treatment of Jews during the German occupation, the loss of its colonies in the wake of World War II, its recruitment of immigrant workers, and the failure of Dutch troops to protect Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
“A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.”
—Fast Company
Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being.
“We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.”
—Science
“A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.”
—Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal
“A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance.”
—John Naughton, The Observer
Increasingly, experts recognize that gender has affected urban planning and the design of the spaces where we live and work. Too often, urban and suburban spaces support stereotypically male activities and planning methodologies reflect a male-dominated society.
To document and analyze the connection between gender and planning, the editors of this volume have assembled an interdisciplinary collection of influential essays by leading scholars. Contributors point to the ubiquitous single-family home, which prevents women from sharing tasks or pooling services. Similarly, they argue that public transportation routes are usually designed for the (male) worker's commute from home to the central city, and do not help the suburban dweller running errands. In addition to these practical considerations, many contributors offer theoretical perspectives on issues such as planning discourse and the construction of concepts of rationality.
While the essays call for an awareness of gender in matters of planning, they do not over-simplify the issue by moving toward a single feminist solution. Contributors realize that not all women gravitate toward communal opportunities, that many women now share the supposedly male commute, and that considerations of race and class need to influence planning as well. Among various recommendations, contributors urge urban planners to provide opportunities that facilitate women's needs, such as childcare on the way to work and jobs that are decentralized so that women can be close to their children.
Bringing together the most important writings of the last twenty-five years, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of planning theory as well as anyone concerned with gender and diversity.
Heritage language (HL) learning and teaching presents particularly difficult challenges. Melding cutting-edge research with innovations in teaching practice, the contributors in this volume provide practical knowledge and tools that introduce new solutions informed by linguistic, sociolinguistic, and educational research on heritage learners. Scholars address new perspectives and orientations on designing HL programs, assessing progress and proficiency, transferring research knowledge into classroom practice, and the essential question of how to define a heritage learner. Articles offer analysis and answers on multiple languages, and the result is a unique and essential text—the only comprehensive guide for heritage language learning based on the latest theory and research with suggestions for the classroom.
“These essays build a valuable, if virtual, bridge between the thought of John Dewey and that of a host of modern European philosophers. They invite us to entertain a set of imagined conversations among the mighty dead that no doubt would have intrigued Dewey and each of the interlocutors gathered here.”—Robert Westbrook, author of John Dewey and American Democracy and/or Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth.
John Dewey and Continental Philosophy provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism.
John Dewey and Continental Philosophy demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate.
In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today’s leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry.
Gathered here are numerous experts eager to share their wisdom with other writers. Each author examines in detail a particular poetic element, shedding new light on the endless possibilities of poetic forms. Addressed within are such topics as the fluid possibilities of imagery in poetry; the duality of myth and the personal, and the power of one to unlock the other; the surprising versatility of traditional poetic forms; and the pleasure of collaboration with other poets. Also explored in depth are the formative roles of cultural identity and expectations, and their effect on composition; advice on how to develop one’s personal poetic style and approach; the importance of setting in reading and meaning; and the value of indirection in the lyric poem. Challenges to conventional concepts of beauty are examined through Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ghost of Longfellow is called upon to guide students through the rewards and roadblocks of writing popular poetry. Poetic persona is demystified through Newton’s law of gravity, while the countless permutations of punctuation are revealed with analysis of e. e. cummings and W. S. Merwin.
The essays include the full text of the poems discussed, and detailed, relevant writing exercises that allow students the opportunity to directly implement the strategies they have learned. While many advanced topics such as authenticity, discordant music, and prosody are covered, this highly readable volume is as user-friendly as it is informative. Offering a variety of aesthetics and approaches to tackling the issues of composition, Mentor and Muse takes poets beyond the simple stages of poetic terms and strategies. These authorsinvite students to explore more advanced concepts, enabling them to draw on the traditions of the past while at the same time forging their own creative paths into the future.
Chosen as one of the "Best Books for Writers" by Poets & Writers magazine
The Other Latinos addresses an important topic: the presence in the United States of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants from countries other than Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Focusing on the Andes, Central America, and Brazil, the book brings together essays by a number of accomplished scholars.
Michael Jones-Correa's chapter is a lucid study of the complex issues in posing "established" and "other," and "old" and "new" in the discussion of Latino immigrant groups. Helen B. Marrow follows with general observations that bring out the many facets of race, ethnicity, and identity. Claret Vargas analyzes the poetry of Eduardo Mitre, followed by Edmundo Paz Soldán's reflections on Bolivians' "obsessive signs of identity." Nestor Rodriguez discusses the tensions between Mexican and Central American immigrants, while Arturo Arias's piece on Central Americans moves brilliantly between the literary (and the cinematic), the historical, and the material. Four Brazilian chapters complete the work.
The editors hope that this introductory work will inspire others to continue these initial inquiries so as to construct a more complete understanding of the realities of Latin American migration into the United States.
The image of rural America portrayed in this illuminating study is one that is vibrant, regionally varied, and sometimes heroic. Communities of Work focuses on the ways in which rural people and places are affected by political, social, and economic forces far outside their control and how they sustain themselves and their communities in response.
Bringing together the two fundamental concepts of community—where the relationships and practices of daily life occur—and work, in which an elementary exchange occurs, Communities of Work bridges several fields of study. Presented here is the contextual and embedded nature of social relations and the complexity involved in understanding them. Through the use of multiple case studies, the authors apply diverse theories and methods in seeking an integrated outcome, one captured by “communities of work.”
Beginning with a description of the broad changes in work and economic activities across the United States, ranging from the Ohio River Valley to a western boomtown, the book shifts its focus to the interplay of work, family, and local networks in time and place. Activities range from fishing in the Mississippi Delta to farming and family life in the Midwest. The authors then highlight how rural people and places respond to extra-local, increasingly global forces in settings as diverse as rural South Carolina and Wisconsin.
A certain communitarian theme runs through Communities of Work. It is about people and communities not merely reacting, but instead responding in ways that reflect their local culture, while being cognizant of the larger world within which they live.
In the later fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary became the first land outside Italy to embrace the Renaissance, thanks to its king, Matthias Corvinus, and his humanist advisors, János Vitéz and Janus Pannonius. Matthias created one of the most famous libraries in the Western World, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, rivaled in importance only by the Vatican. The court became home to many Italian humanists, and through his friendship with Lorenzo the Magnificent, Matthias obtained the services of such great Florentine artists as Andrea del Verrocchio, Benedetto da Maiano, and Filippino Lippi. After Matthias’s death in 1490, interest in Renaissance art was continued by his widowed Neapolitan queen, Beatrice of Aragon, and by his successors Vladislav I and Louis II Jagiello.
The twenty-two essays collected in this volume provide a window onto recent research on the development of humanism and art in the Hungary of Matthias Corvinus and his successors. Richly illustrated with new photography, this book eloquently documents and explores the unique role played by the Hungarian court in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe.
The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street—Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.
Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a “fragile” society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.
Why Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion
Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion.
In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.
Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.
Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.
James Farr and Raymond Seidelman bring new historical reflection to the "state of the discipline" debate in political science. This anthology offers a panorama of views about the state of the discipline that have been sketched by leading political scientists and disciplinary historians from the late nineteenth century to the past.
The essays in this volume explore four distinct periods in the development of the discipline, with special emphasis on the subfields of American politics and political theory, revealing that the identity of the discipline is constituted not so much by agreements over fundamental principles as by the history of debates about the meaning of politics, the methods of science, the theories of behavioralism and the state, and the responsibilities of public professionals and civic educators.
Contributors are Terence Ball, Charles A. Beard, John W. Burgess, Robert A. Dahl, David Easton, John G. Gunnell, Norman Jacobson, Harold D. Lasswell, Francis Lieber, Charles E. Merriam, David M. Ricci, William H. Riker, Dorothy Ross, Helene Silverberg, Leonard D. White, Woodrow Wilson, and W.W. Willoughby.
Its unprecedented treatment of the history of political science makes Discipline and History essential reading for political scientists and their students. Historians of the social sciences will also find much to consider.
Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi present an international collection of essays reevaluating the multifaceted performance art of Nobel laureate Dario Fo.
The contributors, all of whom either have previously published on Fo or have worked with him, are the major Dario Fo scholars of three continents. Going beyond the Marxist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, the editors and contributors try to establish an appropriate language in which to debate Fo’s theater. They seek to identify the core of Fo’s work, the material that will be of lasting value. This involves locating Fo in history, examining the nature of his development through successive phases, incorporating his politics into a wider framework of radical dissent, and setting his theatrical achievements in a context and a tradition.
The essays cover every aspect of Dario Fo: as actor, playwright, performer, and songwriter. They also provide the historical background of Fo’s theater, as well as an in-depth analyses of specific works and the contribution of Franca Rame.
Carnivores provide innumerable ecological benefits and play a unique role in preserving and maintaining ecosystem services and function, but at the same time they can create serious problems for human populations. A key question for conservation biologists and wildlife managers is how to manage the world's carnivore populations to conserve this important natural resource while mitigating harmful impacts on humans.
In People and Predators, leading scientists and researchers offer case studies of human-carnivore conflicts in a variety of landscapes, including rural, urban, and political. The book covers a diverse range of taxa, geographic regions, and conflict scenarios, with each chapter dealing with a specific facet of human-carnivore interactions and offering practical, concrete approaches to resolving the conflict under consideration. Chapters provide background on particular problems and describe how challenges have been met or what research or tools are still needed to resolve the conflicts.
People and Predators will helps readers to better understand issues of carnivore conservation in the 21st century, and provides practical tools for resolving many of the problems that stand between us and a future in which carnivores fulfill their historic ecological roles.
The Art of Urbanism explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Through an investigation of the ecological contexts and environmental opportunities of urban centers, the contributors consider how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves and reflected upon their physical—and metaphysical—place via their built environment. Themes in the volume include the ways in which a kingdom’s public monuments were fashioned to reflect geographic space, patron gods, and mythology, and how the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Zapotecs, and others sought to center their world through architectural monuments and public art.
This collection of papers addresses how communities leveraged their environment and built upon their cultural and historical roots as well as the ways that the performance of calendrical rituals and other public events tied individuals and communities to both urban centers and hinterlands. Twenty-three scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new data and new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericans’ own view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.
This collection of different perspectives on language variation serves as a companion volume to New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English.
In the past decade, there has been a trend towards the global “harmonization” of migration statistics, largely inspired by international bodies and organizations that require comparative data. This volume provides an accessible account of the history of migration measurement in Europe and analyzes the current conceptualizations of migration and data-gathering procedures across twelve European countries. Based on this analysis, the authors provide critical insight into the migrant stocks and flows in their own countries and comment on recent trends in migration scholarship, such as the feminization of migration or the diversification of migrant’s origins.
Winner of the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography
As a young Fulbright scholar in Bogotá determined to democratize the photographic gaze and bring new visions and voices to public debate about Colombia’s armed conflict, Alexander L. Fattal founded Disparando Cámaras para la Paz (Shooting Cameras for Peace). The project taught photography to young people in El Progreso, a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts that was home to families displaced by violence in the countryside. Cameras in hand, the youth had a chance to record and reimagine their daily existence.
Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz is a penetrating look at one of Latin America’s most dynamic participatory media projects. The haunting and exuberant photographs made under its auspices testify to young people’s will to play, to dream, and to survive. The images bear witness to the resilience and creativity of lives marked by a war that refuses to die.
With text in English and Spanish, Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz makes vital contributions to studies of collaborative media, photographic activism, and peace and conflict in Colombia. Fattal’s insightful text offers critical reflection on the genre of participatory photography and the structural challenges faced by similar media projects.
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