The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world.
At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.
From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe, the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic “stagflation,” political scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of “globalization,” as networks of interdependence bound peoples and societies in new and original ways.
The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements. Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental protection, population control, and human rights attracted unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market revolution.
The Shock of the Global examines the large-scale structural upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first time an international system in the throes of enduring transformations.
How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.
Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.
A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.
Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.
Arai Hakuseki, advisor to the sixth and seventh Tokugawa shogun, played an important role in politics between 1709 and 1716, during an era of large changes in the bakufu. He participated in major policy decisions on currency, foreign trade, and local administration, while simultaneously trying to enhance the shogun's authority both within the bakufu and as a national ruler. The following shogun retained Hakuseki's fiscal and trade policies, but promptly reversed those measures designed to make the shogun a king-like figure.
Nakai examines these successes and failures against the background of the time, especially the bifurcated and ambiguous distribution of authority between the Tokugawa shogun and the tenno in Kyoto. She also traces the influence of Confucian political theory on Hakuseki's program and on his defense of that program in the face of criticism. Nakai draws upon Hakuseki's autobiography anddiary and the reportorial letters of a contemporary for Hakuseki's political activities, and on Hakuseki's historical works and memorials for the theoretical basis for his programs, rooted in Confucianism.
Illustrative and lively translations from Hakuseki enrich the book, helping to portray a multi-faceted personality who managed to blend practical politics and Confucian idealism within the complicated and dynamic environment of the early-eighteenth-century bakufu.
Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome, responsible for anxiety, depression, and a wide array of social pathologies, has never before been placed in historical context. Eric Dean does just that as he relates the psychological problems of veterans of the Vietnam War to the mental and readjustment problems experienced by veterans of the Civil War.
Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran. His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses. The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD.
This remarkable and moving book uncovers a hidden chapter of Civil War history and gives new meaning to the Vietnam War.
When it appeared in 1960, the inspired fun of François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player shocked and delighted critics and audiences around the world. Its sudden shifts of tone and mood, its willful play with genre stereotypes, and its hilarious in-jokes clearly signaled that Jean-Luc Godard's equally innovative Breathless was not a fluke. The two films heralded the arrival of the so-called New Wave, sharing with other New Wave films an insistence on low-budget, location shooting and, above all, on cinema as the personal statement of an author. These films had a tremendous impact on all filmmaking.
Peter Brunette's introduction to this book gives us new insight into the film, based in part on revisualizing it in terms of recent postmodern and poststructuralist thinking. He argues, in effect, that Truffaut was one of the directors who paved the way for a postmodern aesthetic. The volume also contains a complete and accurate continuity script of the film (based on the authoritative, wide-screen version), a series of interviews with Truffaut (including one by Hélène Laroche Davis, previously unpublished), a large number of reviews and essays, a filmography, and selected bibliography.
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.
Tracing the western from its hazy silent-picture origins in the 1890s to the advent of talking pictures in the 1920s, Smith examines the ways in which silent westerns contributed to the overall development of the film industry.
Focusing on such early important production companies as Selig Polyscope, New York Motion Picture, and Essanay, Smith revises current thinking about the birth of Hollywood and the establishment of Los Angeles as the nexus of filmmaking in the United States. Smith also reveals the role silent westerns played in the creation of the white male screen hero that dominated American popular culture in the twentieth century.
Illustrated with dozens of historic photos and movie stills, this engaging and substantive story will appeal to scholars interested in Western history, film history, and film studies as well as general readers hoping to learn more about this little-known chapter in popular filmmaking.
Since the beginning of television, Westerns have been playing on the small screen. From the mid-1950s until the early 1960s, they were one of TV's most popular genres, with millions of viewers tuning in to such popular shows as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and Disney's Davy Crockett. Though the cultural revolution of the later 1960s contributed to the demise of traditional Western programs, the Western never actually disappeared from TV. Instead, it took on new forms, such as the highly popular Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, while exploring the lives of characters who never before had a starring role, including anti-heroes, mountain men, farmers, Native and African Americans, Latinos, and women.
Shooting Stars of the Small Screen is a comprehensive encyclopedia of more than 450 actors who received star billing or played a recurring character role in a TV Western series or a made-for-TV Western movie or miniseries from the late 1940s up to 2008. Douglas Brode covers the highlights of each actor's career, including Western movie work, if significant, to give a full sense of the actor's screen persona(s). Within the entries are discussions of scores of popular Western TV shows that explore how these programs both reflected and impacted the social world in which they aired. Brode opens the encyclopedia with a fascinating history of the TV Western that traces its roots in B Western movies, while also showing how TV Westerns developed their own unique storytelling conventions.
How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.
Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district.
After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men.
A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.
To the casual visitor, the Gulf of Mexico shores offer mainly sun, sand, and sea. Even the standard field guides, focused on one group of animals or plants, barely hint at the wealth and diversity of habitats and species along Gulf shores. Shore Ecology of the Gulf of Mexico, using a “whole habitat” approach, breaks new ground in describing all the conspicuous vascular plants, algae, birds, mammals, mollusks, crustaceans, and other invertebrates for each marine habitat. The area covered begins west of the Mississippi delta in Louisiana and follows the shores west and south to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Transitions between habitats also receive detailed treatment. The authors discuss changes in flora and fauna that result from differences in climate, shore geology, and patterns of precipitation in the succeeding habitats along the Gulf rim. They include discussion of more than 1,000 species of plants and animals, both on shore and in the near-shore subtidal zone, to give a virtually complete picture of western Gulf coast ecosystems. Excellent line drawings and photographs of over 800 species complement the text.
For marine scientists, students, and knowledgeable beachcombers, this is a thorough source on Gulf coast marine life.
Writing in Life magazine in February 1941, Henry Luce memorably announced the arrival of “The American Century.” The phrase caught on, as did the belief that America’s moment was at hand. Yet as Andrew J. Bacevich makes clear, that century has now ended, the victim of strategic miscalculation, military misadventures, and economic decline. To take stock of the short American Century and place it in historical perspective, Bacevich has assembled a richly provocative range of perspectives.
What did this age of reputed American preeminence signify? What caused its premature demise? What legacy remains in its wake? Distinguished historians Jeffry Frieden, Akira Iriye, David Kennedy, Walter LaFeber, Jackson Lears, Eugene McCarraher, Emily Rosenberg, and Nikhil Pal Singh offer illuminating answers to these questions. Achievement and failure, wisdom and folly, calculation and confusion all make their appearance in essays that touch on topics as varied as internationalism and empire, race and religion, consumerism and globalization.
As the United States grapples with protracted wars, daunting economic uncertainty, and pressing questions about exactly what role it should play in a rapidly changing world, understanding where the nation has been and how it got where it is today is critical. What did the forging of the American Century—with its considerable achievements but also its ample disappointments and missed opportunities—ultimately yield? That is the question this important volume answers.
A Short History of Canada for Americans was first published in 1942. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) is heralded as the inaugural moment of modern African fiction, and the book remains the most widely read African novel of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it has sold more than twelve million copies and has become a canonical reading in schools the world over. While Things Fall Apart is neither the first African novel to be published in the West nor necessarily the most critically valued, its iconic status has surpassed even that of its author.
Until now—in the sixtieth anniversary year of its publication—there has not been an updated history that moves beyond the book’s commonly discussed contexts and themes. In the accessible and concise A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Terri Ochiagha provides that history, asking new questions and bringing to wider attention unfamiliar but crucial elements of the Things Fall Apart story. These include new insights into questions of canonicity and into literary, historiographical, and precolonial aesthetic influences. She also assesses adaptations and appropriations not just in films but in theater, hip-hop, and popular literary genres such as Onitsha Market Literature.
Distributive justice in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means. Samuel Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries.
Earlier notions of justice, including Aristotle’s, were concerned with the distribution of political office, not of property. It was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that justice began to be applied to the problem of poverty. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity.
Fleischacker explains how confusing these principles has created misconceptions about the historical development of the welfare state. Socialists, for instance, often claim that modern economics obliterated ancient ideals of equality and social justice. Free-market promoters agree but applaud the apparent triumph of skepticism and social-scientific rigor. Both interpretations overlook the gradual changes in thinking that yielded our current assumption that justice calls for everyone, if possible, to be lifted out of poverty. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
A Short History of European Law brings to life 2,500 years of legal history, tying current norms to the circumstances of their conception. Tamar Herzog describes how successive legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was used and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.
“A remarkable achievement, sure to become a go-to text for scholars and students alike… A must-read for anyone eager to understand the origins of core legal concepts and institution—like due process and rule of law—that profoundly shape the societies in which we live today.”
—Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford University
“A fundamental and timely contribution to the understanding of Europe as seen through its legal systems. Herzog masterfully shows the profound unity of legal thinking and practices across the Continent and in England.”
—Federico Varese, Oxford University
“Required reading for Americanists North and South, and indeed, for all of us inhabiting a postcolonial world deeply marked by the millennia of legal imaginings whose dynamic transformations it so lucidly charts.”
—David Nirenberg, University of Chicago
Lake Tahoe is one of the scenic wonders of the American West, a sapphire jewel that attracts millions of visitors each year. But the lake drew Native Americans to its summer shores for millennia, as well as more recent fortune hunters, scientists, and others.
A Short History of Lake Tahoe recounts the long, fascinating history of Lake Tahoe. Author Michael J. Makley examines the geology and natural history of the lake and introduces the people who shaped its history, including the Washoe Indians and such colorful characters as Mark Twain and legendary teamster Hank Monk, and later figures like entertainer Frank Sinatra and Olympic skier Julia Mancuso. He also covers the development of the lake's surrounding valley, including the impacts of mining, logging, and tourism, and the economic, political, and social controversies regarding the use and misuse of the lake's resources.
Generously illustrated with historic photographs, this book is an engaging introduction to one of the most magnificent sites in the world. It also illuminates the challenges of protecting natural beauty and a fragile environment while preserving public access and a viable economy in the surrounding communities.
Winner, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
“We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness . . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
—Billy Collins
Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.
The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.
A Short History of Parliament was first published in 1953. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the advances in physics underlying these applications are poorly understood and widely underappreciated by U.S. citizens today. In this concise overview, David C. Cassidy sharpens our perspective on modern physics by viewing this foundational science through the lens of America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.
American physics first stirred in the 1890s-around the time x-rays and radioactivity were discovered in Germany-with the founding of graduate schools on the German model. Yet American research lagged behind the great European laboratories until highly effective domestic policies, together with the exodus of physicists from fascist countries, brought the nation into the first ranks of world research in the 1930s. The creation of the atomic bomb and radar during World War II ensured lavish government support for particle physics, along with computation, solid-state physics, and military communication. These advances facilitated space exploration and led to the global expansion of the Internet.
Well into the 1960s, physicists bolstered the United States' international status, and the nation repaid the favor through massive outlays of federal, military, and philanthropic funding. But gradually America relinquished its postwar commitment to scientific leadership, and the nation found itself struggling to maintain a competitive edge in science education and research. Today, American physicists, relying primarily on industrial funding, must compete with smaller, scrappier nations intent on writing their own brief history of physics in the twenty-first century.
The historian John Lukacs offers a concise history of the twentieth century—its two world wars and cold war, its nations and leaders. The great themes woven through this spirited narrative are inseparable from the author’s own intellectual preoccupations: the fading of liberalism, the rise of populism and nationalism, the achievements and dangers of technology, and the continuing democratization of the globe.
The historical twentieth century began with the First World War in 1914 and ended seventy-five years later with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. The short century saw the end of European dominance and the rise of American power and influence throughout the world. The twentieth century was an American century—perhaps the American century. Lukacs explores in detail the phenomenon of national socialism (national socialist parties, he reminds us, have outlived the century), Hitler’s sole responsibility for the Second World War, and the crucial roles played by his determined opponents Churchill and Roosevelt. Between 1939 and 1942 Germany came closer to winning than many people suppose.
Lukacs casts a hard eye at the consequences of the Second World War—the often misunderstood Soviet-American cold war—and at the shifting social and political developments in the Far and Middle East and elsewhere. In an eloquent closing meditation on the passing of the twentieth century, he reflects on the advance of democracy throughout the world and the limitations of human knowledge.
Rediscover Wisconsin history from the very beginning. A Short History of Wisconsin recounts the landscapes, people, and traditions that have made the state the multifaceted place it is today. With an approach both comprehensive and accessible, historian Erika Janik covers several centuries of Wisconsin's remarkable past, showing how the state was shaped by the same world wars, waves of new inhabitants, and upheavals in society and politics that shaped the nation.
Swift, authoritative, and compulsively readable, A Short History of Wisconsin commences with the glaciers that hewed the region's breathtaking terrain, the Native American cultures who first called it home, and French explorers and traders who mapped what was once called "Mescousing." Janik moves through the Civil War and two world wars, covers advances in the rights of women, workers, African Americans, and Indians, and recent shifts involving the environmental movement and the conservative revolution of the late 20th century. Wisconsin has hosted industries from fur-trapping to mining to dairying, and its political landscape sprouted figures both renowned and reviled, from Fighting Bob La Follette to Joseph McCarthy. Janik finds the story of a state not only in the broad strokes of immigration and politics, but also in the daily lives shaped by work, leisure, sports, and culture. A Short History of Wisconsin offers a fresh understanding of how Wisconsin came into being and how Wisconsinites past and present share a deep connection to the land itself.
Janice Gary never walked alone without a dog - a big dog. Once, she was an adventurer, a girl who ran off to California with big dreams and hopes of leaving her past behind. But after a brutal rape, her youthful bravado vanished, replaced by a crippling need for safety. When she rescues a gangly Lab-Rottweiler pup,Gary is sure she’s found her biggest protector yet. But after Barney is attacked by a vicious dog, he becomes a clone of his attacker, trying to kill any dog that comes near him. Walking with Barney is impossible. Yet walking without him is unthinkable.
After years of being exiled by her terror and Barney’s defensiveness, Janice risks taking her dog to a park near the Chesapeake Bay. There, she begins the messy, lurching process of walking into her greatest fears. As the leash of the past unravels, Barney sheds the defensive behaviors that once shackled him and Gary steps out of the self-imposed isolation that held her captive for three decades. Beautifully written, Short Leash is much more than a “dog story” or a book about recovering from trauma. It is a moving tale of love and loss, the journey of a broken soul finding itsway toward wholeness.
Contributors. Richard Astro, Jackson J. Benson, Carroll Britch, John Ditsky, Joseph Fontenrose, Warren French, Robert Gentry, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, William Goldhurst, Tetsumaro Hayashi, Robert S. Hughes Jr., Howard Levant, Clifford Lewis, Peter Lisca, Anne Loftis, Charles R. Metzger, Michael J. Meyer, Robert E. Morsberger, Louis Owens, Roy S. Simmonds, Mark Spilka, John Timmerman
A Short Reference Grammar of Iraqi Arabic is the only volume of its kind, reflecting Iraqi Arabic as spoken by Muslims in Baghdad. With all the Arabic transcribed, it is written for beginners as well as Arabic speakers wanting to learn the dialect. It covers the phonology, morphology (word formation of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals, achieved by adding prefixes and suffixes to roots), and syntax, teaching the reader how to make the sounds, form words, and construct sentences.
Conceived to be a practical reference grammar for those who may have basic skills in Moroccan Arabic, this classic volume teaches the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the dialect. Originally published in 1962, A Short Reference Grammar of Moroccan Arabic features the spoken language of the urban speakers of the northwestern part of Morocco, especially Fez, Rabat, and Casablanca. The Arabic has been transcribed for the English-speaking student.
The accompanying audio files, keyed to the text, demonstrate the pronunciation of the Arabic transcribed in the book. These mp3 files are available for free online at www.press.georgetown.edu.
One of the most interesting figures to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century was Ambrose Bierce, whose acerbic columns in the San Francisco Examiner spread his fame as America’s most bitter cynic and misanthrope, and whose disappearance into Mexico surrounded his name with an aura of mystery.
Although best known during his lifetime for his journalism and always critical of his own writing—“the magnificent intention mocked by the actual achievement”—Bierce’s fiction endures, especially his short stories about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1890s and rediscovered in the 1920s, the Civil War stories are filled with unsparing descriptions of death and suffering, disillusionment and fatalism. They also show a concern for form and craftsmanship, a controlled irony, and an economy of detail that are distinctly modern.
In this pioneering study of Bierce’s stories, Stuart Woodruff examines the best and worst of Bierce’s fiction with clarity and excellent critical sense, and he traces the causes of Bierce’s success and failure as a writer, analyzing his inability to reconcile the extremes of temperament and belief that marked his life and give his stories their characteristic form.
Among the pieces discussed: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Mocking-bird,” “One of the Missing,” “Chickamauga,” “Haïta the Shepherd,” “What I Saw at Shiloh,” and excerpts from The Devil’s Dictionary and Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.
An innovative new edition of nine classic short stories from one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era.
“I cannot think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration.
Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six.
Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.
What have been the most significant developments—political, social, economic—in South Africa since 1994? How much has changed since the demise of apartheid, and how much remains stubbornly the same? Should one celebrate a robust democracy now two decades old, or lament the corrosive effects of factionalism, greed, and corruption on political life? Colin Bundy tries to answer such questions, while avoiding simplistic or one-sided assessments of life under Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma. He recognizes real advances under ANC rule but also identifies the limits and contradictions of such progress. Bundy demonstrates, too, how the country’s past permeates the present, complicating and constraining the politics of transition, so that genuine transformation has been short-changed.
This volume contains four shorter works by the influential eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Translators George F. Dole and Jonathan S. Rose have produced an accessible rendering of these important yet easily overlooked works.
New Jerusalem: In this work Swedenborg outlines his theology in twenty-three brief chapters on major Christian topics such as love, faith, regeneration, the inner self and outer self, and the nature of the Bible. Nearly every chapter ends with what is in effect an index to that topic as it appears in his much larger study Secrets of Heaven.
Last Judgment: This work on the “end times” asserts that the Last Judgment foretold in the Bible does not involve the end of the physical world. Rather, the Last Judgment was an event of tremendous upheaval in the spiritual world, a nonmaterial apocalypse which has already occurred and which Swedenborg himself witnessed.
White Horse: This brief work is divided into two parts. The first presents the inner meaning of the white horse mentioned in chapter 19 of the book of Revelation. The second is effectively an index to passages concerning the Bible and its inner meaning in Swedenborg’s much larger work Secrets of Heaven. This work is a good short introduction to Swedenborg’s principle of correspondences between the spiritual and physical worlds, as well as to his unique view of the nature of the Bible.
Other Planets: Building on the eighteenth-century fascination with the possibility of life on other worlds and with traveler’s tales of other cultures, this work describes life on other planets in our solar system and elsewhere in the universe. Swedenborg undertook this work specifically to demonstrate that Jesus is God not just of planet Earth but also of the universe as a whole.
The four main short works in this volume by Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) form the basic foundation of his thought. Although originally printed as if they were stand-alone volumes, they have nearly always been published together, generally under the collective title “The Four Doctrines.”
The Lord discusses the nature of the man known as Jesus Christ, his divine nature, and the meaning of his crucifixion. For Swedenborg, Jesus was not simply a man, but the eternal divine that came to earth for the salvation of humanity.
Sacred Scripture is about the Word, by which Swedenborg means the parts of the Bible that he feels reflect a deep spiritual teaching. Swedenborg believes that study of the Word—which contains a wisdom that predates the written Bible and also transcends it—is the key to humanity’s spiritual development and its eventual union with the Lord.
Life discusses the nature of good and evil and the necessity of shunning sin and evil in order to experience true faith and become a spiritual person. In other words, this work is about how we ought to live.
Faith talks about faith as an acknowledgment of inner truth and the necessity of expressing such faith through good actions rather than simply holding beliefs. Swedenborg also delves into the true nature of charity and the way that it interweaves with faith to produce true goodness.
In addition to these short works, the volume includes a fifth work, which consists of two supplements to previous works by Swedenborg: a brief addition to Last Judgment and a longer addition to Heaven and Hell.
Through these varied essays on politics, ethics, music, race, and culture Philip Martin admits “a minor obsession” with what he calls “the American Frolic”—the essential lack of seriousness with which many of us approach the questions inherent in living in a free society. He observes that Americans have been conditioned to react, not to consider; that while we are very good at ripostes and snappy comebacks, at cracking wise and looking smart, we often fail to authentically engage the issues with which we pretend to be most concerned. We inadvertently talk past one another, he says, resorting to cant and partisan boilerplate.
In the essays presented in The Shortstop’s Son, Philip Martin rigorously resists easy labels and rote ideological truths. He pursues more subtle meanings with a commonsense lucidity and a fundamental compassion for humanity. Whether writing about the mythos built upon Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-ridden Ford or the ignoble death and burial of blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson, Martin strikes the chord that both moves and informs.
Martin is our critic at large. Deeply engaged in the world of thought and experience, he applies his nimble mind and very human heart to those things which should concern us most. He allows us, through his “obsession” and the clarity of his prose, to experience a new vision, one based in our desire for rich life.
In the world of cowboy poetry, no poet is better known or more widely appreciated than Bruce Kiskaddon. Though he died in 1950 his poems have been at the forefront of the cowboy poetry revival that began in the 1980s and have been reprinted frequently in published collections and anthologies. What is less known is that Kiskaddon during his lifetime also published stories. These humorous, realistic prose sketches of cowboy life were almost lost, but they are in their own right gems of literary Americana on a par with the poems. Originally published in the Western Livestock Journal between 1932 and 1939, the short stories drew on Kiskaddon's own experience of ranching in the Southwest and Australia to portray real life on the range. Bill Siems has recovered these stories and compiled and introduced them in this new collection, to which he has added a selection of Kiskaddon's poems and the original drawings that accompanied them, by Katherine Field, a fine, underappreciated western artist.
Set in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, the stories are a loosely tied string of old timer's yarns with a continuing cast of engaging characters, whom Kiskaddon avoids reducing to cowboy stereotypes. They include, as Siems describes them, "Kiskaddon himself as the character Shorty. As a common waddy with a small man's feistiness and a young man's mischief, Shorty encounters the wicked world with a succession of companions: Bill, high-headed and a bit of an outlaw; Rildy Briggs, untamable and unstoppable young cowgirl; and Ike, an old-fashioned dandy and 'a very fortunate person.' More or less in the background is the Boss-actually a series of Bosses-generally affectionately respected as long as he remains democratic in his dealings with the waddies. Buffoonery is provided by a succession of pompous characters, from townspeople who look down their noses on wild, unwashed waddies to professors from the East who have read books on how ranches should be run."
This compilation of Dale Morgan’s historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails. Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for serial publication in the Annals of Wyoming. He also wrote a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshone, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. Morgan biographer Richard L. Saunders introduced, edited, and further annotated this collection. His introduction includes an intellectual biography of Morgan that focuses on the place of the anthologized pieces in Morgan’s corpus. Gregory E. Smoak, a leading historian of the Shoshone, contributed an ethnohistorical essay as additional context for Morgan’s work.
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