front cover of Gabriel's Fire
Gabriel's Fire
A Memoir
Luis Gabriel Aguilera
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Like many boys, Luis Gabriel Aguilera grew up with cartoons, music, friends, and first loves. As he entered his teenage years, he faced the typical questions of adolescence—what kind of person did he want to be? how should he live his life? But for Aguilera, now in his twenties, these questions had a particular urgency. A Mexican immigrant, he came of age in a Polish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that was encroached upon by threats of gangs and drugs. He attended Catholic school and, at age thirteen, began an affair with one of the teachers at the local elementary school. All the while he documented his teenage years in a series of journals, which have now grown into Gabriel's Fire.

Aguilera's memoir is not just an account of race relations and street life in the inner city, nor of the plight of the immigrant and the dilemma of class identity for a "minority" family. Gabriel's Fire also movingly recounts the peculiarly daunting and inspiring moments of a particular age, riddled with confusion, desires, and duties and recorded by an exceptionally observant and articulate young man. Aguilera writes that he "grew into" the English language when he was eleven or twelve, and his recollections reflect his newfound delight with words—the conversations, arguments, taunts, song lyrics, and casual interchanges of his youth are rendered here with an immediacy and directness rare in contemporary memoirs.

Both a picture of American culture of the 1980s and 1990s and a coming-of-age story, Gabriel's Fire counters mainstream and mass-mediated images of the inner city, Hispanic culture, and troubled youth. In its honesty and energy, it is a poignant and compelling story of one man's formative years.
[more]

front cover of A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
Melvin B. Tolson, Edited & Afterword by Robert M. Farnsworth
University of Missouri Press, 1979
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits is Melvin B. Tolson's first book-length collection of poems. It was written in the 1930s when Tolson was immersed in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, the subject of his master's thesis at Columbia University, and will provide scholars and critics a rich insight into how Tolson's literary picture of Harlem evolved. Modeled on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and showing the influence of Browning and Whitman, it is rooted in the Harlem Renaissance in its fascination with Harlem's cultural and ethnic diversity and its use of musical forms. Robert M. Farnsworth's afterword elucidates these and other literary influences.

Tolson eventually attempted to incorporate the technical achievements of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism into a complex modern poetry which would accurately represent the extraordinary tensions, paradoxes, and sophistication, both highbrow and lowbrow, of modern Harlem. As a consequence his position in literary history is problematical. The publication of this earliest of his manuscripts will help clarify Tolson's achievement and surprise many of his readers with its readily accessible, warmly human poetic portraiture.
[more]

front cover of Game
Game
Animals, Video Games, and Humanity
Tom Tyler
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A playful reflection on animals and video games, and what each can teach us about the other
 

Video games conjure new worlds for those who play them, human or otherwise: they’ve been played by cats, orangutans, pigs, and penguins, and they let gamers experience life from the perspective of a pet dog, a predator or a prey animal, or even a pathogen. In Game, author Tom Tyler provides the first sustained consideration of video games and animals and demonstrates how thinking about animals and games together can prompt fresh thinking about both.

Game comprises thirteen short essays, each of which examines a particular video game, franchise, aspect of gameplay, or production in which animals are featured, allowing us to reflect on conventional understandings of humans, animals, and the relationships between them. Tyler contemplates the significance of animals who insert themselves into video games, as protagonists, opponents, and brute resources, but also as ciphers, subjects, and subversive guides to new ways of thinking. These animals encourage us to reconsider how we understand games, contesting established ideas about winning and losing, difficulty settings, accessibility, playing badly, virtuality, vitality and vulnerability, and much more.

Written in a playful style, Game draws from a dizzying array of sources, from children’s television, sitcoms, and regional newspapers to medieval fables, Shakespearean tragedy, and Edwardian comedy; from primatology, entomology, and hunting and fishing manuals to theological tracts and philosophical treatises. By examining video games through the lens of animals and animality, Tyler leads us to a greater humility regarding the nature and status of the human creature, and a greater sensitivity in dealings with other animals.

[more]

logo for American Library Association
Game On! Gaming at the Library
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2009

front cover of Game Poems
Game Poems
Videogame Design as Lyric Practice
Jordan Magnuson
Amherst College Press, 2023

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

“Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems.” — Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design

“Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames.” — D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT

“[Game Poems] tells a new story about games— that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging—to inspire creators and critics alike.” —Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats

“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play.  It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”—Stuart Moulthrop, coauthor of Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
 
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”—John Cayley, Brown University
 
“In Game Poems, Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”—Frank Lantz, Director, NYU Game Center
 
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”—Benjamin Ellinger, Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
 
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own practice of making videogames. His mission to help us apply a ‘lyric reading’ to games so that our engagement with, and appreciation of, games can be enhanced feels deeply personal. Drawing from a wide range of games and computational media scholars, poetry scholars, game creators, and poets, Magnuson provides a rigorous, balanced, and unique interdisciplinary contribution. A must-read for videogame scholars, practicing game makers, and anyone interested in the potential of ‘game poems.’”—Susana Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz
 
“This book tenaciously wrenches videogame hermeneutics from the insatiable maws of rhetoric and narratology—to the cheers of poets everywhere. In elucidating the lyric characteristics of the "game poem," Magnuson demonstrates not just that poetry is a useful lens for understanding videogames, but also that videogames can be a useful lens for understanding poetry. A rewarding text for scholars, game designers, poets, and anyone in between.”—Allison Parrish, Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, NYU
 
“A concise, passionate articulation - and defense! - of an artistic space between poems and videogames. If game scholars wish to prove that they are not engaged merely in an apologetics for violent pornography, they need only to teach this book.”—Chris Bateman, author of Imaginary Games and 21st Century Game Design
 
“I feel I've found a kindred spirit in Jordan Magnuson and his practical recommendations for creating distilled, compelling, personal videogames – throw out the conventions of game design one at a time? Yes, please! The revelation for me in this book, however, is the heat and power of the language of poets and poetry brought close to videogame design. There's much in here worth pursuing to kindle the fires of new and exciting videogame poems, and Jordan is a capable and delightfully humble guide.”—Pippin Barr, author of How to Play a Video Game and The Stuff Games Are Made Of
 
“With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson lays to rest any last vestige of the notion that the implicit limits of games are as ‘entertainment products’. By taking games seriously as successors of the lyric poetry tradition, he opens up new avenues for how game designers can think about what they do, how critical game theorists can approach their many-faceted object of study, and how players can more fully engage with videogames.”—Soraya Murray, author of On Video Games
 
“Game Poems shines an important light on a neglected area of videogame theory and provides unique guidance for those interested in exploring the poetic potential of videogames.”—Jenova Chen, designer of Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light
 
“Popular frameworks for video game scholarship consistently fail to account for the most avant-garde and affective works of interactive art. With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson provides not only a lens to understand these diverse and important titles but also a guide to constructing the next generation of personal and incisive games. With numerous examples from decades of experimental games, including Magnuson's own minimalist and insightful work, this book is an excellent introduction to the form for neophytes as well as finally providing words to describe a movement that many experienced game poets previously understood only intuitively.”—Gregory Avery-Weir, creator of The Majesty of Colors and Looming
 
“Jordan Magnuson is one of a surprisingly small group of artists who see in the technology of videogames a versatile medium capable of expressing much more than conventional games.”—Michaël Samyn, co-founder, Tale of Tales; co-creator of Sunset, The Graveyard, and The Path
 
“So much has been written about what games are, and yet there’s always a new way of thinking about them. In Jordan Magnuson’s Game Poems we discover that games are also a lyrical form of art; that games can be understood as poetry, and that the making games as poetry creates new modes of artistic expression. Jordan Magnuson’s book is a fascinating exploration of games as poetry, and the poetry of play.”—Miguel Sicart, author of Play Matters, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Playing Software
 
“In Game Poems, I found a new perspective on the kind of videogames that are dearest to me: short, personal, poetic games. By looking at games through the lens of lyric poetry, Jordan Magnuson puts into focus the workings of that mysterious hodgepodge of audio, visuals, and interactivity: the language of videogames. Both experienced and novice game makers will find approachable, practical advice on the craft of videogames. And anyone who plays short games will find new ways of appreciating and talking about them. I know I will be returning to it for inspiration when making my own small games!”—Adam Le Doux, creator of Bitsy
 
“As a creator and researcher, Jordan Magnuson has been able to demonstrate through the utmost visual simplicity, by enhancing basic geometric forms, the empathetic capacity of the videogame medium. Game Poems explores this idea and the reconfiguration of the videogame beyond its ludic component, highlighting the artistic and poetic potential of games.”—Antonio César Moreno Cantano, University Complutense of Madrid
 
“Poems ask us to slow down, pay attention, and take the time to appreciate our experiences. Emerging from Magnuson's need to find ways to talk about his own creative practice, this book is all about discovering ways to do this with videogames. Magnuson explores what it means to view videogames as poetry, and provides insight, as a practitioner, on how to make game poems that enable and encourage this type of reflection. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from literature and philosophy to game studies and game design, this book covers a lot of material, but always remains grounded in concrete examples and solid theory. The book ends with a call to “go make some game poems!” After reading the book, I was keen to do exactly that. I urge you to do the same!”—Alex Mitchell, National University of Singapore
 
“To many, poetry is a dying – or dead – art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet’s chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson’s book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style – and brevity – of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful.”—Tim Samoff, Games and Interactive Media Program Director, Azusa Pacific University

[more]

front cover of Game Work
Game Work
Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture
Ken S. McAllister
University of Alabama Press, 2006

Video and computer games in their cultural contexts.

As the popularity of computer games has exploded over the past decade, both scholars and game industry professionals have recognized the necessity of treating games less as frivolous entertainment and more as artifacts of culture worthy of political, social, economic, rhetorical, and aesthetic analysis. Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though games are essentially impractical, they are nevertheless important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power.

In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games—and the work they involve and the industry they spring from—are also negotiating power.

This book sets out a method for "recollecting" some of the diverse and copious influences on computer games and the industry they have spawned. Specifically written for use in computer game theory classes, advanced media studies, and communications courses, Game Work will also be welcome by computer gamers and designers.

Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Gameplay Mode
War, Simulation, and Technoculture
Patrick Crogan
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War. To understand their place in contemporary culture, Patrick Crogan argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. Gameplay Mode situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool.

Crogan begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force’s attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. military’s development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. He then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.

Drawing on critical theoretical perspectives on computer-based technoculture, Crogan reveals the profound extent to which today’s computer games—and the wider culture they increasingly influence—are informed by the technoscientific program they inherited from the military-industrial complex. But, Crogan concludes, games can play with, as well as play out, their underlying logic, offering the potential for computer gaming to anticipate a different, more peaceful and hopeful future.

[more]

logo for American Library Association
Gamers…in the Library?! The Why, What, and How of Videogame Tournaments for All Ages
Eli Neiburger
American Library Association, 2007

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Games of Empire
Global Capitalism and Video Games
Nick Dyer-Witheford
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.

In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street.

Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development.

Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.

[more]

front cover of The Games of July
The Games of July
Explaining the Great War
Frank C. Zagare
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Frank C. Zagare combines a deep command of historical scholarship and the sophisticated skills of an applied game theorist to develop and test a theory of why deterrence failed, catastrophically, in July 1914. . . . Zagare concludes with sage advice on how to avoid even more cataclysmic breakdowns in a nuclear world."
---Steven J. Brams, New York University

"Zagare's deft study of the origins of the First World War using his perfect deterrence theory uncovers new insights into that signal event and shows the value of formal theory applied to historical events. A must-read for those interested in security studies."
---James D. Morrow, University of Michigan

"Through an exemplary combination of formal theory, careful qualitative analysis, and lucid prose, The Games of July delivers important and interesting answers to key questions concerning the international political causes of World War I. Its well-formed narratives and its sustained engagement with leading works in IR and diplomatic history . . . make it a rewarding read for security scholars in general and a useful teaching tool for international security courses."
---Timothy W. Crawford, Boston College

Taking advantage of recent advances in game theory and the latest historiography, Frank C. Zagare offers a new, provocative interpretation of the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. He analyzes key events from Bismarck's surprising decision in 1879 to enter into a strategic alliance with Austria-Hungary to the escalation that culminated in a full-scale global war. Zagare concludes that, while the war was most certainly unintended, it was in no sense accidental or inevitable.

The Games of July serves not only as an analytical narrative but also as a work of theoretical assessment. Standard realist and liberal explanations of the Great War are evaluated along with a collection of game-theoretic models known as perfect deterrence theory.

Frank C. Zagare is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Cover illustration: Satirical Italian postcard from World War I. Used with permission from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

[more]

front cover of Gaming at the Edge
Gaming at the Edge
Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture
Adrienne Shaw
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter.

In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates.

Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

[more]

front cover of Gaming
Gaming
Essays On Algorithmic Culture
Alexander R. Galloway
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices.

In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions.

Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form.

Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age.

Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Gaming Exhaustion
Reclaiming Play from Late Capitalism
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
Duke University Press, 2027
The neoliberal, capitalist logics that underpin the world are failing. Everyone is exhausted, and video games are not the relaxation tools they are often marketed as. In Gaming Exhaustion, Rainforest Scully-Blaker frames video games as media technologies that inform and are informed by culture. Through studies of popular titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, World of Warcraft, and American Truck Simulator, Scully-Blaker shows that games perpetuate hegemonic logics that deplete and oppress, further driving the fatigue that plagues life under capitalism and maintaining an exhausting status quo. However, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. Whether by design or through play, video games can help identify and confront exhaustion and offer models of regenerative play which demand more restful ways of being. Speaking against the systemic conditions that leave people too exhausted to live otherwise, Scully-Blaker demonstrates how the critical, revitalizing potential of play can enable us to take our time before it is taken.
[more]

front cover of Gaming Masculinity
Gaming Masculinity
Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture
Megan Condis
University of Iowa Press, 2018

In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.

Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.

Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.

[more]

front cover of Gaming Matters
Gaming Matters
Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium
Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4
In his 2004 book Game Work, Ken S. McAllister proposed a rigorous critical methodology for the discussion of the “video game complex”—the games themselves, their players, the industry that produces them, and those who review and market them. Games, McAllister demonstrated, are viewed and discussed very differently by different factions: as an economic force, as narrative texts, as a facet of popular culture, as a psychological playground, as an ethical and moral force, even as a tool for military training.
 
In Gaming Matters, McAllister and coauthor Judd Ruggill turn from the broader discussion of video game rhetoric to study the video game itself as a medium and the specific features that give rise to games as similar and yet diverse as Pong, Tomb Raider, and Halo. In short, what defines the computer game itself as a medium distinct from all others? Each chapter takes up a different fundamental characteristic of the medium. Games are:
• Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study
• Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them
• Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands
on players’ attention
• Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play
while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies
• Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies
• Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play
• Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable
Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.
 
Gaming Matters will neither flatter game enthusiasts nor embolden game detractors in their assessments. But it will provide a vocabulary through which games can be discussed in academic settings and will create an important foundation for future academic discourse.
[more]

front cover of Gandhi
Gandhi
The Traditional Roots of Charisma
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph
University of Chicago Press, 1983
The Rudolphs' analysis reveals that Gandhi's charisma was deeply rooted in the aspects of Indian tradition that he interpreted for his time. They key to his political influence was his ability to realize in both his daily life and his public actions, cultural ideals that many Indians honored but could not enact themselves—ideals such as the traditional Hindu belief that a person's capacity for self-control enhances his capacity to control his environment. Appealing to shared expectations and recognitions, Gandhi was able to revitalize tradition while simultaneously breaking with some of its entrenched values, practices, and interests. One result was a self-critical, ethical, and inclusive nationalist movement that eventually led to independence.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Gastrodiplomacy
Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943
Heather Ruth Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2027

Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age. 

In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.

In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.

[more]

front cover of Gates of Awe
Gates of Awe
Holy Day Prayers for Young Children
Rabbi Howard I. Bogot
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1991
The second in a series of prayerbooks for early childhood use, Gates of Awe contains rich and enchanting illustrations combined with poetic text that enhances the sense of awe found during the Holy Days. The special qualities of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are skillfully introduced to young worshippers through the inspiration of prayer, the excitement of the Shofar, and the lessons in the stories of Abraham and Torah.
 
[more]

front cover of Gates of Wonder
Gates of Wonder
A Prayerbook for Very Young Children
Rabbi Howard Bogot
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1989
This is the first official prayerbook for young children ever produced by the Reform Movement. Intended for pre-school children through six years of age, Gates of Wonder is beautifully illustrated by award-winning artist Neil Waldman. As young children enter the Gates of Wonder they will experience a world of beauty, a world of mystery and the enduring world of Jewish prayer.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Gay Men at the Movies
Cinema, Memory and the History of a Gay Male Community
Scott McKinnon
Intellect Books, 2016
Cinema has long played a major role in the formation of community among marginalized groups, and this book details that process for gay men in Sydney, Australia from the 1950s to the present. Scott McKinnon builds the book from a variety of sources, including film reviews, media reports, personal memoirs, oral histories, and a striking range of films, all deployed to answer the question of understanding cinema-going as a moment of connection to community and identity—how the experience of seeing these films and being part of an audience helped to build a community among the gay men of Sydney in the period.
 
[more]

front cover of Geezers' Guide to Colorado Hikes
Geezers' Guide to Colorado Hikes
Stuart A. Schneck
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Written by two self-proclaimed "geezers" who have shared forty-six years of hiking together, The Geezers' Guide to Colorado Hikes is the first book aimed at hikers over the age of sixty, as well as not-yet-acclimated visitors to Colorado, who want a glorious outdoor experience with minimal accompanying pain.

Fifty-six hikes are described that fit, in a graded fashion, the physical capabilities of most older hikers. While the majority of hikes listed are in the Denver / Boulder area and the nearby foothills, the authors have detailed several routes in Rocky Mountain National Park, Aspen, and Vail that will entice more ambitious readers up into the high Colorado Rockies.

The Geezers' Guide to Colorado Hikes includes an overview of the physiology of altitude and aging, a summary of altitude-related medical problems, notes on hike preparation and what to pack, and 56 recommended hikes with: Degree of difficulty ratings, distances, e stimated round-trip time for the older hiker, starting altitude and elevation gain figures, driving direction, trail descriptions, and maps.

[more]

front cover of Gehennical Fire
Gehennical Fire
The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution
William R. Newman
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Both the quest for natural knowledge and the aspiration to alchemical wisdom played crucial roles in the Scientific Revolution, as William R. Newman demonstrates in this fascinating book about George Starkey (1628-1665), America's first famous scientist. Beginning with Starkey's unusual education in colonial New England, Newman traces out his many interconnected careers—natural philosopher, alchemist, chemist, medical practitioner, economic projector, and creator of the fabulous adept, "Eirenaeus Philalethes." Newman reveals the profound impact Starkey had on the work of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and other key thinkers in the realm of early modern science.
[more]

front cover of Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba
Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba
The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin
Adriana Mendez Rodenas
Vanderbilt University Press, 1998
Author of novels, memoirs, and travel writings, Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, better known as la Condesa de Merlin (1789-1852), is arguably one of Cuba's most engaging authors; yet until now her works have gone largely ignored.

Born in colonial Havana to an aristocratic Creole family, the future countess of Merlin left Cuba for Spain at an early age. Later, her marriage to the French count Antoine Christophe Merlin and the invasion of French Napoleonic troops precipitated another move to France, where she became one of the belle dames of Paris and began her literary career. She returned only once to Cuba after the death of her husband in 1840, a journey that produced Viaje a la Habana. Upon her return to Paris, Merlin expanded this into La Havane, an ambitious three-volume account of the political, social, and economic organization of the island.

From the viewpoint of feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba brilliantly explores the many ways in which issues of gender have contributed to Merlin's virtual absence from the canons of literature and from the discourses on Cuban national identity. Merlin's double identity as both Cuban and French is symbolic of the Cuban exiled condition, a fact taken up by contemporary exiled Cuban writers who see the countess as an alter-ego.

Mendez Rodenas seeks to restore Merlin as the first woman writer in Cuban literary history to articulate a sense of national identity, as well as being Cuba's first female historian. She focuses on Merlin's travel writings because they examine such issues as slavery, independence, nationhood, the role of women, education, and local literature. Together her writings construct an alternative, gendered history of nineteenth-century Cuba that must be acknowledged as both functional and authentic.

By situating Merlin at the intersection of the discourses of gender and nationalism, Mendez Rodenas reveals not only her pioneering role but also the need to expand current critical categories to account for the specificity of the Latin American literary tradition. In the process of restoring Merlin to her appropriate place in the canon of Latin American literature, she broadens our understanding of colonial Cuban history and expands our knowledge of the ways in which travel writing can influence a country's national literature .

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music
Thomas B. Yee
Intellect Books, 2024
Analyzing music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings.

This book provides semiotically focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on the musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship, these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as the representation of gender, race, and religion in video games.

An original and welcome contribution to the field, it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender, race, and religion. This book will help readers develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music, the book sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game’s soundtrack as mere background music, this research demonstrates video game music’s social relevance as a major factor impacting players’ cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs.

Part I explores immersion, interactivity, and interpretation in video game music, proposing a theory of interpretative interactivity to account for players’ semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores musical gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction, alternative femininities and masculinities, and the potential for nonbinary representational possibilities. Part III explores the musical representation of nationality, culture, and race, proposing the concept of racialized fantasy and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real-world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion, introducing the concept of sonic iconography to connect theological meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.
 
[more]

front cover of The Genealogical Science
The Genealogical Science
The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology
Nadia Abu El-Haj
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The Genealogical Science analyzes the scientific work and social implications of the flourishing field of genetic history. A biological discipline that relies on genetic data in order to reconstruct the geographic origins of contemporary populations—their histories of migration and genealogical connections to other present-day groups—this historical science is garnering ever more credibility and social reach, in large part due to a growing industry in ancestry testing. 
 
In this book, Nadia Abu El-Haj examines genetic history’s working assumptions about culture and nature, identity and biology, and the individual and the collective. Through the example of the study of Jewish origins, she explores novel cultural and political practices that are emerging as genetic history’s claims and “facts” circulate in the public domain and illustrates how this historical science is intrinsically entangled with cultural imaginations and political commitments.  Chronicling late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century understandings of race, nature, and culture, she identifies continuities and shifts in scientific claims, institutional contexts, and political worlds in order to show how the meanings of biological difference have changed over time.  In so doing she gives an account of how and why it is that genetic history is so socially felicitous today and elucidates the range of understandings of the self, individual and collective, this scientific field is making possible. More specifically, through her focus on the history of projects of Jewish self-fashioning that have taken place on the terrain of the biological sciences, The Genealogical Science analyzes genetic history as the latest iteration of a cultural and political practice now over a century old. 
[more]

front cover of General Smuts
General Smuts
South Africa
Antony Lentin
Haus Publishing, 2009
Jan Smuts was one of the key figures behind the creation of the League of Nations; Wilson was inspired by his ideas, including the mandates scheme. He pleaded for a magnanimous peace, warning that the treaty of Versailles would lead to another war.
[more]

front cover of Generation Vet
Generation Vet
Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University
Sue Doe
Utah State University Press, 2014

Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student veterans for English and writing studies departments.

In work with veterans in writing-intensive courses and community contexts, questions of citizenship, disability, activism, community-campus relationships, and retention come to the fore. Moreover, writing-intensive courses can be sites of significant cultural exchanges—even clashes—as veterans bring military values, rhetorical traditions, and communication styles that may challenge the values, beliefs, and assumptions of traditional college students and faculty.

This classroom-oriented text addresses a wide range of issues concerning veterans, pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing program administration. Written by diverse scholar-teachers and written in diverse genres, the essays in this collection promise to enhance our understanding of student veterans, composition pedagogy and administration, and the post-9/11 university.

[more]

front cover of Generational Politics in the United States
Generational Politics in the United States
From the Silents to Gen Z and Beyond
Sally Friedman and David Schultz, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024
The role of generations is an important, yet often overlooked, variable in the study of American politics. A topic of research in sociology, business, and marketing, the focus on generations frequently occurs in American pop culture and journalism. The general public often assumes that different generations have different political leanings and beliefs—that the Silent Generation is all Republican, white, and conservative, or that Millennials are liberal and diverse—but are these assumptions true?

Generational Politics in the United States is the first comprehensive book that examines the concept of generations from a political science perspective. It defines what a generation is and how to sort out the differences between life cycle, cohort, and aging effect. The book then brings together chapters from an array of political science scholars that examine the role of generations in American politics and how it relates to other variables such as age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. It discusses how politics in the United States are impacted by changes in generations, including how the passing of the Baby Boom generation and rise of the Millennials and Gen Z will change American politics. By examining the differences in political attitudes, engagement, and impact of recent generations, Generational Politics in the United States suggests how generational change will impact American politics in the future.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
The Genius of the System
Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
Thomas Schatz
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz recalls Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1920s until the dawn of television in the late 1940s, when quality films were produced swiftly and cost efficiently thanks to the intricate design of the system. Schatz takes us through the rise and fall of individual careers and the making—and unmaking—of movies such as Frankenstein, Casablanca, and Hitchcock’s Notorious. Through detailed analysis of major Hollywood moviemakers including Universal, Warner Bros., and MGM, he reminds us of a time when studios had distinct personalities and the relationship between contracts and creativity was not mutually exclusive.
[more]

front cover of Genre Migrations
Genre Migrations
Rhetorical Borders in Post-9/11 U.S. Literature
Liliana M. Naydan
University of Iowa Press, 2026
President John F. Kennedy believed the U.S. to be a nation of immigrants, an opinion that influenced the country’s rhetoric and public feelings for decades. But opinions changed after 9/11. Immigration developed into a national security issue and one of the most hotly debated political talking points, openly reflecting the xenophobia entrenched in U.S. history.

Genre Migrations argues that authors Jhumpa Lahiri, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Claudia Rankine, and Gary Shteyngart address immigration in both their content and innovative literary form. These authors highlight the relationship between immigrant identities and others, exposing borders—and genres—as porous and malleable constructs. Through their revisionist aesthetics and rhetorical engagements, these writers challenge the logic of globalization and xenophobia and condemn blind adherence to the limiting conventions of genres and life.
[more]

front cover of Gentile New York
Gentile New York
The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants
Ribak, Gil
Rutgers University Press, 2012

The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process.

Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.
 

[more]

front cover of Gentlemen on the Prairie
Gentlemen on the Prairie
Victorians in Pioneer Iowa
Harnack, Curtis
University of Iowa Press, 1985

@font-face { font-family: "Palatino";}@font-face { font-family: "?????? Pro W3";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.FreeForm, li.FreeForm, div.FreeForm { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

In the 1880s, the well-connected young Englishman William B. Close and his three brothers, having bought thousands of acres of northwest Iowa prairie, conceived the idea of enticing sons of Britain’s upper classes to pursue the life of the landed gentry on these fertile acres. “Yesterday a wilderness, today an empire”: their bizarre experiment, which created a colony for people “of the better class” who were not in line to inherit land but whose fathers would set them up in farming, flourished in Le Mars, Iowa (and later in Pipestone, Minnesota), with over five hundred youths having a go at farming. In Gentlemen on the Prairie, Curtis Harnack tells the remarkable story of this quite unusual chapter in the settling of the Midwest.    

Many of these immigrants had no interest in American citizenship but enjoyed or endured the challenging adventure of remaining part of the empire while stranded on the plains. They didn’t mix socially with other Le Mars area residents but enjoyed such sports as horse racing, fox hunts, polo, and an annual derby followed by a glittering grand ball. Their pubs were named the House of Lords, the House of Commons, and Windsor Castle; the Prairie Club was a replica of a London gentlemen’s club, an opera house attracted traveling shows, and their principal hotel was Albion House. In St. George’s Episcopal Church, prayers were offered for the well-being of Queen Victoria.

Problems soon surfaced, however, even for these well-heeled aristocrats. The chief problem was farm labor; there was no native population to exploit, and immigrant workers soon bought their own land. Although sisters might visit the colonists and sometimes marry one of them, appropriate female companionship was scarce. The climate was brutal in its extremes, and many colonists soon sold their acres at a profit and moved to countries affiliated with Britain. When the financial depression in the early 1890s lowered land values and made agriculture less profitable, the colony collapsed. Harnack skillfully draws upon the founder’s “Prairie Journal,” company ledgers, and other records to create an engaging, engrossing story of this quixotic pioneering experiment.

[more]

front cover of Geopolitical Economy
Geopolitical Economy
The South Korean FTA Strategy
Jonathan Krieckhaus
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Geopolitical Economy examines the significance and nature of free trade agreements (FTAs), the primary policy tool through which modern nations seek access to international markets and promote economic growth. The book focuses specifically on how South Korea, the world’s leader in the number and significance of FTAs as well as the world’s sixth largest export economy, uses FTAs.

Jonathan Krieckhaus argues that geopolitics—the struggle between powerful nations over specific geographic regions around the globe—influenced FTA strategy and economic policy in South Korea and beyond. This perspective illustrates the security approach to FTAs, but adds that the geographic specificity of security concerns deeply shape FTA policy.

Geopolitical Economy also looks at Korean FTAs through the lens of development strategy. South Korea is singularly successful in garnering FTAs with all three players in the global economy: the United States, the European Union, and China. This unprecedented success was built on a strong commitment from three consecutive Korean presidential administrations, each operating within a favorable state-society context that enjoyed the existence of a centralized and effective trade bureaucracy.

[more]

front cover of George Cukor
George Cukor
A Double Life
Patrick McGilligan
University of Minnesota Press, 2013


One of the highest-paid studio contract directors of his time, George Cukor was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director. In publicity and mystique he was dubbed the “women’s director” for guiding the most sensitive leading ladies to immortal performances, including Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, and—in ten films, among them The Philadelphia Story and Adam’s Rib—his lifelong friend and collaborator Katharine Hepburn. But behind the “women’s director” label lurked the open secret that set Cukor apart from a generally macho fraternity of directors: he was a homosexual, a rarity among the top echelon. Patrick McGilligan’s biography reveals how Cukor persevered within a system fraught with bigotry while becoming one of Hollywood’s consummate filmmakers.

[more]

front cover of The George Washington Bridge
The George Washington Bridge
Poetry in Steel
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.

Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.

.
[more]

front cover of The George Washington Bridge
The George Washington Bridge
Poetry in Steel
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 108 million vehicles crossing it in 2007. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the late 1920s when the bridge was built through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it some day.
  • First major book on the George Washington Bridge
  • Full of amazing facts about the GWB that will surprise even bridge historians
  • Includes over 30 spectacular illustrations, ranging from archival photographs of the building of the bridge to those that show it draped in an enormous flag after 9/11
  • Includes personal accounts of the author's adventures on the bridge
[more]

front cover of Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau
France
David Watson
Haus Publishing, 2010
The Anglo-Saxon view of Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) is based on John Maynard Keynes's misjudged caricature, that he had imposed a treaty that was harsh and oppressive of Germany. French critics' view, however, is that he had been too lenient, and left Germany in a position to challenge the treaty. In fact the treaty was a just settlement, and it could have been maintained. The failure was not in the terms of the treaty but in the subsequent failure to insist on maintaining them in the face of German resistance.
[more]

front cover of German Ways of War
German Ways of War
The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films
Jaimey Fisher
Rutgers University Press, 2022
German Ways of War deploys theories of space, mobility, and affect to investigate how war films realize their political projects. Analyzing films across the decades, from the 1910s to 2000s, German Ways of War addresses an important lacuna in media studies: while scholars have tended to focus on the similarities between cinematic looking and weaponized targeting -- between shooting a camera and discharging a gun – this book argues that war films negotiate spaces throughout that frame their violence in ways more revealing than their battle scenes. Beyond that well-known intersection of visuality and violence, German Ways of War explores how the genre frames violence within spatio-affective operations. The production of novel spaces and evocation of new affects transform war films, including the genre’s manipulation of mobility, landscape, territory, scales, and topological networks. Such effects amount to what author Jaimey Fisher terms the films’ “affective geographies” that interweave narrative-generated affects, spatial depictions, and political processes.
 
[more]

front cover of The Ghost of Meter
The Ghost of Meter
Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse
Annie Finch
University of Michigan Press, 2000

The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse provides a new strategy for interpreting the ways in which metrical patterns contribute to the meaning of poems. Annie Finch puts forth the theory of "the metrical code," a way of tracing the changing cultural connotations of metered verse, especially iambic pentameter. By applying the code to specific poems, the author is able to analyze a writer's relation to literary history and to trace the evolution of modern and contemporary poetries from the forms that precede them.

Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

Author bio:
Annie Finch, poet, editor, and critic, has published twenty books of poetry and poetics including Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self,  An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, and The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse.  Based in New York, Dr. Finch travels widely to teach and perform her poetry and is the founder of PoetryWitchCommunity.org, where she teaches poetry, meter, and more. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Ghostlife of Third Cinema
Asian American Film and Video
Glen M. Mimura
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

An interpretive history of Asian American independent media since the 1960s

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown.

For Glen M. Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema’s radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha’s experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. In Ghostlife of Third Cinema, Mimura confronts the ongoing erasure of Asian American independent media andilluminates its cultural and political significance today.
[more]

front cover of Giant Steps
Giant Steps
Suffragettes and Soldiers
Mary Blair Immel
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017
As Giant Steps opens, thirteen-year-old Bernie Epperson of Lafayette, Indiana, is wrestling with double standards placed on her compared with her brothers. Soon her cousin awakens her to all the unfair restrictions women face, and Bernie becomes a suffragette. Meanwhile, World War I begins. Her family is devastated when her brothers become soldiers, and Bernie must decide how to help the war effort and continue to fight for women’s rights. While this story is fictional, the details of the suffrage movement and the war efforts of ordinary Americans are true. Middle and high school students will relate to Bernie and her brothers’ dilemmas a century ago because they also face making decisions in a turbulent world while sifting through contradictory news and changing wisdom.
[more]

front cover of Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic
Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic
Thomas H. Cox
Ohio University Press, 2009

Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic examines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.

Decided in 1824, Gibbons v. Ogden arose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall’s court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.

Gibbons v. Ogden initially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress—cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states’ rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided—the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.

[more]

front cover of The Gift
The Gift
Expanded Edition
Marcel Mauss
HAU, 2016
Scan down a list of essential works in any introduction to anthropology course and you are likely to see Marcel Mauss’ masterpiece, The Gift. With this new translation, Mauss’ classic essay is returned to its original context, published alongside the works that framed its first publication in the 1923–24 issue of L’Année Sociologique. With a critical foreword by Bill Maurer and a new introduction by translator Jane Guyer, this expanded edition is certain to become the standard English version of the essay—a gift that keeps on giving.

Included alongside the “Essay on the Gift” are Mauss’ memorial accounts of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues who were lost during World War I, as well as his scholarly reviews of influential contemporaries such as Franz Boas, J. G. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others. Read in the context of these additional pieces, the “Essay on the Gift” is revealed as a complementary whole, a gesture of both personal and political generosity: Mauss’ honor for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern society’s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his own careful, yet critical, reading of his intellectual milieu. The result sets the scene for a whole new generation of readers to study this essay alongside pieces that exhibit the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished the essay into life.
[more]

front cover of Giraffe on Fire
Giraffe on Fire
Juan Felipe Herrera
University of Arizona Press, 2001
First Place co-winner, Best Poetry, Latino Literary Hall of Fame

A poetic collage of voices, genres, and time-spaces. A display of power over language and rhythm. A postmodern performance of naked figures hanging in the nebulae of a militarized universe. A new millennium cubist manifesto against decrepit political machines. A mystic song in search of birth and love. In this new collection of poems, Juan Felipe Herrera's natural talent for capturing the raw dimensions of reality merges with his wild imagination and technical prowess.

Things, names, places, histories, herstories, desires, wills, minds, and their effects and progeny are re-mixed, re-mastered, and re-cast into a new narrative theater. Characters in a constant and stubborn rush, appearance, disappearance, and flow—with, against, and for each other—create the fire and give birth to the hallucinatory spotted and leaf-eating, long-necked child. Exciting and original, cutting-edge and risk-taking, Giraffe on Fire is a breathtaking addition to a respected body of work by a poet not afraid to speak out about how poetry reflects the raw beauty and truth of life.
[more]

front cover of Girls Will Be Boys
Girls Will Be Boys
Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934
Horak, Laura
Rutgers University Press, 2016
2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association
Long-listed for the 2017 Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation​


Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.
 
Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
 
Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.   
[more]

front cover of GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES
GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES
SONGS AND SONGMAKERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST
John I. White
University of Illinois Press, 1975
A former singing cowboy himself, John I. White spent decades compiling information on cowboy and western songs and the artists, songwriters, and others attached to them. He also sought out and corresponded with a who's who of the genre, people like Badger Clark, Curley Fletcher, D. J. O'Malley, Romaine Lowdermilk, Will Barnes, Joseph Mills Hanson, and Owen Wister.
 
In Git Along, Little Dogies, White draws on old friendships and his exhaustive files to bring readers the untold story of cowboy and western song. Wonderful anecdotes stand beside White's trademark attention to detail as he painstakingly establishes the time, place, and circumstance behind each song's origin and places the music within the evolution of popular song. He also looks at how radio and recording affected the genre and shows how the music crisscrossed with pop music but also with folk and the traditional Anglo-Irish tradition.
 
From "Whoopee Ti Yi Yo" to "Ten Thousand Cattle Straying," Git Along, Little Dogies ventures from cow camps to saloons to big-city radio studios as it lassos a vivid piece of American music history. 
 
[more]

front cover of Gleanings of Freedom
Gleanings of Freedom
Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860
Max Grivno
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.
[more]

front cover of Glenway Wescott Personally
Glenway Wescott Personally
A Biography
Jerry Rosco
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901–1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York’s artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn’t finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.
     In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott’s long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott’s private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.

[more]

front cover of Global Cinema Networks
Global Cinema Networks
Gorfinkel, Elena
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames.  
[more]

front cover of Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3
Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in human life
Edited by Alena Ledeneva
University College London, 2024
A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.
 
[more]

front cover of Global Environmental History
Global Environmental History
I. G. Simmons
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The global environment has been in a state of change since the height of the last glacial maximum of the Pleistocene. Examining this state of flux of both the natural environment and the living organisms that inhabit it, I. G. Simmons’s Global Environmental History ranges from 10,000 BCE to the modern day to present an incredibly rich and deep time overview of how we have come to our current state of ecological crisis.

A far-reaching approach that considers the truly global picture and recognizes the contributions of many disciplines—including the natural sciences, the social sciences, and increasingly, the humanities—Global Environmental History focuses not only on the material world but also on humans’ ideas about the planet and their place on it. Taking as his starting point the major phases of human technological evolution of the last 12,000 years, Simmons considers how these changes have affected the natural world and goes on to assess the response to conditions such as climate change. By putting today’s environmental preoccupations into a long-term perspective, Simmons reveals the history of some current anxieties.

A timely examination of the interrelation of history and nature, Simmons’s book will be welcomed by any concerned reader interested in the origins of the modern environmental crisis.
[more]

front cover of The Global Guide to Animal Protection
The Global Guide to Animal Protection
Edited by Andrew Linzey
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Raising awareness of human indifference and cruelty toward animals, The Global Guide to Animal Protection includes more than 180 introductory articles that survey the extent of worldwide human exploitation of animals from a variety of perspectives. In addition to entries on often disturbing examples of human cruelty toward animals, the book provides inspiring accounts of attempts by courageous individuals--including Jane Goodall, Shirley McGreal, Birute Mary Galdikas, Richard D. Ryder, and Roger Fouts--to challenge and change exploitative practices.
 
As concern for animals and their welfare grows, this volume will be an indispensable aid to general readers, activists, scholars, and students interested in developing a keener awareness of cruelty to animals and considering avenues for reform. Also included is a special foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, urging readers to seek justice and protection for all creatures, humans and animals alike.

[more]

front cover of Global Mental Health
Global Mental Health
Latin America and Spanish-Speaking Populations
Javier I Escobar
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Global Mental Health provides an outline of the field of mental health with a particular focus on Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. The book details evidence-based approaches being implemented globally and presents ongoing state of the art research on major mental disorders taking place in Latin America, including work being done on understanding Alzheimer’s, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and other psychoses. While supporting the initiative for building capacity of care in low income countries, the book warns about some of the potential risks related to the abuse of psychiatry, using examples from the past, focusing on early 20th century Spain.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
The Global Police State
William I Robinson
Pluto Press, 2020

"Karl Marx aspired to a world in which our animal needs would be satisfied and our human needs could be addressed. It is a realistic possibility now, as William Robinson outlines—or the alternative that is taking shape before our eyes: a 'global police state' controlled by narrowly concentrated capital with 'surplus humanity' left to survive somehow on its own. The choice is in our hands."
—Noam Chomsky, author of Who Rules the World?
 
As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more “disposable.” Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan.
 
William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists.
 
He writes in his Introduction, “I offer a ‘big picture” of the emerging global police state in a short book that is eminently readable. The pages to follow may startle many readers and make them angry. I trust the work will serve as a warning of the dystopic future that is upon us. More importantly, by exposing the nature and dynamic of this out-of-control system, I hope it will contribute to the struggles to bring about an alternative future based on human freedom and liberation.”
 
Movements have emerged to combat the increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing; however, many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice rather than addressing its root: global capitalism.
 
Using shocking data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global police state.     

[more]

front cover of Global Storytelling, vol. 2, no. 2
Global Storytelling, vol. 2, no. 2
Journal of Digital and Moving Images
Special Issue Editors: Kenneth Paul Tan & Dorothy Lau
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022
In This Issue

Special Issue Editors: Kenneth Paul Tan & Dorothy Lau

Letter from the Editor - YING ZHU

Cold War and New Cold War Narratives: Special Issue Editor’s Introduction - KENNETH PAUL TAN

Research Articles

Notes on Cold War Historiography - LOUIS MENAND

Tales from the Hot Cold War - MARTHA BAYLES

Bomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set - ILONA JURKONYTĖ

Das unsichtbare Visier—A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too - TARIK CYRIL AMAR

To Whom Have We Been Talking? Naeem Mohaiemen’s Fabulation of a People-to-Come - NOIT BANAI

The Man without a Country: British Imperial Nostalgia in Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) - KENNY K. K. NG

Imagining Cooperation: Cold War Aesthetics for a Hot Planet - MARINA KANETI

Book Reviews

Through Space and Time - Review of The Odyssey of Communism: Visual Narratives, Memory and Culture edited by Michaela Praisler and Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021 - ISABEL GALWEY

Review of Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market by Ying Zhu, New Press, 2022 - YONGLI LI

The Cautionary Tale of Painting War Remembrance in China as a New Nationalism - Review of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Rana Mitter, Belknap Press, 2020 - FUWEI ZUO

Tracking American Political Currents - Review of White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina, Cambridge University Press, 2019, and Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class by Reece Peck, Cambridge University Press, 2019 - DAVID GURNEY
[more]

front cover of Global Storytelling, vol. 3, no. 1
Global Storytelling, vol. 3, no. 1
East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming Services: Journal of Digital and Moving Images
Special Issue Editors: Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu
Michigan Publishing Services, 2023
Special Issue 3.1 – East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming Services (Summer 2023)
Special Issue Editors Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu

IN THIS ISSUE

Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu - East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming Services: Special Issue Editors’ Introduction

Research Articles
Ying Zhu - The Therapeutic and the Transgressive: Chinese Fansub Straddling between Hollywood IP Laws and Chinese State Censorship
David Humphrey - Japanese Dramas and the Streaming Success Story that Wasn’t: How Industry Practices and IP Shape Japan’s Access to Global Streaming    
Yucong Hao - Transmedia Adaptation, Sonic Affect, and Multisensory Participation in Contemporary Chinese Danmei Radio Drama
Eunice Ying Ci Lim - The Nostalgic Negotiation of Post-TV Legibility in Mom, Don’t Do That!    
Winnie Yanjing Wu - How Pachinko Mirrors Migrant Life: Rethinking the Temporal, Spatial, and Linguistic Dimensions of Migration

Drama Reviews
Mei Mingxue Nan - Squid Game: The Hall of Screens in the Age of Platform Cosmopolitanism
Shuwen Yang - Review of Light the Night

Short Essay
Sheng-mei Ma - Three Bad Kids, One Loving Killer: Red China Noir in Blakean Symmetry
[more]

front cover of Global Storytelling, vol. 3, no. 2
Global Storytelling, vol. 3, no. 2
Satirical Activism and Youth Culture in and Beyond COVID-19 China: Journal of Digital and Moving Images
Special Issue Editor: Haiqing Yu
Michigan Publishing Services, 2024
Special Issue Editor: Haiqing Yu

Haiqing Yu. COVID-19, Satirical Activism, and Chinese Youth Culture: An Introduction

Research Articles
Ying Zhu and Junqi Peng.  From Diaosi to Sang to Tangping: The Chinese DST Youth Subculture Online
Shaohua Guo. Moments of "Madness": Cynicism in Times of COVID
Howard Choy. Laughter in the Time of Coronavirus: Epidemic Humor and Satire in Chinese Women's Digital Diaries
Shaoyu Tang. Political In Between: Streaming Stand-Up Comedy and Feminist Reckoning in Contemporary Mainland China
Jingxue Zhang and Charlie Yi Zhang. The Power of Citation: Feminist Counter-Appropriation of State Discourses in Post-Reform China

Book Reviews
Ethan Tussey. Revised Research Methodology for the Age of Media Industries Speculation - Review of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries by John Thornton Caldwell, University of California Press, 2023
Michael Keane. Precarious Creativity and the State in New Era China - Review of Chinese Creator Economies: Labor and Bilateral Creative Workers by Jian Lin, New York University Press, 2023
[more]

front cover of Global Storytelling, vol. 4, no. 1
Global Storytelling, vol. 4, no. 1
The Global Social Mediascape of Feminism and Misogyny (Summer 2024)
Special Issue Editor: Hong Zeng
Michigan Publishing Services, 2024
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images serves as an international and interdisciplinary forum for intellectual debates concerning the politics, economics, culture, media, and technology of the moving image. This special issue (Vol 4.1) tackles the topic of The Global Social Mediascape of Feminism and Misogyny.
[more]

front cover of Global Storytelling, vol. 4, no. 2
Global Storytelling, vol. 4, no. 2
Netflix and East Asian Audiovisual Culture (Winter 2024)
Special Issue Editor: Dal Yong Jin
Michigan Publishing Services, 2024
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images serves as an international and interdisciplinary forum for intellectual debates concerning the politics, economics, culture, media, and technology of the moving image. This special issue (Vol 4.2) tackles the topic of Netflix and East Asian Audiovisual Culture.
[more]



front cover of The Gloria Wekker Reader
The Gloria Wekker Reader
Gloria Wekker. Chandra Frank, Nancy Jouwe, and Mikki Stelder, editors. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis.
Duke University Press, 2026
The Gloria Wekker Reader compiles articles, essays, interviews, poems, and letters by the Afro-Surinamese Dutch theorist and activist, Gloria Wekker. Wekker is a preeminent scholar in feminist Black diaspora studies, especially known for her developments in epistemology and methodology, conceptualizations of sexuality, and mapping of the connections between race, gender, and empire. These writings demonstrate Wekker’s theoretical and political prowess, illuminating how her scholarship was foundational in shifting the fields of anthropology, feminist and queer studies, and Black diasporic studies. Featuring a foreword by Angela Y. Davis, engaging with The Gloria Wekker Reader is an invitation for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue to inspire political action.
[more]

front cover of God in the Machine
God in the Machine
Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit
Liel Leibovitz
Templeton Press, 2014
What might Heidegger say about Halo, the popular video game franchise, if he were alive today? What would Augustine think about Assassin’s Creed? What could Maimonides teach us about Nintendo’s eponymous hero, Mario? While some critics might dismiss such inquiries outright, protesting that these great thinkers would never concern themselves with a medium so crude and mindless as video games, it is impor­tant to recognize that games like these are becoming the defining medium of our time. We spend more time and money on video games than on books, television, or film, and any serious thinker of our age should be concerned with these games, what they are saying about us, and what we are learning from them.

Yet video games remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond out­moded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this rumor now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philosophical inquiry.

In God in the Machine, author Liel Leibovitz leads a fas­cinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection all come into play in the video games that some critics so quickly write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, their inherent logic, and their cognitive effects on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, the gameplay is a far more dynamic process that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensa­tions that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engaging game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not to think, but rather to be, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers.

As more and more of us look “screenward,” it is crucial to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with God in the Machine. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years.

[more]

logo for Temple University Press
God In The Street
New York Writing from The Penny Press to Melville
Hans Bergmann
Temple University Press, 1995

In the fast changing culture of antebellum New York, writers of every stripe celebrated "the City" as a stage for the daily urban encounter between the familiar and the inexplicable. Probing into these richly varied texts, Hans Bergmann uncovers the innovations in writing that accompanied the new market society— the penny newspapers' grandiose boastings, the poetic catalogues of Walt Whitman, the sentimental realism of charity workers, the sensationalism of slum visitors, and the complex urban encounters of Herman Melville's fiction.

The period in which New York, the city itself, became firmly established as a subject invented a literary form that attempts to capture the variety of the teeming city and the flaneur, the walking observer. But Bergmann does not simply lead a parade of images and themes; he explores the ways in which these observers understood what was happening around them and to them, always attentive to class struggle and race and gender issues.

God in the Street shows how the penny press and Whitman's New York poetry create a new mass culture hero who interprets and dignifies the city's confusions. New York writers, both serious and sensationalist, meditate upon street encounters with tricksters and confidence-men and explore the meanings of encounters. Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrinever" underlines the unrelenting isolation and inability to control the interpreter. Bergmann reinterprets Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of how a complex literary form arises directly from its own historical materials and is itself socially symbolic. Bergmann sees Melville as special because he recognizes his inability to make sense of the surface of chaotic images and encounters. In mid-century New York City, Melville believes God is in the street, unavailable and unrecognizable, rather than omnipresent and guiding.

 
[more]

front cover of God of Many Names
God of Many Names
Play, Poetry and Power in Hellenic Thought, From Homer to Aristotle
Mihai I. Spariosu
Duke University Press, 1991
Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu’s perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time.
Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus—the “God of many names,” of both poetic play and sacred power—as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides’ Bacchae, Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Poetics and Politics.
Spariosu’s model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics.
[more]

front cover of Gogo Breeze
Gogo Breeze
Zambia’s Radio Elder and the Voices of Free Speech
Harri Englund
University of Chicago Press, 2018
When Breeze FM, a radio station in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired schoolteacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected.
 
Harri Englund provides a masterfully detailed study of this popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, Englund presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property—an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, Englund focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere.
 
A lively, engaging portrait of an extraordinary personality, Gogo Breeze will interest Africanists, scholars of radio and mass media, and anyone interested in the history and future of free speech.
[more]

front cover of Going Solo
Going Solo
Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century
G. Stuart Smith
University of Missouri Press, 2011
The traditional model of video news reporting has always had two separate roles: reporting and videography. For years, however, small-market news outlets have relied on “one-man bands”—individual reporters who shoot and edit their own video—for stories and footage. Lately, as the journalism landscape has evolved, this controversial practice has grown more and more popular. With the use of video constantly expanding, many large-market TV stations, networks, and newspaper Web sites are relying on one person to carry out a job formerly executed by two. News outlets now call these contributors VJs, digital journalists, backpack journalists, or mobile journalists. But no matter what they are called, there’s no denying the growing significance of solo videojournalists to the media landscape.
            Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century details the controversy, history, and rise of this news genre, but its main objective is to show aspiring videojournalists how to learn the craft. While other textbooks depict the conventional reporter-and-videographer model, Going Solo innovates by teaching readers how to successfully juggle the skills traditionally required of two different people.
            Award-winning journalist G. Stuart Smith begins by describing how and why the media’s use of solo videojournalists is growing, then delves into the controversy over whether one person can cover a story as well as two. He illuminates how, together, the downsizing of the media, downturn in the economy, and growth of video on the Web have led to the rise of the solo videojournalist model. Going Solo profiles TV stations and newspaper Web operations across the country that are using the model and offers helpful advice from VJs in the field. The book presents useful guidelines on how to multitask as a reporter-videographer: conducting interviews, shooting cover video, and writing and editing a good video story. Readers will also learn how to produce non-narrated stories and market themselves in a competitive field.
            Smith, who started his career as a “one-man band,” insightfully covers an area of journalism that, despite its growing market demand, has received little academic attention. Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century is useful for students learning the basics and those already in the field who need to upgrade their skills. By presenting industry know-how and valuable tips, this unique guidebook can help any enterprising videojournalist create a niche for him- or herself in the increasingly fragmented news media market.
[more]

front cover of The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 1954–1973
The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 1954–1973
Lester Embree
Ohio University Press, 2017

This collection focuses on the introduction of phenomenology to the United States by the community of scholars who taught and studied at the New School for Social Research from 1954 through 1973. During those years, Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch—all former students of Edmund Husserl—came together in the department of philosophy to establish the first locus of phenomenology scholarship in the country. This founding trio was soon joined by three other prominent scholars in the field: Werner Marx, Thomas M. Seebohm, and J. N. Mohanty. The Husserlian phenomenology that they brought to the New School has subsequently spread through the Anglophone world as the tradition of Continental philosophy.

The first part of this volume includes original works by each of these six influential teachers of phenomenology, introduced either by one of their students or, in the case of Seebohm and Mohanty, by the thinkers themselves. The second part comprises contributions from twelve leading scholars of phenomenology who trained at the New School during this period. The result is a powerful document tracing the lineage and development of phenomenology in the North American context, written by members of the first two generations of scholars who shaped the field.

Contributors: Michael Barber, Lester Embree, Jorge García-Gómez, Fred Kersten, Thomas M. T. Luckmann, William McKenna, J. N. Mohanty, Giuseppina C. Moneta, Thomas Nenon, George Psathas, Osborne P. Wiggins, Matthew M. Seebohm, and Richard M. Zaner.

[more]

front cover of Gone Missing in Harlem
Gone Missing in Harlem
A Novel
Karla FC Holloway
Northwestern University Press, 2021
In her anticipated second novel, Karla Holloway evokes the resilience of a family whose journey traces the river of America’s early twentieth century. The Mosby family, like other thousands, migrate from the loblolly-scented Carolinas north to the Harlem of their aspirations—with its promise of freedom and opportunities, sunlit boulevards, and elegant societies.

The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe. As the Great Depression creeps across the world at the close of the twenties, however, the farsighted see hard times coming.

The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then Chloe goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.

The urgent investigation tests Thomas’s abilities to draw out the secrets Harlem harbors, untangling the color-coded connections and relationships that keep company with greed, ghosts, and grief. With nuanced characters, lush historical detail, and a lyrical voice, Gone Missing in Harlem affirms the restoring powers of home and family.
[more]

front cover of Good Reasons to Run
Good Reasons to Run
Women and Political Candidacy
Edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele
Temple University Press, 2020

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.) 

The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns? 

The essays in Good Reasons to Run ask not just who wants to run, but how to activate and encourage such ambition among a larger population of potential female candidates while also increasing the diversity of women running for office.

[more]

front cover of Good Thinking
Good Thinking
The Foundations of Probability and Its Applications
I.J. Good
University of Minnesota Press, 1983
Good Thinking was first published in 1983.Good Thinking is a representative sampling of I. J. Good’s writing on a wide range of questions about the foundations of statistical inference, especially where induction intersects with philosophy. Good believes that clear reasoning about many important practical and philosophical questions is impossible except in terms of probability. This book collects from various published sources 23 of Good’s articles with an emphasis on more philosophical than mathematical.He covers such topics as rational decisions, randomness, operational research, measurement of knowledge, mathematical discovery, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, chess, and the nature of probability itself. In spite of the wide variety of topics covered, Good Thinking is based on a unified philosophy which makes it more than the sum of its parts. The papers are organized into five sections: Bayesian Rationality; Probability; Corroboration, Hypothesis Testing, and Simplicity; Information and Surprise; and Causality and Explanation. The numerous references, an extensive index, and a bibliography guide the reader to related modern and historic literature.This collection makes available to a wide audience, for the first time, the most accessible work of a very creative thinker. Philosophers of science, mathematicians, scientists, and, in Good’s words, anyone who wants “to understand understanding, to reason about reasoning, to explain explanation, to think about thought, and to decide how to decide” will find Good Thinking a stimulating and provocative look at probability.
[more]

front cover of Goodbye Gluten
Goodbye Gluten
Kim Stanford
University of North Texas Press, 2014

front cover of The Gothic War
The Gothic War
Justinian's Campaign to Reclaim Italy
Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen
Westholme Publishing, 2009
The War that Reshaped the Political Future of Europe

“Jacobsen brings to the story an intimate knowledge of Italy. The battles took place on terrain Jacobsen knows well. . . Recommended.”—Choice

“Jacobsen provides an operational history of Justinian’s campaign. Throughout he traces the military strategies and tactical intrigues of leaders such as the Roman general Belisarius and the Goth leader Totila.”—Publishers Weekly

“Jacobsen knows the sites he writes about, he has read Procopius diligently . . . and his military reconstruction can be faulted only in attributing to both sides rather better command and control than the ancient armies could generally manage. . . . Jacobsen has offered wargamers a tool they will appreciate.”—The Classical Review

A period of stability in the early sixth century A.D. gave the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian an opportunity to recapture parts of the Western Empire which had been lost to invading barbarians in the preceding centuries. The climactic conflict over Italy between 535 and 554—the Gothic War—decided the political future of Europe, holding in its balance the possibility that the Roman Empire might rise again. While large portions of the original territory of the ancient Roman Empire were recaptured, the Eastern Empire was incapable of retaining much of its hard-won advances, and soon the empire once again retracted. As a result of the Gothic War, Italy was invaded by the Lombards who began their important kingdom, the Franks began transforming Gaul into France, and without any major force remaining in North Africa, that territory was quickly overrun by the first wave of Muslim expansion in the ensuing century. Written as a general overview of this critical period, The Gothic War: Justinian’s Campaign to Reclaim Italy opens with a history of the conflict with Persia and the great Roman general Belisarius’s successful conquest of the Vandals in North Africa. After an account of the Ostrogothic tribe and their history, the campaigns of the long war for Italy are described in detail, including the three sieges of Rome, which turned the great city from a bustling metropolis into a desolate ruin. In addition to Belisarius, the Gothic War featured many of history’s most colorful antagonists, including Rome’s Narses the Eunuch, and the Goths’ ruthless and brilliant tactician, Totila. Two appendices provide information about the armies of the Romans and Ostrogoths, including their organization, weapons, and tactics, all of which changed over the course of the war.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Governing Visions of the Real
The National Film Unit and Griersonian Documentary Film in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Lars Weckbecker
Intellect Books, 2015
Governing Visions of the Real traces the emergence, development, and techniques of Griersonian documentary—named for pioneering Scottish filmmaker John Grierson—in New Zealand throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the productions of the National Film Unit in the 1940s and ’50s, Lars Weckbecker follows the shifting practices and governmentality of documentary’s “visions of the real” as New Zealand and its population—particularly workers and its indigenous population—came to be envisioned through NFU film for an ensemble of political, pedagogic, and propagandistic purposes.
[more]

front cover of Grace for Grace
Grace for Grace
Alexander Y. Hwang
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
The contributors to Grace for Grace focus on the debates on grace and free will inspired by Augustine's later teachings on grace and the various reactions to it. In both popular and scholarly literature, the conflict has been traditionally referred to as the "Semi-Pelagian Controversy." For several decades, scholars have distanced themselves from that overly-simplistic and inaccurate portrayal. This book intends to solidify a disparate movement of scholarly thought and offer a secure basis for renewed study of the persons, texts, and events of this critical period in the reception of Augustine in the Early Middle Ages. This volume brings together new perspectives, based on fresh study of a wealth of primary sources, from an international team of scholars to explore the intra-church debates over grace and free will, after Augustine and Pelagius.
[more]

front cover of The Grand Gennaro
The Grand Gennaro
Belluscio, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2009
An illiterate Calabrian in southern Italy owes money to his church and mayor. He skips town for the bustling streets of New York. Meeting an old friend, a fellow immigrant, he thanks him for help getting settled, and then steals his money. With a new parcel of wealth, he materializes from a small-time laborer into a big-time entrepreneur, soon becoming the tyrant of the local Italian American community. By pluck, luck, and unscrupulous business practices, this cunning character "makes America." There are riches, pleasure, and the beautiful Carmela. Then trouble. Comeuppance. Ambush. Revenge.Twenty-first century popular culture? Not at all.

The Grand Gennaro, a riveting saga set at the turn of the last century in Italian American Harlem, reflects on how youthful acts of cruelty and desperation follow many to the grave. A classic in the truest sense, this operatic narrative is alive once again, addressing the question: How does one become an "American"?

[more]

front cover of Granite, Fire, and Fog
Granite, Fire, and Fog
The Natural and Cultural History of Acadia
Tom Wessels
University Press of New England, 2017
Acadia National Park, on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, is among the most popular national parks in the United States. From the road, visitors can experience magnificent vistas of summit and sea, but on a more intimate scale, equally compelling views abound along Acadia’s hiking trails. Tom Wessels, an ecologist, naturalist, and avid hiker, attributes the park’s popularity—and its unusual beauty—to the unique way in which earth, air, fire, and water—in the form of glacially scoured granite, winter winds, fire, and ocean fog—have converged to create a landscape that can be found nowhere else. In this beautifully illustrated book, Wessels invites readers to investigate the remarkable natural history of Mount Desert Island, along with the unique cultural story it gave rise to. This account of nature, terrain, and human interaction with the landscape will delight those who like to hike these bald summits, ride along the carriage roads, or explore the island’s rugged shoreline. Wessels concludes with a guided tour of one of his favorite hikes, a ten-mile loop that will acquaint the reader with the diverse ecosystems described throughout his book.
[more]

front cover of Gray Love
Gray Love
Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60
NaN Bauer-Maglin
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Gray Love narrates stories about the most common themes – searching for and (perhaps) finding love. Forty-five men and women between ages 60 and 94 from diverse backgrounds talk about dating, starting or ending a relationship, embracing life alone or enjoying a partnered one. The longing for connection as old age encroaches is palpable here, with more and more senior singles searching online. Those who find new partners explore issues that most relationships encounter at any age, as well as some that are unique to elder relationships. These include having had previous partners and a complicated and deep personal history; family and friends’ reactions to an older person’s dating; alternative models to marriage (such as sharing space or living apart); having more than one partner at the same time; one’s aging body, appearance, and sexuality; and the pressure of time and the specter of illness and death.
[more]

front cover of The Great Beyond
The Great Beyond
Art in the Age of Annihilation
Philip D. Beidler
University of Alabama Press, 2022

Essays mapping how modern art confronts mortality in an age of war and annihilation.

While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond: Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.
 

[more]

front cover of The Great Disappearing Act
The Great Disappearing Act
Germans in New York City, 1880-1930
Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Where did all the Germans go? How does a community of several hundred thousand people become invisible within a generation?

This study examines these questions in relation to the German immigrant community in New York City between 1880-1930, and seeks to understand how German-American New Yorkers assimilated into the larger American society in the early twentieth century.
By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was one of the largest German-speaking cities in the world and was home to the largest German community in the United States. This community was socio-economically diverse and increasingly geographically dispersed, as upwardly mobile second and third generation German Americans began moving out of the Lower East Side, the location of America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), uptown to Yorkville and other neighborhoods. New York’s German American community was already in transition, geographically, socio-economically, and culturally, when the anti-German/One Hundred Percent Americanism of World War I erupted in 1917.

This book examines the structure of New York City’s German community in terms of its maturity, geographic dispersal from the Lower East Side to other neighborhoods, and its ultimate assimilation to the point of invisibility in the 1920s. It argues that when confronted with the anti-German feelings of World War I, German immigrants and German Americans hid their culture – especially their language and their institutions – behind closed doors and sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a German community.
But becoming invisible did not mean being absorbed into an Anglo-American English-speaking culture and society. Instead, German Americans adopted visible behaviors of a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create, although by no means dominated. Just as the meaning of “German” changed in this period, so did the meaning of “American” change as well, due to nearly 100 years of German immigration.
 
[more]

front cover of The Great Peshtigo Fire
The Great Peshtigo Fire
An Eyewitness Account
Peter Pernin
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1999
Reverend Peter Pernin was the parish priest for Peshtigo and nearby Marinette, whose churches burned to the ground. He published his account of the fire in 1874. The late William Converse Haygood served as editor of the Wisconsin Magazine of History from 1957 to 1975. He prepared this version of Father Pernin's account on the occasion of the Peshtigo Fire's centennial in 1971. Foreword writer Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of numerous books on wildland fire, including Fire in America.
[more]

front cover of The Great Peshtigo Fire
The Great Peshtigo Fire
Stories and Science from America’s Deadliest Fire
Scott Knickelbine
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

On the night of October 8, 1871, a whirlwind of fire swept through northeastern Wisconsin, destroying the bustling frontier town of Peshtigo. Trees, buildings, and people burst into flames. Metal melted. Sand turned into glass. People thought the end of the world had come. When the “tornado of fire” was over, 2,500 people were dead, and Peshtigo was nothing but a smoking ruin. It was the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Great Peshtigo Fire: Stories and Science from America’s Deadliest Firestorm explores the history, science, and legacy of the 1871 Peshtigo Fire at a fourth-grade reading level. Readers will learn about the history of settlement, agriculture, and forestry in 19th-century Wisconsin. This illuminating text covers a diverse range of topics that will enrich the reader’s understanding of the Peshtigo Fire, including the building and land-use practices of the time that made the area ripe for such a fire, the weather patterns that fostered widespread fires throughout the upper Midwest in the summer and fall of 1871, and exciting first-person accounts that vividly bring the `victims’ stories to life. Connections made between the Peshtigo Fire and the history of fire prevention in the United States encourage critical thinking about issues that remain controversial to this day, such as planned burns and housing development restrictions near forested areas. The Great Peshtigo Fire: Stories and Science from America’s Deadliest Firestorm will inform and captivate its readers as it journeys through the horrifying history of the Peshtigo Fire.

[more]

front cover of The Great Plains
The Great Plains
A Fire Survey
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2017

Early descriptions of the Great Plains often focus on a vast, grassy expanse that was either burnt or burning. The scene continued to burn until the land was plowed under or grazed away and broken by innumerable roads and towns. Yet, where the original landscape has persisted, so has fire, and where people have sought to restore something of that original setting, they have had to reinstate fire. This has required the persistence or creation of a fire culture, which in turn inspired schools of science and art that make the Great Plains today a regional hearth for American fire.

Volume 5 of To the Last Smoke introduces a region that once lay at the geographic heart of American fire, and today promises to reclaim something of that heritage. After all these years, the Great Plains continue to bear witness to how fires can shape contemporary life, and vice versa. In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Pyne explores how this once most regularly and widely burned province of North America, composed of various subregions and peoples, has been shaped by the flames contained within it and what fire, both tame and feral, might mean for the future of its landscapes.

Included in this volume:

  • How wildland and rural fire have changed from the 19th century to the 21st century
  • How fire is managed in the nation’s historic tallgrass prairies, from Texas to South Dakota, from Illinois to Nebraska
  • How fire connects with other themes of Great Plains life and culture
  • How and why Texas has returned to the national narrative of landscape fire
[more]

front cover of The Great Refusal
The Great Refusal
Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements
Andrew Lamas
Temple University Press, 2016

Herbert Marcuse examined the subjective and material conditions of radical social change and developed the "Great Refusal," a radical concept of "the protest against that which is." The editors and contributors to the exciting new volume The Great Refusal provide an analysis of contemporary social movements around the world with particular reference to Marcuse's revolutionary concept. The book also engages-and puts Marcuse in critical dialogue with-major theorists including Slavoj Žižek and Michel Foucault, among others.

The chapters in this book analyze different elements and locations of the contemporary wave of struggle, drawing on the work and vision of Marcuse in order to reveal, with a historical perspective, the present moment of resistance. Essays seek to understand recent uprisings-such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement-in the context of Marcuse's powerful conceptual apparatus.

The Great Refusal also charts contemporary social movements against global warming, mass incarceration, police brutality, white supremacy, militarization, technological development, and more, to provide insights that advance our understanding of resistance today.

Contributors include: Kevin B. Anderson, Stanley Aronowitz, Joan Braune, Jenny Chan, Angela Y. Davis, Arnold L. Farr, Andrew Feenberg, Michael Forman, Christian Fuchs, Stefan Gandler, Christian Garland, Toorjo Ghose, Imaculada Kangussu, George Katsiaficas, Douglas Kellner, Sarah Lynn Kleeb, Filip Kovacevic, Lauren Langman, Heather Love, Peter Marcuse, Martin J. Beck Matuštík, Russell Rockwell, AK Thompson, Marcelo Vieta, and the editors.

[more]

front cover of The Great War Comes to Wisconsin
The Great War Comes to Wisconsin
Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Free Speech in a Time of Crisis
Richard L. Pifer
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
The Great War Comes to Wisconsin examines Wisconsin’s response to World War I, the first "total war" of the twentieth century, a war so large that it engaged virtually everyone.
Instead of a comprehensive history of the battlefield, this book captures the homefront experience: the political debates over war policy, the worry over loved ones fighting overseas, the countless everyday sacrifices, and the impact of a wartime hysteria that drove dissent underground. It also includes the voices of soldiers from Wisconsin’s famed 32nd Division, through extensively quoted letters and newspaper accounts. Immerse yourself in the Wisconsin experience during World War I—a conflict that demonstrated America’s great capacity for sacrifice and generosity, but also for prejudice, intolerance, and injustice.
[more]

front cover of The Greatest Ballpark Ever
The Greatest Ballpark Ever
Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers
McGee, Bob
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Generations after its demise, Ebbets Field remains the single most colorful and enduring image of a baseball park, with a treasured niche in the game's legacy and the American imagination.

In this lively story of sports, politics, and the talented, hilarious, and charming characters associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bob McGee chronicles the ballpark's vibrant history from the drawing board to the wrecking ball, beginning with Charley Ebbets and the heralded opening in 1913, on through the eras that followed. McGee weaves a story about how Ebbets Field's architectural details, notable flaws, and striking facade brought Brooklyn and its team together in ways that allowed each to define the other.

Drawing on original interviews and letters, as well as published and archival sources, The Greatest Ballpark Ever explores the struggle of Charley Ebbets to build Ebbets Field, the days of Wilbert Robinson's early pennant winners, the eras of the Daffiness Boys, Larry MacPhail, and Branch Rickey, the tumultuous field leadership of Leo the Lip, the fiery triumph of Jackie Robinson, the golden days of the Boys of Summer, and Walter O'Malley's ignominious departure.

With humor and passion, The Greatest Ballpark Ever lets readers relive a day in the raucous ballpark with its quirky angles and its bent right-field wall, with the characters and events that have become part of the nation's folklore.
[more]

front cover of Greek Tragedies 3
Greek Tragedies 3
Aeschylus: The Eumenides; Sophocles: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides: The Bacchae, Alcestis
Edited by Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Greek Tragedies, Volume III contains Aeschylus’s “The Eumenides,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Oedipus at Colonus,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Euripides’s “The Bacchae,” translated by William Arrowsmith; and Euripides’s “Alecestis,” translated by Richmond Lattimore.
 
Many years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. The updated third editions of these classic works were designed to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.
 
In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.
 
In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
[more]

front cover of Greek Tragedies, Volume 3
Greek Tragedies, Volume 3
Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Green Politics in China
Environmental Governance and State-Society Relations
Joy Y Zhang and Michael Barr
Pluto Press, 2013
Based on interviews with members of grassroots organisations, media and government institutions, Green Politics in China provides an in-depth and engaging account of the novel ways in which Chinese society is responding to its environmental crisis, using examples rarely captured in Western media or academia.

Joy Y. Zhang and Michael Barr explain how environmental problems are transforming Chinese society through new developments such as the struggle for clean air, low-carbon conspiracy theories, new forms of public fund raising and the international tactics of grassroots NGOs. In doing so, they challenge static understandings of state-society relations in China.

Green Politics in China is an illuminating and detailed investigation which provides crucial insights into how China is both changing internally and emerging as a powerful player in global environmental politics.
[more]

front cover of The Green Revolution in the Global South
The Green Revolution in the Global South
Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences
R. Douglas Hurt
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A synthesis of the agricultural history of the Green Revolution
 
The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled.
 
In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives.
 
Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.
 
[more]

front cover of The Greenlining of Staten Island
The Greenlining of Staten Island
Environmental Preservation and Racial Segregation, 1945–1995
Patrick D. Nugent
University of Chicago Press, 2026

Illuminates how borough residents, urban planners, and politicians used environmental policy to cement a racially restrictive landscape.

Though it was once home to the world’s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In this book, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space—but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easement, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as greenlining.

The Greenlining of Staten Island shows that the political and environmental history of Staten Island is key to understanding how environmentalism has been used to reinforce racial discrimination, not just in New York City, but nationwide. By the mid-1970s, conservationists had embraced urban planning that preserved low-density housing districts and bolstered the sprawling and segregated landscape that took shape in metropolitan America over the coming decades. In exploring the gap between the modern environmental movement’s ambitious goals and its tangible outcomes, Nugent excavates important lessons for contemporary city dwellers debating zoning reform and planning for climate change’s impending effects.

[more]

front cover of Greenwich Village 1963
Greenwich Village 1963
Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
Sally Banes
Duke University Press, 1993
The year was 1963 and from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., from Vietnam to the Kremlin to the Berlin Wall, the world was in the throes of political upheaval and historic change. But that same year, in New York's Greenwich Village, another kind of history and a different sort of politics were being made. This was a political history that had nothing to do with states or governments or armies--and had everything to do with art. And this is the story that Sally Banes tells, a year in the life of American culture, a year that would change American life and culture forever. It was in 1963, as Banes's book shows us, that the Sixties really began.
A leading writer on cultural history, Banes draws a vibrant portrait of the artists and performers who gave the 1963 Village its exhilarating force, the avant-garde whose interweaving of public and private life, work and play, art and ordinary experience, began a wholesale reworking of the social and cultural fabric of America. Among these young artists were many who went on to become acknowledged masters in their fields, including Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Brian de Palma, Harvey Keitel, Kate Millet, and Claes Oldenburg. In live performance--Off-Off Broadway theater, Happenings, Fluxus, and dance--as well as in Pop Art and underground film, we see this generation of artists laying the groundwork for the explosion of the counterculture in the late 1960s and the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s. Exploring themes of community, freedom, equality, the body, and the absolute, Banes shows us how the Sixties artists, though shaped by a culture of hope and optimism, helped to galvanize a culture of criticism and change. As 1963 came to define the Sixties, so this vivid account of the year will redefine a crucial generation in recent American history.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Gregg Bordowitz
I Wanna Be Well
Edited by Robyn Farrell and Solveig Nelson
University of Chicago Press

The first monograph to trace artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz’s visual practice.

For over four decades, Gregg Bordowitz has been a force in contemporary art, recognized for his work as an AIDS activist and an artist working in video, conceptual art, and institutional critique. During the 1980s, Bordowitz made vital contributions in the early years of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York, where he cofounded video collectives including Testing the Limits and DIVA (Damn Interfering Video Activists). His collaborative activist work formed the foundation of his art practice—a sprawling, diverse, and deeply human endeavor that has explored his gay and Jewish identities within the context of the ongoing AIDS crisis. 

Despite his expansive artistic production, activism, and influence, there has yet to be a full monographic exploration of Bordowitz’s work. This landmark volume serves as the first publication dedicated exclusively to his visual work, offering a comprehensive portrait of an artist in constant motion. I Wanna Be Well—named after the 1977 Ramones song—traces the emergence of his visual art practice. Developed in close collaboration with Bordowitz and a team of art historians, curators, scholars, poets, and artists who have worked with him over the years, this book reveals Bordowitz’s practice as an evolving investigation of how to live, teach, and make art through sustained acts of care, critique, and remembrance. Lavishly illustrated with color throughout, the essays, interviews, poetry, and other writings gathered here present a rich look at Bordowitz’s life and career.

[more]

logo for UpSet Press
The Ground Below Zero
9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street
Nicholas Powers
UpSet Press

front cover of Growing Gardens, Building Power
Growing Gardens, Building Power
Food Justice and Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn
Justin Sean Myers
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Across the United States marginalized communities are organizing to address social, economic, and environmental inequities through building community food systems rooted in the principles of social justice.  But how exactly are communities doing this work, why are residents tackling these issues through food, what are their successes, and what barriers are they encountering?  This book dives into the heart of the food justice movement through an exploration of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), one of the oldest food justice organizations in Brooklyn, and one that emerged from a bottom-up asset-oriented development model.  It details the food inequities the community faces and what produced them, how and why residents mobilized to turn vacant land into community gardens, and the struggles the organization has encountered as they worked to feed residents through urban farms and farmers markets.  This book also discusses how through the politics of food justice, ENYF! has challenged the growth-oriented development politics of City Hall, opposed the neoliberalization of food politics, navigated the funding constraints of philanthropy and the welfare state, and opposed the entrance of a Walmart into their community.  Through telling this story, Growing Gardens, Building Power offers insights into how the food justice movement is challenging the major structures and institutions that seek to curtail the transformative power of the food justice movement and its efforts to build a more just and sustainable world.
 
[more]

front cover of Growing Girls
Growing Girls
The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America
Miller, Susan A
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to recognize adolescence as a developmental phase distinct from both childhood and adulthood. This awareness, however, came fraught with anxiety about the debilitating effects of modern life on adolescents of both sexes. For boys, competitive sports as well as "primitive" outdoor activities offered by fledging organizations such as the Boy Scouts would enable them to combat the effeminacy of an overly civilized society. But for girls, the remedy wasn't quite so clear.

Surprisingly, the "girl problem"?a crisis caused by the transition from a sheltered, family-centered Victorian childhood to modern adolescence where self-control and a strong democratic spirit were required of reliable citizens?was also solved by way of traditionally masculine, adventurous, outdoor activities, as practiced by the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and many other similar organizations.

Susan A. Miller explores these girls' organizations that sprung up in the first half of the twentieth century from a socio-historical perspective, showing how the notions of uniform identity, civic duty, "primitive domesticity," and fitness shaped the formation of the modern girl.

[more]

front cover of Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership
Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership
Rafael Reuveny and William R. Thompson
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Using a "lead economy" approach, Reuveny and Thompson link question about the global trade system to debates about hegemonic stability and the balance of power in world politics. By focusing on economic growth, protectionism, and trade, they surpass hegemonic stability interpretations of international politics to explain not only how hegemons maintain political order, but also the source of hegemonic/systemic leadership, the rise and decline of leadership over time, and the role of system leaders in generating worldwide economic growth and international political economic order.
Rafael Reuveny is Associate Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. William R. Thompson is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.
[more]

logo for Catholic University of America Press
Guadalupe in New Spain
Sermons, 1731-1747
Bartolome Felipe de Ita y Parra
Catholic University of America Press, 2027
Bartolomé Felipe de Ita y Parra was the most influential preacher in New Spain on Our Lady of Guadalupe. His orations helped advance expansive growth in Guadalupan devotion. The advocacy of Ita y Parra and his fellow Guadalupan promoters culminated in Pope Benedict XIV’s 1754 endorsement of Guadalupe as the patroness of New Spain, the first major international recognition of the Guadalupe tradition. While Guadalupan studies have tended to focus on the origins of her cult in the sixteenth century, the most pivotal turning points in Guadalupe’s devotional ascent occurred in the eighteenth century. A monograph dedicated to Ita y Parra’s impact on this decisive evolution is long overdue. Moreover, his sermons illuminate the theology of divine providence at the heart of colonial Guadalupan sermons and devotion, indeed at the core of colonial Catholicism and society. Guadalupe in New Spain breaks new ground through a critical examination of Ita y Parra’s Guadalupan sermons and their significance for understanding the most renowned Christian tradition indigenous to the American hemisphere.
[more]

front cover of Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space
Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space
Peter I. Rose
Ohio University Press, 2003
Peter Rose has spent a lifetime exploring patterns of culture, examining issues of race and ethnicity, working with refugees, teaching sociology, and roaming the world. In Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space, he reflects on his adventures and the formative experiences that led him to a fascination with lives that seem quite unlike our own.

Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space introduces us to many of those whom Rose has met along the way, a cast of characters as colorful as it is diverse. It includes his music-loving mother; his tour guides in China, Germany, and Israel; Indochinese refugees he followed to the United States; the notorious murderer, Nathan Leopold; the simple tailor, Mr. David; and three writers for whom Rose has a special affinity: Philip Roth, John Updike, and Paul Theroux.

Peter Rose gives us an entirely pleasurable and insightful look into the life of an American scholar actively involved in contemporary issues as he takes readers along on his field trips and guest appearances.
[more]

logo for The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Guidance Note 3
Inspection & Testing
The Institution of Engineering and Technology
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026
Guidance Note 3: Inspection & Testing is a fundamental guidance book for all those involved with the testing and inspection of electrical installations. It also contains essential guidance for those studying for inspection and testing qualifications and has been fully updated to BS 7671:2018+A4:2026, including identification of conductors, Stationary Secondary Batteries, Prosumers Electrical Installations, Recommended initial frequencies of inspection of electrical installations and Maximum permissible measured earth fault loop impedance (EFLI).
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter