front cover of Bach Perspectives, Volume 3
Bach Perspectives, Volume 3
Creative Responses to Bach, from Mozart to Hindemith
Edited by Michael Marissen.
University of Illinois Press, 2025

Launched in 1995, Bach Perspectives has become the premier English-language serial book series dedicated to cutting-edge Bach scholarship. The University of Illinois Press now offers the first four volumes in open access editions available for free to all interested readers.

The third volume of the acclaimed series features a roster of scholars analyzing the crucial influence of J. S. Bach’s music upon compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Hindemith, and others. Throughout, the contributors highlight Bach’s subtle presence in the history of composition and illuminate the intertwined works of Bach and his successors.

Contributors: Thomas Christensen, Ludwig Finscher, Walter Frisch, Stephen Hinton, William Kinderman, and Robert L. Marshall

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Bagpipe Brothers
The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery
Kerry Sheridan
Rutgers University Press, 2004
After the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks, New York City's Emerald Society Bagpipe Band of firefighter-musicians took out their instruments and prepared to bury their dead--343 brothers in duty and in blood. Many firefighters alternated between playing their instruments at funerals and digging for the missing in the rubble of Ground Zero. The Irish American tradition of funeral bagpiping became the sound of mourning for an entire nation.

Bagpipe Brothers tells the unforgettable story of four firefighters in the band, who struggled to bring peace to their families and themselves while searching for the dead, coping with the endless round of funerals, and rethinking the meaning of faith. Their experiences illustrate the grief and recovery of the nation in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Kerry Sheridan has written the first book to cover the ordeal of the massive number of funerals, the importance of recovering bodies in Irish American culture, and the bagpiping ritual, both traditional and modern.
 
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Bags to Riches
The Story of I J Wagner
Gale, Don
University of Utah Press, 2007
The life of I. J. 'Izzi' Wagner mirrors the development of Salt Lake City during the twentieth century—from poverty and obscurity to affluence and prominence. Wagner was born in poverty, but through hard work, wise management, and good luck, he built a fortune. He also changed the city for the better—leading the movement to eliminate overhead signs on Main Street, opening the southwest quadrant to controlled industrial development, ridding the city center of railroad tracks, funding the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, and using his substantial influence to promote tolerance.

His sense of humor was legendary. His tenacity in pursuit of goals was unwavering. His grasp of past, present, and future opportunities was profound. Bags to Riches shows the personal side of an 'outsider' who became an 'insider' through congeniality, good humor, and integrity.
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Baha'i
Studies in Contemporary Religion
Margit Warburg
Signature Books, 2001
 There are 100,000 Baha’is in the United States, about five million worldwide including a significant population in Iran, their country of origin. They are also the most persecuted minority in Iran, where they are accused of being heretics by the Shi’i establishment.

In fact, Baha’i draws on a diverse heritage that encompasses both East and West. Reflecting their Islamic roots, they observe daily prayers and the reading of sacred texts; a month of fast; pilgrimage to Haifa, Israel, where the religion’s relics are preserved; and abstinence from alcohol. They face toward their prophet Baha’u'llah’s resting place when praying, which is reminiscent of Muslims facing Mecca to pray.

In other ways, the Baha’i religion has dissociated itself from orthodox Shi’ism. Adherents avoid communal prayer, reject the idea of a professional clergy, promote gender equality, and devote a great deal of attention to education, health care, and environmental issues. They work actively through the United Nations system to promote their view of a new world order of peace and harmony that they feel will one day unify humankind across all nations, races, and religions.

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The Bahá'í
The Religious Construction of a Global Identity
McMullen, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 2000

The Bahá’í Faith is one of the fastest growing, but least studied, of the world’s religions. Adherents view themselves as united by a universal belief that transcends national boundaries. Michael McMullen examines how the Bahá’í develop and maintain this global identity. Taking the Bahá’í community in Atlanta, Georgia, as a case in point, his book is the first to comprehensively examine the tenets of this little-understood faith.

McMullen notes that, to the Bahá’í, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed are all divinely sent teachers of ‘the Truth’, whose messages conform to the needs of their individual cultures and historical periods. But religion—which draws from the teaching of Bahá’u’lláh, a nineteenth-century Persian—encourages its members to think of themselves as global citizens. It also seeks to establish unity among its members through adherence to a Bahá’í worldview.

By examining the Atlanta Bahá’í community, McMullen shows how this global identity is interpreted locally. He discusses such topics as: the organizational structure and authority relations in the Bahá’í “Administrative Order”; Bahá’í evangelicalism; and the social boundaries between Bahá’ís and the wider culture.

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Banquet at Delmonico's
The Gilded Age and the Triumph of Evolution in America
Barry Werth
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In Banquet at Delmonico’s, Barry Werth draws readers inside the circle of intellectuals, scientists, politicians, businessmen, and clergymen who brought Charles Darwin’s controversial ideas to post-Civil-War America. Each chapter is dedicated to a crucial intellectual encounter, culminating with an exclusive farewell dinner held in English philosopher Herbert Spencer’s honor at the venerable New York restaurant Delmonico’s in 1882. In this thought-provoking and nuanced account, Werth firmly situates social Darwinism in the context of the Gilded Age. Banquet at Delmonico’s is social history at its finest.

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The Bard in the Borderlands
An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 3
Edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2026

The third volume in the anthology, featuring a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.

For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives.

The plays featured in this volume diverge drastically from Shakespeare, bringing elements of Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, and The Tempest into a range of subcultures that challenge dominant structures of power. In so doing, they remix and revise intersecting histories and traditions to heal colonial wounds and to call forth new worlds for fronterizos.

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Bargaining for Brooklyn
Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City
Nicole P. Marwell
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.

Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.
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Barren Island
Carol Zoref
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2017
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930’s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World’s Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.
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Battles of the North Country
Wilderness Politics and Recreational Development in the Adirondack State Park, 1920-1980
Jonathan D. Anzalone
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
The Adirondack region is trapped in a cycle of conflict. Nature lovers advocate for the preservation of wilderness, while sports enthusiasts demand infrastructure for recreation. Local residents seek economic opportunities, while environmentalists fight industrial or real estate growth. These clashes have played out over the course of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first.

Through a series of case studies, historian Jonathan D. Anzalone highlights the role of public and private interests in the region and shows how partnerships frayed and realigned in the course of several key developments: the rise of camping in the 1920s and 1930s; the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics; the construction of a highway to the top of Whiteface Mountain; the postwar rise of downhill skiing; the completion of I-87 and the resulting demand for second homes; and the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. Battles of the North Country reveals how class, economic self-interest, state power, and a wide range of environmental concerns have shaped modern politics in the Adirondacks and beyond.
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BBL vol 231 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

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BBL vol 232 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

front cover of BBL vol 233 num 3
BBL vol 233 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

front cover of BBL vol 234 num 3
BBL vol 234 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

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BBL vol 235 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
BBL vol 236 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
BBL vol 237 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
BBL vol 238 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
BBL vol 239 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

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Because I'd Hate to Just Disappear
My Cancer, My Self, Our Story
Don Hardy
University of Nevada Press, 2018
“Illness, in the larger sense of mortality,” Don Hardy writes, “is an inescapable shared trait among all living creatures, and we humans know about it, whether or not we want to talk about it.”

Because I’d Hate to Just Disappear is a portrait of a husband and wife, Don and Heather Hardy, thrown into the physical and emotional machinery of Don being diagnosed with leukemia and going through chemotherapy and treatment over a period of close to two years.

In this thoughtful and exquisite account, Don and Heather narrate Don’s struggle in real-time. Disarmingly honest, they recount each intimate stage of a couple living through cancer together, the mental and physical struggles, the humor and visceral emotion to reveal how two very different personalities shape—and are shaped by—the experience of cancer and its treatment. Through these moments emerge a constant flow of human kindness and discovery that lifts them each day.
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Becoming Mikhail Lermontov
The Ironies of Romantic Individualism in Nicholas I's Russia
David Powelstock
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is one of Russia's most prominent poets--and one of its most puzzling. In this radically new interpretation, David Powelstock reveals how the seeming contradictions in Lermontov's life and works can be understood as manifestations of a coherent worldview.

By bringing to light Lermontov's operative version of Romantic individualism, Powelstock is able to make sense of the poet's relationship to "romantic irony," his highly modern concept of the reader (both real, and implied in the text), and his vexed passion for his predecessor Alexander Pushkin--a relationship that is almost always treated sentimentally, but is here given its true competitive edge. Furthermore, Powelstock offers the most persuasive account ever given of Lermontov's exceptionally odd treatment of, and success with, women--both in real life and in fiction--and of his cruel overlapping of these two planes.

Clarifying what has remained perplexing for so long, and correcting what has been misinterpreted, Powelstock's work illuminates Lermontov's views of dignity, death, love, nature, society, and ethics--and, finally, gives us an intellectual biography that is deeper and more subtle than any written before.
[more]

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Becoming New Yorkers
Ethnographies of the New Second Generation
Philip Kasinitz
Russell Sage Foundation, 2004
More than half of New Yorkers under the age of eighteen are the children of immigrants. This second generation shares with previous waves of immigrant youth the experience of attempting to reconcile their cultural heritage with American society. In Becoming New Yorkers, noted social scientists Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, and Mary Waters bring together in-depth ethnographies of some of New York's largest immigrant populations to assess the experience of the new second generation and to explore the ways in which they are changing the fabric of American culture. Becoming New Yorkers looks at the experience of specific immigrant groups, with regard to education, jobs, and community life. Exploring immigrant education, Nancy López shows how teachers' low expectations of Dominican males often translate into lower graduation rates for boys than for girls. In the labor market, Dae Young Kim finds that Koreans, young and old alike, believe the second generation should use the opportunities provided by their parents' small business success to pursue less arduous, more rewarding work than their parents. Analyzing civic life, Amy Forester profiles how the high-ranking members of a predominantly black labor union, who came of age fighting for civil rights in the 1960s, adjust to an increasingly large Caribbean membership that sees the leaders not as pioneers but as the old-guard establishment. In a revealing look at how the second-generation views itself, Sherry Ann Butterfield and Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida point out that black West Indian and Russian Jewish immigrants often must choose whether to identify themselves alongside those with similar skin color or to differentiate themselves from both native blacks and whites based on their unique heritage. Like many other groups studied here, these two groups experience race as a fluid, situational category that matters in some contexts but is irrelevant in others. As immigrants move out of gateway cities and into the rest of the country, America will increasingly look like the multicultural society vividly described in Becoming New Yorkers. This insightful work paints a vibrant picture of the experience of second generation Americans as they adjust to American society and help to shape its future.
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Becoming the Story
War Correspondents since 9/11
Lindsay Palmer
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The September 11 attacks produced great changes in journalism and the lives of the people who practiced it. Foreign reporters felt surrounded by the hate of American colleagues for "the enemy." Americans in combat areas became literal targets of anti–U.S. sentiment. Behind the lines, editors and bureau chiefs scrambled to reorient priorities while feeling the pressure of sending others into danger.

Becoming the Story examines the transformation of war reporting in the decade after 9/11. Lindsay Palmer delves into times when print or television correspondents themselves received intense public scrutiny because of an incident associated with the work of war reporting. Such instances include Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and murder; Bob Woodruff’s near-fatal injury in Iraq; the expulsions of Maziar Bahari and Nazila Fathi from Iran in 2009; the sexual assault of Lara Logan; and Marie Colvin’s 2012 death in Syria. Merging analysis with in-depth interviews of Woodruff and others, Palmer shows what these events say about how post-9/11 conflicts transformed the day-to-day labor of reporting. But they also illuminate how journalists’ work became entangled with issues ranging from digitization processes to unprecedented hostility from all sides to the political logic of the War on Terror.

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Beekmantown, New York
Forest Frontier to Farm Community
By Philip L. White
University of Texas Press, 1979

This volume reports in detail how a particular portion of the American wilderness developed into a settled farming community. To fully comprehend the history of the American people in the early national period, an understanding of this transformation from forest to community—and the pattern of life within such communities where the vast majority of the people live—is essential.

Three major conclusions emerge from Philip L. White's study of Beekmantown, New York. First, the economic advantages of the frontier attracted a first generation of settlers relatively high in social and economic status, but the disappearance of frontier conditions brought a second generation of settlers appreciably lower in status. Second, White rejects the romantic notion that the frontier fostered equality and argues instead that the frontier's economic opportunities fostered inequality. Finally, in contrast to revisionist arguments, he affirms that in Beekmantown the Jacksonian period does indeed warrant characterization as the era of the "common man."

This book represents a model in community history: the narrative is full of human interest; the scholarship is prodigious; the applications are universal.

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Before and After an Oil Spill
The Arthur Kill
Burger, Joanna
Rutgers University Press, 1994

In January 1990, the New York Harbor suffered a major oil spill when an underwater pipe at an Exxon refinery leaked into the Arthur Kill, the fifteen-mile strait that runs between New Jersey and Staten Island. The waterway is home to herons and egrets, fiddler crabs and sea turtles, and a favorite place for recreational fishing, bird-watching, hiking, and boating. It is also lined with refineries and a busy corridor for oil tankers. Because this industrial activity posed such an imposing threat to the fragile ecosystem, biologists had been monitoring the region’s water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife for some time before the oil spill. Thus, we have before -and-after data about the habitat—the only oil spill anywhere for which this is true.

This unique book discusses the human consequences of the oil spill as well as providing detailed studies of its effects on the plants and animals of the Arthur Kill. Biologists, environmentalists, lawyers, and officials worldwide will find this book an essential guide to dealing with—and possibly preventing—future environmental disasters.

The contributors areJohn Brzorad, Angela Christini, Keith Cooper, Lynn Frink, Michael Gochfeld, Paul Hauge, Gordon Johnson,  Alan D. Maccarone, Katherine Parsons, Carolyn Summers, Robert Tucker.

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Before Grenfell
Fire, Safety and Deregulation in Twentieth-Century Britain
Shane Ewen
University of London Press, 2023
An account of the systemic failures that led to the Grenfell tower fire.

The 2017 Grenfell tower fire in London was a “slow disaster,” the product of a long accumulation of faults and errors that resulted from erroneous assumptions and organizational and governmental decision-making. This book offers a critical perspective on the systematic failures that lead to one of the greatest tragedies in Britain in our time.
 
Before Grenfell is a poignant and timely analysis of risk, fire, and safety in postwar Britain. Tracing the evolution of state housing policy in relation to multistory housing since the mid-1950s, the book adds to a burgeoning history of the British experience of fire and safety in high-rises and investigates a latent housing crisis in contemporary Britain against a backdrop of increasingly deregulated urban building development. Drawing on public inquiries, newspaper accounts, and oral histories, Shane Ewen details other avoidable disasters, including the Ronan Point tower block explosion in 1968, the Summerland leisure center fire in 1972, and the Bradford City Football Club fire in 1985. The book closes with a powerful chapter on fire safety campaigners, including survivor groups, who are seeking justice for the victims of fire disasters. Before Grenfell aims to exert pressure on policy-makers to act on the lessons of fatal disasters in order to both prevent future casualties and establish a legacy for those who lost their lives.
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Before THE BIG BONANZA
Dan De Quille's Early Comstock Accounts
Edited by Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove
University of Missouri Press, 2015
The discovery and mining of the Comstock Lode in Nevada forever changed the mining culture of the American West. Using the pen name Dan De Quille, in 1876 William Wright published The Big Bonanza, the best-known contemporary account of the Comstock Lode mines. Previously, however, in nearly fifty newspaper accounts from 1860 to 1863, De Quille had documented the development of the early Comstock with a frankness, abundance of detail, sense of immediacy, and excitement largely absent from his book. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove have gathered those accounts together in Before The Big Bonanza.



De Quille describes the amazing transformation of the Comstock in less than four years from miscellaneous tent camps and primitive mining sites to an incredible complex of underground shafts and tunnels beneath a group of wealth-producing cities, with modern buildings, state-of-the-art mills, orderly streets, and traffic jams. He captures the vitality of the inhabitants' resolution and resourcefulness as they survive destructive storms and being cut off from supplies and entertainment, and he chronicles the events that kept Nevada and California in the Union. While reporting the prevailing violence of brawling and dueling and anti-Indian prejudice, De Quille at the same time conveys his thoughtful observations on the significance to democracy and civilization of the existence of such license.



This trove of columns, collected from a variety of newspapers, is history in the making and additionally casts new light on the life and rapidly developing art of De Quille, the biographer of the Comstock and one of the most versatile and accomplished authors of the Old West.
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Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun
An Elegy
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Duke University Press, 2026
In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik offers an intimate cultural history of war, illness, banishment, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family. Beginning with her father's death and mother's psychiatric hold in 2022, Baik situates her parents’ lives within the enmeshed narratives of Japanese colonialism, war, and transoceanic migration, examining Korean diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than an object of study. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity that have configured the everyday lives of her parents and ancestral communities. Blending different genres from narrative prose to visual essay, epistles to ancestral mourning rites, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is a meditation on the personal and ethical entanglements scholars must confront when they are implicated in the histories of violence they study.
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Before the Storm
A Year in the Pribilof Islands, 1941-1942
Fredericka Martin
University of Alaska Press, 2010

From June of 1941 through the following summer, Fredericka Martin lived with her husband, Dr. Samuel Berenberg, on remote St. Paul Island in Alaska. During that time, Martin delved into the complex history of the Unangan people, and Before the Storm draws from her personal accounts of that year and her research to present a fascinating portrait of a time and a people facing radical change. A government-ordered evacuation of all Aleuts from the island in the face of World War II, which Martin recounts in her journal, proved but the first step in a long struggle by native peoples to gain independence, and, as editor Raymond L. Hudson explains, Martin came to play a significant role in the effort.

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Behind the Backlash
Muslim Americans After 9/11
Lori Peek
Temple University Press, 2010

As the nation tried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught up in an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community.

Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book, Behind the Backlash presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis.

Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scapegoating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek’s book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.

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Behind the Gas Mask
The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace
Thomas Faith
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In Behind the Gas Mask, Thomas Faith offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service, the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War One. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, he explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles.
 
As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
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Behind the Guns
The History of Battery I, 2nd Regiment, Illinois Light Artillery
Thaddeus C. S. Brown, Samuel J. Murphy, and William G. Putney. Edited with a Foreword by Clyde C. Walton
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Much has been written of the infantry and the cavalry during the Civil War, but little attention has been paid the artillery. Through the battles of Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge in 1863 and the Atlanta Campaign of 1864 and with General Sherman’s forces on the famous March to the Sea, the acts of a courageous fighting group are vividly recounted in Behind the Guns: The History of Battery I, 2nd Regiment, Illinois Light Artillery. Originally published in 1965 in a limited edition, this regimental history of a light artillery unit was written by three of its soldiers, including the bugler.

            

Battery I was formed in 1861 by Charles W. Keith of Joliet and Henry B. Plant of Peoria. More than a hundred men were mustered into service in December near Springfield and left for Cairo in February 1862. The battery trained at Camp Paine across the Ohio River in Kentucky until March, when the men were dispatched to the South. During the war, the Battery was attached to three different armies: the Army of the Mississippi, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of the Cumberland.

            

Clyde C. Walton’s foreword and the narrative discuss the variety of weapons used by the unit, including James, Parrott, and Rodman guns and the bronze, muzzle-loading Napoleons that fired twelve-pound projectiles. The book also includes an account of the prisoner-of-war experience of Battery I lieutenant Charles McDonald, biographical sketches of the battery soldiers, and eighteen maps and five line drawings.

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Beijing Film Academy Yearbook
2015
Edited by the Journal of Beijing Film Academy
Intellect Books, 2016
The Beijing Film Academy (BFA) is one of the most revered film institutions in the world. Since 1984, the BFA’s Department of Film Studies has been publishing the Journal of the Beijing Film Academy, the only journal of film theory that integrates film education in higher learning with film theory studies. Now, coinciding with dramatically increased interest in Chinese cinema, comes the Beijing Film Academy Yearbook, showcasing the best academic debates, discussions, and research from the academy in 2015—all available for the first time in English. Aimed at narrowing the cultural gap for cross-cultural research, the book contributes not only to scholarly work on Chinese cinema, but also to film and media studies more generally.
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Beijing Film Academy Yearbook 2018
Edited by The Journal of Beijing Film Academy
Intellect Books, 2020

The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook continues to showcase the best academic debates, discussions, and research published in the prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy from the previous year. This volume brings together specially selected articles, covering the most up-to-date topics in Chinese cinema studies appearing for the first time in English, in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies, as well as to encourage new conversations. 

This book is the latest offering in Intellect China Library series, which publishes work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English-language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, media, and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

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Beijing Film Academy Yearbook 2021
Edited by the Journal of Beijing Film Academy
Intellect Books, 2024
A collection of publications from the Journal of Beijing Film Academy.

The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates, discussions, and research from the previous year, as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles, appearing for the first time in English, to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.

The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English-language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, and media and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
 
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Beijing Film Academy Yearbook 2022
Edited by the Journal of Beijing Film Academy
Intellect Books, 2025
Discover the academic perspectives shaping China’s evolving film and media industries, curated from the country’s foremost film journal.

Beijing Film Academy 2022 offers an essential collection of the most thought-provoking debates, discussions, and research from China’s leading institution for film and media studies. For the first time in English, this volume presents carefully selected articles from the prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy, providing scholars and students with unparalleled access to a significant body of work from Chinese academics.

This book covers a wide range of topics–from film studies and visual arts to performing arts and media culture and provides critical insights into contemporary cinematic and media discourse in China. As part of the Intellect China Library series, it fosters cross-cultural intellectual exchange and bridges the gap between Chinese scholarship and global academia.

An indispensable resource for film and media scholars, this yearbook serves as a vital tool for understanding the evolving landscape of Chinese cinema and its global impact.
 
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Being and Belonging
Muslims in the United States since 9/11
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Russell Sage Foundation, 2008
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, instantly transformed many ordinary Muslim and Arab Americans into suspected terrorists. In the weeks and months following the attacks, Muslims in the United States faced a frighteningly altered social climate consisting of heightened surveillance, interrogation, and harassment. In the long run, however, the backlash has been more complicated. In Being and Belonging, Katherine Pratt Ewing leads a group of anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural studies experts in exploring how the events of September 11th have affected the quest for belonging and identity among Muslims in America—for better and for worse. From Chicago to Detroit to San Francisco, Being and Belonging takes readers on an extensive tour of Muslim America—inside mosques, through high school hallways, and along inner city streets.  Jen'nan Ghazal Read compares the experiences of Arab Muslims and Arab Christians in Houston and finds that the events of 9/11 created a "cultural wedge" dividing Arab Americans along religious lines. While Arab Christians highlighted their religious affiliation as a means of distancing themselves from the perceived terrorist sympathies of Islam, Muslims quickly found that their religious affiliation served as a barrier, rather than a bridge, to social and political integration. Katherine Pratt Ewing and Marguerite Hoyler document the way South Asian Muslim youth in Raleigh, North Carolina, actively contested the prevailing notion that one cannot be both Muslim and American by asserting their religious identities more powerfully than they might have before the terrorist acts, while still identifying themselves as fully American. Sally Howell and Amaney Jamal distinguish between national and local responses to terrorism. In striking contrast to the erosion of civil rights, ethnic profiling, and surveillance set into motion by the federal government, well-established Muslim community leaders in Detroit used their influence in law enforcement, media, and social services to empower the community and protect civil rights. Craig Joseph and Barnaby Riedel analyze how an Islamic private school in Chicago responded to both September 11 and the increasing ethnic diversity of its student body by adopting a secular character education program to instruct children in universal values rather than religious doctrine. In a series of poignant interviews, the school's students articulate a clear understanding that while 9/11 left deep wounds on their community, it also created a valuable opportunity to teach the nation about Islam. The rich ethnographies in this volume link 9/11 and its effects to the experiences of a group that was struggling to be included in the American mainstream long before that fateful day. Many Muslim communities never had a chance to tell their stories after September 11. In Being and Belonging, they get that chance.
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Belarusian Nation-Building in Times of War and Revolution
Lizaveta Kasmach
Central European University Press, 2023

The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, created two distinct and mutually exclusive national myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. This book examines the processes that resulted in this dual resolution in the context of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolutions.

Based on original archival material, Lizaveta Kasmach scrutinizes the development of competing concepts of Belarusian nationhood in the context of rivaling national aspirations and imperial policies. The analysis convincingly demonstrates the divisions within the nationalist movement, both politically between the moderates and socialists, and geographically between German-occupied territory with Vilna as a center versus Russian-controlled territory around Minsk. Besides the case study of Belarusian nation-building efforts, the book is a contribution to the study of the First World War in East Central Europe, approaching the war and its aftermath as a mobilizational moment in the region.

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Benes & Masaryk
Czechoslovakia
Peter Neville
Haus Publishing, 2010
Of even greater importance for Hungary's future were the activities of the champions of an independent state of Czechs and Slovaks. Tomáš Masaryk, a Czech professor of philosophy and a future leader of his people, was hard at work within a month of the outbreak of war lobbying in Paris and London for an independent Bohemia, still a major component of the Austrian Empire within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which would incorporate the predominantly Slovak regions of northern Hungary. Masaryk, who was assisted in his efforts by Eduard Beneš, a bitter enemy of the Habsburgs. Thus the new state was effectively shaped before the Paris Peace Conference. But the Conference laid down the seeds of Czechoslovakia's later destruction. Only nine million Czechoslovaks lived in the state out of a population of fourteen million. A large discontented Hungarian minority lived in Slovakia, and the Polish majority area of Teschen poisoned Czech-Polish relations. Yet the greatest challenge came from the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1930s: Masaryk always claimed that he did not want three and half million ethnic Germans, but he and Beneš accepted them nonetheless. Masaryk died in 1937, and Britain and France would not support the Czechs over the Sudetenland, the infamous deal struck in Munich by Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.
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Bennu 3-D
Anatomy of an Asteroid
Dante Lauretta, Brian May, Carina A. Bennett, Kenneth S. Coles, Claudia Manzoni, and C. W. V. Wolner
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.

In 2020 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Bennu and collected pristine asteroid material for delivery to Earth in September 2023. Scientific studies of the samples, along with data collected during the rendezvous, promise to help find answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions: Where did we come from? What is our destiny in space?

This book, the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.
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The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 11
Gayle Reaves
University of North Texas Press, 2024

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The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 3
Gayle Reaves
University of North Texas Press, 2016

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The Best of Technology Writing 2006
Brendan I. Koerner, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2006
“The essays collected in this book are sparkling, imaginative pieces of journalism that just happen to be about technology. People steeped in the world of AJAX or Massively Mulitplayer Online Games will find a lot to value here, but so will readers simply in search of good writing.”
—James Fallows, National Correspondent for Atlantic Monthly


“The human experience is being shaped by our symbiotic relationship to technology. What makes this collection wonderful is that it’s not about the technology, per se, but it’s about this changing human experience. I will look forward to it every year.”
—Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life?


The Best of Technology Writing 2006 brings together some of the most important, timely, and just plain readable writing in the fast-paced, high-stakes field of technology. The first annual collection to target this vibrant and versatile area, The Best of Technology Writing 2006 features innovative work from an unusually diverse array of writers: best-selling authors, noted academics, and indie journalists and bloggers. The culmination of an open, on-line nominating process, this collection covers topics ranging from jetpacks, to the ethics of genetically cloned pets, to the meaning of life in the information age. By turns epic and intimate, serious and playful, The Best of Technology Writing 2006 captures the vitality, importance, and complexity of technology today. Koerner

Featuring contributions from:
David A. Bell
David Bernstein
Mike Daisey
Joshua Davis
Jay Dixit
Daniel Engber
Dan Ferber
Steven Johnson
Steven Levy
Farhad Manjoo
Lisa Margonelli
David McNeill
Justin Mullins
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah
Adam L. Penenberg
Daniel H. Pink
Evan Ratliff
Alex Ross
Jim Rossignol
Jesse Sunenblick
Edward Tenner
Clive Thompson
Joseph Turow
Richard Waters
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor for Wired, a columnist for both New York Times and Slate, and a fellow at the New America Foundation. His first book will be published by Henry Holt & Company in 2008.

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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The Best World War I Story I Know
On the Point in the Argonne, September 26–October 16, 1918
Nimrod T. Frazer
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An astonishing account of fortitude and bravery in World War I

The Best World War I Story I Know: On the Point in the Argonne is the breath-taking story of three US Army divisions tasked with capturing the Côte de Châtillon during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in autumn 1918. Readers will first follow in the footsteps of Missouri-Kansas Guard troops who were repulsed in the opening days of the battle; their courage in the face of heavy fire was not enough to overcome poor leadership.

They were replaced by the 1st Division, the “best of the Regular Army.”  This fine unit became physically and mentally exhausted after suffering  horrendous casualties. Unable to fight on, “The Big Red One” was exchanged at the base of Côte de Châtillon, with the 42nd, the Rainbow Division. It too struggled to gain ground on the heavily-contested hill until General Douglas MacArthur’s determined 84th Brigade of “Alabama cotton pickers and Iowa corn growers” forced their way past the Germans. The Côte was finally in American hands and the war all but over.
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Between the Black Box and the White Cube
Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art
Andrew V. Uroskie
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art.
 
Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.
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Between the Iceberg and the Ship
Selected Essays
Anne Stevenson
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
Feminist critics will find much to invigorate and infuriate them in these essays. Stevenson believes that the "takeover" of poetry by critical theorists has, in recent years, all but brought about its demise in England and America. But she also fears that the media's doctrine of mass marketability may have a detrimental effect on the future of poetry. Her essays on Plath, Bishop, Irish poetry, and other subjects are as witty as they are challenging, upsetting many of the easy assumptions of our putatively "postmodern" era.
Anne Stevenson is the author of numerous books, including Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, The Other House, Four and a Half Dancing Men, and most recently, Collected Poems 1955- 1995.
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Between Two Fires
A Fire History of Contemporary America
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2015
From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved since then.

Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America’s fire story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire’s history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Earth overall. In his earlier life, he spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park.

In Between Two Fires, Pyne recounts how, after the Great Fires of 1910, a policy of fire suppression spread from America’s founding corps of foresters into a national policy that manifested itself as a costly all-out war on fire. After fifty years of attempted fire suppression, a revolution in thinking led to a more pluralistic strategy for fire’s restoration. The revolution succeeded in displacing suppression as a sole strategy, but it has failed to fully integrate fire and land management and has fallen short of its goals.

Today, the nation’s backcountry and increasingly its exurban fringe are threatened by larger and more damaging burns, fire agencies are scrambling for funds, firefighters continue to die, and the country seems unable to come to grips with the fundamentals behind a rising tide of megafires. Pyne has once again constructed a history of record that will shape our next century of fire management. Between Two Fires is a story of ideas, institutions, and fires. It’s America’s story told through the nation’s flames.
 
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Beyond Bondage
Free Women of Color in the Americas
Edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Emancipation, manumission, and complex legalities surrounding slavery led to a number of women of color achieving a measure of freedom and prosperity from the 1600s through the 1800s. These black women held property in places like Suriname and New Orleans, headed households in Brazil, enjoyed religious freedom in Peru, and created new selves and new lives across the Caribbean. Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, carved out many kinds of existences. Although their freedom--represented by respectability, opportunity, and the acquisition of property--always remained precarious, the essayists support the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.
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Beyond Notation
The Music of Earle Brown
Rebecca Y. Kim, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Earle Brown (1926–2002) was a crucial part of a group of experimental composers known as the New York School, and his music intersects in fascinating ways with that of his colleagues John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.  This book seeks to expand our view of Brown’s work by exploring his practices as a composer and draughtsman through a selection of works composed in the United States and Europe, which included a seminal collaboration with sculptor Alexander Calder.  These essays detail Brown’s compositional methods in historical context: not only his influential experiments with open form composition and graphic notation, but his interest in performance, mixed media, jazz, the Schillinger system, and his engagement with the European avant-garde.  The volume also includes never before published essays by Brown that shed new light on his relationships with colleagues and the ideas that shaped his work, in addition to several color photographs of Brown’s paintings.

 
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Beyond Postprocess
Sidney I. Dobrin, J.A. Rice, and Michael Vastola
Utah State University Press, 2011

Beyond Postprocess offers a vigorous, provocative discussion of postprocess theory in its contemporary profile. Fueled by something like a fundamental refusal to see writing as self-evident, reducible, and easily explicable, the contributors rethink postprocess, suggesting that there is no easily defined moment or method that could be called postprocess. Instead, each contribution to this collection provides a unique and important example of what work beyond postprocess could be.

Since postprocess theory in writing studies first challenged traditional conceptions of writing and the subject who writes, developments there have continued to push theorists of writing in a number of promising theoretical directions. Spaces for writing have arisen that radically alter ideological notions of space, rational thinking, intellectual property and politics, and epistemologies; and new media, digital, and visual rhetorics have increasingly complicated the scene, as well.

Contributors to Beyond Postprocess reconsider writing and writing studies through posthumanism, ecology, new media, materiality, multimodal and digital writing, institutional critique, and postpedagogy. Through the lively and provocative character of these essays, Beyond Postprocess aims to provide a critical site for nothing less than the broad reevaluation of what it means to study writing today. Its polyvocal considerations and conclusions invest the volume with a unique potential to describe not what that field of study should be, but what it has the capacity to create. The central purpose of Beyond Postprocess is to unleash this creative potential.

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Beyond September 11
An Anthology of Dissent
Edited by Phil Scraton
Pluto Press, 2002
The unprecedented and tragic events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania left an indelible mark on world politics. Civilian deaths in horrific circumstances triggered an uncompromising response from the US administration and its allies: an open-ended 'war on terrorism'.

This anthology includes some of the world's leading commentators - Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Naomi Klein, John Pilger, Paul Foot and A.Sivanandan. It presents accessible, detailed and often deeply personal accounts of the aftermath, the bombing of Afghanistan and the dubious claims for its legality. From investigative journalists to critical academics, human rights lawyers and anti-racist campaigners, the contributors are united in their opposition to military intervention in Afghanistan and beyond and to the attack on civil liberties in the US, the UK and Europe.

From the US and Canada, Herman and Julia Schwendinger, Jonathan Farley, Tony Platt, Cecilia O'Leary, Christian Parenti and Michael Mandel are among critical academics who assess the validity, lawfulness and political consequences of the Bush/Blair agenda. European based commentators include Martti Gronfors and Thomas Mathiesen.

Examining the the context and rhetoric of US vengeance -- ennobled by the symbolic title 'Enduring Freedom' -- they challenge political and popular definitions, constructions,pathologisation and reporting of terrorism. In questioning the representation of war as 'just', the anthology focuses on civilian deaths in Afghanistan, evidence of US/allied atrocities, violations of prisoners' rights and US determination to escalate military offensives, regardless of global destabilisation.
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Beyond Squid Game
Korean Media and the Netflix Paradigm
Benjamin M. Han
University of Texas Press, 2026

Examining Netflix’s global influence through its complex global-local dynamics in Korean media.

Korea is a global entertainment powerhouse, thanks in no small part to Netflix. Analyzing the artistry and industry behind Netflix-produced Korean hits like Squid Game, The Glory, and Narco-Saints, Benjamin Han argues that Korea is ground zero for an emerging “Netflix Paradigm.” The US-based streaming platform generates massive profits by erasing boundaries of foreign and domestic production, even as it underscores the resilience of the national media within global popular culture.

Beyond Squid Game breaks down the intricate and often ambivalent relationship between Netflix and the Korean media business, drawing on interviews with creative workers navigating the streaming giant’s ever-increasing economic and cultural power. Challenging narratives that present Netflix as a revolutionary disruptor, Han shows how the company has replicated abroad the precarious labor conditions and tensions over intellectual property from which US studios have long benefited. At the same time, Beyond Squid Game underscores the complex dynamics of a globalized media industry in which cultural imperialism thrives on localization and perceived authenticity.

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Beyond the Archives
Research as a Lived Process
Edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan Foreword by Lucille M. Schultz
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

This collection of highly readable essays reveals that research is not restricted to library archives. When researchers pursue information and perspectives from sources beyond the archives—from existing people and places— they are often rewarded with unexpected discoveries that enrich their research and their lives.

Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process presents narratives that demystify and illuminate the research process by showing how personal experiences, family history, and scholarly research intersect. Editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan emphasize how important it is for researchers to tap into their passions, pursuing research subjects that attract their attention with creativity and intuition without limiting themselves to traditional archival sources and research methods.

Eighteen contributors from a number of disciplines detail inspiring research opportunities that led to recently published works, while offering insights on such topics as starting and finishing research projects, using a wide range of types of sources and methods, and taking advantage of unexpected leads, chance encounters and simple clues. In addition, the narratives trace the importance of place in archival research, the parallels between the lives of research subjects and researchers, and explore archives as sites that resurrect personal, cultural, and historical memory.

Beyond the Archives sheds light on the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of research, addressing what attracts researchers to their subjects, as well as what inspires them to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work. This timely and essential volume supplements traditional-method textbooks and effectively models concrete practices of retrieving and synthesizing information by professional researchers.

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Beyond the Public Sphere
Film and the Feminist Imaginary
María Pía Lara
Northwestern University Press, 2021

In Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary, the renowned philosopher and critical theorist María Pía Lara challenges the notion that the bourgeois public sphere is the most important informal institution between social and political actors and the state.

Drawing on a wide range of films—including The Milk of Sorrow, Ixcanul, Wadja, The Stone of Patience, Marnie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Talk to Her—Lara dissects cinematic images of women’s struggles and their oppression. She builds on this analysis, developing a concept of the feminist social imaginary as a broader and more complex space that provides a way of thinking through the possibilities for emancipatory social transformation in response to forms of domination perpetuated by patriarchal capitalism.

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Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate
Free Speech and the Inculcation of Values
Robert Wheeler Lane
Temple University Press, 1995
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 1995 "What makes Lane's approach unique is that he weaves together different perspectives on the nature of school into a very colorful but informative and lucid tapestry that seeks the outer limits of free expression within the boundaries of the school context, always with an eye toward promoting the goal of inculcation of values, a worthy end for students and school officials alike." --Samuel M. Davis, Allen Post Professor of Law, University of Georgia *In a 1969 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the suspension of student for protesting the Vietnam War violated the First Amendment. *In 1972, the U.S. court of appeals upheld the suspension of black high school students for protesting the playing of "Dixie" at a pep rally. *In 1986, a U.S. district court ruled that the suspension of a student for directing a vulgar gesture at one of his school teachers in a fast-food restaurant was unconstitutional. On what grounds do public school students merit First Amendment protection? These three examples illustrate the broad range of litigation that has attempted to answer this question. Robert Wheeler Lane reviews the obstacles of this important issue and suggests a mix of protection and autonomy for students. Pulling together evidence about the aims of public education, the changing legal status of children, and the values underlying freedom of expression, Lane debates the relationship between constitutional litigation and the dual pursuits of academic excellence and classroom order. Ultimately, utilizing both lower court and Supreme Court decisions, he finds that independent student expression deserves considerable constitutional protection; student expression assisted by school officials (such as school-funded student newspapers) should be subject to some control; and nonstudent expression (such as a school's selection of library books) should be left largely to the school's discretion. His conclusions suggest that in forging First Amendment protection for public school students, strongly held positions need not be extreme.
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Beyond the Stars 3
The Material World in American Popular Film
Paul Loukides
University of Wisconsin Press

This anthology deals with such diverse conventions as the treatment of food, the iconography of weapons, the paraphernalia of baseball, the uses of clothing, tools, and technologies, and the representation of art and print media within the world of film. The essays within this collection help to reveal how the objects in American movies reflect both the fixed and changeable cultural assumptions of film makers and film audiences.

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Big Data Recommender Systems
Algorithms, Architectures, Big Data, Security and Trust, Volume 1
Osman Khalid
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
First designed to generate personalized recommendations to users in the 90s, recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to users’ data to suggest information, products, and services that best match their preferences. In recent decades, we have seen an exponential increase in the volumes of data, which has introduced many new challenges.
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Big Data Recommender Systems
Application Paradigms, Volume 2
Osman Khalid
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
First designed to generate personalized recommendations to users in the 90s, recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to users’ data to suggest information, products, and services that best match their preferences. In recent decades, we have seen an exponential increase in the volumes of data, which has introduced many new challenges.
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Big Data Recommender Systems
Recent trends and advances
Osman Khalid
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
This timely volume combines experimental and theoretical research on big data recommender systems to help computer scientists develop new concepts and methodologies for complex applications. It includes original scientific contributions in the form of theoretical foundations, comparative analysis, surveys, case studies, techniques and tools. The authors give special attention to key topics such as data filtering and cleaning techniques for recommendations, novelty and diversity, privacy issues, security threats and their mitigation, trust, cold start, sparsity, scalability, application domains, and recommender system evaluations.
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Big Data-Enabled Internet of Things
Muhammad Usman Shahid Khan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
The fields of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) have seen tremendous advances, developments, and growth in recent years. The IoT is the inter-networking of connected smart devices, buildings, vehicles and other items which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors and actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. The IoT produces a lot of data. Big data describes very large and complex data sets that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with, and the use of analytical methods to extract value from data. This edited book covers analytical techniques for handling the huge amount of data generated by the Internet of Things, from architectures and platforms to security and privacy issues, applications, and challenges as well as future directions.
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The Big Sourcebook of Free and Low-Cost Library Programming
300+ Resources, Ideas, and Tools
Ellyssa Kroski
American Library Association, 2024

There’s no need to spend hours trying to come up with creative programming ideas—bestselling library activity guru Kroski has already done all the hard work for you! Largely drawn from contributions by library workers across the country, this e-book is a cornucopia of ready-to-go activities, easily accessible resources, and adaptable tools for inspiring countless fun and engaging programs at your library. Best of all, these exciting low cost/no-cost library programs can be implemented using only free resources. Offering a broad selection of ideas for adults, tweens, and younger children that can be tailored to a variety of contexts, inside this sourcebook you’ll discover

  • seniors and older adult programming resources on such topics as genealogy, financial literacy, lifelong learning, gardening, and health and wellness;
  • career, ESL/literacy, and "just for fun" programs and book clubs perfect for adults;
  • young adult programming resources such as the Book to Action toolkit, YALSA’s Teen Programming Guidelines, literacy and educational resources, computers and coding activities, live action roleplaying games (LARPS), and many more;
  • free resources to teach financial responsibility to toddlers, lesson plans from NASA, resources to host an Earth Day event incorporating a “free trees for kids” program, StoryWalks and more ideas for children;
  • makerspace, STEM, and art programming resources;
  • Pinterest boards, idea lists, writing prompts, coloring pages, free books, and passive programming downloadables and printables;
  • information about more than two dozen grant opportunities for funding programs; and
  • planning templates, marketing tips, assessment resources, and tools for brainstorming and productivity.
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Billionaires and Stealth Politics
Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In 2016, when millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, many believed his claims that personal wealth would free him from wealthy donors and allow him to “drain the swamp.” But then Trump appointed several billionaires and multimillionaires to high-level positions and pursued billionaire-friendly policies, such as cutting corporate income taxes. Why the change from his fiery campaign rhetoric and promises to the working class? This should not be surprising, argue Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe: As the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us has widened, the few who hold one billion dollars or more in net worth have begun to play a more and more active part in politics—with serious consequences for democracy in the United States.

Page, Seawright, and Lacombe argue that while political contributions offer a window onto billionaires’ influence, especially on economic policy, they do not present a full picture of policy preferences and political actions. That is because on some of the most important issues, including taxation, immigration, and Social Security, billionaires have chosen to engage in “stealth politics.” They try hard to influence public policy, making large contributions to political parties and policy-focused causes, leading policy-advocacy organizations, holding political fundraisers, and bundling others’ contributions—all while rarely talking about public policy to the media. This means that their influence is not only unequal but also largely unaccountable to and unchallengeable by the American people. Stealth politics makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to know what billionaires are doing or mobilize against it. The book closes with remedies citizens can pursue if they wish to make wealthy Americans more politically accountable, such as public financing of political campaigns and easier voting procedures, and notes the broader types of reforms, such as a more progressive income tax system, that would be needed to increase political equality and reinvigorate majoritarian democracy in the United States.
 
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Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture
A View from the Southeast
Edited by Patricia M. Lambert
University of Alabama Press, 2000

Investigations of skeletal remains from key archaeological sites reveal new data and offer insights on prehistoric life and health in the Southeast.

The shift from foraging to farming had important health consequences for prehistoric peoples, but variations in health existed within communities that had made this transition. This new collection draws on the rich bioarchaeological record of the Southeastern United States to explore variability in health and behavior within the age of agriculture. It offers new perspectives on human adaptation to various geographic and cultural landscapes across the entire Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, and presents new data from both classic and little-known sites.

The contributors question the reliance on simple cause-and-effect relationships in human health and behavior by addressing such key bioarchaeological issues as disease history and epidemiology, dietary composition and sufficiency, workload stress, patterns of violence, mortuary practices, and biological consequences of European contact. They also advance our understanding of agriculture by showing that uses of maize were more varied than has been previously supposed.

Representing some of the best work being done today by physical anthropologists, this volume provides new insights into human adaptation for both archaeologists and osteologists. It attests to the heterogeneous character of Southeastern societies during the late prehistoric and early historic periods while effectively detailing the many factors that have shaped biocultural evolution.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 3, Cabanel to Cory
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans
Southern Illinois University Press, 1975

Volumes three and four of this monumen­tal work include full entries for all such illustrious names as those of the Cibbers—Colley, Theophilus, and Susanna Maria—Kitty Clive, and Charlotte Charke, George Colman, the Elder, and the Younger, William Davenant, and De Loutherboug. But here also are full entries for dozens of important secondary figures and of minor ones whose stories have never been told, as well as a census (and at least a few recoverable facts) for even the most inconsiderable performers and servants of the theatres.

As in the previous volumes in this dis­tinguished series, the accompanying illus­trations include at least one picture of each subject for whom a portrait exists.

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The Biological Bulletin, volume 240 number 3 (June 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 241 number 3 (December 2021)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 241 number 3 (December 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 241 issue 3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
[more]

front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 242 number 3 (June 2022)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 242 number 3 (June 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 242 issue 3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
[more]

front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 243 number 3 (December 2022)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 243 number 3 (December 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 243 issue 3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
[more]

front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 244 number 3 (June 2023)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 244 number 3 (June 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 244 issue 3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
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front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 245 number 3 (December 2023)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 245 number 3 (December 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 245 issue 3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
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front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 246 number 2-3 (April 2024)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 246 number 2-3 (April 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 246 issue 2-3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
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front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 247 number 2-3 (October 2024)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 247 number 2-3 (October 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 247 issue 2-3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
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front cover of The Biological Bulletin, volume 248 number 2-3 (April 2025)
The Biological Bulletin, volume 248 number 2-3 (April 2025)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
This is volume 248 issue 2-3 of The Biological Bulletin. The Biological Bulletin disseminates novel scientific results in broadly related fields of biology in keeping with more than 100 years of a tradition of excellence. The Bulletin publishes outstanding original research with an overarching goal of explaining how organisms develop, function, and evolve in their natural environments. To that end, the journal publishes papers in the fields of Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biomechanics, Ecology and Evolution, Development and Reproduction, Cell Biology, Symbiosis and Systematics. The Bulletin emphasizes basic research, including articles on marine model systems and those of an interdisciplinary nature.
[more]

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Birding the Hudson Valley
Kathryn J. Schneider
University Press of New England, 2018
Although an estimated four hundred thousand Hudson Valley residents feed, observe, or photograph birds, the vast majority of New Yorkers enjoy their birdwatching activities mostly around the home. Kathryn J. Schneider’s engaging site guide provides encouragement for bird enthusiasts to expand their horizons. More than just a collection of bird-finding tips, this book explores Hudson Valley history, ecology, bird biology, and tourism. It describes sites in every county in the region, including farms, grasslands, old fields, wetlands, orchards, city parks, rocky summits, forests, rivers, lakes, and salt marshes. Designed for birders of all levels of skill and interest, this beautifully illustrated book contains explicit directions to more than eighty locations, as well as useful species accounts and hints for finding the valley’s most sought-after birds.
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Birds of Fire
Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion
Kevin Fellezs
Duke University Press, 2011
Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, a musical idiom that emerged as young musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the time, fusion was disparaged by jazz writers and ignored by rock critics. In the years since, it has come to be seen as a commercially driven jazz substyle. Fusion never did coalesce into a genre. In Birds of Fire, Kevin Fellezs contends that hybridity was its reason for being. By mixing different musical and cultural traditions, fusion artists sought to disrupt generic boundaries, cultural hierarchies, and critical assumptions. Interpreting the work of four distinctive fusion artists—Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Herbie Hancock—Fellezs highlights the ways that they challenged convention in the 1960s and 1970s. He also considers the extent to which a musician can be taken seriously as an artist across divergent musical traditions. Birds of Fire concludes with a look at the current activities of McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock; Williams’s final recordings; and the legacy of the fusion music made by these four pioneering artists.
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Bitter English
Ahmad Almallah
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Imagine you are a Palestinian who came to America as a young man, eventually finding yourself caught between the country you live in with your wife and daughter, and the home—and parents—you left behind. Imagine living every day in your nonnative language and becoming estranged from your native tongue, which you use less and less as you become more ensconced in the United States. This is the story told by Ahmad Almallah in Bitter English, an autobiography-in-verse that explores the central role language plays in how we construct our identities and how our cultures construct them for us.
 
Through finely crafted poems that utilize a plainspoken roughness to keep the reader slightly disoriented, Almallah replicates his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies. There is a sense of displacement to these poems as Almallah recounts the amusing, sad, and perilous moments of day-to-day living in exile. At the heart of Bitter English is a sense of loss, both of home and of his mother, whose struggle with Alzheimer’s becomes a reflection of his own reality in exile. Filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations of the world, Bitter English brings a fresh poetic voice to the American immigrant experience.
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Black and White Cinema
A Short History
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Rutgers University Press, 2015
From the glossy monochrome of the classic Hollywood romance, to the gritty greyscale of the gangster picture, to film noir’s moody interplay of light and shadow, black-and-white cinematography has been used to create a remarkably wide array of tones. Yet today, with black-and-white film stock nearly impossible to find, these cinematographic techniques are virtually extinct, and filmgoers’ appreciation of them is similarly waning.  
 
Black and White Cinema is the first study to consider the use of black-and-white as an art form in its own right, providing a comprehensive and global overview of the era when it flourished, from the 1900s to the 1960s. Acclaimed film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon introduces us to the masters of this art, discussing the signature styles and technical innovations of award-winning cinematographers like James Wong Howe, Gregg Toland, Freddie Francis, and Sven Nykvist. Giving us a unique glimpse behind the scenes, Dixon also reveals the creative teams—from lighting technicians to matte painters—whose work profoundly shaped the look of black-and-white cinema.  
 
More than just a study of film history, this book is a rallying cry, meant to inspire a love for the artistry of black-and-white film, so that we might work to preserve this important part of our cinematic heritage. Lavishly illustrated with more than forty on-the-set stills, Black and White Cinema provides a vivid and illuminating look at a creatively vital era.
 
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Black Fire
African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights
Harold D. Weaver, Jr.
QuakerPress, 2011

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Black Freethinkers
A History of African American Secularism
Christopher Cameron
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Black Freethinkers argues that, contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, freethought has been central to black political and intellectual life from the nineteenth century to the present. Freethought encompasses many different schools of thought, including atheism, agnosticism, and nontraditional orientations such as deism and paganism. 

Christopher Cameron suggests an alternative origin of nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. He also traces the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. In a final chapter, he explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Examining a wealth of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters, the study follows the lives and contributions of well-known figures, including Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser-known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore. 
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The Black Intellectual Tradition
African American Thought in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, and James B. Stewart
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.

Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

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Black Jack
John A. Logan and Southern Illinois in the Civil War Era
James Pickett Jones. Foreword by John Y. Simon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

John A. Logan, called "Black Jack" by the men he led in Civil War battles from the Henry-Donelson campaign to Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and on to Atlanta, was one of the Union Army’s most colorful generals.

James Pickett Jones places Logan in his southern Illinois surroundings as he examines the role of the political soldier in the Civil War. When Logan altered his stance on national issues, so did the southern part of the state. Although secession, civil strife, Copperheadism, and the new attitudes created by the war contributed to this change of position in southern Illinois, Logan’s role as political and military leader was important in the region’s swing to strong support of the war against the Confederacy, to the policies of Lincoln, and eventually, to the Republican party.

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Black Poachers, White Hunters
A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya
Edward I. Steinhart
Ohio University Press, 2006
For centuries, Kenya’s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts. This both created and enforced an image of African inferiority and subordination. Ultimately conservationists came to claim sovereignty over African wildlife, completing the transformation of indigenous hunters into criminal poachers and seeking to eliminate them altogether from the “sportsman’s paradise” of Kenya.ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Edward I. Steinhart is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.
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Black Powder, White Lace
The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
Margaret M. Mulrooney
University of Delaware Press, 2023
Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.
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Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War
Howard C. Westwood
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Recounting the experiences of black soldiers in the Civil War

In the ten probing essays collected in this volume, Howard C. Westwood recounts the often bitter experiences of black men who were admitted to military service and the wrenching problems associated with the shifting status of African Americans during the Civil War.

Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War covers topics ranging from the roles played by Lincoln and Grant in beginning black soldiery to the sensitive issues that arose when black soldiers (and their white officers) were captured by the Confederates. The essays relate the exploits of black heroes such as Robert Smalls, who single-handedly captured a Confederate steamer, as well as the experiences of the ignoble Reverend Fountain Brown, who became the first person charged with violating the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although many thousands were enlisted as soldiers, blacks were barred from becoming commissioned officers and for a long time they were paid far less than their white counterparts. These and other blatant forms of discrimination understandably provoked discontent among black troops which, in turn, sparked friction with their white commanders. Westwood's fascinating account of the artillery company from Rhode Island amply demonstrates how frustrations among black soldiers came to be seen as "mutiny" by some white officers.

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Black Wave
How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters
Daniel P. Aldrich
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others?
           
Black Wave illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding.
 
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Black Women against the Land Grab
The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador’s city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women’s views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.

In Black Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women–led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women’s agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.

Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt, Black Women against the Land Grab offers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.

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Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean
Critical Research and Perspectives
Melanie A. Medeiros
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women’s social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women’s innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and book chapters. This volume situates these social and political analyses as interrelated and dialogic and contributes a transnational perspective to contemporary conversations surrounding the continued relevance of Black women as a category of social science inquiry. Many of the contributing authors are from Latin American and Caribbean countries, reflecting a commitment to representing the valuable observations and lived experiences of scholars from this region. When read together, the chapters offer a hemispheric framework for understanding the lasting legacies of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, plantation life, and persistent socio-economic and cultural violence.
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A Blacklist Education
American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire
Jane S. Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2025

Finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction 

In A Blacklist Education, a mysterious file of family papers triggers a journey through the dark days of political purges in the 1950s. Jane S. Smith tells the story of the anticommunist witch hunt that sent shockwaves through New York City’s public schools as more than a thousand teachers were targeted by Board of Education investigators. Her father was one of them—a fact she learned only long after his death.
 
Beginning in 1949, amid widespread panic about supposed communist subversion, investigators questioned teachers in their homes, accosted them in their classrooms, and ordered them to report to individual hearings. The interrogations were not published, filmed, open to the public, or reported in the news. By 1956, hundreds of New York City teachers had been fired, often because of uncorroborated reports from paid informers or anonymous accusers. 
 
Most of the targeted teachers resigned or retired without any public process, their names recorded only in municipal files and their futures never known. Their absence became the invisible outline of an educational void, a narrowing of thought that pervaded classrooms for decades. In this highly personal story, family lore and childhood memory lead to restricted archives, forgotten inquisitions, and an eerily contemporary campaign to control who could teach and what was acceptable for students to learn.
 

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The Blitz Companion
Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City since 1911
Mark Clapson
University of Westminster Press, 2019
The Blitz Companion offers a unique overview of a century of aerial warfare, its impact on cities and the people who lived in them. It tells the story of aerial warfare from the earliest bombing raids and in World War 1 through to the London Blitz and Allied bombings of Europe and Japan. These are compared with more recent American air campaigns over Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the NATO bombings during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and subsequent bombings in the aftermath of 9/11. Beginning with the premonitions and predictions of air warfare and its terrible consequences, the book focuses on air raids precautions, evacuation and preparations for total war, and resilience, both of citizens and of cities. The legacies of air raids, from reconstruction to commemoration, are also discussed. While a key theme of the book is the futility of many air campaigns, care is taken to situate them in their historical context. The Blitz Companion also includes a guide to documentary and visual resources for students and general readers. Uniquely accessible, comparative and broad in scope this book draws key conclusions about civilian experience in the twentieth century and what these might mean for military engagement and civil reconstruction processes once conflicts have been resolved.
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Block by Block
Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side
Amanda I. Seligman
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America.

Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the "flight" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.
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Blockchain Fundamentals for Web 3.0
-
Mary C. Lacity
Epic Books, 2022
Our book explains the movement to establish online trust through the decentralization of value, identity, and data ownership. This movement is part of ‘Web 3.0’, the idea that individuals rather than institutions will control and benefit from online social and economic activities. Blockchain technologies are the digital infrastructure for Web 3.0. While there are many books on blockchains, crypto, and digital assets, we focus on blockchain applications for Web 3.0. Our target audience is students, professionals, and managers who want to learn about the overall Web 3.0 landscape—the investments, the size of markets, major players, and the global reach—as well as the economic and social value of applications.
 
We present applications that use Web 3.0 technologies to unlock value in DeFi, NFTs, supply chains, media, identity, credentials, metaverses, and more. Readers will learn about the underlying technologies, the maturity of Web 3.0 today, and the future of the space from thought-leaders. This textbook is used by undergraduate and graduate Blockchain Fundamentals courses at the University of Arkansas, the University of Wyoming, and other universities around the world. Professors interested in adopting this book for instructional purposes are welcome to contact the authors for supporting instructional materials.
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Blood and Fire
La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953
Mary Roldan
Duke University Press, 2003
Between 1946 and 1966a surge of violence in Colombia left 200,000 dead in one of the worst conflicts the western hemisphere has ever experienced. the first seven years of this little-studied period of terror, known as la Violencia, is the subject of Blood and Fire. Scholars have traditionally assumed that partisan politics drove La Violencia, but Mary Roldán challenges earlier assessments by providing a nuanced account of the political and cultural motives behind the fratricide. Although the author acknowledges that partisan animosities played an important role in the disintegration of peaceful discourse into violence, she argues that conventional political conflicts were intensified by other concerns.
Through an analysis of the evolution of violence in Antioquia, which at the time was the wealthiest and most economically diverse region of Colombia, Roldán demonstrates how tensions between regional politicians and the weak central state, diverse forms of social prejudice, and processes of economic development combined to make violence a preferred mode of political action. Privatization of state violence into paramilitary units and the emergence of armed resistance movements exacted a horrible cost on Colombian civic life, and these processes continue to plague the country.
Roldan’s reading of the historical events suggests that Antioquia’s experience of la Violencia was the culmination of a brand of internal colonialism in which regional identity formation based on assumptions of cultural superiority was used to justify violence against racial or ethnic "others" and as a pretext to seize land and natural resources. Blood and Fire demonstrates that, far from being a peculiarity of the Colombians, la Violencia was a logical product of capitalist development and state formation in the modern world.
This is the first study to analyze intersections of ethnicity, geography, and class to explore the genesis of Colombian violence, and it has implications for the study of repression in many other nations.
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Bloody Good
Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War
Allen J. Frantzen
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In the popular imagination, World War I stands for the horror of all wars. The unprecedented scale of the war and the mechanized weaponry it introduced to battle brought an abrupt end to the romantic idea that soldiers were somehow knights in shining armor who always vanquished their foes and saved the day. Yet the concept of chivalry still played a crucial role in how soldiers saw themselves in the conflict.

Here for the first time, Allen J. Frantzen traces these chivalric ideals from the Great War back to their origins in the Middle Ages and shows how they resulted in highly influential models of behavior for men in combat. Drawing on a wide selection of literature and images from the medieval period, along with photographs, memorials, postcards, war posters, and film from both sides of the front, Frantzen shows how such media shaped a chivalric ideal of male sacrifice based on the Passion of Jesus Christ. He demonstrates, for instance, how the wounded body of Christ became the inspiration for heroic male suffering in battle. For some men, the Crucifixion inspired a culture of revenge, one in which Christ's bleeding wounds were venerated as badges of valor and honor. For others, Christ's sacrifice inspired action more in line with his teachings—a daring stay of hands or reason not to visit death upon one's enemies.

Lavishly illustrated and eloquently written, Bloody Good will be must reading for anyone interested in World War I and the influence of Christian ideas on modern life.
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Bloody Williamson
A Chapter in American Lawlessness
Paul M. Angle; Introduction by John Y. Simon
University of Illinois Press, 1952

"In Williamson County some men took to violence almost as a way of life. A shocking story, well told."--New Yorker

Williamson County in southern Illinois has been the scene of almost unparalleled violence, from the Bloody Vendetta between two families in the 1870s through the Herrin Massacre of 1922, Ku Klux Klan activities that ended in fatalities, and the gang war of the 1920s between the Charlie Birger and Shelton brothers gangs. Paul Angle was fascinated by this more-than-fifty-year history, and his account of this violence has become a classic.

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front cover of BLUE HIGHWAYS Revisited
BLUE HIGHWAYS Revisited
Edgar I. Ailor III, Photography by Edgar I. Ailor III and Edgar I. Ailor IV, Foreword by William Least Heat-Moon
University of Missouri Press, 2012
In 1978, William Least Heat-Moon made a 14,000-mile journey on the back roads of America, visiting 38 states along the way. In 1982, the popular Blue Highways, which chronicled his adventures, was published. Three decades later, Edgar Ailor III and his son, Edgar IV, retraced and photographed Heat-Moon’s route, culminating in Blue Highways Revisited, released for publication on the thirtieth anniversary of Blue Highways. A foreword by Heat-Moon notes, "The photographs, often with amazing accuracy, capture my verbal images and the spirit of the book. Taking the journey again through these pictures, I have been intrigued and even somewhat reassured that America is changing not quite so fast as we often believe. The photographs, happily, reveal a recognizable continuity – but for how much longer who can say – and I'm glad the Ailors have recorded so many places and people from Blue Highways while they are yet with us."

Through illustrative photography and text, Ailor and his son capture once more the local color and beauty of the back roads, cafes, taverns, and people of Heat-Moon’s original trek. Almost every photograph in Blue Highways Revisited is referenced to a page in the original work. With side-by-side photographic comparisons of eleven of Heat-Moon’s characters, this new volume reflects upon and develops the memoir of Heat-Moon’s cross-country study of American culture and spirit. Photographs of Heat-Moon’s logbook entries, original manuscript pages, Olympia typewriter, Ford van, and other artifacts also give readers insight into Heat-Moon’s approach to his trip. Discussions with Heat-Moon about these archival images provide the reader insight into the travels and the writing of Blue Highways that only the perspective of the author could provide.

Blue Highways Revisited reaffirms that the "blue highway" serves as a romantic symbol of the free and restless American spirit, as the Ailors lose themselves to the open road as Heat-Moon did thirty years previously. This book reminds readers of the insatiable attraction of the “blue highway”—“But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day or night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself” (Introduction to Blue Highways).
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Blue Hours
A Novel
Daphne Kalotay
Northwestern University Press, 2019

A mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, Blue Hours tells of a life-changing friendship between two memorable heroines. When we first meet Mim, she is a recent college graduate who has disavowed her lower middle class roots to befriend Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrangement. Twenty years later, Kyra has gone missing from her NGO’s headquarters in Jalalabad, and Mim—now a recluse in rural New England—embarks on a journey to find her. In its nuance, originality, and moral complexity, Blue Hours becomes an unexpected page-turner.

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Blue Song
St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams
Henry I. Schvey
University of Missouri Press, 2022
In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri.

The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.
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Blues Before Sunrise 3
Guitar Slingers and Backbeaters
Steve Cushing. Introduction by Wayne Everett Goins
University of Illinois Press, 2025

Steve Cushing’s third volume of interviews from Blues Before Sunrise puts fans face-to-face with music legends and industry figures. The volume kicks off with a roundtable featuring drumming all-stars Earl Phillips, S.P. Leary, Odie Payne, Clifton James, and Fred Below discussing their lives and craft. Cushing segues to one-on-one interviews with Howlin’ Wolf sideman Phillips; Leary, a fellow Wolf alum and player with Sonny Boy Williamson II; Payne, known for his kick drum technique; longtime Muddy Waters drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith; next-generation standard bearer and session mainstay Casey Jones; and King Records house drummer Phillip Paul.

Interviews with guitarists include talks with Honeyboy Edwards, whose friendships with innumerable Chicago blues legends (and Robert Johnson) predated the Great Migration; jazz player turned bluesman Guitar Shorty; and figures like Texas native Roy Gaines, Johnny Heartsman of Oakland, and Memphis-born Floyd Murphy. A final section offers interviews with vocalists, record label founders, and other figures. Music scholar Wayne Everett Goins provides an introduction on blues history, blues style, and the careers of the featured artists.

Interviews: Joel Dorn, Honeyboy Edwards, Slim Gaillard, Roy Gaines, Johnny Heartsman, Franz Jackson, Casey Jones, S.P. Leary, Floyd Murphy, Jimmy “T-99” Nelson, Johnny Parth, Phillip Paul, Odie Payne, Earl Phillips, Art Sheridan, Guitar Shorty, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, and Norvel Taborn

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The Body of Brooklyn
David Lazar
University of Iowa Press, 2003
Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, 'This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?"
The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of non-fiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.
Contributors: 
John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer.
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