This volume includes “Milesians and Alans in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Mythical Invasion of Ireland,” by Manuel Alberro; “The Breton Compositions of Jean Cras,” by Paul André Bempéchat; “The ‘Gallic Disaster’: Did Dionysius I of Syracuse Order It?,” by Timothy Bridgman; “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Marion Deane; “Cernunnos: Looking a Different Way,” by David Fickett-Wilbar; “Epic or Exegesis? The Form and Genesis of the Táin Bó Cúalnge,” by John J. Fisher; “Introducing King Nuadha: Mythology and Politics in the Belfast Murals,” by Alexandra Hartnett; “‘Gaelic Political Scripture’: Uí Mhaoil Chonaire Scribes and the Book of Mac Murchadha Caomhánach,” by Benjamin James Hazard; “Voice, Power, and Narrative Structure in Orgain Denna Rig,” by Bettina Kimpton; “Cú Chulainn: God, Man, or Animal?,” by Erik Larsen; “The Celtic Seasonal Festivals in the Light of Recent Approaches to the Indo-European Ritual Year,” by Emily Lyle; “The Date and Provenance of Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae,” by Laurance Maney†; “Spirit and Flesh in Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry: A Comparison of the Works of D. Gwenalt Jones (1899–1968) and Pennar Davies (1911–1996),” by D. Densil Morgan; “Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786): Significance and Impact,” by Lesa Ní Mhunghaile; “Old Irish *desgabál and the Concept of Ascension in Irish Religious Texts,” by Brian Ó Broin; “Oenach Aimsire na mBan: Early Irish Seasonal Celebrations, Gender Roles, and Mythological Cycles,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; “Literature Reviews in An Claidheamh Soluis: A Journalistic Insight to Irish Literary Reviews in the Revival Period 1899–1932,” by Regina Uí Chollatáin; and “Celtic Ornament, Irish Gospel Book Decoration, and the Illustrated Prose Lancelot of Yale 229,” by Elizabeth Moore Willingham.

The coming-of-age story of a master musician in mid-twentieth century colonial Rhodesia as he learns his community’s most cherished art, all while navigating profound social transformation.
 
Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner has been studying Zimbabwean mbira for more than fifty years. When he first arrived in what was then Rhodesia after the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom, he met Cosmas Magaya, a mbira player who would become his teacher and lifelong collaborator. A Prodigy’s Calling chronicles the early years of Magaya’s life, documenting the master mbira player’s journey from child prodigy to established expert. As a child, Magaya was immersed in mbira music through his father’s work as a healer and spirit medium. As Magaya grew, so too did his world; his performances extended beyond the family compound as his skill and knowledge increased, bringing him into contact with a society fraught with decolonial conflict.
 
Following Magaya’s childhood, readers will learn how his upbringing guided his journey through the community’s social networks and how his early sensibilities, proclivities, and talents shaped his development. At the same time, his deepening engagement with music and the ancestors was affected by overlapping tensions between Shona cosmology and Christian ideology, rural and urban lifestyles, and the escalating African nationalist struggle and the white supremacist state. While Magaya’s story reflects profound social changes in the nation, it is also a story of musical apprenticeship. Readers following Magaya’s discovery of ever finer details in the music’s richly layered patterns will enhance their ability to hear mbira music’s forms, variations, and sonic qualities. Linocut illustrations by South African artist Lucas Bambo bring the narrative to life, and Berliner’s spirited storytelling is accompanied by QR codes that take readers directly to recordings of music as Magaya learns it. Appendices for musicians interested in learning or improving their mbira playing complement the story of Magaya’s early life. Inviting the reader into the very tradition it recounts, the book offers intimate insights into the relationships among music, Shona cosmology, and colonial politics in everyday life.
 

Faith in progress is a characteristic we often associate with the Victorian era. Victorian intellectuals and free-thinkers who believed in progress and wrote history from a progressive point of view—men such as Leslie Stephen, John Morley, W. E. H. Lecky, and James Anthony Froude—are usually thought to have done so because they were optimistic about their own times. Their optimism has been seen as the result of a successful Liberal campaign for political reform in the sixties and seventies, carried out in alliance with religious dissenters—a campaign that removed religion from the arena of public debate.

Jeffrey Paul von Arx challenges this long-standing view of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. He sees them as preoccupied with and even fearful of a religious resurgence throughout their careers, and demonstrates that their loss of confidence in contemporary liberalism began with their disillusionment over the effects of the Franchise Reform Act of 1867. He portrays their championing of the idea of progress as motivated not by optimism about the present, but by their desire to explain away and reverse if possible contemporary religious and political trends, such as the new mass politics in England and Ireland.

This is the first book to explore how pessimism could be the psychological basis for the Victorians’ progressive conception of history. Throughout, von Arx skillfully interweaves threads of religion, politics, and history, showing how ideas in one sphere cannot be understood without reference to the others.

Paul Seaton’s Public Philosophy and Patriotism:  The Declaration and Us is a very countercultural book.  It advances the provocative thesis that not only is the Declaration worthy of our study today, but its principles and way of thinking about politics can and should be used to judge us and our politics today.   That’s countercultural.   While conservatives still have a warm place for the document in their hearts, one rarely hears them apply it to today’s debates.   Progressives tend to take two contradictory tacks toward the founding document:  on one hand, it’s the negligible product of hypocritical white males, on another, it limns the “ideals” and “values” of the American project that History is charged with fulfilling.  Neither of these views takes the document intellectually seriously.   Jefferson, however, articulated a different view when he called the Declaration “an expression of the American mind” at the time of the Revolution.  Here was a self-conscious, self-confident American mind, ready to take on the world.  Taking his cue from Jefferson, Seaton takes the Declaration seriously.  He takes it seriously as the expression of a mind that confidently judged despotic designs, but also grasped the principles of free government and free and reasonable politics and looked forward to a country embodying them.   Seaton argues that both these dimensions of Declaration political thought are applicable today.  
 
He does so in an interesting way.  For a number of years, he penned a Fourth of July essay on “the Declaration and Us” for the Law & Liberty website.   On that occasion, he provided an exposition of some theme of the Declaration and applied it to a contemporary debate or issue.  Over the years, they added up to a rather full exposition of the document, as well as an ongoing commentary on American political life.  With this collection, the essentials of the Declaration’s view of politics are laid bare, and significant threats to freedom-loving Americans are identified. This is the bold claim and aim of this unique book.  
 
At the beginning and end of the collection, Seaton makes a point of dating the completion of the manuscript on April 18th.  When the curious reader looks up the date, he finds that it is the date when Paul Revere undertook his famous ride.  In this way, the author indicates his judgment of the dire circumstances in which we live today and the patriotic models to which he hearkens.   In the form of an explication de texte, this collection is a call to arms against today’s enemies of ordered liberty.
 

Prometheus brought the gift of enlightenment to humanity and suffered for his benevolence. This collection takes on scholars’ Promethean view of themselves as selfless bringers of light and instead offers a new vision of public scholarship as service to society.

Thomas J Billard and Silvio Waisbord curate essays from a wide range of specialties within the study of communication. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the contributors use approaches from critical meditations to case studies to how-to guides as they explore the possibilities of seeing shared knowledge not as a gift to be granted but as an imperative urging readers to address the problems of the world. Throughout the volume, the works show that a pivot to ideas of scholarship as public service is already underway in corners of communication studies across the country.

Visionary and provocative, Public Scholarship in Communication Studies proposes a needed reconsideration of knowledge and a roadmap to its integration with community.

Contributors: Elaine Almeida, Becca Beets, Thomas J Billard, Danielle K. Brown, Aymar Jean Christian, Stacey L. Connaughton, Paula Gardner, Larry Gross, Amy Jordan, Daniel Kreiss, Rachel Kuo, Susan Mancino, Shannon C. McGregor, Philip M. Napoli, Todd P. Newman, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Chad Raphael, Sue Robinson, Silvio Waisbord, Yidong Wang, and Holley Wilkin

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture

In the 1940s and ’50s, comic books were some of the most popular—and most unfiltered—entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics—it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official—and clandestine—foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism.

As Hirsch details, during World War II—and the concurrent golden age of comic books—government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned—and as comic book sales reached historic heights—the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda.

Hirsch’s groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id—scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.

Explores the notion of identities, ideologies, and cultural discourse in contemporary global punk scenes. 

Punk Identities, Punk Utopias unpacks punk and the factors that shape its increasingly complex and indefinable social, political, and economic setting. The third offering in Intellect’s Global Punk series, produced in collaboration with the Punk Scholars Network, this volume examines the broader social, political, and technological concerns that affect punk scenes around the world, from digital technology and new media to gender, ethnicity, identity, and representation.

Drawing on scholarship in cultural studies, musicology, and social sciences, this interdisciplinary collection will add to the academic discussion of contemporary popular culture, particularly in relation to punk and the critical understanding of transnational and cross-cultural dialogue.

Surveying the range of Sun Ra’s extraordinary creativity, this book explores how the father of Afrofuturism brought “space music” to a planet in need of transformation, supporting the aspirations of black people in an inhospitable white world.

Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra.” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth.

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism offers a spirited introduction to the life and work of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra’s wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.

Putting on Christ aims to situate Augustine’s early soteriology and sacramental theology within the context of his personal history and intellectual development. Beginning with an extended analysis of the theology of salvation and sacramental efficacy contained within Augustine’s Confessions (ca. 400), the study then traces the maturation of his views on these matters, beginning with his earliest extant works, the Cassicacum dialogues (ca. 386). The journey entails treating Augustine’s earliest discussions of Christ’s person and his saving work, as well as the believer’s subjective experience of conversion and salvation. As Augustine’s corpus shifts from philosophical dialogues to explicitly apologetic and scriptural-exegetical works, so too does his soteriological lexicon expand to include concepts and terms that will later become his stock-in-trade, such as the virtue of humilitas. And as his roles in the North African Church come to include participation in the presbyterate and the episcopacy, so too does his engagement expand to a wider set of polemical contexts, both anti-Manichaean and anti-Donatist. Putting on Christ tracks these and many other aspects of Augustine’s maturing thought, showing where lines of both continuity and development lie and aiming to uncover their reasons. In doing so, it reveals Augustine to be a thinker and a teacher who continued to hone his understanding of salvation, the very heartbeat of Christian life and thought, as well as its relation to various other aspects of the Christian theological worldview, from Christology and anthropology to sacramental theology and ecclesiology.