front cover of Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present
Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present
Monroe C. Beardsley
University of Alabama Press, 1975
Seeks to bring present-day philosophy principles into the history of aesthetics

Before the publication of Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present there were three histories of aesthetics in English—Bosanquet's pioneering work, the second part of Croce's Aesthetic in the Ainsle translation, and the comprehensive volume by Gilbert and Kuhn. While each of these is interesting in its own ways, and together they cover a good deal of ground, none of them is very new. Thus none could take advantage of recent work on many important philosophers and periods and bring into a consideration of the past the best concepts and principles that have been developed by present-day philosophy.
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After the Program Era
The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University
Loren Glass
University of Iowa Press, 2016
The publication in 2009 of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era provoked a sea change in the study of postwar literature. Even though almost every English department in the United States housed some version of a creative writing program by the time of its publication, literary scholars had not previously considered that this institutional phenomenon was historically significant. McGurl’s groundbreaking book effectively established that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history,” forcing us to revise our understanding not only of the relationship between higher education and literary production, but also of the periodizing terminology we had previously used to structure our understanding of twentieth-century literature.

After the Program Era explores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl’s foundational intervention. Glass focuses only on American fiction and the traditional MFA program, and this collection aims to expand and examine its insights in terms of other genres and sites. Postwar poetry, in particular, has until now been neglected as a product of the Program Era, even though it is, arguably, a “purer” example, since poets now depend almost entirely on the patronage of the university. Similarly, this collection looks beyond the traditional MFA writing program to explore the pre-history of writing programs in American universities, as well as alternatives to the traditionally structured program that have emerged along the way.

Taken together, the essays in After the Program Era seek to answer and explore many of these questions and continue the conversations McGurl only began.

CONTRIBUTORS
Seth Abramson, Greg Barnhisel, Eric Bennett, Matthew Blackwell, Kelly Budruweit, Mike Chasar, Simon During, Donal Harris, Michael Hill, Benjamin Kirbach, Sean McCann, Mark McGurl, Marija Rieff, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Voyce, Stephanie Young
 
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Alaska at 50
The Past, Present, and Future of Alaska Statehood
Edited by Gregory W. Kimura
University of Alaska Press, 2009

In 2009 Alaska celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of U.S. statehood. To commemorate that milestone, Alaska at 50 brings together some of today’s most noteworthy and recognizable writers and researchers to address the past, present, and future of Alaska. Divided into three overarching sections—art, culture, and humanities; law, economy, and politics; and environment, people, and place—Alaska at 50 is written in highly accessible prose. Illustrations and photographs of significant artefacts of Alaska history enliven the text. Each contributor brings a strong voice and prescription for the next fifty years, and the resulting work presents Alaskans and the nation with an overview of Alaska statehood and ideas for future development.

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All Manners of Food
Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present
Stephen Mennell
University of Illinois Press, 1985
So close geographically, how could France and England be so enormously far apart gastronomically? Not just in different recipes and ways of cooking, but in their underlying attitudes toward the enjoyment of eating and its place in social life. In a new afterword that draws the United States and other European countries into the food fight, Stephen Mennell also addresses the rise of Asian influence and "multicultural" cuisine.
Debunking myths along the way, All Manners of Food is a sweeping look at how social and political development has helped to shape different culinary cultures. Food and almost everything to do with food, fasting and gluttony, cookbooks, women's magazines, chefs and cooks, types of foods, the influential difference between "court" and "country" food are comprehensively explored and tastefully presented in a dish that will linger in the memory long after the plates have been cleared.
     
 
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Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present
Anthropological Perspectives
Anna Roosevelt
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Amazonia has long been a focus of debate about the impact of the tropical rain forest environment on indigenous cultural development. This edited volume draws on the subdisciplines of anthropology to present an integrated perspective of Amazonian studies. The contributors address transformations of native societies as a result of their interaction with Western civilization from initial contact to the present day, demonstrating that the pre- and postcontact characteristics of these societies display differences that until now have been little recognized.

CONTENTS
Amazonian Anthropology: Strategy for a New Synthesis, Anna C. Roosevelt
The Ancient Amerindian Polities of the Amazon, Orinoco and Atlantic Coast: A Preliminary Analysis of Their Passage from Antiquity to Extinction, Neil Lancelot Whitehead
The Impact of Conquest on Contemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield: The System of Orinoco Regional Interdependence, Nelly Arvelo-Jiménez and Horacio Biord
Social Organization and Political Power in the Amazon Floodplain: The Ethnohistorical Sources, Antonio Porro
The Evidence for the Nature of the Process of Indigenous Deculturation and Destabilization in the Amazon Region in the Last 300 Years: Preliminary Data, Adélia Engrácia de Oliveira
Health and Demography of Native Amazonians: Historical Perspective and Current Status, Warren M. Hern
Diet and Nutritional Status of Amazonian Peoples, Darna L. Dufour
Hunting and Fishing in Amazonia: Hold the Answers, What are the Questions?, Stephen Beckerman
Homeostasis as a Cultural System: The Jivaro Case, Philippe Descola
Farming, Feuding, and Female Status: The Achuara Case, Pita Kelekna
Subsistence Strategy, Social Organization, and Warfare in Central Brazil in the Context of European Penetration, Nancy M. Flowers
Environmental and Social Implications of Pre- and Post-Contact Situations on Brazilian Indians: The Kayapo and a New Amazonian Synthesis, Darrell Addison Posey
Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia, Michael F. Brown
The Eastern Bororo Seen from an Archaeological Perspective, Irmhilde Wüst
Genetic Relatedness and Language Distributions in Amazonia, Harriet E. Manelis Klein
Language, Culture, and Environment: Tup¡-Guaran¡ Plant Names Over Time, William Balée and Denny Moore
Becoming Indian: The Politics of Tukanoan Ethnicity, Jean E. Jackson
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American Datelines
Major News Stories from Colonial Times to the Present
Edited by Ed Cray, Jonathan Kotler, and Miles Beller
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Capturing the kick and stir of history as it unfolded, American Datelines reveals the courage, hope, and grit of the American experience as chronicled in the headlines of the nation's public press from the earliest issue of The Boston News-Letter to the major newspapers of today. 
 
The original articles in this compelling collection are arranged chronologically and appear as they were first published, providing a lively and unique view of the events that have most influenced politics and culture. Readers can experience the thrill and excitement of breaking news from the real story of Jesse James and the capture of Al Capone to a vibrant portrayal of baseball's first professional African American player and a probing look at the shocking New York Armory show where modern art was born. This first paperback edition features an updated introduction by the editors and several newsworthy additions, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Clinton impeachment trial, the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and Bush v. Gore.
 
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American Families Past and Present
Social Perspectives on Transformations
Ross, Susan
Rutgers University Press, 2006

American families today are noted for their wide variety of guises. Among the mix are single-parent families, childless-by-choice marriages, nuclear families, multigenerational families, and same-sex couples. Although this diversity has come under the scrutiny of everyone from politicians to the media, family diversity is not a recent development of contemporary culture. While nuclear families with a mother, a father, and children are the presumed historical norm, people have always resided in an assortment of family formations.

Bringing together essays by twenty-one distinguished scholars who have helped shape the field of family sociology in the last decade, this interdisciplinary anthology examines variation within family experience, especially as it has evolved across racial, ethnic, social, gender, and generational lines. The essays place historical and institutional frameworks at the center of the discussion.

The first part of the book focuses on the development of socially constructed dominant ideologies, demographic shifts in family composition, and historical perspectives on family rituals and mythmaking. Essays in the second part provide a historical perspective on the interdependence between the family as a social institution and other institutions. Selections highlight changes in women’s roles, the impact of economic, racial, and social inequalities on household labor and child care, the effects of war and military service, and the implications of the political climate for family welfare policy.

In-depth chapter introductions along with critical questions to spark class discussion make this an ideal text for courses focusing on family composition, trends, and controversies in the United States.

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American Spies
Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present
Michael J. Sulick
Georgetown University Press, 2017

A history of Americans who spied against their country and what their stories reveal about national security


What's your secret?

American Spies presents the stunning histories of more than forty Americans who spied against their country during the past six decades. Michael Sulick, former head of the CIA's clandestine service, illustrates through these stories—some familiar, others much less well known—the common threads in the spy cases and the evolution of American attitudes toward espionage since the onset of the Cold War. After highlighting the accounts of many who have spied for traditional adversaries such as Russian and Chinese intelligence services, Sulick shows how spy hunters today confront a far broader spectrum of threats not only from hostile states but also substate groups, including those conducting cyberespionage.

Sulick reveals six fundamental elements of espionage in these stories: the motivations that drove them to spy; their access and the secrets they betrayed; their tradecraft, or the techniques of concealing their espionage; their exposure; their punishment; and, finally, the damage they inflicted on America's national security.

The book is the sequel to Sulick's popular Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War. Together they serve as a basic introduction to understanding America's vulnerability to espionage, which has oscillated between peacetime complacency and wartime vigilance, and continues to be shaped by the inherent conflict between our nation's security needs and our commitment to the preservation of civil liberties. Now available in paperback, with a new preface that brings the conversation up to the present, American Spies is as insightful and relevant as ever.

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American Unemployment
Past, Present, and Future
Frank Stricker
University of Illinois Press, 2020
The history of unemployment and concepts surrounding it remain a mystery to many Americans. Frank Stricker believes we need to understand this essential thread in our shared past. American Unemployment is an introduction for everyone that takes aim at misinformation, willful deceptions, and popular myths to set the record straight:
  • Workers do not normally choose to be unemployed.
  • In our current system, persistent unemployment is not an aberration. It is much more common than full employment, and the outcome of elite policy choices.
  • Labor surpluses propped up by flawed unemployment numbers have helped to keep real wages stagnant for more than forty years.
  • Prior to the New Deal and the era of big government, laissez-faire policies repeatedly led to depressions with heavy, even catastrophic, job losses.
  • Undercounting the unemployed sabotages the creation of government job programs that can lead to more high-paying jobs and full employment.
Written for non-economists, American Unemployment is a history and primer on vital economic topics that also provides a roadmap to better jobs and economic security.
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America's Entangling Alliances
1778 to the Present
Jason W. Davidson
Georgetown University Press

A challenge to long-held assumptions about the costs and benefits of America’s allies.


Since the Revolutionary War, the United States has entered into dozens of alliances with international powers to protect its assets and advance its security interests. America’s Entangling Alliances offers a corrective to long-held assumptions about US foreign policy and is relevant to current public and academic debates about the costs and benefits of America’s allies.

Author Jason W. Davidson examines these alliances to shed light on their nature and what they reveal about the evolution of American power. He challenges the belief that the nation resists international alliances, showing that this has been true in practice only when using a narrow definition of alliance. While there have been more alliances since World War II than before it, US presidents and Congress have viewed it in the country’s best interest to enter into a variety of security arrangements over virtually the entire course of the country’s history. By documenting thirty-four alliances—categorized as defense pacts, military coalitions, or security partnerships—Davidson finds that the US demand for allies is best explained by looking at variance in its relative power and the threats it has faced.

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America's Music
From the Pilgrims to the Present
Gilbert Chase
University of Illinois Press, 1987

Completely rewritten, the updated third edition of American Music broadens the scope of the classic text. Gilbert Chase devotes greater attention to modern forms like jazz, folk, and popular music, while expanding existing scholarship. Chase's musical tour begins with the various religious movements that dominated our musical expression for over two centuries. From there, he explores the rapid changes and artistic flowerings of the twentieth century—a series of musical revolutions that saw the development of "serious" instrumental music and an influential avant-garde alongside the birth of ragtime, jazz, and a far-reaching constellation of popular forms. 

Written by the leading expert of his era, American Music is a long-standing classroom perennial and an indispensable guide to anyone interested in the United States and its musical heritage.

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The Ancient Art of Emulation
Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity
Elaine K. Gazda, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This volume of essays examines the question of copying and other forms of artistic imitation and emulation in relation to Greek and Roman art, focusing particularly on sculpture and painting in the Roman period. It goes beyond recent studies of the subject in bringing to bear the views of early modern, modern, and contemporary artists on matters of copying and imitation as well as an exceptionally wide array of traditional and current critical perspectives--historiographic, literary, technical, stylistic, iconographic, and museological, among others.
Long regarded as copies of lost Greek masterpieces, a great many Roman works are now seen as neoclassical images worthy of analysis within their own Roman contexts. This book identifies and takes account of Roman criteria in rethinking the function and aesthetic appeal of these works in the eyes of their Roman owners and audiences. Collectively, the essays argue that many traditional assumptions about the status of works of classical art as originals or copies, and much of the evidence that has been used to sustain these assumptions, must be thoroughly rethought.
Among the authors are classical archaeologists, art historians (whose areas of expertise range from antiquity to the nineteenth century), and a contemporary artist and critic.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan.
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Animals as Neighbors
The Past and Present of Commensal Animals
Terry O'Connor
Michigan State University Press, 2013

In this fascinating book, Terry O’Connor explores a distinction that is deeply ingrained in much of the language that we use in zoology, human-animal studies, and archaeology—the difference between wild and domestic. For thousands of years, humans have categorized animals in simple terms, often according to the degree of control that we have over them, and have tended to see the long story of human-animal relations as one of increasing control and management for human benefit. And yet, around the world, species have adapted to our homes, our towns, and our artificial landscapes, finding ways to gain benefit from our activities and so becoming an important part of our everyday lives. These commensal animals remind us that other species are not passive elements in the world around us but intelligent and adaptable creatures. Animals as Neighbors shows how a blend of adaptation and opportunism has enabled many species to benefit from our often destructive footprint on the world. O’Connor investigates the history of this relationship, working back through archaeological records. By requiring us to take a multifaceted view of human-animal relations, commensal animals encourage a more nuanced understanding of those relations, both today and throughout the prehistory of our species.

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front cover of The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico from Independence to the Present
The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico from Independence to the Present
By Edward R. Burian
University of Texas Press, 2015

The states of Northern Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California Norte and Sur—have architecture, urbanism, and landscape design that offer numerous lessons in how to build well, but this constructed environment is largely undervalued or unknown. To make this architecture better known to a wide professional, academic, and public audience, this book presents the first comprehensive overview in either English or Spanish of the architecture, urban landscapes, and cities of Northern Mexico from the country’s emergence as a modern nation in 1821 to the present day.

Profusely illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, maps, and analytical drawings of urban cores of major cities, The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico systematically examines significant works of architecture in large cities and small towns in each state, from the earliest buildings in the urban core to the newest at the periphery. Edward R. Burian describes the most memorable works of architecture in each city in greater detail in terms of their spatial organization, materials, and sensory experience. He also includes a concise geographical and historical summary of the region that provides a useful background for the discussions of the works of architecture. Burian concludes the book with a brief commentary on lessons learned and possible futures for the architectural culture of the region, as well as the first comprehensive biographical listing of the architects practicing in Northern Mexico during the past two centuries.

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Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes
Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the Present
By Mary Strong
University of Texas Press, 2012

From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society.

In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.

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The Art of Protest
Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present
T.V. Reed
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance


The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. 

Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. 

Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

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