Recounts the remarkable life of a Prussian/Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States as a teenager in the 1850s and became one of the nation’s best-known physicians by the turn of the century
After medical study in South Carolina and Virginia on the eve of the Civil War, Simon Baruch served the Confederacy as a surgeon for three years, twice undergoing capture and internment. Despite economic hardships while practicing in South Carolina during Reconstruction, he helped to reactivate the State Medical Association and served as president of the State Board of Health.
In 1881 he joined the exodus of southern physicians and scientists of that period, taking up residence in New York City, where he rose to prominence through his advocacy of surgery in one of the early operations for appendicitis and through is role as the protective physician in a widely publicized “child cruelty” case involving the musical prodigy, Josef Hofmann. Baruch became a leader in the nationwide movement to establish free public baths for tenement dwellers and in the development of expert medical journalism. Although his advocacy of such natural remedies as water, fresh air, and diet often made him appear unaccountably iconoclastic to his contemporaries, he has gained posthumous recognition as a pioneer in physical medicine.
Bernard N. Baruch, one of his four sons, has memorialized this work through endowments for research and instruction in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Ward reconstructs the life of a medical student in the South at the opening of the Civil War, the adventures of a Confederate surgeon, and the difficulties of a practitioner in Reconstruction South Carolina. Simon Baruch’s physician’s registers and his correspondence with colleagues afford the reader an immediate sense of the therapeutic dilemmas facing physicians and patients of his era. Baruch’s experiences while establishing himself in New York City after 1881 reflect the challenges facing those trying to break into what was then the nation’s medical capital—as well as that city’s rich opportunities and heady intellectual atmosphere. His energetic campaign for free public baths illustrates one of the most colorful chapters of American social history, as immigrants flooded the cities at the turn of the century. As medical editor of the New York Sun from 1912 to 1918, Baruch touched on most of the health concerns of that period and a few—such as handgun control—that persist to this day.
Following its publication in 1949, The Second Sex quickly became one of the fundamental works of feminist thought. In it, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) offered up a statement that has informed nearly all feminist and gender scholarship that has followed, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” And it is the woman Beauvoir became who continues to fascinate, fostering a legend of coffee-drinking Parisian intellectuals debating existentialism in smoky cafes along the Left Bank.
Beauvoir lived through some of the most dramatic and significant events of the twentieth century, and a time of enormous change for women across the world. Her personal and intellectual companions were one and the same—and as a result, her intimate relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren provide a captivating context to the development of her ideas. In this concise and up-to-date critical appraisal of both the life and words of Beauvoir, Ursula Tidd illuminates the many facets of the feminist icon’s complex personality, including her relentless autobiographical drive, which led her to envision her life as a continuously unfolding narrative, her active involvement in twentieth-century political struggles, and how Beauvoir the woman has over the decades become Beauvoir the myth.
2008 marked the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth, yet her ideas continue to reverberate throughout contemporary scholarship. This critical biography will benefit any reader seeking insight into one of the most prominent and intriguing intellectuals of the twentieth century.
By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.
As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality.
This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.
Simone Weil, legendary French philosopher, political activist, and mystic, died in 1943 at a sanatorium in Kent, England, at the age of thirty-four. During her brief lifetime, Weil was a paradox of asceticism and reclusive introversion who also maintained a teaching career and an active participation in politics.
In this concise biography, Palle Yourgrau outlines Weil’s influential life and work and demonstrates how she tried to apply philosophy to everyday life. Born in Paris to a cultivated Jewish-French family, Weil excelled at philosophy, and her empathetic political conscience channeled itself into political engagement and activism on behalf of the working class. Yourgrau assesses Weil’s controversial critique of Judaism as well as her radical re-imagination of Christianity—following a powerful religious experience in 1937—in light of Plato’s philosophy as a bridge between human suffering and divine perfection.
In Simone Weil, Yourgrau provides careful, concise readings of Weil’s work while exploring how Weil has come to be seen as both a modern saint and a bête noir, a Jew accused of having abandoned her own people in their hour of greatest need.
Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial delivers what no other book on Weil has—a comprehensive study of her political thought. In this examination of the development of her thought, Athanasios Moulakis offers a philosophical understanding of politics that reaches beyond current affairs and ideological advocacy.
Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—unites a profound reflection on the human condition with a consistent and courageous existential and intellectual honesty manifest in the moving testimony of her life and her death. Moulakis examines Weil's political thought as an integral part of a lived philosophy, in which analysis and doctrine are inseparable from the articulation of an intensely personal, ultimately religious experience.
Because it is impossible to distinguish Weil's life from her thought, her writings cannot be understood properly without linking them to her life and character. By situating Weil's political thought within the context of the intellectual climate of her time, Moulakis connects it also to her epistemology, her cosmology, and her personal experience.
Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial presents the unfolding of Weil's philosophical life against the backdrop of the political and social conditions of the last days of the Third French Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and clash of totalitarian ideologies. The ideological climate of the age—of which Weil herself was not quite free—was indeed the major "obstacle" in the struggle against which she fashioned her critical, intellectual, and moral tools.
Weil has been categorized a number of ways: as a saint and a near convert to Roman Catholicism, as a social critic, or as an analytic philosopher. Moulakis examines all aspects of Weil's thought in the indissoluble unity in which she lived them. This thorough investigation pursues the particular intellectual affiliations and the social and political experiential stimuli of Weil's work while simultaneously teasing out the timeless themes that her own timely analysis was intended to reveal.
How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience--as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism.
This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.
HE MADE HISTORY. HE TELLS THE TRUTHS HE KNOWS.
LEAD TITLE/Our National Conversation Series
Too many laws, too many lawyers--that's the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principles. In this book, Epstein demonstrates how.
The first four rules, which regulate human interactions in ordinary social life, concern the autonomy of the individual, property, contract, and tort. Taken together these rules establish and protect consistent entitlements over all resources, both human and natural. These rules are backstopped by two more rules that permit forced exchanges on payment of just compensation when private or public necessity so dictates. Epstein then uses these six building blocks to clarify many intractable problems in the modern legal landscape. His discussion of employment contracts explains the hidden virtues of contracts at will and exposes the crippling weaknesses of laws regarding collective bargaining, unjust dismissal, employer discrimination, and comparable worth. And his analysis shows how laws governing liability for products and professional services, corporate transactions, and environmental protection have generated unnecessary social strife and economic dislocation by violating these basic principles.
Simple Rules for a Complex World offers a sophisticated agenda for comprehensive social reform that undoes much of the mischief of the modern regulatory state. At a time when most Americans have come to distrust and fear government at all levels, Epstein shows how a consistent application of economic and political theory allows us to steer a middle path between too much and too little.
We drive cars with "Save the Whales" bumper stickers, buy aerosol sprays that advertise "no chlorofluorocarbons," and wear T-shirts made from organically grown cotton. All of these "earth friendly" choices and products convince us that we are "thinking globally, acting locally" and saving the planet. But are we really?
In this provocative book, J. Robert Hunter asserts that using catchy slogans and symbols to sell the public on environmental conservation is ineffective, misleading, and even dangerous. Debunking the Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth approach, Hunter shows that there are no simple solutions to major environmental problems such as species extinction, ozone depletion, global warming, pollution, and non-renewable resource consumption.
The use of slogans and symbols, Hunter argues, simply gives the public a false sense that "someone" is solving the environmental crisis—while it remains as serious now as when the environmental movement began. Writing in plain yet passionate prose for general readers, he here opens a national debate on what is really required to preserve the earth as a habitat for the human species.
“If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman—for example, if a group of Australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA—I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead.” In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life.
Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts—where he ranges freely from dining to painting—and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution.
Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.
A central tenet of Catholic religious practice, confession relies upon the use of language between the penitent and his or her confessor. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Spain colonized the Quechua-speaking Andean world, the communication of religious beliefs and practices—especially the practice of confession—to the native population became a primary concern, and as a result, expansive bodies of Spanish ecclesiastic literature were translated into Quechua. In this fascinating study of the semantic changes evident in translations of Catholic catechisms, sermons, and manuals, Regina Harrison demonstrates how the translated texts often retained traces of ancient Andean modes of thought, despite the didactic lessons they contained.
In Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru, Harrison draws directly from confession manuals to demonstrate how sin was newly defined in Quechua lexemes, how the role of women was circumscribed to fit Old World patterns, and how new monetized perspectives on labor and trade were taught to the subjugated indigenous peoples of the Andes by means of the Ten Commandments. Although outwardly confession appears to be an instrument of oppression, the reformer Bartolomé de Las Casas influenced priests working in the Andes; through their agency, confessional practice ultimately became a political weapon to compel Spanish restitution of Incan lands and wealth. Bringing together an unprecedented study (and translation) of Quechua religious texts with an expansive history of Andean and Spanish transculturation, Harrison uses the lens of confession to understand the vast and telling ways in which language changed at the intersection of culture and religion.
The texts available here in English for the first time open a window into the lives of three early modern Frenchwomen as they explore the common themes of family, memory, sin, and salvation. The Regrets of Marguerite d’Auge (1600), the Memoirs of Renée Burlamacchi (1623), and the Genealogy of Jeanne du Laurens (1631), taken from different genres of historical writings, raise important questions: Why and how did female authorship find its way into the historical record? How did these voices escape the censorship and prejudice against female publication? In a time of extreme religious conflict, how did these women convey their views on controversial issues such as primacy of grace, indulgences, and salvation without disrupting the gender expectations of the era?
Sin, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation: Christian and Muslim Perspectives is a collection of essays and scripture passages studied at the 2014 Building Bridges seminar.
Thoughtful and provocative, the book begins with the complete texts of the opening lectures by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen and Jonathan A. C. Brown and contains essays by Christoph Schwöbel, Ayman Shabana, Susan Eastman, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Philip Sheldrake, and Asma Afsaruddin. Peppered throughout with relevant scripture passages and commentary, the text concludes with an extensive account of the informal conversations at the seminar that conveys the lively and respectful dialogue that is the hallmark of this meeting.
Long before today’s culture wars, the “Third Great Awakening” rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women.
Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how revivalists negotiated that era’s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. While most studies of this movement have focused on its male leaders and their interactions with society, Thekla Ellen Joiner raises new questions about gender and race by exploring Third Awakening revivalism as the ritualized performance of an evangelical social system defined by middle-class Protestant moral aspirations for urban America. Rather than approaching these events merely as the achievements of persuasive men, she views them as choreographed collective rituals reinforcing a moral order defined by ideals of femininity, masculinity, and racial purity.
Joiner reveals how revivalist rhetoric and ritual shifted from sentimentalist identification of sin with males to a more hard-nosed focus on females, castigating “loose women” whose economic and sexual independence defied revivalist ideals and its civic culture. She focuses on Dwight L. Moody’s 1893 World’s Fair revival, the 1910 Chapman-Alexander campaign, and the 1918 Billy Sunday revival, comparing the locations, organization, messages, and leaders of these three events to depict the shift from masculinized to feminized sin. She identifies the central role women played in the Third Awakening as the revivalists promoted feminine virtue as the corrective to America’s urban decline. She also shows that even as its definition of sin became more feminized, Billy Sunday’s revivalism began to conform to Chicago’s emerging color line.
Enraged by rapid social change in cities like Chicago, these preachers spurred Protestant evangelicals to formulate a gendered and racialized moral regime for urban America. Yet, as Joiner shows, even as revivalists demonized new forms of entertainment, they used many of the modern cultural practices popularized in theaters and nickelodeons to boost the success of their mass conversions.
Sin in the City shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right’s sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms. Providing cultural and gender analysis too often lacking in the study of American religious history, it offers a new model for understanding the development of a gendered theology and set of religious practices that influenced Protestantism in a period of enormous social change.
One of the world's oldest crossroads, the Sinai joins the great continental land masses of Africa and Eurasia. Its physical geography of rugged mountain peaks, desert plains, and sea coasts was formed by the collision of the two continental plates, while the human tides that have swept across the region over millennia have left an intricate web of cultures and ethnicities.
In this book, Ned Greenwood offers a complete, up-to-date physical geography of Sinai. After an introductory chapter that situates Sinai within world history and geography, he focuses in detail on the following areas: plate tectonics and geology, geomorphology and drainage, weather and climate, soils, and biogeography.
In the concluding chapter, Greenwood considers the human geography of Sinai, including the pressures currently posed by population growth, political extremism, and environmental constrictions on development. He offers a fully rounded picture of the physical environment of Sinai that will be vital reading for everyone concerned about the future of this strategic yet fragile land.
"Since when is Fran Drescher Jewish?" This was Chiara Francesca Ferrari's reaction when she learned that Drescher's character on the television sitcom The Nanny was meant to be a portrayal of a stereotypical Jewish-American princess. Ferrari had only seen the Italian version of the show, in which the protagonist was dubbed into an exotic, eccentric Italian-American nanny. Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish? explores this "ventriloquism" as not only a textual and cultural transfer between languages but also as an industrial practice that helps the media industry foster identification among varying audiences around the globe.
At the heart of this study is an in-depth exploration of three shows that moved from global to local, mapping stereotypes from both sides of the Atlantic in the process. Presented in Italy, for example, Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons is no longer a belligerent, alcoholic Scotsman but instead easily becomes a primitive figure from Sardinia. Ironically, The Sopranos—a show built around Italian-Americans—was carefully re-positioned by Italian TV executives, who erased the word "mafia" and all regional references to Sicily. The result of Ferrari's three case studies is evidence that "otherness" transcends translation, as the stereotypes produced by the American entertainment industry are simply replaced by other stereotypes in foreign markets. As American television studios continue to attempt to increase earnings by licensing their shows abroad, Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish? illuminates the significant issues of identity raised by this ever-growing marketplace, along with the intriguing messages that lie in the larger realm of audiovisual cultural exchange.
“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R. D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life.
Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.
In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry. Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for reading poetry.
Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry.
Sinclair Lewis - American Writers 27 was first published in 1963. 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.
Sinclair Lewis Remembered is a collection of reminiscences and memoirs by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Lewis that offers a revealing and intimate portrait of this complex and significant Nobel Prize–winning American writer.
This powerful interpretation of English history provides a completely new framework for understanding how Britain emerged in the eighteenth century as a major international power.
John Brewer’s brilliant analysis makes clear that the drastic increase in Britain's military involvement (and success) in Europe and the expansion of her commercial and imperial interests would not have happened without a concurrent radical increase in taxation, along with a surge in deficit financing and the growth of a substantial public administration. Warfare and taxes reshaped the English economy, and at the heart of these dramatic changes lay an issue that is still very much with us today: the tension between a nation's aspirations to be a major power and fear of the domestic consequences of such an ambition—namely, the loss of liberty.
Sing a Sad Songs tells the story of Hank Williams's rise from impoverished Alabama roots, his coming of age during and after World War II, his meteoric climb to national acclaim and star status on the Grand Ole Opry, his star-crossed marriages and recurring health problems, the chronic bouts with alcoholism and the alienation it caused in those he loved and sang for, and finally his tragic death at twenty-nine and subsequent emergence as a folk hero.
In addition, the book includes an essential discography compiled by Bob Pinson of the Country Music Foundation.
Hymns and hymnbooks as American historical and cultural icons.
This work is a study of the importance of Protestant hymns in defining America and American religion. It explores the underappreciated influence of hymns in shaping many spheres of personal and corporate life as well as the value of hymns for studying religious life. Distinguishing features of this volume are studies of the most popular hymns (“Amazing Grace,” “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”), with attention to the ability of such hymns to reveal, as they are altered and adapted, shifts in American popular religion. The book also focuses attention on the role hymns play in changing attitudes about race, class, gender, economic life, politics, and society.
Singapore in Global History explores Singapore’s past and present through the lens of global history. It analyses Singapore as a city-state and adds an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of its growth. The studies presented here demonstrate that Singapore’s history and growth have implications that extend to Southeast Asia and the world. This book will be of interest to economists, sociologists and political scientists, as well as those interested in imperial history, business history, and networks.
First published in 1960, Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry. Based upon pathbreaking fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and 1950s among oral epic singers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, Lord analyzes in impressive detail the techniques of oral composition in performance. He explores the consequences of this analysis for the interpretation of numerous works of traditional verbal art, including—in addition to South Slavic epic songs—the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Byzantine epic Digenis Akritas. A cardinal text for the study of oral traditions, The Singer of Tales also represents an exemplary use of the comparative method in literary criticism.
This third edition offers a corrected text of the second edition and is supplemented by an open-access website (in lieu of the second edition’s CD-ROM), providing all the recordings discussed by Lord, as well as a variety of other multimedia materials.
Grounded in the intellectual legacies of two pioneering scholars of oral literature, Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Albert Lord (1912–1991), Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century gathers reflections on what the study of oral poetry might mean today across diverse poetic traditions, especially in light of ongoing global transformations that have dramatically reshaped and destabilized the very notion of tradition. This collection of essays spans disciplinary perspectives from Classics and comparative literature to musicology and anthropology. Oral traditions from ancient Greece and modern southeastern Europe, on which Parry and Lord focused, remain central in the present volume, but the book also offers important perspectives from regions beyond Europe, especially across Asia.
The title’s “singers and tales”—both in the plural, as opposed to an individual “singer of tales”—signals interest both in the polyphony of oral traditions and in the proliferation of methodologies and objects of study inspired by the work of Parry and Lord. Their notion of what has become known as the Oral-Formulaic Theory remains a necessary starting point—but only a starting point—for research on a whole range of verbal and musical arts.
Zilphia Horton was a pioneer of cultural organizing, an activist and musician who taught people how to use the arts as a tool for social change, and a catalyst for anthems of empowerment such as “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Her contributions to the Highlander Folk School, a pivotal center of the labor and civil rights movements in the mid-twentieth century, and her work creating the songbook of the labor movement influenced countless figures, from Woody Guthrie to Eleanor Roosevelt to Rosa Parks. Despite her outsized impact, Horton’s story is little known. A Singing Army introduces this overlooked figure to the world.
Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, as well as numerous interviews with Horton's family and friends, Kim Ruehl chronicles her life from her childhood in Arkansas coal country, through her formative travels and friendship with radical Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams, and into her instrumental work in desegregation and fostering the music of the civil rights era. Revealing these experiences—as well as her unconventional marriage and controversial death by poisoning—A Singing Army tells the story of an all-but-forgotten woman who inspired thousands of working-class people to stand up and sing for freedom and equality.
How does performing affect those who perform? Starting from observation of the intergenerational tradition of performing the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32.1–43), Keith Stone explores ways in which the Song contributes to Deuteronomy’s educational program through the dynamics of reenactment that operate in traditions of performance.
Performers of the Song are transformed as they reenact not only characters within the Song but also those who came before them in the history of the Song’s performance—particularly YHWH and Moses, whom Deuteronomy depicts as that tradition’s founders. In support of this thesis, Stone provides a close reading of the text of the Song as preserved in Deuteronomy and as informed by the account of its origins and subsequent history. He examines how the persona of the performer interacts with these reenacted personas in the moment of performance. He also argues that the various composers of Deuteronomy themselves participated in the tradition of performing the Song, citing examples throughout the book in which certain elements originally found in the Song have been adopted, elaborated, acted out, or simply mimicked.
The Quechua people, the "singing mountaineers" of Peru, still sing the songs that their Inca ancestors knew before the Spaniards invaded the Andes. Some of these songs, collected and translated into Spanish by José María Arguedas and María Lourdes Valladares from the Quechua language and the Huanca dialect, are now presented for the first time in English in the beautiful translations of Ruth Stephan, author of the recent prize-winning novel, The Flight. Also included in this rich collection are nine folk tales collected by Father Jorge A. Lira, translated into Spanish by Sr. Arguedas, and into English by Kate and Angel Flores.
The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.
Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species.
The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.
Pundits often wax eloquent about the power of music, asserting that it can, in some positive way, change the world. Such statements often rest on an unexamined claim that music can and does foster social justice. Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change tackles the premise underlying such claims, analyzing groups of amateur singers who are explicitly committed to an agenda of social justice.
Integrating personal narrative and natural history, Fleischner presents what he calls a "guide to understanding" the relatively unknown landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Like a bright blue seam incised deep in solid rock, the Escalante River binds the fir forests of Utah’s High Plateau with the barren deserts of the canyonlands region in the newly designed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To this wild landscape, naturalist Thomas Fleischner brings both emotional engagement and a wealth of knowledge. With unabashed passion and patient and learned observations Fleischner presents this relatively unknown landscape.
Singing Stone is ideal for curious visitors to the national monument as well as students of environmental studies. Fleischner’s background as a conservation biologist and former park ranger, a professor of environmental studies, and a naturalist in the Escalante Region for almost twenty years has provided him with a deep reservoir of experience and knowledge.
The book’s first three chapters survey the unique geology, flora and fauna, and human history of the region. Chapters four and five trace the more recent impacts of human activities—grazing and wilderness recreation—and explore the shifts in cultural values and public policy that have occurred as a result. Examining these topics in the context of a specific landscape offers a lens through which these changes, now the topic of examination and controversy throughout the New West, can be clearly seen and, hopefully, re-evaluated.
Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry combines both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German, and Russian poets. Comprehensive in scope and arranged chronologically to survey a century of high poetic achievement, the study is unified by Pratt's overriding argument that "modern poets have endowed a disintegrating civilization with humane wisdom by 'singing the chaos' that surrounds them, making ours a great age in spite of itself."
In developing this central theme, Pratt brings alive the energy, the freshness, and the originality of technique that made Baudelaire, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and others the initiators of the revolution in poetry. He brings a more complete, clearer perspective to other major themes: modernism as an age of irony; poets as both madmen and geniuses; the modern poet as tragic hero; the dominance of religious or visionary truths over social or political issues; and the combination of radical experiments in poetic form with an apocalyptic view of Western civilization. His detailed treatment of the Fugitive poets and his recognition of their prominent role in twentieth-century literature constitute an important historical revision.
Brilliantly informed, insightful, and, above all, accurately sympathetic to the points of view of the poets Pratt presents, Singing the Chaos is that rare book that belongs on all shelves devoted to modernist poetry.
Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart.
Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city’s landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place.
Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.
Combining ethnographic observation derived from her experience as a student and performer of South Indian music with close readings of archival materials, Weidman traces the emergence of this politics of voice through compelling analyses of the relationship between vocal sound and instrumental imitation, conventions of performance and staging, the status of women as performers, debates about language and music, and the relationship between oral tradition and technologies of printing and sound reproduction. Through her sustained exploration of the way “voice” is elaborated as a trope of modern subjectivity, national identity, and cultural authenticity, Weidman provides a model for thinking about the voice in anthropological and historical terms. In so doing, she shows that modernity is characterized as much by particular ideas about orality, aurality, and the voice as it is by regimes of visuality.
Singing the Gospel offers a new appraisal of the Reformation and its popular appeal, based on the place of German hymns in the sixteenth-century press and in the lives of early Lutherans. The Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal--where pastors, musicians, and laity forged an enduring and influential union of Lutheranism, music, and culture--is at the center of the story.
The Lutheran hymns, sung in the streets and homes as well as in the churches and schools of Joachimsthal, were central instruments of a Lutheran pedagogy that sought to convey the Gospel to lay men and women in a form that they could remember and apply for themselves. Townspeople and miners sang the hymns at home, as they taught their children, counseled one another, and consoled themselves when death came near.
Shaped and nourished by the theology of the hymns, the laity of Joachimsthal maintained this Lutheran piety in their homes for a generation after Evangelical pastors had been expelled, finally choosing emigration over submission to the Counter-Reformation. Singing the Gospel challenges the prevailing view that Lutheranism failed to transform the homes and hearts of sixteenth-century Germany.
This book is a study of a Soviet cultural phenomenon of the 1950s through the 1980s known as guitar poetry—songs accompanied by guitar and considered poetry in much the same way as those of, for example, Bob Dylan. Platonov’s is the most comprehensive book in English to date to analyze guitar poetry, which has rarely received scholarly attention outside of Russia. Going well beyond the conventional, text-centered view of guitar poetry as a form of political or artistic dissent, largely a function of the Cold War climate in which it began, Platonov argues for a more complex understanding of guitar poetry as a means of self-invention and community formation. Although grounded in literary studies, the book effectively brings historical, anthropological, and musicological perspectives to bear on an understudied phenomenon of the post-Stalin period.
For John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, there was one simple rule in politics: “You’ve got to bloody your knuckles.” It’s a maxim that applies in so many ways to the state of Texas, where the struggle for power has often unfolded through underhanded politicking, backroom dealings, and, quite literally, bloodshed. The contentious history of Texas politics has been shaped by dangerous and often violent events, and been formed not just in the halls of power but by marginalized voices omitted from the official narratives.
A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles traces the state’s conflicted and dramatic evolution over the past 150 years through its pivotal political players, including oft-neglected women and people of color. Beginning in 1870 with the birth of Texas’s modern political framework, Bill Minutaglio chronicles Texas political life against the backdrop of industry, the economy, and race relations, recasting the narrative of influential Texans. With journalistic verve and candor, Minutaglio delivers a contemporary history of the determined men and women who fought for their particular visions of Texas and helped define the state as a potent force in national affairs.
This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"—verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic—of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book’s geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free world."
The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called "neo–avant-garde" with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo–avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in Singular Examples. Miller’s key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo–avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for "artistic politics." Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, Singular Examples is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.
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