A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Informed by recent developments in literary criticism and social theory, In the Nature of Things addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language. The theoretical approaches of the contributors represent both modernist and postmodernist positions, including feminist theory, critical theory, Marxism, science fiction, theology, and botany. They demonstrate how the concept of nature is invoked and constituted in a wide range of cultural projects—from the Bible to science fiction movies, from hunting to green consumerism. Ultimately, it weeks to link the work of theorists concerned with nature and the environment to nontheorists who share similar concerns.
Contributors include R. McGreggor Cawley, Romand Coles, William E. Connolly, Jan E. Dizard, Valerie Hartouni, Cheri Lucas Jennings, Bruce H. Jennings, Timothy W. Luke, Shane Phelan, John Rodman, Michael J. Shapiro, and Wade Sikorski.
Winner of the 2018 Early American Literature Book Prize
In this compelling and original book, Caroline Wigginton reshapes our understanding of early American literary history. Overturning long-standing connections between the male-dominated print culture of pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers and the transformative ideas that instigated the American Revolution, Wigginton explores how women's “relational publications”—circulated texts, objects, and performances—transformed their public and intimate worlds. She argues that Native, black, and white women's interpersonal "publications" revolutionized the dynamics of power and connection in public and private spaces, whether those spaces were Quaker meeting houses, Creek talwas, trading posts, burial grounds, or the women's own "neighborhoods."
Informed by deep and rich archival research, Wigginton's case studies explore specific instances of “relational publication.” The book begins with a pairing of examples—the statement a grieving Lenape mother made through a wampum belt and the political affiliations created when a salon hostess shared her poetry. Subsequent chapters trace a history of women's publication practice, including a Creek woman's diplomatic and legal procession-spectacles in the colonial Southeast, a black mother's expression of protest in Newport, Rhode Island, and the resulting evangelical revival, Phillis Wheatley's elegies that refigured neighborhoods of enslaved and free Bostonians, and a Quaker woman's pious and political commonplace book in Revolutionary Philadelphia.
Spurning fixed boundaries, Stokes relates the controversial topics of the day—the status of the "New Journalism," the "degenerative" influence of Impressionist painting, the dubious morality of the music hall, the urgent need for prison reform, and the prevalence of suicide—to primary literary texts, such as The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, Jude the Obscure, and Portrait of a Lady. And in the process, he explores crucial areas of sociological and psychological interest: criminality, sexuality, madness, and "morbidity."
Each of the book's six chapters opens with a look at the correspondence columns of daily newspapers and goes on, with a keen eye for the hidden link, to pursue a particular theme. Locations shift from Leicester Square and the Thames embankment to the Normandy coast and the Paris morgue and feature, along with famous names, a lesser known company of acrobats, convicts, aesthetes, "philistines," and mysterious suicides.
Nearly a century later, John Stokes's unrivalled knowledge of how the arts actually functioned in the nineties makes this book a major contribution to modern cultural studies.
Donohue's experiences are brutal, but his perceptions are poetic. This account of an intelligent and sensitive man in the grip of alcoholism and homelessness challenges our perceptions of those on the margins of American contemporary life.
"Donohue recorded this often-moving account during a four-year period of homelessness caused by his alcoholism. . . . There are many brilliant observations here on a range of topics, including human nature, technology, and capitalism. . . . Donohue's life on the fringe also provides an inside look at the homeless system of overnight shelters, labor offices, and food stamp providers. But, somehow, in spite of all the negatives, a hopeful book emerges."—Booklist
"A startlingly original book. In this confessional age, Donohue's diary becomes a different sort of tell-all, a palimpsest that forces us to extract the author from his own writing. . . . Donohue comes to resemble Swift's Gulliver"—Nicholas Nesson, Boston Phoenix
"Donohue punctuates his account of 'domiciling within the black walls of a mosquito-infested night' with rambling metaphysical asides in the style of an eighteenth-century philosophe."—Molly McQuade, Lingua Franca
"Despite hunger, homelessness, dead-end jobs and abusive drinking, what is most striking about Donohue is his amazing optimism and endurance."—Patrick Markee, Nation
"Donohue is a gifted writer. . . . But what gives [his diary] the breath of life is that it is written by an artist."—Alec Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in iconic script ("picture writing"), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernán Cortés in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex.
Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglas's study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.
In the Philippines and Okinawa, the third volume of Colonel William S. Triplet's memoirs, tells of Triplet's experiences during the American occupations in the early years after World War II. Continuing the story from the preceding books of his memoirs, A Youth in the Meuse-Argonne and A Colonel in the Armored Divisions, Triplet takes us to the Philippines, where his duties included rounding up isolated groups of Japanese holdouts, men who refused to believe or admit that their nation had lost the war, and holding them until the time came to transport them back to Japan.
Triplet also had to reorganize his battalions and companies to raise morale, which had plummeted with the end of the war and the seemingly dull tasks of occupation. When he took over his assignment of commanding a regiment in a division, he was dismayed to discover the unmilitary habits of almost everyone, regardless of rank. A strict disciplinarian himself, Colonel Triplet, who had served in both world wars, at one time commanding a four-thousand-man combat group, brought his regiment of garrison troops back into shape in a short time.
Okinawa presented the new challenge of bringing order to an island that had seen the deaths of one hundred thousand civilians. Virtually every building on the island had been leveled, and tens of thousands of Japanese defenders had been killed. Triplet was also obliged to oversee the temporary burial of thirteen thousand U.S. servicemen, both soldiers and sailors.
In the Philippines and Okinawa portrays the ever-changing, very human, and frequently dangerous occupation of two East Asian regions that are still important to American foreign policy. Any reader interested in military history or American history will find this memoir engaging.
Through her careful examination of the transformations of spirit mediumship wrought by the mass media, Morris takes readers into the world of the northern Thai past to discover the anticipations of future histories. In this process, she finds new objects for anthropological inquiry, including romantic love and epistolary poetry. She then turns her eye toward the relationships between commodification and prosaic form and photography and the discourses of gendered and national identity. Attending to these issues as they manifest themselves in the practices of mediums, Morris describes both the mundane activities of spirit mediums and the grand ambitions to political authority that are embodied in the increasingly spectacular forms of possession that are becoming so popular with both tourists and local culture brokers. In the Place of Origins traverses this ground with accounts of right-wing militarism and ritual revival during the 70s, and of the democracy movement of 1992, when a global mass media was galvanized by images of military repression and the spectacle of traditional ritual power in cursing. Finally, considering the claims that mediums make to magical power in the face of both AIDS and the Asian economic crisis, Morris reveals the potency of extrajudicial forms of power and violence in the late modern era.
This provocative study will interest anthropologists, historians, Asianists, and those involved in gender, performance, media, and literary studies.
In October 2004, Andrea Garrison’s mother, Mattie Pearl, passed into the spiritual world. The weeks leading up to her crossing were a powerful time for Andrea and the rest of her family as Mattie Pearl shared her love, her insights, and her visions of heaven with those around her.
Andrea knew from the time she was a little girl that there was a spiritual reality beyond what we could see, and her mother encouraged her to explore different understandings of the Divine. As an adult, Andrea encountered the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and was struck by the similarities between his theology and her experiences. Her quest to find others who knew about the Swedish mystic led her to new friends and, ultimately, a deeper exploration of her family history.
Originally published as The Crossing Over of Mattie Pearl, this expanded edition tells more about Andrea’s family history, including the role her father played in her life, as well as her reflections on Emanuel Swedenborg. Anyone who has mourned the loss of a loved one or been curious about the other side will be inspired and uplifted by this true story of a remarkable woman.
As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.
In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.
Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.
Winner of the American Sociological Association Sociology of Law Section 2013 Outstanding Book Award
How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public.
Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the mechanisms that democratic societies have developed to certify doctors to deliver critical services. Combining her skills as a public member of medical licensing boards and as an ethnographer, Horowitz illuminates the workings of the crucial public institutions charged with maintaining public safety. She demonstrates the complex agendas different actors bring to board deliberations, the variations in the board authority across the country, the unevenly distributed institutional resources available to board members, and the difficulties non-physician members face as they struggle to balance interests of the parties involved.
In the Public Interest suggests new procedures, resource allocation, and educational initiatives to increase physician oversight. Horowitz makes the case for regulations modeled after deliberative democracy that promise to open debates to the general public and allow public members to take a more active part in the decision-making process that affects vital community interests.
"I recommend In the Rainforest as scientific journalism at its best, and [Caufield's] book as the one to read to become informed about the tropical crisis. Caufield traveled the world, went to the difficult places, sometimes beautiful and often dispiriting, mastered the important ideas, and talked to an impressive number of people on all sides of the issues. . . . There are villains in abundance: corrupt government agents who aid in the destruction of native tribes, greedy caballero landowners, and even the governmental planners who with the best of intentions rush heedlessly toward the environmental degradation of their own countries."—E. O. Wilson, Science
"The whole book is filled with amazing facts. . . . Moving and informative."—Ellen W. Chu, New York Times Book Review
In the Realm of Nachan Kan opens a window on Postclassic Maya patterns of cultural development and organization through a close examination of the small rural island of Laguna de On, a location that was distant from the governing political centers of the day. Using diachronic analysis of regional settlement patterns, ceramic traditions, household and ritual features, and artifacts from the site, Masson tracks developmental changes throughout the Postclassic period. These data suggest that affluent patterns of economic production and local and long-distance exchange were established within northern Belize by the eleventh century, and continued to develop, virtually uninterrupted, until the time of Spanish arrival.
In addition, Masson analyzes contemporary political and religious artistic traditions at the temples of Mayapan, Tulum, and Santa Rita to provide a regional context for the changes in community patterns at Laguna de On. These cultural changes, she maintains, are closely correlated with the rise of Mayapan to power and participation of sites like Laguna de On in a pan-lowland economic and ritual interaction sphere. Offering a thoroughly new interpretation of Postclassic Mayan civilization. In the Realm of Nachan Kan is a must for scholars of Mesoamerican history and culture.
In the Realms of Gold is Oliver’s account of his life and work. He writes in a deft and lively style about the circumstances of his early life that shaped his education and outlook: his childhood on a river houseboat in Kashmir, the influential teachers and friends met at Stowe and Cambridge, and his service in World War II as a cryptographer in British intelligence, where he met his first wife, Caroline Linehan. His interest in church history while at Cambridge led him to study the historical effects of Christian missionaries in Africa, and thus his career began.
The core of the book is Oliver’s account of his research travels throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s; his efforts to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African universities; his role in establishing conferences and journals to bring together the work of historians and archaeologists from Europe and Africa; his encounters with political and religious leaders, scholars, soldiers, and storytellers; and the political and economic upheavals of the continent that he witnessed.
The sociologist Thomas Sowell writes, "We need to confront the most blatant fact that has persisted across centuries of social history—vast ddifferences in productivity among peoples, and the economic and other consequences of such differences." Poverty demeans dignity, shrinks the soul, wastes potential, and inflicts suffering on three billion people on our planet. We must also acknowledge that, during the past fifty yyears, the record in international assistance to the least developed countries has been disappointing; the economics-based abstractions developed in the think tanks of Europe and North America are insufficient.
In the River They Swim is the antithesis to that search for solutions the next big theory of global poverty. From the fresh perspective of advisors on the frontlines of development to the insight of leaders like President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Pastor Rick Warren, it tells the story of change in the microcosms of emerging businesses, industries, and governments. These essays display a personal nature to their work that rigorous analysis alone cannot explain.
We learn that a Sufi master can teach us about the different levels of knowledge, the "different ways to know a river." These practitioners could have written about its length, its source, its depth, its width, the power of its current, and the life it contains. They could have invested time and money to travel to that river so that they could sit on its shores and look at it, feel the sand that borders it, and watch the birds at play over it. Instead, they dove in to swim in the river, felt its current along their bodies, and tasted something of it. They wondered, briefly, if they had the strength to swim its length, and now they share the answer.
If human development is a river, the authors in this volume, and perhaps some readers, will no longer be satisfied to stand along its banks.
In each of the twelve essays that comprise this timely volume, Fisher addresses issues of vital concern to architects and students, offering hard-hitting criticism and proposing innovative and practical ideas for reform at the level of both the individual practitioner and the profession as a whole. Through his thoughtful and nuanced consideration of architecture’s ideological foundations and its relationship to ecology, politics, and technology, as well as his subtle understanding of the architect’s interior life, Fisher challenges the demoralized design community to recapture its historical role as steward and visionary of the public realm.
Thomas R. Fisher is dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and coeditor of Architectural Research Quarterly. His essays have appeared in Design Quarterly, Architectural Record, and other leading journals.
In the Shade of the Pine: Artists, Writers, and Trees in America, 1825–1876 explores the significance of trees in the visual and literary imagination of mid-nineteenth-century America through the work of seven artists and writers: Thomas Cole’s explorations of the Catskills; Albert Bierstadt’s portrayal of the splendid trees of California, including the ancient giant sequoias; the paintings and drawings of Asher Brown Durand and Frederic Edwin Church; the photographs of William James Stillman; and the environmental writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau.
This richly illustrated volume shows the unique influence the ecology of their land had on the emotional and intellectual landscapes of a generation. In their careful study of the woods—the beauty of trees, their practical importance to human beings and other living creatures, and the power of the forest to confer spiritual and emotional benefits—these artists and writers laid the groundwork for an ecological consciousness that remains vitally relevant today.
In the Shade of the Shady Tree is a collection of stories set in the Western Australian wheatbelt, a vast grain-growing area that ranges across the southwestern end of the immense Australian interior. Kinsella’s stories offer glimpses into the lives of the people who call this area home, as the reader journeys from just north of the town of Geraldton to the far eastern and southern shires of the region.
Cast against a backdrop of indigenous dispossession, settler migration, and the destructive impact of land-clearing and monocultural farming methods, the stories offer moments of connection with the inhabitants, ranging from the matter-of-fact to the bizarre and inexplicable. Something about the nature of the place wrestles with all human interactions and affects their outcomes. The land itself is a dominant character, with dust, gnarled scrubland, and the need for rain underpinning human endeavor. Inflected with both contemporary ideas of short fiction and the “everyman” tradition of Australian storytelling, this collection will introduce many readers to a new landscape and unforgettable characters.
Following the route of Hernán Cortés, In the Shadow of Cortés offers a visual and cultural history of the legacy of contact between Spaniards and indigenous civilizations. The book is a reflective journey that presents a diversity of voices, images, and ideas about history and conquest. Specialist in Mexican culture Kathleen Ann Myers teams up with prize-winning translators and photographers to offer a unique reading experience that combines accessible interpretative essays with beautifully translated interviews and dozens of historical and contemporary black-and-white and color images, including some by award-winner Steven Raymer. The result offers readers multiple perspectives on these pivotal events as imagined and re-envisioned today by Mexicans both in their homeland and in the United States.
In the Shadow of Cortés offers an extensive visual narrative about conquest and, ultimately, about Mexican history. It traces the symbolic geography of the conquest and shows how the historical memory of colonialism continues to shape lives today.
In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.
A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.
In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.
The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics.
For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.
Alicia Volk brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere—at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices—and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds.
Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art.
Empires Come and Go, Homelands Never
Readers of the Hebrew Bible know the basic story line: during the early sixth century BCE the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, deported a portion of the population to Mesopotamia, and triggered a crisis of faith in the minds of prophets, priests, and liturgists that still echoes through the centuries. Though many Judahites chose to make their way home under Persian imperial control, the straightforward biblical story of exile and return masks many complex issues of evidence and fact. Unlike previous studies that focused narrowly on the Babylonian exile of the Judahite elites, this volume widens the geographical and temporal scope to include the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires. Improved access to and understanding of relevant texts, iconography, and material culture provide an opportunity for scholars to reappraise methods of imperial control and the responses of those in exile and under occupation. Contributors Pamela Barmash, Ryan P. Bonfiglio, Caralie Cooke, Lisbeth S. Fried, Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor, Mark W. Hamilton, Matt Waters, and Ian D. Wilson lay a firm foundation for future work on the long sixth century.
Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there. While slaves quietly kept the nation’s capital running smoothly, lawmakers debated the place of slavery in the nation, the status of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico, and even the legality of the slave trade in itself.
This volume, with essays by some of the most distinguished historians in the nation, explores the twin issues of how slavery made life possible in the District of Columbia and how lawmakers in the district regulated slavery in the nation.
Contributors: David Brion Davis, Mary Beth Corrigan, A. Glenn Crothers, Jonathan Earle, Stanley Harrold, Mitch Kachun, Mary K. Ricks, James B. Stewart, Susan Zaeske, David Zarefsky
In this extensive study of how southern Jews in the United States responded to the Nazi persecution of European Jews, Dan J. Puckett recounts the divisions between Alabama Jews in the early 1930s. As awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust spread, Jews across Alabama from different backgrounds and from Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox traditions worked to bridge their internal divisions in order to mount efforts to save Jewish lives in Europe. Only by leveraging their collective strength were Alabama’s Jews able to sway the opinions of newspaper editors, Christian groups, and the general public as well as lobby local, state, and national political leaders.
Puckett’s comprehensive analysis is enlivened and illustrated by true stories that will fascinate all readers of southern history. One such story concerns the Altneuschule Torah of Prague and describes how the Nazis, during their brutal occupation of Czechoslovakia, confiscated 1,564 Torahs and sacred Judaic objects from communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia as exhibits in a planned museum to the extinct Jewish race. Recovered after the war by the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Altneuschule Torah was acquired in 1982 by the Orthodox congregation Ahavas Chesed of Mobile. Ahavas Chesed re-consecrated the scroll as an Alabama memorial to Czech Jews who perished in Nazi death camps.
In the Shadow of Hitler illustrates how Alabama’s Jews, in seeking to influence the national and international well-being of Jews, were changed, emerging from the war period with close cultural and religious cooperation that continues today.
Griffiths's analysis is based on careful observation of how people actually experience the law as well as the more standard tools of statutes and cases familiar to Western legal scholars. She explains how women's access to law is determined by social relations over which they have little control. In this powerful feminist critique of law and anthropology, Griffiths shows how law and custom are inseparable for Kwena women. Both colonial common law and customary law pose comparable and constant challenges to Kwena women's attempts to improve their positions in society.
Throughout much of the twentieth century and even to this day, there has been a dearth of scholarship on the intellectual and political contributions of Haitians. In the Shadow of Powers, first published in 1985, was a corrective to this oversight and remains a foundational text. Bellegarde-Smith traces the history of Haiti through the life and career of his grandfather Dantès Bellegarde, one of Haiti's influential diplomats and preeminent thinkers. As Brandon R. Byrd describes in his foreword to this new edition, "Bellegarde was driven by a subversive, racially inclusive vision of civilized progress. He believed in and continued to push for Haiti to establish an existence for itself, black people, and the colonized world independent of the considerable shadow cast by the world's military, economic, and industrial powers." Scholars and students who want to learn about the intellectual and political foundations of Haiti, its influence on other intellectuals worldwide, and its struggles against imperialism continue to find this to be an invaluable classic.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
“Grindle’s passionate book, including extensive research in Mexico, will ensure that [Zelia Nuttall] is never forgotten.” —British Museum Magazine
“[A] beautifully crafted biography.” —Foreign Affairs
“What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story.” —Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature
The question of human origins took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, as scholars began to look beyond the Bible to understand how different cultures and civilizations emerged. Zelia Nuttall was among the most accomplished of these scholars. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush, Nuttall also had roots in Mexico City, where her mother was born. As a young woman, she threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the emerging sciences of archaeology and anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancients.
Proud, prickly, and independent, Nuttall made the first accurate decoding of the Aztec calendar stone. She found pre-Columbian texts lost in European archives and made sense of their pictographic histories. Her work on the terra-cotta heads of Teotihuacán vaulted her into the highest echelons of her discipline. She was also a single mother who made ends meet by collecting artifacts for US museums. Such trade in sacred artifacts is today rightfully under scrutiny, but in her time, Nuttall was recognized as a vital bridge between Mexican and US anthropologists.
The first biography of Zelia Nuttall, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl captures the contributions and contradictions of a trailblazing woman and her intellectual milieu.
Victoria Hattam locates the origins of ethnicity in the New York Zionist movement of the early 1900s. In a major revision of widely held assumptions, she argues that Jewish activists identified as ethnics not as a means of assimilating and becoming white, but rather as a way of defending immigrant difference as distinct from race—rooted in culture rather than body and blood. Eventually, Hattam shows, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Census Bureau institutionalized this distinction by classifying Latinos as an ethnic group and not a race. But immigration and the resulting population shifts of the last half century have created a political opening for reimagining the relationship between immigration and race. How to do so is the question at hand.
In the Shadow of Race concludes by examining the recent New York and Los Angeles elections and the 2006 immigrant rallies across the country to assess the possibilities of forging a more robust alliance between immigrants and African Americans. Such an alliance is needed, Hattam argues, to more effectively redress the persistent inequalities in American life.
In the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fifteen new independent republics have embarked on unprecedented transitions from command economies into market-oriented economies.
Important motivating factors for their reform efforts included issues of geographic and economic proximity to Europe and the influence of the pre-Soviet era histories in those countries. In the Shadow of Russia builds upon the conceptual frameworks that include geography and policy choices about economic integration in an analysis of the reform efforts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Blackmon's book addresses such central questions as: How and in what areas has a republic's previous level of integration with Soviet-era Russia influenced its present economic orientation? What are the contributing factors that explain the differences in how leaders ( of a similar regime type) developed economic reform policies? To answer these questions, the author utilizes information from both the economic and the political literature on post-communist transitions, as well from political speeches.
By July 1692, the witch hunt surrounding the town of Salem and Salem Village had been raging for four months. The Massachusetts Bay colony’s new governor, William Phips, had established a special court to try the suspected witches and the trials were well under way. No new arrests had taken place for nearly six weeks and residents had every reason to believe the crisis soon would be over. However, a middle-aged woman in nearby Andover lay gravely ill. Her husband suspected witchcraft as the cause and invited some of the afflicted girls from Salem Village to the town, thinking they could determine whether his suspicions were valid. Not surprisingly, they confirmed his supposition. The first person these girls accused in Andover—a frail and elderly widow bereaved by a series of family tragedies over the previous three years—not only confessed, but stated that there were more than three hundred witches in the region, five times more than the number of suspects already in jail. This touched off a new wave of accusations, confessions, and formal charges. Before the witchcraft crisis ended, forty-five residents of Andover found themselves jailed on suspicion of witchcraft—more than the combined total of suspects from Salem Village and the town of Salem. Of these, three were hanged and one died while awaiting execution.
Based on extensive primary source research, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692, by historian and archivist Richard Hite, tells for the first time the fascinating story of this long overlooked phase of the largest witch hunt in American history. Untangling a net of rivalries and ties between families and neighbors, the author explains the actions of the accusers, the reactions of the accused, and their ultimate fates. In the process, he shows how the Andover arrests prompted a large segment of the town’s population to openly oppose the entire witch hunt and how their actions played a crucial role in finally bringing the 1692 witchcraft crisis to a close.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that sectarianism is intrinsically linked to violence, bloodshed, or social disharmony, Max Weiss uncovers the complex roots of Shiʿi sectarianism in twentieth-century Lebanon.
The template for conflicted relations between the Lebanese state and Shiʿi society arose under French Mandate rule through a process of gradual transformation, long before the political mobilization of the Shiʿi community under the charismatic Imam Musa al-Sadr and his Movement of the Deprived, and decades before the radicalization linked to Hizballah. Throughout the period, the Shiʿi community was buffeted by crosscutting political, religious, and ideological currents: transnational affiliations versus local concerns; the competing pull of Arab nationalism and Lebanese nationalism; loyalty to Jabal ʿAmil, the cultural heartland of Shiʿi Lebanon; and the modernization of religious and juridical traditions.
Uncoupling the beginnings of modern Shiʿi collective identity from the rise of political Shiʿism, Weiss transforms our understanding of the nature of sectarianism and shows why in Lebanon it has been both so productive and so destructive at the same time.
The popular understanding of the history of slavery in America almost entirely ignores the institution’s extensive reach in the North. But the cities of the North were built by—and became the home of—tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans, many of whom would continue to live there as free people after Emancipation.
In the Shadow of Slavery reveals the history of African Americans in the nation’s largest metropolis, New York City. Leslie M. Harris draws on travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records to extend prior studies of racial discrimination. She traces the undeniable impact of African Americans on class distinctions, politics, and community formation by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers. This new edition includes an afterword by the author addressing subsequent research and the ongoing arguments over how slavery and its legacy should be taught, memorialized, and acknowledged by governments.
In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city.
In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers.
Written with clarity and grace, In the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience, as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.
In the Shadow of the Bear chronicles the author's return, after a forty-year absence, to the site of his childhood summer vacations at Little Glen Lake in northwestern Lower Michigan's Leelanau peninsula.
The ancient Ojibwa legend that gave a name to the area's most striking geographical feature, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, offers a way of understanding his mother's powerful but sometimes restless force of love and ambition in the family, as well as his father's quieter, often self-sacrificing love. Chapters devoted to the return to Leelanau, to each of his parents, and to his father's family culminate in the narrative of his daughter's 2005 Leelanau wedding.
Jim McGavran tells his story of self-discovery in prose that is alternatively frank and lyrical as he recaptures his bewildered yet enchanted boyhood self, filtered through his consciousness of longing and loss, lending the writing a particular poignancy.
Odets calls attention to the dire need to address issues that are affecting HIV-negative individuals—from concerns about sexuality and relations with those who are HIV-positive to universal questions about the nature and meaning of survival in the midst of disease. He argues that such action, while explicitly not directing attention away from the needs of those with AIDS, is essential to the human and biological well-being of gay communities. In the immensely powerful firsthand words of gay men living in a semiprivate holocaust, the need for a broader, compassionate approach to all of the AIDS epidemic’s victims becomes clear. In the Shadow of the Epidemic is a pathbreaking first step toward meeting that need.
In this first book to view modern Mexico in the era of NAFTA and globalization, In the Shadow of the Giant offers insight into the land on our southern border.
What we find is a nation that looks more like the United States than even Mexicans themselves could have imagined a decade ago: Rates of obesity are second only to the United States among the world's industrialized countries. Recreational drug use is soaring among young Mexicans, Citigroup owns the largest bank in Mexico Wal-Mart is the country's biggest private employer revealing a vastly different physical and cultural landscape from his days as a young journalist living in Mexico in the mid-1980s. Joseph Contreras tracks the relentless and ongoing Americanization of his ancestral home. Although these changes may seem a natural part of globalization, the country had long prided itself on the social, political, economic, and even spiritual differences that distinguished it from the United States. In addition to embracing our virtues and vices, Contreras argues that our southern neighbor has become a de facto economic colony of the United States.
At a time when immigration looms as a leading hot-button issue in American politics, the time is ripe for examining our influences, for better or worse, on our neighbor to the south.
Thomas Mann’s two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. Although their father’s fame has unfairly overshadowed their legacy, Erika and Klaus were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.
In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain begins with an account of the make-believe world the Manns created together as children—an early sign of their talents as well as the intensity of their relationship. Weiss documents the lifelong artistic collaboration that followed, showing how, as the Nazis took power, Erika and Klaus infused their work with a shared sense of political commitment. Their views earned them exile, and after escaping Germany they eventually moved to the United States, where both served as members of the U.S. armed forces. Abroad, they enjoyed a wide circle of famous friends, including Andre Gide, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Cocteau, and W. H. Auden, whom Erika married in 1935. But the demands of life in exile, Klaus’s heroin addiction, and Erika’s new allegiance to their father strained their mutual devotion, and in 1949 Klaus committed suicide.
Beautiful never-before-seen photographs illustrate Weiss’s riveting tale of two brave nonconformists whose dramatic lives open up new perspectives on the history of the twentieth century.
Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, two of Mexico's leading intellectuals, set out to fill a void in the literature on Mexican history: the lack of a single text to cover the history of contemporary Mexico during the twentieth century. A la sombra de la Revolución Mexicana, now available in English as In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, covers the Mexican Revolution itself, the gradual consolidation of institutions, the Cárdenas regime, the "Mexican economic miracle" and its subsequent collapse, and the recent transition toward a new historical period.
The authors offer a comprehensive and authoritative study of Mexico's turbulent recent history, a history that increasingly intertwines with that of the United States. Given the level of interest in Mexico—likely to increase still more as a result of the recent liberalization of trade policies—this volume will be useful in affording U.S. readers an intelligent, comprehensive, and accessible study of their neighbor to the south.
Smith and colleagues present their work in a way that allows readers to understand not only how people adapted to local change but also how North Warner Valley fits into the complex mosaic of precontact history in the American West. This research is the most comprehensive work conducted in the northern Great Basin in more than two decades. Its multidisciplinary nature should interest students of natural and cultural history, archaeology, and Indigenous lifeways.
As civil wars and insurgencies rage around the globe, Klaus Schlichte’s In the Shadow of Violence addresses a crucial question: why do some groups succeed in violently seizing and holding power while others fail? What makes for a successful non-state armed force? Arguing that success rests on the ability of these groups to transform the power of violence into legitimate domination, both inside their ranks and in the larger society, Schlichte explores the techniques and strategies they employ—and the long shadow of violence they must overcome along the way.
"Included here is a very helpful and touchingly personal interview with the poet. . . . For readers with no prior knowledge of Bonnefoy's work, this volume would be an excellent place to start."—Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement
In the Shadows of State and Capital tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry. Providing an ethnographic history of the emergence of subcontracting within Latin American agriculture and of the central role played by class conflict in this process, Steve Striffler looks at the quintessential form of twentieth-century U.S. imperialism in the region—the banana industry and, in particular, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita). He argues that, even within this highly stratified industry, popular struggle has contributed greatly to processes of capitalist transformation and historical change.
Striffler traces the entrance of United Fruit into Ecuador during the 1930s, its worker-induced departure in the 1960s, the troubled process through which contract farming emerged during the last half of the twentieth century, and the continuing struggles of those involved. To explore the influence of both peasant activism and state power on the withdrawal of multinational corporations from banana production, Striffler draws on state and popular archives, United Fruit documents, and extensive oral testimony from workers, peasants, political activists, plantation owners, United Fruit administrators, and state bureaucrats. Through an innovative melding of history and anthropology, he demonstrates that, although peasant-workers helped dismantle the foreign-owned plantation, they were unable to determine the broad contours through which the subsequent system of production—contract farming—emerged and transformed agrarian landscapes throughout Latin America.
By revealing the banana industry’s impact on processes of state formation in Latin America, In the Shadows of State and Capital will interest historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of globalization and agrarian studies.
Contributors: Fiona M. Barnett, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Michael Dieter, Alexander R. Galloway, David Golumbia, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Adeline Koh, Brian Lennon, Tara McPherson, Rita Raley, Lisa Marie Rhody
A stunning history of legendary treasure seekers and enigmatic natives in Mexico's Copper Canyon
Based on his one-year sojourn in Copper Canyon among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers who have journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters including Antonin Artaud, Henry Flipper, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre.
Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
In 1989, The National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA) was successfully passed after a long and intense struggle. One year later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) followed. These federal repatriation statutes—arguably some of the most important laws in the history of anthropology, museology, and American Indian rights—enabled Native Americans to reclaim human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.
Twenty years later, the controversy instigated by the creation of NMAIA and NAGPRA continues to simmer. In the Smaller Scope of Conscience is a thoughtful and detailed study of the ins and outs of the four-year process behind these laws. It is a singular contribution to the history of these issues, with the potential to help mediate the ongoing debate by encouraging all sides to retrace the steps of the legislators responsible for the acts.
Few works are as detailed as McKeown’s account, which looks into bills that came prior to NMAIA and NAGPRA and combs the legislative history for relevant reports and correspondence. Testimonies, documents, and interviews from the primary players of this legislative process are cited to offer insights into the drafting and political processes that shaped NMAIA and NAGPRA.
Above all else, this landmark work distinguishes itself from earlier legislative histories with the quality of its analysis. Invested and yet evenhanded in his narrative, McKeown ensures that this journey through history—through the strategies and struggles of different actors to effect change through federal legislation—is not only accurate but eminently intriguing.
Originally published to glowing reviews and literary prizes in France in 1985, this revealing diary not only recounts the moving and tragic relationship of its author, Geneviève Bréton, with the rising young nineteenth-century artist Henri Regnault, it also serves as a valuable historical document concerning the social, cultural, and political life of the French Second Empire.
The young Geneviève Bréton began her journal in 1867 as a consolation for the death of her eldest brother, Antoine. She met Regnault soon after on a trip to Rome. Throughout the next four years of their relationship, Bréton eloquently describes the personal, cultural, and political turbulence that affected her life. Writing against the backdrop of France’s fateful conflict with Prussia and the hardships and dangers of the siege of Paris and the Commune, Bréton, with innate candor and lyricism, creates a text that beautifully illuminates French art, literature, family life, society, and politics of the time. Her poignant account of her love for and engagement to Regnault reveals special insight into the life and mind of an extraordinary, though little known, literary talent. At Regnault’s death in 1871 during the Franco–Prussian War, the expression of her anguish is as much testimony to the political and cultural disorder of the time as it is to her own personal tragedy.
Following Bréton’s own instructions that she left before her death in 1918, this English version of the diary reincorporates material that was deleted from the French edition. Graced by rare photographs of the Bréton family as well as Regnault’s paintings, the book contains a touching foreword by the author’s granddaughter, Daphné Doublet-Vaudoyer. In its first English translation, it is a book for lovers of French life and culture, as well as students of French history; literature, and art.
Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was, Richard Rorty writes, "as original a mind as C. S. Peirce, and it has taken almost as long for the importance of his ideas to be appreciated." This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.
The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates what Robert Brandom calls the "inferentialist" conception of meaning at the heart of his work. This conception, laid out in the early essays, is deployed in various epistemological contexts throughout the book so that, upon arriving at the concluding papers on Kant, the reader has been given a tour d'horizon not only of the central topics of philosophy of mind and language, but of much of the history of philosophy as well--and, with this, a sense of what a shifting of analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian stage would entail.
In the Space of Theory details the territorial implications of the Iraq war, NAFTA, welfare reform, constitutional reform, cross-border regional development, and the legal battles of First Nations. In using antiessentialist arguments to elucidate the complexity of these developments, Sparke seeks to ground and critique postfoundational theory itself. He shows how the postfoundational arguments of Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri obscure politically important processes of reterritorialization at the same time they deterritorialize diverse theoretical assumptions about the nation-state. Engaged with theory and grounded in close study of cultural, political, and economic change, In the Space of Theory explores the geographies of struggle that at once underlie and undermine the hyphen in contemporary nation-states.
Matthew Sparke is associate professor of geography and international studies at the University of Washington.
As Gannett shows, the methods pioneered by legendary activist Saul Alinsky provide the means for channeling citizens’ anger and frustration into meaningful social change. Gannett weaves his personal journey as an “outside agitator” through in-depth studies of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. Gannett places financial sustainability, political independence, and a commitment to process as much as to purpose at the core of organizing. He also focuses on the importance of veterans mentoring the next generation to meet the challenges of the future.
Hard-headed but hopeful, In the Spirit of Alinsky distills decades of on-the-ground experience into a guide for effective radical action.
The essays collected in this book honor H. Chandler Davis (1926-2022), a University of Michigan faculty member who became a symbol of principled dissent when suspended and fired in 1954 for refusing to testify about his political affiliations to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Invoking academic freedom and First Amendment protection, Davis was convicted of contempt of Congress. He served six months in prison before moving to Canada, where he established himself as a brilliant mathematician, prolific writer, and ardent and much beloved advocate for justice.
At a time when a new McCarthyism has come roaring back to threaten free inquiry everywhere, the 12 contributors to this book argue against censorship, the suppression of protest, the policed and surveilled campus, the self-silencing of "institutional neutrality," and other enemies of academic freedom. Also included in this volume is posthumously published work by Davis and by his late wife, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, which reflects on the importance of facing, and not accepting, authoritarian threats.
Inspired by Chandler Davis’ courage, integrity, and devotion to the struggle against oppression, injustice, and the persecution of speech, these essays offer crucial insights into the importance of defending intellectual independence, institutional autonomy, and the right to free expression.
An inspiring document of passion and advocacy, In the Spirit of Wetlands reveals the transformative power of restoration.
So wrote James Agee in 1939. He shared this fascination with children’s street drawings and messages with his friend Helen Levitt. Here now are over one hundred of her photographs, made in the years between 1938 and 1948. Most of these pictures have never before been published. They have been selected and arranged by the photographer and carefully reproduced.
Robert Coles has written especially for this book an essay on the imaginative live of children and of a time when “. . . children still had some visual independence, some keen-eyed interest in laying pictorial claim to the world around them. . . . I have not seen scenes such as Helen Levitt offers in my wanderings through America’s city streets twenty and thirty and forty years after these were taken. They offer, then, a look backward—though they are also timeless in certain aspects. For children will never really stop being tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell—to let others see what they find themselves conceiving in thought and fantasy and dream.”
Offering a new history of a formative cultural and political era through the cosmic phenomena that captured the public’s imagination
In the winters of 1664–65 and 1680–81, the French public was galvanized by two bright comets whose elliptical orbits could not be mapped with contemporary geometry and that thus seemed to appear in random and unpredictable locations. Bookending the period during which Louis XIV’s sun king mythology was created, these comets defied the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. As Claire Goldstein demonstrates, literary texts, cultural institutions, and architecture inspired by comets offer a different perspective on the relationship between sensory experience, ideology, and artistic form.
In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France presents an alternative view of a formative era in cultural and political history, when distinctly modern forms of power and control were established through a regime of the spectacular. Goldstein shows how comets allow us to see the seventeenth century in ways that complicate the narrative of a race toward rationalization, classicism, and modernity, indexing instead a messy period in which the spectacular was sometimes also inscrutable.
In an age when many of the major environmental policies established over the past four decades are under siege, Michael McCloskey reminds us of better days. . .days when conservation initiatives were seen not as political lightning rods, but as opportunities to cope with disturbing threats to the quality of our environment.
In 1961, a young let's-get-it-done McCloskey was hired as the Sierra Club's first field representative for the Northwest. From there, for nearly forty years, he rose to guide the oldest and most powerful environmental organization in the world. He helped to pave the way for the original Wilderness Act in 1964, and as the club's conservation director worked to see it implemented. He successfully lobbied for the creation of new national parks and wilderness areas, the North Cascades and Redwood National Park among them. As executive director, he was present at the creation of Earthday in 1970, directed lobbying for the enactment of over one hundred environmental laws, and watched Sierra Club membership rise from about 70,000 to more than 500,000. In the nineties, he led the Sierra Club in mounting fights against attempts to undercut EPA regulations and against trade agreements that curtailed environmental programs.
His tenure was no walk in the park or smooth glide across a placid mountain lake. The large and very public Sierra Club was fraught with brush fires, seismic tremors, and pitched battles, both within and without. He survived the ouster of his mentor, the charismatic but controversial David Brower, succeeding him as the second executive director in the club's history, and put the Sierra Club back on firm financial footing. Under less than ideal political circumstances, McCloskey helped to keep the environmental agenda moving steadily forward, even in the face of Ronald Reagan's virulently pro-development Interior Secretary James Watt (whom he was instrumental in expelling from office).
In the Thick of It describes not only McCloskey's life as an environmental activist; it reveals the inner workings and politics of one of the nation's most influential environmental nonprofit organizations during an era of ground-breaking environmental legislation. In addition to sharing the details of battles exhilaratingly won and disappointingly lost on the environmental front, he demonstrates how it is indeed possible to turn idealism and hope into practical action that can make an impact at the national level. With this book McCloskey offers not only invaluable insight into the past, but also inspiration to carry into the future.
One of the most memorable images of the British women’s suffrage movement occurred on June 4, Derby Day, 1913. As the field of horses approached a turning at Epsom, militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ducked out from under the railing and ran onto the track, reaching for the bridle of the King’s horse, and was killed in the collision. While her death transformed her into a heroine, it all but erased her identity. To identify what impelled Davison to suffer multiple imprisonments, to experience the torture of force-feedings and the insults of hostile members of the crowds who came to hear her speak, Carolyn P. Collette explores a largely ignored source—the writing to which Davison dedicated so much time and effort during the years from 1908 to 1913. Davison’s writing is an implicit apologia for why she lived the life of a militant suffragette and where she continually revisits and restates the principles that guided her: that woman suffrage was necessary to improve the lives of men, women, and children; that the freedom and justice women sought was sanctioned by God and unjustly withheld by humans whose opposition constituted a tyranny that had to be opposed; and that the evolution of human progress demanded that women become fully equal citizens of their nation in every respect— politically, economically, and culturally.
In the Thick of the Fight makes available for the first time the archive of published and unpublished writings of Emily Wilding Davison. Collette reorients both scholarly and public attention away from a single, defining event to the complexity of Davison’s contributions to modern feminist discourse, giving the reader a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Davison’s suffrage writings.
Coplan discusses every aspect of the Basotho musical literature, taking into account historical conditions, political dynamics, and social forces as well as the styles, artistry, and occasions of performance. He engages the postmodern challenge to decolonize our representation of the ethnographic subject and demonstrates how performance formulates local knowledge and communicates its shared understandings.
Complete with transcriptions of full male and female performances, this book develops a theoretical and methodological framework crucial to anyone seeking to understand the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of performance. This work is an important contribution to South African studies, to ethnomusicology and anthropology, and to performance studies in general.
Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community’s relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical “fact” and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees?
This absorbing and insightful biography illuminates the life of the controversial champion of Social Gospel in early-20th-century America.
Radical religious and political leader Harry F. Ward started life quietly enough in a family of Methodist shopkeepers and butchers in London. But his relentless pursuit of social justice would lead him to the United States and a long career of religious activism. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles.
David Duke builds his comprehensive story of this fiery leader from extensive archival sources, including FBI files and private correspondence, sermons, class notes, and other unpublished material. Duke skillfully charts Ward's rise from an idealistic Methodist minister in a Chicago stockyard parish to a prominent national religious leader and influential political figure. Ultimately, Ward's lifelong attempt to synthesize the beliefs of Jesus and Marx and his role as an admirer of the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthyism in Cold War America. Viewed by some as a prophet and by others as a heretic, traitor, and communist, Ward became increasingly marginalized as he stubbornly maintained his radical positions. Even in his own circle, he went from being a figure of unquestioned integrity who eloquently spoke his convictions to a tragically short-sighted idealogue whose unwavering pro-Soviet agenda blinded him to the horrors of Stalinist oppression.
Harry Ward's long, colorful career intersected nearly every intellectual current in American culture for more than a half century. This biography will be important for scholars of American religious history, students of liberalism and politics, social Christians, and general readers who enjoy a compelling tour into the private and public lives of notable figures of history.
Examining the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, Illich celebrates the culture of the book from the twelfth century to the present. Hugh's work, at once an encyclopedia and guide to the art of reading, reveals a twelfth-century revolution as sweeping as that brought about by the invention of the printing press and equal in magnitude only to the changes of the computer age—the transition from reading as a vocal activity done in the monastery to reading as a predominantly silent activity performed by and for individuals.
In a timely book with a powerful and persuasive message, Dr. Harold G. Koenig addresses federal, state, and local government policy leaders, urging them to more fully integrate religious organizations into the formal disaster response system, and he then provides recommendations on how this can effectively be done. Koenig also advocates faith communities and organizations to learn more about the role they can play in responding to disasters and terrorism.
The Mongol conquest of north China between 1211 and 1234 inflicted terrible wartime destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. In the Wake of the Mongols recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese men and women adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their alien Mongol conquerors to create a drastically new social order. To construct this story, the book uses a previously unknown source of inscriptions recorded on stone tablets.
Jinping Wang explores a north China where Mongol patrons, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and sometimes single women—rather than Confucian gentry—exercised power and shaped events, a portrait that upends the conventional view of imperial Chinese society. Setting the stage by portraying the late Jin and closing by tracing the Mongol period’s legacy during the Ming dynasty, she delineates the changing social dynamics over four centuries in the northern province of Shanxi, still a poorly understood region.
How acts of violence are rhetorically "managed" by social movements: In the Wake of Violence explores the immediate and longer term aftermath of violence committed by independent radicals involved in single-issue movements. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp explores several specific incidents in recent history—the arson of a Vail ski resort by environmentalists, the murder of Dr. John Britton by an antiabortion activist, and the torching of a University of California research laboratory by animal rights activists among them—to discover how the perpetrators of the violence and the majority of reformers involved in their movements rhetorically framed the violent act for a potentially outraged public.
In the Wake of Violence, claims Jorgensen-Earp, the perpetrators are often forthcoming with both explanations for and a defense of their actions, casting themselves as righteous actors or martyrs for a cause. However, ardent reformers within the same cause might look with genuine revulsion at the actions of their own radical wing. This study claims that the nonviolent majority in single-issue reform movements employs a predictable constellation of rhetorical strategies to manage the impact of radical fringe violence. The primary goal of this rhetoric is to avoid a backlash against the larger movement by a public alienated by violent acts.
In examining specific rhetorical responses by the nonviolent majority in antiabortion, animal welfare, environmental reform, abolition, and women’s suffrage movements, Jorgensen-Earp considers a wide range of discourse types—from newspaper articles, interviews, and editorials to private letters; from editorial cartoons to the homemade signs of movement activists; and from speeches to modern Internet sites. She discovers that the image restoration techniques brought to bear for a reform cause are similar to those employed by a corporation accused of wrongdoing. Ultimately, she finds that the majority of proponents of the causes she examines believe that the violence can or will be condoned and that it must be rhetorically mitigated.
Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. Peter C. Baldwin’s evocative book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors—scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike—in the nocturnal city.
More and more states are legalizing marijuana in some form. Moreover, a majority of the U.S. population is in favor of the drug for recreational use. In the Weeds looks at how our society has become more permissive in the past 150 years—even though marijuana is still considered a Schedule I drug by the American government.
Sociologists Clayton Mosher and Scott Akins take a deep dive into marijuana policy reform, looking at the incremental developments and the historical, legal, social, and political implications of these changes. They investigate the effects, medicinal applications, and possible harms of marijuana. In the Weeds also considers arguments that youth will be heavy users of legalized cannabis, and shows how “weed” is demonized by exaggerations of the drug’s risks and claims of its lack of medicinal value. Mosher and Akins end their timely and insightful book by tracing the distinct paths to the legalization of recreational marijuana in the United States and other countries as well as discussing what the future of marijuana law holds.
God deserves obedience simply because he’s God—or does he? Inspired by a passion for biblical as well as constitutional scholarship, in this bold exploration Yale Law Professor Robert A. Burt conceptualizes the political theory of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. God’s authority as expressed in these accounts is not a given. It is no less inherently problematic and in need of justification than the legitimacy of secular government.
In recounting the rich narratives of key biblical figures—from Adam and Eve to Noah, Cain, Abraham, Moses, Job, and Jesus—In the Whirlwind paints a surprising picture of the ambivalent, mutually dependent relationship between God and his peoples. Taking the Hebrew and Christian Bibles as a unified whole, Burt traces God’s relationship with humanity as it evolves from complete harmony at the outset to continual struggle. In almost every case, God insists on unconditional obedience, while humanity withholds submission and holds God accountable for his promises.
Contemporary political theory aims for perfect justice. The Bible, Burt shows, does not make this assumption. Justice in the biblical account is an imperfect process grounded in human—and divine—limitation. Burt suggests that we consider the lessons of this tension as we try to negotiate the power struggles within secular governments, and also the conflicts roiling our public and private lives.
Westward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America’s Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.
Enlisting canonical and noncanonical sources, Joel Daehnke examines the manner in which the imagery of the human figure at work and play in the frontier landscape participated in the nationalist, “civilizing” project of westward expansion. While he acknowledges the growing secularization of American life, Professor Daehnke surveys the continuing claims of the Christian redemptive scheme as a powerful symbolic domain for these writers’ meditations on social progress and the potential for human perfectibility in the landscapes of the West.
Whether discussing the Edenic imagery of women’s gardens, the advocacy of an ethics of land use, or the affairs of fortune in the mining districts of Nevada, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer presents an enlightening reexamination of an American ideology of progress and its enduring fascination with mission, Manifest Destiny, and the ends of history.
In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer is a welcome addition to the extended library of critical attention to the ideology, history, and literary traditions of the American frontier.
Furet views history as a field bounded at each end by two ideal types. One end is concerned with the history of periods and with the empiricism of "facts" rather than received ideas. At the other end is problem-oriented history, which substitutes for the supposed coherence of a "period" the analytical examination of a question. Furet's own work leans toward the second, more conceptually oriented kind of historiography. The essays in this volume, most of them never before published in English, illustrate the breadth of his approach. Furet's discussion ranges through Tocqueville's conceptual system to present-day America, from the origins of history in France to the Jewish experience in the late twentieth century. Among Furet's recurrent themes is the contention that the historian constructs the object or field of his research rather than receiving it from the past.
A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history. Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.
Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters. By allowing the soldiers to speak for themselves, he captures what mattered most to them. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army. Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts.
Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.
Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize
For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policy makers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or realpolitik in pursuit of a superpower’s interests?
“In this subtle and searing critique of U.S. efforts to ‘uplift’ Latin America, Lars Schoultz challenges us to question the fundamental tenets of the development industry that became entrenched in the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy over the last century.”
—Piero Gleijeses, author of Visions of Freedom
“In this masterful work, Lars Schoultz provides a companion and follow-up to his classic Beneath the United States…A necessary and rewarding read for scholars and students of U.S. foreign policy and inter-American relations.”
—Renata Keller, The Americas
The Jazz Age of the 1920s is an era remembered for illegal liquor, innovative music and dance styles, and burgeoning ideas of social equality. It was also the period during which second-generation Jews began to emerge as a significant demographic in New York City. In TheirOwn Image examines thegrowing cultural visibility of Jewish life amid this vibrant scene.
From the vaudeville routines of Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker, to the slew of Broadway comedies about Jewish life and the silent films that showed immigrant families struggling to leave the ghetto, images and representations of Jews became staples of interwar popular culture. Through the performing arts, Jews expressed highly ambivalent feelings about their identification with Jewish and American cultures. Ted Merwin shows how they became American by producing and consuming not images of another group, but images of themselves. As a result, they humanized Jewish stereotypes, softened anti-Semitic attitudes, and laid the groundwork for today’s Jewish comedians.
An entertaining look at the role popular culture plays in promoting the acculturation of an ethnic group, In Their Own Image enhances our understanding of American Jewish history and provides a model for the study of other groups and their integration into mainstream society.
Harvard University inaugurated a new research center devoted to international relations in 1958. The Center for International Affairs (CFIA) was founded by State Department Director of Policy Planning Staff, Robert R. Bowie, at the invitation of McGeorge Bundy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Joined by Henry A. Kissinger, Edward S. Mason, and Thomas C. Schelling, Bowie quickly established the CFIA as a hub for studying international affairs in the United States. CFIA affiliates produced seminal work on arms control theory, development and modernization theory, and transatlantic relations.
Digging deep into unpublished material in the Harvard, MIT, and Kennedy Library archives, this book is punctuated with personal interviews with influential CFIA affiliates. David Atkinson describes the relationship between foreign policy and scholarship during the Cold War and documents the maturation of a remarkable academic institution. Atkinson’s history of the Center’s first twenty-five years traces the institutional and intellectual development of a research center that, fifty years later, continues to facilitate innovative scholarship. He explores the connection between knowledge and politics, beginning with the Center’s confident first decade and concluding with the second decade, which found the CFIA embroiled in Vietnam-era student protests.
From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues.
With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace.
With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West’s most powerful and enduring intellectual creations—and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century’s darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import.
In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche’s legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust.
These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians—from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander—who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general.
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