History records only one peaceful transition of hegemonic power: the passage from British to American dominance of the international order. What made that transition uniquely cooperative and nonviolent? Does it offer lessons to guide policy as the United States faces its own challengers to the order it has enforced since the 1940s? To answer these questions, Kori Schake explores nine points of crisis or tension between Britain and the United States, from the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 to the establishment of the unequal “special relationship” during World War II.
Over this period, Safe Passage shows, the United States gradually changed the rules that Britain had established at its imperial height. It was able to do so peacefully because, during the crucial years, Britain and the United States came to look alike to each other and different from other nations. Britain followed America’s lead in becoming more democratic, while the United States, because of its conquest of the American West, developed an imperial cast of mind. Until the end of World War II, both countries paid more attention to their cumulative power relative to other states in the order than to their individual power relative to each other.
The factors that made the Anglo-American transition peaceful, notably the convergence in their domestic ideologies, are unlikely to apply in future transitions, Schake concludes. We are much more likely to see high-stake standoffs among competing powers attempting to shape the international order to reflect the starkly different ideologies that prevail at home.
Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.
As Germany faced inevitable defeat in World War II, the Allies became concerned that the Nazis would attempt to hide their assets in neutral countries—Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey—in order to revive their cause in later years. To address this danger, the United States, along with Britain and France as reluctant partners, started the “Safehaven” program to probe questions of secret foreign bank accounts, the German wartime gold trade, and the actions of German companies abroad toward the end of the Nazi regime. Initiated by the Federal Economic Administration, Safehaven was soon integrated with U.S. plans, advocated by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to avert future German aggression. These proposals quickly fell out of favor, but the Morgenthau Plan’s suggestion to use all German assets as reparations remained attractive.
In this first detailed historical study of Safehaven in English, Martin Lorenz-Meyer focuses on policies of the Allies, revealing their disagreements about the program and addressing the historical roots of a problem that over decades the Cold War had successfully buried. Lorenz-Meyer shows how American administrative agencies were constantly at odds regarding Safehaven’s administration and how coordination of the program was further complicated by different assumptions held by the United States and Britain regarding its aims. Using Sweden as an example, he offers an investigation of the effects of Safehaven in the neutral countries, drawing comparisons with experiences of the program in Switzerland. His research discloses the sums involved and the neutral countries’ positions and also explores the complications posed by international law for any plan to expropriate German assets.
Over time, the neutral countries objected to uncompensated confiscations for a war in which they had not participated, and the United States gradually lost interest in infringing on German wealth because Germany was needed as a new ally. Lorenz-Meyer tells how Safehaven suffered from the discontinuation of wartime controls in a renewed climate of free trade. He also contends that the very problem that necessitated the program raised questions regarding the true neutrality of the countries involved.
Safehaven is a significant addition to the history of Third Reich and international relations, notably concerning American foreign policy. As America continues to face foreign-policy dilemmas regarding trade with enemies and issues of neutrality, Safehaven offers an illuminating case history that sheds new light on current affairs.
Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, Blanche Coll documents the evolution of the federal and state government policymaking for welfare and Social Security, our "safety net." As Coll points out, the policies that determine who is "entitled" to aid, how standard dollar amounts are set, child support responsibilities, the equitable fiscal division between state, federal, and local governments, and the resulting impact on the poorÐÐparticularly women and children of all racesÐÐhave fluctuated throughout the history of welfare.
Coll shows how demographic patterns, the definition of a family, the relative health of the economy, and Presidents' political agendas all deeply affect the system of entitlements to Social Security and welfare, the kernal of the American welfare state.
Safety Net is the only comprehensive history of modern welfare in the United States. Clearly written and unpolemical, it is based on a wealth of primary sources, interviews with key policymakers, and the authoritative analysis of a trained historian who served as a research administrator in the federal government through Democractic and Republican administrations. Saftey Net will be indispensable reading for everyone concerned with contemporary debates about welfare and Social Security.
When Sandy Holston is on dry land, she’s nothing special: a nurse who wears her hair in a ponytail and prefers a fishing lure as an earring. But once she dons waders, picks up a fly rod, and steps into a river, she becomes a remarkable, elegant fisherwoman who’s at peace with the world.
After surviving her marriage to Vernon - her violent, incarcerated ex-husband - peace is just what Sandy needs. So she moves to Damascus, a small town on the Ripshin River, where she plans to enjoy the fishing and the solitude. Finally she is on the brink of a life she desires in a place she loves. But as the Ripshin’s trout mysteriously die off, and as Sandy grows closer to a reclusive neighbor who has a propensity for fishing naked, her plans are put in jeopardy. Will Sandy be able to find peace - in the river or out - once Vernon is released from prison and fulfills his promise to hunt her down?
How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States
Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable.
Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
This volume contains a translation of the version of the Saga of St. Jón of Hólar that is probably closest to the first Latin vita. It is only the second saga of an Icelandic episcopal saint to appear in a modern translation in the present century. The volume consists of two parts, the first comprising a general introduction and a translation by Margaret Cormack. The second part provides a detailed scholarly analysis of the manuscripts, contents, style, and literary connections of the saga by the late Peter Foote, one of the foremost scholars of Old Norse and Icelandic literature.
The Jóns saga was written in the early thirteenth century, nearly a century after the death of its protagonist, the first bishop of the diocese of Hólar in Northern Iceland. The author of the saga combined Latin learning with native folklore to produce a readable narrative that is contemporary with the earliest family and contemporary sagas. This text provides valuable insight into the religious life of ordinary Icelanders in the thirteenth century, and the introduction corrects common misconceptions about ecclesiastical history and the cult of saints in Iceland. It will be of value to scholars of medieval Icelandic literature, hagiography, and history.
In A.D. 986, Earl Hákon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjórunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jómsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all. In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterization is preserved.
The biography of Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, who was awarded the highly prestigious Melvil Dewey Medal by the American Library Association in 2015, will be welcomed by readers interested in knowing not only more about Lee’s personal achievements and contributions in librarianship but also about the rapid changes in the library profession in general. The biography, written by Ms. Yang Yang of China Central Television in Beijing, was first published in Chinese in China in 2011. It was republished in Taiwan with added information in 2014. This English edition, translated by Dr. Ying Zhang of the Universityof California in Irvine, was updated by Lee.
Throughout his childhood and youth, Lee experienced tremendous hardship during the brutal Sino-Japanese War and then the Chinese civil war, described in the first three chapters. After arriving in the United States as a graduate student from Taiwan in 1957, he struggled to realize the American dream by studying hard and working diligently in the field of librarianship for nearly half a century.
The biography explores Lee’s career at major academic libraries, beginning at the University of Pittsburgh to his retirement from Ohio University, including his seven years of library directorship at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Agency for International Development. After his first retirement, Lee was invited by OCLC to become a Visiting Distinguished Scholar. From there he was appointed Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress and retired for the second time in 2008.
The biography also highlights Lee’s contributions in international librarianship, especially in the promotion of library cooperation between the United States and China.
Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. It was heavily influenced by several classic texts in the Sufi tradition. Liu’s approach, however, is distinguished from that of other Muslim scholars in that he addressed the basic articles of Islamic thought with Neo-Confucian terminology and categories. Besides its innate metaphysical and philosophical value, the text is invaluable for understanding how the masters of Chinese Islam straddled religious and civilizational frontiers and created harmony between two different intellectual worlds.
The introductory chapters explore both the Chinese and the Islamic intellectual traditions behind Liu’s work and locate the arguments of Tianfang xingli within those systems of thought. The copious annotations to the translation explain Liu’s text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.
Every American is co-owner of the most magnificent estate in the world—federal public forests, grazing lands, monuments, national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public places. The writer Wallace Stegner famously referred to public lands as “America’s best idea,” but there have always been some who oppose the idea for ideological reasons, or because they have a vested economic interest. In the current decade, federal public lands have been under physical threat as never before, with armed standoffs and takeovers that the US government has proved stunningly unsuccessful at prosecuting in federal courts.
One such incident was the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, in 2016. Armed militants seized the headquarters of the refuge for forty-one days and occupied the community for three months. Militants threatened and harassed local residents, pledging to “give back” the land to unnamed “rightful owners” in their effort to enact a fringe interpretation of the US Constitution.
Drawing on more than two years of intensive fieldwork, Sagebrush Collaboration shows that the militants failed in their objectives because the sensible and hardworking citizens of Harney County had invested decades in collaboratively solving the very problems that the militia used to justify their anti–federal government revolution.
In Sagebrush Collaboration, Peter Walker offers the first book-length study of why the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge failed. His nuanced and deeply researched account provides the full context for the takeover, including the response from local and federal officials and the grassroots community resistance. It will be essential reading for years to come for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing battle over the future of America’s public lands.
This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.
This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.
Jaan Kross's historical novel Sailing Against the Wind fictionalizes the life of Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), an Estonian-born inventor. Schmidt lost an arm in his youth while experimenting with a homemade rocket, resulting in psychological trauma that would plague him for the rest of his life. Largely self-taught, Schmidt was driven to seek recognition of his talents.
He moved to Germany in the 1930s, where, after perfecting techniques for polishing lenses, he began developing ideas for improving astronomical telescopes. He was arrested for selling one to the Russians, and although he got off with only a warning, he later suffered a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital, where he soon died. Sailing Against the Wind becomes a meditation on national identity, the relationship between history and the individual life, and the mechanisms of the historical novel as a genre.
As Japan’s pre–Pearl Harbor ambassador to the United States, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburō (1877–1964) played a significant role in a tense and turbulent period in Japanese–U.S. relations. Scholars tend to view his actions and missteps as ambassador as representing the failure of diplomacy to avert the outbreak of hostilities between the two paramount Pacific powers.
This extensively researched biography casts new light on the life and career of this important figure. Connecting his experiences as a naval officer to his service as foreign minister and ambassador, and later as “father” of Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces and proponent of the U.S.–Japanese alliance, this study reassesses Nomura’s contributions as a hard-nosed realist whose grasp of the underlying realities of Japanese–U.S. relations went largely unappreciated by the Japanese political and military establishment.
In highlighting the complexities and conundrums of Nomura’s position, as well as the role of the Imperial Navy in the formulation of Japan’s foreign policy, Peter Mauch draws upon rarely accessed materials from naval and diplomatic archives in Japan as well as various collections of personal papers, including Nomura’s, which Mauch discovered in 2005 and which are now housed in the National Diet Library.
In the winter of 1917, with most of the world at war, twenty-three-year-old Irving Edward Sheely of Albany, New York, enlisted in Naval Aviation and began his training at Pensacola Naval Air Station. When Congress declared ware on Germany on April 6, 1917, the combined strength of aviation within the Navy and Marine Corps was 48 officers, 239 enlisted men, 54 airplanes, one airship, and one air station.
Saint Genet is Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic biography of Jean Genet—thief, convict, and great artist—a character of almost legendary proportions whose influence grows stronger with time. Bringing together two of the century’s greatest minds and artists, Saint Genet is at once a compelling psychological portrait, masterpiece of literary criticism, and one of Sartre’s most personal and inspired philosophical creations.
When the paralyzed cripple Domingo Vidal is rescued unsinged from a burning house, the people of Chima believe they have witnessed a miracle. Domingo becomes their patron "saint," and tales of his miracles multiply. Domingo makes the rains come, cures the blind and lame, and swells barren wombs with new life. But is Domingo really a saint, or is he a pagan idol? Padre Berrocal calls the people heretics, but they are afraid not to worship Domingo. To what excesses will superstition and ignorance drive the frightened people of Chima?
This novel, published in 1963 as En Chimá nace un santo, makes important connections between the frustrations of poverty and the excesses of religious fanaticism. Zapata Olivella indicts the dogmatic attitudes of religious and civil institutions as a major cause of the creation of local cults like the one that grows up around "Saint" Domingo. In Zapata Olivella's compelling narrative, the struggle over Domingo points up both the inflexibility of established institutions and the potential power for change that lies within the hands of a determined populace.
In 1852, President Louis Napoleon of France declared that August 15--Napoleon Bonaparte's birthday--would be celebrated as France's national day. Leading up to the creation of the Second Empire, this was the first in a series of attempts to "Bonapartize" his regime and strengthen its popular legitimacy. Across France, public institutions sought to draw local citizens together to celebrate civic ideals of unity, order, and patriotism. But the new sense of French togetherness was fraught with tensions.
Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Sudhir Hazareesingh vividly reconstructs the symbolic richness and political complexity of the Saint-Napoleon festivities in a work that opens up broader questions about the nature of the French state, unity and lines of fracture in society, changing boundaries between public and private spheres, and the role of myth and memory in constructing nationhood. The state's Bonapartist identity was at times vigorously contested by local social, political, and religious groups. In various regions, people used the national day to celebrate their own communities and to honor their hometown veterans; but elsewhere, the revival of republican sentiment clashed sharply with imperial attitudes.
Sophisticated and gracefully written, this book offers rich insights into modern French history and culture.
Revised and updated edition of the perennial Georgetown University Press classic, Saints of the Liturgical Year, this beautiful and comfortably sized guide is compact, but brimming with information. This edition includes over 260 brief biographies, including 33 new entries, as well as a glossary of terms to help explain the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. Based on the General Roman Calendar, presently in use in the Roman Catholic Church, it also includes the feasts, Saints, and Blesseds from the Liturgical Calendar of the Society of Jesus—known as the Jesuits—as officially observed within the Society of Jesus.
Offering inspiration and encouragement, Saints and Feasts of the Liturgical Year functions as an aid in introducing the faithful to the day's feast or to the saint whose memorial is being celebrated. As a gift, for personal or group study, and helpful for introducing parishioners to the history of the church, this book can also be used as a source of ideas for all pastors.
A compelling history of the 1846 Mormon expulsion from Illinois that exemplifies the limits of American democracy and religious tolerance.
When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as Mormons) settled in Illinois in 1839, they had been persecuted for their beliefs from Ohio to Missouri. Illinoisans viewed themselves as religiously tolerant egalitarians and initially welcomed the Mormons to their state. However, non-Mormon locals who valued competitive individualism perceived the saints‘ western Illinois settlement, Nauvoo, as a theocracy with too much political power. Amid escalating tensions in 1844, anti-Mormon vigilantes assassinated church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Two years later, the state expelled the saints. Illinois rejected the Mormons not for their religion, but rather for their effort to create a self-governing state in Nauvoo.
Mormons put the essential aspirations of American liberal democracy to the test in Illinois. The saints’ inward group focus and their decision to live together in Nauvoo highlight the challenges strong group consciousness and attachment pose to democratic governance. The Saints and the State narrates this tragic story as an epic failure of governance and shows how the conflicting demands of fairness to the Mormons and accountability to Illinois’s majority became incompatible.
A collection of medieval tales of Byzantine saints, including some rejected by the Church, translated into English for the first time.
The legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages—as related cults, multiple retellings, and contemporary translations attest. Their protagonists span the entire spectrum of Byzantine society, including foreigners, soldiers, ascetics, lustful women, beggars, and the sons and daughters of rulers. They travel to exotic lands, perform outlandish miracles, suffer extraordinary violence, reject family ties, save cities, destroy absolute rulers, and discover the divine. Some saints, like Markos the Athenian, are forgotten nowadays; others, like Saint George the Great Martyr, still command a wide appeal. Each, however, negotiates the limits of Byzantine imagination: the borders that separate the powerful from the outcasts, the real from the imaginary, the human from the beyond human. These stories, edited in Greek and translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal human fears and desires in their Byzantine guise.
While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma.
Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece collects funeral orations, encomia, and narrative hagiography. Together, these works illuminate one of the most obscure periods of Greek history—when holy men played central roles as the Byzantine administration reimposed control on southern and central Greece in the wake of Avar, Slavic, and Arab attacks and the collapse of the late Roman Empire. The bishops of the region provided much-needed leadership and institutional stability, while ascetics established hermitages and faced invaders. The Lives gathered here include accounts of Peter of Argos, which offers insight into episcopal authority in medieval Greece, and Theodore of Kythera, an important source for the history of piracy in the Aegean Sea.
This volume, which illustrates the literary variety of saints’ Lives, presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.
Working simultaneously on two levels, Saladin represents the best kind of biography—a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin’s military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Eddé’s narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of the Crusades from an Arab perspective.
Saladin became a legend in his own time, venerated by friend and foe alike as a paragon of justice, chivalry, and generosity. Arab politicians ever since have sought to claim his mantle as a justification for their own exercise of power. But Saladin's world-historical status as the ideal Muslim ruler owes its longevity to a tacit agreement among contemporaries and later chroniclers about the set of virtues Saladin possessed—virtues that can now be tested against a rich tapestry of historical research. This tension between the mythical image of Saladin, layered over centuries and deployed in service of specific moral and political objectives, and the verifiable facts of his life available to a judicious modern historian is what sustains Anne-Marie Eddé's erudite biography, published to acclaim in France in 2008 and offered here in smooth, readable English translation.
Salafism, comprised of fundamentalist Islamic movements whose adherents consider themselves the only “saved” sect of Islam, has been little studied, remains shrouded in misconceptions, and has provoked new interest as Salafists have recently staked a claim to power in some Arab states while spearheading battles against “infidel” Arab regimes during recent rebellions in the Arab world. Robert G. Rabil examines the emergence and development of Salafism into a prominent religious movement in Lebanon, including the ideological and sociopolitical foundation that led to the three different schools of Salafism in Lebanon: quietist Salafists, Haraki (active) Salafists; and Salafi Jihadists.
Emphasizing their manhaj (methodology) toward politics, the author surveys Salafists’ ideological transformation from opponents to supporters of political engagement. Their antagonism to Hezbollah, which they denounce as the party of Satan, has risen exponentially following the party’s seizure of Beirut in 2008 and support of the tyrannical Syrian regime. Salafism in Lebanon also demonstrates how activists and jihadi Salafists, in response to the political weakness of Sunni leadership, have threatened regional and international security by endorsing violence and jihad.
Drawing on field research trips, personal interviews, and Arabic primary sources, the book explores the relationship between the ideologies of the various schools of Salafism and their praxis in relation to Lebanese politics. The book should interest students and scholars of Islamic movements, international affairs, politics and religion, and radical groups and terrorism.
What was the “salamander letter” and why were so many people determined to possess—and to conceal—it? Why was this one of the most unusual cases in American forensic history?
A skilled con artist by anyone’s assessment, Mark Hofmann eluded exposure by police and document authenticators—the FBI, Library of Congress, the LDS historical department, and polygraph experts—until George Throckmorton discovered the telltale microscopic alligatoring that was characteristic of the forgeries. What ensued was a suspense-ridden cat-and-mouse game between seasoned prosecutors and a clever, homicidal criminal. In the end, this story only verifies that some facts are indeed stranger than fiction.
In one of his public disavowals of autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne informed his readers that external traits "hide the man, instead of displaying him," directing them instead to "look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits." In this multidimensional biography of America's first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne's challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller's account as "the best biography of this most elusive of American authors."
Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill.
The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it.
From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.”
Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.
Although most writers on Nathaniel Hawthorne touch on the importance of Salem, Massachusetts, to his life and career, no detailed study has been published on the powerful heritage bequeathed to him by his ancestors and present to him during his years in that town. In The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret B. Moore thoroughly investigates Hawthorne's family, his education before college (about which almost nothing has been known), and Salem's religious and political influences on him. She details what Salem had to offer Hawthorne in the way of entertainment and stimulation, discusses his friends and acquaintances, and examines the significant role of women in his life—particularly Mary Crowninshield Silsbee and Sophia Peabody.
Nathaniel Hawthorne felt a strong attachment to Salem. No matter what he wrote about the town, it was the locale for many of his stories, sketches, a novel, and a fragmentary novel. Salem history haunted him, and Salem people fascinated him. And Salem seems to have a perennial fascination for readers, not just for Hawthorne scholars. New information from primary sources, including letters (many unpublished), diaries, and contemporary newspapers, adds much not previously known about Salem in the early nineteenth century. Moore has found new sources in various manuscript collections, such as the privately owned Felt-White Collection and the Richards and Ashburner Papers in the National Library in Scotland. She also uses extensively the many manuscript collections at the Peabody Essex Museum.
By tracing the effect of Salem on Hawthorne's writing, The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne makes clear that Hawthorne not only was aware of his "own dear native place" but also drew upon it consciously and subconsciously in his work. This book contributes to a better understanding of Hawthorne as man and writer and of Salem's vital part in his life and work.
Between the two world wars, the retail world experienced tremendous changes. New forms of competition, expanded networks of communication and transportation, and the proliferation of manufactured goods posed challenges to department store and small shopkeeper alike.
In western New York, and in Buffalo and Rochester in particular, retailers were a crucial part of urban life, acting as cultural brokers and civic leaders. They were also cultivators of area pride. Even as they adopted the latest merchandising techniques or stocked the newest items, merchants emphasized their local roots and their ability to put a local spin on national trends and innovations. Regional identity became a powerful selling tool not only during the prosperity of the 1920s but also through the economic crisis of the Great Depression.
Sales and Celebrations explains how local traditions and institutions affected the evolution of American consumer culture. It expands our understanding of American consumerism, demonstrating that local particularities and loyalties could often coexist with, and occasionally challenge, the spread of mass consumption. In her award-winning study, Professor Sarah Elvins provides new insight into the relationship between America’s largest metropolises and its smaller centers. Retailers in Buffalo and Rochester did not simply imitate the practices of their counterparts in Manhattan and Chicago; they highlighted their unique ability to serve the wants and needs of their particular markets.
By drawing attention to this persistent power of the local, Sales and Celebrations illuminates a neglected aspect of the story of American culture in the interwar period.
In this remarkable and deeply felt book, Virginia Kerns uncovers the singular and forgotten life of a young Indian woman who was captured in 1847 in what was then Mexican territory. Sold to a settler, a son-in-law of Brigham Young, the woman spent the next thirty years as a servant to Young’s family. Sally, as they called her, lived in the shadows, largely unseen. She was later remembered as a “wild” woman made “tame” who happily shed her past to enter a new and better life in civilization.
Drawing from a broad range of primary sources, Kerns retrieves Sally from obscurity and reconstructs her complex life before, during, and after captivity. This true story from the American past resonates deeply in the current moment, attentive as it is to killing epidemics and racial injustices. In telling Sally’s story, Kerns presents a new narrative of the American West.
This survey of Sally Potter’s work explores her cinematic development from the feminist reworking of La Bohème in Thriller to the provocative contemplation of romantic relationships after 9/11 in Yes. Catherine Fowler traces a clear trajectory of developing themes and preoccupations and shows how Potter uses song, dance, performance, and poetry to expand our experience of cinema beyond the audiovisual.
Potter has relentlessly struggled against predictability and safe options. Again and again, her works grapple with the complexities of being a woman in charge. Instead of the quest to find a romantic partner that drives mainstream cinema, Potter’s films feature characters seeking answers to questions about their sexual, gendered, social, cultural, and ethnic identities. They find answers by retelling stories, investigating mysteries, and traveling and interacting with people. At the heart of Potter’s work is a concern with the ways narrative circumscribes women's ability to act, speak, look, desire, and think for themselves. Her first two films, Thriller and The Gold Diggers, largely deconstruct found stories, clichés, and images. By contrast, later films like Orlando and The Tango Lesson create new and original narratives that place female acts, voices, looks, desires, and thoughts at their center.
Fowler’s analysis is supplemented by a detailed filmography, bibliography, and an extensive interview with the director.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press