A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY204 start with M start with M
Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentine’s work and a critical document for understanding influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Lefort’s later writings on democracy and totalitarianism. Lefort extricates Machiavelli’s thought from the dominant interpretations of him as the founder of “objective” political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that Machiavelli’s discourse opens the “place of the political” which had previously been occupied by theology and morality.
In this collection of essays, written by K. G. Subramanyan over twenty-five years, this artist delves into the evolving aesthetic sensibilities in a globalized world, offering profound reflections on art, aesthetics, tradition, and societal challenges. As one of India's most celebrated artists, Subramanyan provides invaluable insights into contemporary art and cultural dynamics
Covering a broad spectrum of topics including art, visual perception, creativity, craft practice, tradition, and societal issues, Subramanyan's essays offer a comprehensive exploration of the complexities shaping modern civilization. He critically examines the impact of globalization, industrialization, environmental degradation, and societal disparities on art, education, and society, urging readers to negotiate these challenges with insight and vigilance.
Subramanyan played a pivotal role in shaping India’s artistic identity after Independence. Mani-da, as he was fondly called, seamlessly blended elements of modernism with folk expression in his works, spanning paintings, murals, sculptures, prints, set designs, and toys. Beyond his visual artistry, his writings have laid a solid foundation for understanding the demands of art on the individual. In the year of his centenary, Seagull is proud to publish his writings in special new editions.
An early interpreter of Buddhist art to the West, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy laid the foundation of what would become the South Asian visual canon, particularly through his efforts to understand how Buddhist art emerged and developed. In Making a Canon, Janice Leoshko examines how Coomaraswamy’s experience as the director of a mineralogical survey in Sri Lanka shaped his understanding of South Asian art and religion. Along the way, she reveals how Coomaraswamy’s distinctive repetition of Sri Lankan visual images in his work influenced the direction of South Asia’s canon formation and left a lasting impression on our understanding of Buddhist art.
Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park--with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population--from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City's most vibrant neighborhoods.
Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in low-wage labor markets and immigration patterns, shaped the neighborhood. She explains why Sunset Park's future now depends on Asian and Latino immigrant collaborations in advancing common interests in community building, civic engagement, entrepreneurialism, and sustainability planning. She shows, too, how residents' responses to urban development policies and projects and the capital represented by local institutions and banks foster community activism.
Hum pays close attention to the complex social, political, and spatial dynamics that forge a community and create new models of leadership as well as coalitions. The evolution of Sunset Park so astutely depicted in this book suggests new avenues for studying urban change and community development.
Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border.
This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juárez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border—from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.
The gentleman, Making a Man argues, is a dangerous alimental force. Threatened with placelessness, he seeks to locate and mark himself through his feasting and fasting. But in doing so, he inevitably threatens to starve, to subsume, to swallow the community around him. The gentleman is at once fundamental and fundamentally threatening to the health of the nation: his alimental monstrousness constitutes the nightmare of the period’s striving, anxious, alimentally fraught middle class.
Making a Man makes use of food history and theory, literary criticism, anthropology, gender theory, economics, and social criticism to read gentlemanly consumers from Mr. Woodhouse, the gruel-eater in Jane Austen’s Emma, through the vampire and the men who hunt him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hyman argues that appetite is a crucial means of casting light on the elusive identity of the gentleman, a figure who is the embodiment of power and yet is hardly embodied in Victorian literature.
Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.
In this book, Dawn Keetley details the story of Pomeroy's crimes and the intense public outcry. She explores the two reigning theories at the time—that he was shaped before birth when his pregnant mother visited a slaughterhouse and that he imitated brutal acts found in popular dime novels. Keetley then thoughtfully offers a new theory: that Pomeroy suffered a devastating reaction to a smallpox vaccination which altered his brain, creating a psychopath who revealed the human potential for brutality. The reaction to Pomeroy's acts, then and now, demonstrates the struggle to account for exactly those aspects of human nature that remain beyond our ability to understand.
Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the “Mecca of the New Negro” became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem’s downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed are Fights of Nations (1907), Dark Manhattan (1937), The Cool World (1963), Black Caesar (1974), Malcolm X (1992), and American Gangster (2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood’s symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.
In the three largest cities in Sweden, social movement “scenes”—networks of social movement actors and the places they inhabit—challenge threats such as gentrification. The geography of the built environment influences their ability to lay claim to urban space and to local political processes. In Making a Scene, Kimberly Creasap emphasizes that it is the centrality, concentration, and visibility of these scenes that make them most effective. Whereas some scenes become embedded as part of everyday life—as in Malmö—in contrast, scenes in Göteborg and Stockholm often fail to become part of the fabric of urban neighborhoods.
Creasap investigates key spaces for scenes, from abandoned industrial areas and punk clubs to street festivals, bookstores, and social centers, to show how activists create sites and develop structures of resistance that are anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-gentrification, queer, and feminist. She also charts the relationship between scenes and city spaces to show these autonomous social movements create their own cultural landscapes. Making a Scene encourages critical thinking about spatiality and place in the sociology of social movements and the role of social movements as important actors in urban development.
Poovey illuminates the ways literary genres, such as the novel, and innovations in social thought, such as statistical thinking and anatomical realism, helped separate social concerns from the political and economic domains. She then discusses the influence of the social body concept on Victorian ideas about the role of the state, examining writings by James Phillips Kay, Thomas Chalmers, and Edwin Chadwick on regulating the poor. Analyzing the conflict between Kay's idea of the social body and Babbage's image of the social machine, she considers the implications of both models for the place of Victorian women. Poovey's provocative readings of Disraeli's Coningsby, Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend show that the novel as a genre exposed the role gender played in contemporary discussions of poverty and wealth.
Making a Social Body argues that gender, race, and class should be considered in the context of broader concerns such as how social authority is distributed, how institutions formalize knowledge, and how truth is defined.
With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.
The essays collected here explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history. With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Making a World after Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global South, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.
Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.
The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.
Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull
Focusing on the workers themselves—men, women, and children representative of a variety of immigrant and ethnic groups—contributors trace the emergence of the Employee Representation Plan, the work of the company's Sociology Department, and CF&I's interactions with the YMCA in the early twentieth century. They examine CF&I's early commitment to Americanize its immigrant employees and shape worker behavior, the development of policies that constructed the workforce it envisioned while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the strike that eventually led to the Ludlow Massacre, and the impact of the massacre on the employees, the company, and beyond.
Making an American Workforce provides greater insight into the repercussions of the Industrial Representation Plan and the Ludlow Massacre, revealing the long-term consequences of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company policies on the American worker, the state of Colorado, and the creation of corporate culture. Making an American Workforce will be of interest to Western, labor, and business historians.
This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation.
Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered the Civil War.
Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.
Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism.
The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Yet rather than being a mass taken advantage of by populist leaders, the working class Musić presents is one with agency and voice, a force that played an important role in shaping the fate of the country. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in “intellectual property” has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics ranging from traditional knowledge to international trade. Though recognition of the central role played by “knowledge economies” has increased, there is a special urgency associated with present-day inquiries into where rights to information come from, how they are justified, and the ways in which they are deployed.
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, presents a range of diverse—and even conflicting—contemporary perspectives on intellectual property rights and the contested sources of authority associated with them. Examining fundamental concepts and challenging conventional narratives—including those centered around authorship, invention, and the public domain—this book provides a rich introduction to an important intersection of law, culture, and material production.
A study of literature written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos emphasizes how authors processed their horrific experiences through poetry and prose.
This is the first study devoted to how little known but essential authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the gothic horror tale. Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose’s readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.
Grounded in a richly detailed ethnography of Haya practice, Weiss’s analysis considers the symbolic qualities and values embedded in goods and transactions across a wide range of cultural activity: agricultural practice and food preparation, the body’s experience of epidemic disease from AIDS to the infant affliction of “plastic teeth,” and long-standing forms of social movement and migration. Weiss emphasizes how Haya images of consumption describe the relationship between their local community and the global economy. Throughout, he demonstrates that particular commodities and more general market processes are always material and meaningful forces with the potential for creativity as well as disruption in Haya social life. By calling attention to the productive dimensions of this spatial and temporal world, his work highlights the importance of human agency in not only the Haya but any sociocultural order.
Offering a significant contribution to the anthropological theories of practice, embodiment, and agency, and enriching our understanding of the lives of a rural African people, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World will interest historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars of cultural studies.
With essays devoted to theories of racial domination, comparative global racisms, and transnational white identity, the geographical reach of the volume is significant and broad. Dalton Conley writes on “How I Learned to Be White.” Allan Bérubé discusses the intersection of gay identity and whiteness, and Mab Segrest describes the spiritual price white people pay for living in a system of white supremacy. Other pieces examine the utility of whiteness as a critical term for social analysis and contextualize different attempts at antiracist activism. In a razor-sharp introduction, the editors not only raise provocative questions about the intellectual, social, and political goals of those interested in the study of whiteness but assess several of the topic’s major recurrent themes: the visibility of whiteness (or the lack thereof); the “emptiness” of whiteness as a category of identification; and conceptions of whiteness as a structural privilege, a harbinger of violence, or an institutionalization of European imperialism.
Contributors. William Aal, Allan Bérubé, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Dalton Conley, Troy Duster, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., Eric Klinenberg, Eric Lott, Irene J. Nexica, Michael Omi, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Mab Segrest, Vron Ware, Howard Winant, Matt Wray
This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.
Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi; Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.
Robert Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. This detailed and candid account of the process of making Dead Birds, from the birth of the idea through filming in New Guinea to editing and releasing the finished film, is more than the chronicle of a single work. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. Letters, journals, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and over 50 images are assembled to recreate a vivid chronology of events. Making Dead Birds not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.
Gardner led a remarkable cast of participants on the 1961 expedition. All brought back extraordinary bodies of work. Probably most influential of all was Dead Birds, which marked a sea change in nonfiction filmmaking. This book takes the reader inside the creative process of making that landmark film and offers a revealing look into the heart and mind of one of the great filmmakers of our time.
Readers will gain practical insights about how to
- Define goals and target audiences
- Customize programs to meet community needs
- Equip a makerspace
- Document activities
- Assess achievements and areas for growth
- Engage makers in a variety of technology and hands-on activities, including robots, 3D printing, sewing, cardboard challenges, knitting and crochet, design thinking, and zines
The authors’ experiences include co-creating one of the nation’s first school library makerspaces; establishing after-school maker programs with elementary and middle school learners; co-designing one-off and ongoing maker events for community-building in diverse public libraries; engaging with senior citizens in a low-income Senior Summer Camp pilot; and state, national, and international workshops for teachers, librarians, and youth mentors.
We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point in life when friendship is particularly important. Why is it, then, that so many college students are falling victim to what the US Surgeon General termed an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”? How do different aspects of college life help or hinder students’ ability to form deep connections?
In Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks, sociologist Janice M. McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships. Based on interviews with 95 students on three distinct campuses—a small private college (Dartmouth College), a large public university (University of New Hampshire), and a non-residential community college (Manchester Community College)—McCabe captures a wide range of experiences and discovers how features of the campuses make it easier or harder for students to make and keep friends. She shows how and why, across all three institutions, some students thrive in deep and lasting friendships with their peers.
As McCabe’s research reveals, we need to look at the structures of students’ networks, the institutions they attend, and the importance of their identities in these places if we are to truly uncover and address the loneliness epidemic facing today’s young adults.
Eugene Gordon (1891–1974) was a major writer involved in the development of the burgeoning Black literary scene in Boston in the 1920s, an active player in the Harlem Renaissance, and a longtime member of the Communist Party. Despite his credentials as a reporter, editor, fiction writer, and political activist, he is rarely mentioned in studies of the Harlem Renaissance or Marxist politics. Here, Louis J. Parascandola has pulled together Gordon’s journalism, autobiographical writing, and fiction. This new collection, featuring both previously published pieces from a wide variety of publications as well as material that has never before been published, demonstrates his range and his skill while establishing his importance as a critical voice of his time.
Gordon was born and raised in the South but made his way north at a young age. In Boston, he founded the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an African American literary group that included other notable writers such as Helene Johnson and Dorothy West. He later became editor of and contributor to two major publications coming out of the era: the Messenger and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. As he grew more political, he joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and became editor of and contributor to the New Masses. Scholars looking to research him have struggled to find disparate writings to get a fuller sense of his literary stylings as well as his political commitments. This welcome new volume establishes Gordon as a significant, understudied figure.
The Making of a Black Scholar is structured around schools. Porter attends Georgia's segregated black schools until he enters the privileged world of Amherst College. He graduates (spending one semester at Morehouse College) and moves on to graduate study at Yale. He starts his teaching career at Detroit's Wayne State University and spends the 1980s at Dartmouth College and the 1990s at Stanford University.
Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised—through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of José Angel Gutiérrez.
Gutiérrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first insider's view of the important political and social events within the Mexican American communities in South Texas during the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial and dynamic political figure during the height of the Chicano movement, Gutiérrez offers an absorbing personal account of his life at the forefront of the Mexican-American civil rights movement—first as a Chicano and then as a militant.
Gutiérrez traces the racial, ethnic, economic, and social prejudices facing Chicanos with powerful scenes from his own life: his first summer job as a tortilla maker at the age of eleven, his racially motivated kidnapping as a teenager, and his coming of age in the face of discrimination as a radical organizer in college and graduate school. When Gutiérrez finally returned to Cristal, he helped form the Mexican American Youth Organization and, subsequently the Raza Unida Party to confront issues of ethnic intolerance in his community. His story is soon to be a classic in the developing literature of Mexican American leaders.
What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Michele Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic.
Roman aristocrats would seem to be unlikely candidates for conversion to Christianity. Pagan and civic traditions were deeply entrenched among the educated and politically well-connected. Indeed, men who held state offices often were also esteemed priests in the pagan state cults: these priesthoods were traditionally sought as a way to reinforce one’s social position. Moreover, a religion whose texts taught love for one’s neighbor and humility, with strictures on wealth and notions of equality, would not have obvious appeal for those at the top of a hierarchical society. Yet somehow in the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christianity and the Roman aristocracy met and merged.
Examining the world of the ruling class—its institutions and resources, its values and style of life—Salzman paints a fascinating picture, especially of aristocratic women. Her study yields new insight into the religious revolution that transformed the late Roman Empire.
Walter Prescott Webb became one of the best known interpreters of the American West following the publication of The Great Plains in 1931. That book remained one of the outstanding studies of the region for decades and attracted considerable attention over the years for its unusual emphasis on the impact of geographic factors on the process of settlement. Using manuscript sources, some of which had not previously been available, Gregory M. Tobin has traced the elements that went into the planning and writing of The Great Plains and that account for its distinctive approach to the writing of a regional history.
Tobin emphasizes two aspects of Webb's life that molded the historian's outlook: his early family life and community connections in West Texas and his admiration for the ideas of scholar Lindley Miller Keasbey. Webb reacted strongly against the assumption that the only cultural values of any real worth emanated from the urban and sophisticated East; he was determined to write the history of his own people in a way that would reveal the scale of their anonymous contribution to American civilization. By reverting to Keasbey's stress on the relationship between natural environment and social institutions, Webb broadened his study to take in what he believed to be a distinct geographic environment. The result was The Great Plains, an assertion of individual and regional identity by a man with a personal stake in establishing the image of a distinctive Plains civilization.
Although The Making of a History is not a full biography of Walter Prescott Webb, it is the first biographically oriented study of a man regarded as one of the twentieth century's major western historians. It places his development within the framework of his intellectual and social setting and, in a sense, subjects his career to the same type of scrutiny that he advocated as the basis of the study of evolving cultures.
Abufarha draws on the life histories of martyrs, interviews he conducted with their families and members of the groups that sponsored their operations, and examinations of Palestinian literature, art, performance, news stories, and political commentaries. He also assesses data—about the bombers, targets, and fatalities caused—from more than two hundred martyrdom operations carried out by Palestinian groups between 2001 and 2004. Some involved the use of explosive belts or the detonation of cars; others entailed armed attacks against Israeli targets (military and civilian) undertaken with the intent of fighting until death. In addition, he scrutinized suicide attacks executed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad between 1994 and 2000. In his analysis of Palestinian political violence, Abufarha takes into account Palestinians’ understanding of the history of the conflict with Israel, the effects of containment on Palestinians’ everyday lives, the disillusionment created by the Oslo peace process, and reactions to specific forms of Israeli state violence. The Making of a Human Bomb illuminates the Palestinians’ perspective on the conflict with Israel and provides a model for ethnographers seeking to make sense of political violence.
In this book, distinguished historian Robin Waterfield draws on his deep understanding of Greek history to bring us into the world of this complicated, splintered empire. He shows how, while Antigonus was confirming his Macedonian rule through constitutional changes, the Greeks were making moves toward independence. Two great confederacies of Greek cities emerged, forming powerful blocs that had the potential to resist the power of Macedon. The Making of a King charts Antigonus’s conflicts with the Greeks and with his perennial enemy, Ptolemy of Egypt. But Antigonus’s diplomatic and military successes were not enough to secure peace, and in his final years he saw his control of Greece whittled away by rebellion and the growing power of the Greek confederacies. Macedon’s lack of firm control over Greece ultimately made it possible for Rome to take its place as the arbiter of the Greeks’ future.
The Making of a King is Waterfield’s third volume about the Greeks in the era after Alexander the Great. Completing the story begun in his previous two books, Dividing the Spoils and Taken at the Flood, it brings Antigonus and his turbulent era to life. With The Making of a King—the first book in more than a century to tell in full the story of Antigonus Gonatas’s reign—this fascinating figure finally receives his due.
How a culture of violence legitimized lynching among ordinary people
On May 15, 1916, a crowd of fifteen thousand witnessed the lynching of an eighteen-year-old black farm worker named Jesse Washington. Most central Texans of the time failed to call for the punishment of the mob’s leaders. In The Making of a Lynching Culture, now in paperback, William D. Carrigan seeks to explain not how a fiendish mob could lynch one man but how a culture of violence that nourished this practice could form and endure for so long among ordinary people.
Beginning with the 1836 independence of Texas, The Making of a Lynching Culture reexamines traditional explanations of lynching, including the role of the frontier, economic tensions, and political conflicts. Using a voluminous body of court records, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and other sources, Carrigan shows how notions of justice and historical memory were shaped to glorify violence and foster a culture that legitimized lynching.
Februari contemplates the many questions that sexual transitions entail: the clinical effects of testosterone, the alteration of sexual organs, and its effects on sexual intimacy; how transsexuality figures in the law; and how it challenges the way we talk about sex and gender, such as the seemingly minor—but crucially important—difference between the terms “transsexual” and “transgender.” He analyzes our impressions of effeminate men and butch women, separating apparent acceptance from actual prejudice, and critically examines the curious requirement in many countries that one must demonstrate a psychological disturbance—a “gender identity disorder”—in order to be granted sex change therapies. From there he explores the seemingly endless minutiae changing genders or sex effect, from the little box with an M or an F on passports to the shockingly sudden way testosterone can adjust physical features.
With his characteristically clear voice combined with intimate—sometimes moving, sometimes funny—ruminations, Februari wakes readers up to all the ways, big and small, our world is structured by sex and gender.
In the border metropolis of El Paso, more than half the population is Mexican American, yet this group had been denied effective political representation. Mexican Americans broke this barrier and achieved the “politics of status” through Telles’s stunning 1957 victory. This book captures the excitement of that long-awaited election.
The Making of a Mexican American Mayor also examines Telles’s story as a microcosm of the history of Mexican Americans before and after World War II—the Mexican American Generation. As mayor and ambassador, Telles symbolized this generation’s striving for political participation, and his legacy is evident in the growing number of Latinas/os holding office today.
In time for the centennial celebration of her classic Mysticism, this volume of Underhill's letters will enable readers and researchers to follow her as she reconciled her beliefs with her daily life. The letters reveal her personal and theological development and clarify the relationships that influenced her life and work. Hardly aloof, she enjoyed the interests, mirth, and compassion of close friendships.
Drawing from collections previously unknown to scholars, The Making of a Mystic shows the range of Evelyn Underhill's mind and interests as well as the immense network of her correspondents, including Sir James Frazier and Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This substantial selection of Underhill's correspondence demonstrates an exceptional scope, beginning with her earliest letters from boarding school to her mother and extending to a letter written to T. S. Eliot from what was to be her deathbed in London in 1941 as the London Blitz raged around her.
Jonathan Schofer offers the first theoretically framed examination of rabbinic ethics in several decades. Centering on one large and influential anthology, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Jonathan Schofer situates that text within a broader spectrum of rabbinic thought, while at the same time bringing rabbinic thought into dialogue with current scholarship on the self, ethics, theology, and the history of religions.
Notable Selection, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought, Association for Jewish Studies
In The Making of a Terrorist, Jeffrey Champlin examines key figures from three canonical texts from the German-language literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, Schiller’s Die Rauber, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. Champlin situates these readings within a larger theoretical and historical context, exploring the mechanics, aesthetics, and poetics of terror while explicating the emergence of the terrorist personality in modernity. In engaging and accessible prose, Champlin explores the ethical dimensions of violence and interrogates an ethics of textual violence.
The harsh Armistice terms of 1918, the short-lived Weimar Republic, Hindenburg's senile vacillations, and behind-the-scene power plays form the backbone of this excellent study covering German history during the first three-and-a-half decades of the century.
In this comprehensive and accessible book, Dean Krouk examines a significant public figure in Scandinavian literature and a critical period in modern European history through original readings of the political, ethical, and gender issues in Grieg’s works. This volume offers a first-rate analysis of the interwar period’s political and cultural agendas in Scandinavia and Europe leading to the Second World War by examining the rise of fascism, communism, and antifascism. Grieg’s poetry found renewed resonance in Norway following the 2011 far-right domestic terrorist attacks, making insight into his contradictory ideas more crucial than ever. Krouk’s presentation of Grieg’s unexpected ideological tensions will be thought-provoking for many readers in the United States and elsewhere.
Powerfully insightful and fully accessible, The Making of an Artist will be an invaluable resource for practicing artists, those just setting out on artistic careers, and art teachers alike.
The first portion of the book is comprised of stories from Klein’s life collected during oral history interviews, while the latter section contains essays written by Klein about philosophical topics of importance to him, such as eco-philosophy, the definition of wilderness, and the morality of hunting.
Many of Klein’s graduate students have gone on to become successful wildlife managers themselves, in Alaska and around the globe. Through The Making of an Ecologist, Klein’s outlook, philosophy, and approach toward sustainability, wildlife management, and conservation can now inspire even more readers to ensure the survival of our fragile planet in an ever-changing global society.
The insurrection of 31 May-2 June 1793 that overthrew the Girondins and brought the Montagnards to power was a decisive event in the history of the French Revolution. Morris Slavin's study is the first that discusses the background, the mechanisms, and the immediate results of the uprising, as well as the hidden forces that produced it and the contradictions that were inherent in it from the beginning.
Slavin's approach to the controversy between the Gironde and the Mountain is from below (d'en bas), from the vantage point of the sections of Paris and their extralegal assembly, the Eveche assembly, and its Comite des Neuf. He shows how and why the Montagnards used the insurrectionary organs created by the sans-culottes for their own purposes, and how the Montagnards won them over against their Girondin enemies by granting the sans-culottes economic concessions, at the same time disarming them politically.
This revelation of the profound differences between the sans-culottes and the Montagnards on the goals of the insurrection is a major contribution to understanding French revolutionary behavior. Slavin finds that the rank and file in the pro-Girondin sections were just as self-sacrificing and just as patriotic as the followers of the Mountain. The dispute between the Girondins and the Montagnards was an intraclass contest, not a class struggle.
Professor Lien looks at political participation by Asian Americans prior to 1965 and then examines, at both organizational and mass politics levels, how race, ethnicity, and transnationalism help to construct a complex American electorate. She looks not only at rates of participation among Asian Americans as compared with blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and non-Hispanic whites, but also among specific groups of Asian Americans—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese. She also discusses how gender, socioeconomic class, and place of birth affect political participation.
With documentation ranging from historical narrative to opinion survey data, Professor Lien creates a picture of a diverse group of politically active people who are intent on carving out a place for themselves in American political life.
The Making of Chicana/o Studies traces the philosophy and historical development of the field of Chicana/o studies from precursor movements to the Civil Rights era to today, focusing its lens on the political machinations in higher education that sought to destroy the discipline. As a renowned leader, activist, scholar, and founding member of the movement to establish this curriculum in the California State University system, which serves as a model for the rest of the country, Rodolfo F. Acuña has, for more than forty years, battled the trend in academia to deprive this group of its academic presence.
The book assesses the development of Chicana/o studies (an area of studies that has even more value today than at its inception)--myths about its epistemological foundations have remained uncontested. Acuña sets the record straight, challenging those in the academy who would fold the discipline into Latino studies, shadow it under the dubious umbrella of ethnic studies, or eliminate it altogether.
Building the largest Chicana/o studies program in the nation was no easy feat, especially in an atmosphere of academic contention. In this remarkable account, Acuña reveals how California State University, Northridge, was instrumental in developing an area of study that offers more than 166 sections per semester, taught by 26 tenured and 45 part-time instructors. He provides vignettes of successful programs across the country and offers contemporary educators and students a game plan--the mechanics for creating a successful Chicana/o studies discipline--and a comprehensive index of current Chicana/o studies programs nationwide.
Latinas/os, of which Mexican Americans are nearly seventy percent, comprise a complex sector of society projected to be just shy of thirty percent of the nation's population by 2050. The Making of Chicana/o Studies identifies what went wrong in the history of Chicana/o studies and offers tangible solutions for the future.
The Making of China’s Post Office traces the origins and early development of the country’s modern postal system. Sweeping in perspective, it goes beyond the bounds of institutional history to explore the political maneuverings, economic imperatives, and societal pressures both inhibiting and driving forward postal development. Although its prime mover was Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the wider cast of characters includes foreign and native staff, Qing officials, local administrations, commercial interests, and foreign governments.
Drawing extensively on archival material from the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing, the Tianjin Municipal Archives, and the Archive of Queen’s University Belfast, Weipin Tsai contextualizes the making of the post office within the country’s long and contested path of modernization, bringing Chinese voices to the fore. Tsai illustrates the extent to which local agency shaped the design and development of the service as it expanded from experimental coastal operation into China’s interior and on to its border periphery, the first nationwide modernization project to directly impact people’s daily lives. Ultimately, the grand spatial reach of the Post Office carried significant symbolic meaning in relation to sovereignty for the Qing government and for later Republican administrations.
Over the centuries, early Chinese classical poetry became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. But modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt on the accuracy of received texts. The result has destabilized the study of early Chinese poetry.
This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century BCE and the third century CE. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged, with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, Stephen Owen argues, we can see that this was "one poetry," created from a shared poetic repertoire and compositional practices. Second, it considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.
As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction—reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, and by scribes and anthologists—all of whom changed texts to suit their needs.
How did environmental law first emerge in the United States? Why has it evolved in the ways that it has? And what are the unique challenges inherent to environmental lawmaking in general and in the United States in particular?
Since its first edition, The Making of Environmental Law has been foundational to our understanding of these questions. For the second edition, Richard J. Lazarus returns to his landmark book and takes stock of developments over the last two decades. Drawing on many years of experience on the frontlines of legal and policy battles, Lazarus provides a theoretical overview of the challenges that environmental protection poses for lawmaking, related to both the distinctive features of US lawmaking institutions and the spatial and temporal dimensions of ecological change. The book explains why environmental law emerged in the manner and form that it did in the 1970s and traces how it developed over sequent decades through key laws and controversies. New chapters, composing more than half of the second edition, examine a host of recent developments. These include how Congress dropped out of environmental lawmaking in the early twenty-first century; the shifting role of the judiciary; long-overdue efforts to provide environmental justice to disadvantaged communities; and the destabilization of environmental law that has resulted from the election of Presidents with dramatically clashing environmental policies.
As the nation’s partisan divide has grown deeper and the challenge of climate change has dramatically raised the perceived stakes for opposing interests, environmental law is facing its greatest challenges yet. This book is essential reading for understanding where we have been and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
In The Making of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus offers a new interpretation of the past three decades of this area of the law, examining the legal, political, cultural, and scientific factors that have shaped—and sometimes hindered—the creation of pollution controls and natural resource management laws. He argues that in the future, environmental law must forge a more nuanced understanding of the uncertainties and trade-offs, as well as the better-organized political opposition that currently dominates the federal government. Lazarus is especially well equipped to tell this story, given his active involvement in many of the most significant moments in the history of environmental law as a litigator for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, an assistant to the Solicitor General, and a member of advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
Ranging widely in his analysis, Lazarus not only explains why modern environmental law emerged when it did and how it has evolved, but also points to the ambiguities in our current situation. As the field of environmental law "grays" with middle age, Lazarus's discussions of its history, the lessons learned from past legal reforms, and the challenges facing future lawmakers are both timely and invigorating.
Placing Handel’s best-known work in the context of its times, this vivid account charts the composer’s working relationship with his librettist, the gifted but demanding Charles Jennens, and looks at Handel’s varied and evolving company of singers together with his royal patronage. Through examination of the original composition manuscript and Handel’s own conducting score, held in the Bodleian Library’s collection, The Making of Handel’s Messiah sheds new light on the piece’s construction, performance, and reception. Exploring the complex history of one of the most successful pieces of choral music of all time, this volume examines issues around the performance of sacred texts in a non-sacred context, particularly Handel’s collaboration with the men and boys of the Chapel Royal. This book also explores the later reception and performance history of the piece, including the festival performance attended by Haydn, the massed-choir tradition of the Victorian period, and today’s “come-and-sing” events.
In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan's military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book.
The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan's interwar history.
An unprecedented account of social stratification within the US legal profession.
How do race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do professionals then navigate these parameters?
The Making of Lawyers’ Careers provides an unprecedented account of the last two decades of the legal profession in the US, offering a data-backed look at the structure of the profession and the inequalities that early-career lawyers face across race, gender, and class distinctions. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also interviewed more than two hundred lawyers and drew insights from their individual stories, contextualizing data with theory and close attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession.
Their findings show that lawyers’ careers both reflect and reproduce inequalities within society writ large. They also reveal how individuals exercise agency despite these constraints.
Mark Dugan brings reality to the forefront in The Making of Legends. Some of the characters in his accounts are practically unknown but deserve more recognition than the bandits whose names are mythic. Exhaustive archival research enables him to recreate such colorful lives as North Carolina’s Malina Blaylock, who, disguised as a man, joined her outlaw husband in the Confederate army; slippery escape artist David Lewis, the Robin Hood of the Cumberland, who finally stopped two bullets in a chaotic Pennsylvania shoot-out; Wyatt Earp, in his mysterious post-OK Corral year, amidst the Coeur d’Alene gold rush; and grim “Laughing Sam” Hartman, of South Dakota.
Dugan sets the stage by explaining how newspapers and dime novels fanned the flames of public fascination with outlaws. He unmasks the real Billy the Kid, traces the paths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to their historic shoot-out in South America, and masterfully summarizes the Civil War grudges, bloodshed, and wanton destruction along the Kansas-Missouri border that spawned Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers gang.
In researching the lawless era of the American frontier, Dugan discovered much information that has never been published — material that will expand readers' views of frontier history and people, both good and bad. The Making of Legends proves that the actual stories of notorious legends can be more exciting, moving, and intriguing than anything dreamed up in a dime novel or a Hollywood fantasy.
With The Making of Legends Mark Dugan’s pursuit of outlaws takes him to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, California, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Nebraska, Indiana, Wyoming, and Montana.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two of the most famous, translated, and quoted books in the world. What began as a simple tale told by eccentric Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) to Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, become a worldwide phenomenon. Fostering film adaptations and retellings, and influencing countless other works, the Alice books have a deeply cherished place in popular culture. Known for their oddities and absurdities, the books have been endlessly interpreted and analyzed for symbolism and hidden messages.
Peter Hunt cuts away the psychological speculation that has grown up around the Alice books, and instead traces the historical sources of their multilayered in-jokes and political, literary, and philosophical satire. He situates the books in the history of children’s literature and explores the local and personal references that the real Alice would have understood. Equally fascinating are the rich fragments about everything from the “sensation” novel to Darwinian theory—not to mention Dodgson’s personal feelings—that he wove into the books as they developed.
Illustrated with manuscripts, portraits, Sir John Tenniel’s original line drawings for the first editions, and contemporary photographs, this is an innovative look at two remarkable stories. The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland takes us on a guided tour from the treacle wells of Victorian Oxford through an astonishing world of politics, philosophy, humor, and nightmare.
Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade.
The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.
Investigating Mary Ellen Pleasant's convoluted legacy
Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush-era San Francisco a free black woman with abolitionist convictions and a predilection for entrepreneurial success. Behind the convenient and trusted disguise of "Mammy," she transformed domestic labor into enterprise, amassed remarkable real estate, wealth, and power, and gained notoriety for her work in fighting Jim Crow.
Pleasant's legacy is steeped in scandals and lore. Was she a voodoo queen who traded in sexual secrets? A madam? A murderer? In The Making of "Mammy Pleasant," Lynn M. Hudson examines the folklore of Pleasant's real and imagined powers. Emphasizing the significance of her life in the context of how it has been interpreted or ignored in the larger trends of American history, Hudson integrates fact and speculation culled from periodicals, court cases, diaries, letters, Pleasant's interviews with the San Francisco press, and various biographical and fictional accounts.
Addressing the lack of a historical record of black women's lives, the author argues that the silences and mysteries of Pleasant's past, whether never recorded or intentionally omitted, reveal as much about her life as what has been documented. Through Pleasant's life, Hudson also interrogates the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality during the formative years of California's economy and challenges popular mythology about the liberatory sexual culture of the American West.
In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors of the day, were excluded both from the delivery and from the subsequent month of lying-in.
But in the eighteenth century there emerged a new practitioner: the "man-midwife" who acted in lieu of a midwife and delivered normal births. By the late eighteenth century, men-midwives had achieved a permanent place in the management of childbirth, especially in the most lucrative spheres of practice.
Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control and collective solidarity became instead a region of male medical practice? What had broken down the barrier that had formerly excluded the male practitioner from the management of birth?
This confident and authoritative work explores and explains a remarkable transformation--a shift not just in medical practices but in gender relations. Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of childbirth, Wilson argues with great skill that it was not the desires of medical men but the choices of mothers that summoned man-midwifery into being.
In the two hundred years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein’s creation during stormy days and nights at Byron’s Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this compelling and innovative book, Daisy Hay stitches together the objects and manuscripts of the novel’s turbulent genesis in order to bring its story back to life.
Frankenstein was inspired by the extraordinary people surrounding the eighteen-year-old author and by the places and historical dramas that formed the backdrop of her youth. Featuring manuscripts, portraits, illustrations, and artifacts, The Making of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” explores the novel’s time and place, the people who inspired its characters, the relics of its long afterlife, and the notebooks in which it was created. Hay strips Frankenstein back to its constituent parts to reveal an uneven novel written by a young woman deeply engaged in the process of working out what she thought about the pressing issues of her time: from science, politics, religion, and slavery to maternity, the imagination, creativity, and community. Richly illustrated throughout, this is an astute and intricate biography of the novel for all those fascinated by its essential, brilliant chaos.
Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case.
This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys, and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy’s newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day.
This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful.
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience.
Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture.
Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due.
The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives.
For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.
Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself.
Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women’s health. It was precisely the book’s distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.
Drawing on rich documentary evidence—records of Klee's sales, reviews of his exhibitions, the artist's published writings about his art, unpublished correspondence, as well as contemporary criticism—Werckmeister follows Klee's transformation from an idiosyncratic abstract individualist to a metaphysical storyteller to mystical sage. Werckmeister argues that this latter image was promoted by a number of influential art critics and dealers acting in cooperation with the artist himself. This posture prompted Klee's success first in the war-weary modernist art world of 1916-18 and then in the pseudo-revolutionary art world of 1919-20.
This work is a critical challenge to the myth of Klee's art and to the hagiography of his artistic personality. Werckmeister's historical account is sure to be a controversial yet significant contribution to Klee studies—one that will change the nature of Klee scholarship for some time to come.
The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin provides a unique and intimate glimpse into the lives of these early settlers, as they describe what it felt like to be a teenager in a wagon heading west or an isolated young wife living far from her friends and family. Woven together with context provided by historian Michael E. Stevens, these first-person accounts form a fascinating narrative that deepens our ability to understand and empathize with Wisconsin’s early pioneers.
The gardens Hunt explores offer surprising new ideas about how we can carve out a space for respite in nature. Taking readers to gardens public and private, busy and hidden away, to botanical gardens, small parks, university campuses, and vernacular gardens, Hunt showcases the differences between cultures and countries around the globe, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Australia. Richly illustrated, The Making of Place is sure to enchant and inspire even the most modest of home gardeners.
Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion—in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism.
The Making of Pro-life Activists provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.
Kessler supplies both the biography of a legend and an explanation of why that legend has endured.
Sacagawea is one of the most renowned figures of the American West. A member of the Shoshone tribe, she was captured by the Hidatsas as a child and eventually became one of the wives of a French fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau. In 1805 Charbonneau joined Lewis and Clark as the expedition's interpreter. Sacagawea was the only woman to participate in this important mission, and some claim that she served as a guide when the expedition reached the upper Missouri River and the mountainous region.
Although much has been written about the historical importance of Sacagawea in connection with the expedition, no one has explored why her story has endured so successfully in Euro-American culture. In an examination of representative texts (including histories, works of fiction, plays, films, and the visual arts) from 1805 to the present, Kessler charts the evolution and transformation of the legend over two centuries and demonstrates that Sacagawea has persisted as a Euro-American legend because her story exemplified critical elements of America's foundation myths-especially the concept of manifest destiny. Kessler also shows how the Sacagawea legend was flexible within its mythic framework and was used to address cultural issues specific to different time periods, including suffrage for women, taboos against miscegenation, and modern feminism.
Celebrities and popular icons are increasingly ubiquitous figures of a 21st century postmodern world. Some, in death, blur age-old distinctions of sanctification and trespass on sacred ground long held exclusively by religious saints. An emerging continuum is transforming that sacred arena and raising a number of important issues, including the nature of the relationships between the worshipped and the worshipful and the types of institutions that sustain them.
The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground investigates a number of religious leaders, healers, folk saints, and popular icons in seeking to identify their commonalities and discover how they speak to the same inner yearnings of human beings for gods and heroes. Issues of social relations, love, emotion, charisma, power, and sanctification are addressed by the contributors. Analyses of hagiographies, biographies, media, control of space, pilgrimage, and acts of devotion provide the bases for the authors' explorations of these issues. Among the sanctified included for analysis are the folk saints El Nino Fidencio and Teresa Urrea; the charismatic rabbis Baba Sali, Baba Baruch, and Ifargan; King Chulalongkorn of Thailand; two political figures, Evita Peron and Che Guevara; and three celebrities: James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Japanese rock star HIDE.
The contributors challenge notions of what is sacred and who may be sanctified, and argue that a broadening of views is needed to accommodate and appreciate emerging contemporary realities.
The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in the making, Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies—as the First Folio was then known—appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Nearly one thousand pages in length, the collection comprised thirty-six plays, half of which had never been previously published. Emma Smith tells the story of the First Folio’s origins, locating it within the social and political context of Jacobean London and bringing in the latest scholarship on the seventeenth-century book trade.
Extensively illustrated, The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio is a landmark addition to the copious literature on Shakespeare. It will shed much-needed light on the birth of the First Folio—of which fewer than 250 copies remain—and the birth of Shakespeare’s towering reputation.
This study of the Japanese imperial court in the early thirteenth century focuses on the compilation of one of Japan’s most important poetry collections, Shinkokinshū. Using personal diaries, court records, poetry texts, and literary treatises, Robert N. Huey reconstructs the process by which Retired Emperor Go-Toba brought together contending factions to produce this collection and laid the groundwork for his later attempt at imperial restoration. The work analyzes how poetic discourse of the imperial court animated both other kinds of writing and other activities. Finally, it underscores the inextricable ties between the writing of poetry and court politics.
Shinkokinshū—the “New Kokinshu”—has been viewed as a neo-classical effort. Reading history backward, scholars have often taken the work to be the outgrowth of a nostalgia for greatness presumed to have been lost in the wars of the origins of the collection. The author argues that the compilers of Shinkokinshū instead saw it as a “new” beginning, a revitalization and affirmation of courtly traditions, and not a reaction to loss. It is a dynamic collection, full of innovative, challenging poetry—not an elegy for a lost age.
Wieviorka demonstrates that the truly terrorist actor has become alienated both from the collective movement and society. The actor turns to the blind violence when he finds himself cut off from the very ideology which legitimates his actions. Pure terrorism, Wieviorka concludes, is more than simply a break between those who use it and those it targets; it is also a relationship—between the individual and the collective he represents—which has been rendered unrealistic or artificial. Thus, terrorist violence should be understood not as the desperate act of a faltering movement but as a substitute for a movement which has fallen away from the ideology in which it was forged.
For the revelations it offers on the roots and motivations of terrorism, for its innovative methods, and for its useful comparative analysis of terrorist groups in recent history, The Making of Terrorism will be an important resource across many disciplines for anyone interested in terrorism or political violence.
Making of the Auden canon was first published in 1957. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
No poet writing in English is more representative of the intellectual trends of the thirties and forties than W. H. Auden. British born, Oxford educated, American by naturalization, and now returned to Oxford to occupy the chair of poetry, he is widely regarded as the spiritual guide and keeper of the conscience of the age, at the same time that he exemplifies the gradual passage from ideological left to right so characteristic of the period. This study of Auden's poetry and revisions has far-reaching implications for an understanding not only of Auden's own writing but that of his contemporaries as well.
Considering that 1945 Collected Poetry as the Auden canon, or authorized version of the poems, Mr. Beach examines the process by which Auden selected poems to be admitted to the canon. He shows that the poet eliminated many that were at odds with his later style and thought, discreetly revised others to bring them into line, and, at the same time, left unaltered some of the pieces from his unregenerate days. Auden's system of selection and revision reflects the winding course of his thought, and, by tracing this course, Mr. Beach endeavors to penetrate the poet's diverse masks in an effort to get at the identity of t he man himself.
“The Making of the Bible is invaluable for anyone interested in Scripture and in the intertwined histories of Judaism and Christianity.”
—John Barton, author of A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths
The authoritative new account of the Bible’s origins, illuminating the 1,600-year tradition that shaped the Christian and Jewish holy books as millions know them today.
The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In this revelatory account, a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose.
Recent scholarship has overturned popular assumptions about Israel’s past, suggesting, for instance, that the five books of the Torah were written not by Moses but during the reign of Josiah centuries later. The sources of the Gospels are also under scrutiny. Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter reveal the long, transformative journeys of these and other texts en route to inclusion in the holy books. The New Testament, the authors show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. Rather the two evolved in parallel, in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, Schmid and Schröter argue that Judaism might not have survived had it not been reshaped in competition with early Christianity.
A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, The Making of the Bible is the most comprehensive history yet told of the world’s best-known literature, revealing its buried lessons and secrets.
“A landmark…If you have time to read only one book on the Bible this year, make sure that it is this one.”—Katherine J. Dell, Church Times
“Excellent…With a sure touch, the authors lead the reader through the geopolitical context of the Hebrew Bible and the setting and background of the New Testament, finding something to say about practically every book’s origins and development.”—John Barton, The Tablet
“A remarkable deep dive into foundational books whose origins are often taken for granted.”—Publishers Weekly
In this revelatory account of the making of the foundational text of western civilization, a world-renowned scholar of the Hebrew scriptures joins a noted authority on the New Testament to reconstruct Jewish and Christian scriptural histories and reveal the underappreciated contest between them.
The New Testament, they show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. The two evolved in parallel, often in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, The Making of the Bible is the most comprehensive history yet of the long, transformative journeys of these texts on route to inclusion in the holy books, revealing their buried lessons and secrets.
Patrick's work is both fine scholarship and epic story-telling, a key component to both the education and fascination of the Christian mind, which in turn has shaped the world more deeply than any other influence in human history. "The Christian intellect will guide the heart to the place where the knee can bend and the eye see; the making of the Christian mind will continue from age to age, locating eternal truth in a human history that will endure as God wills so that many may be saved, pointing beyond itself to the reality that thoughts and words represent, making all things new."
This is not a history of dogma or systematic account of the building of doctrine. It is a narrative that follows the major moments wherein the Christian heart so in tune with the Paraclete has rendered the seminal texts and literature of this new culture, from the Didache to the Rule of Saint Benedict and The Consolation of Philosophy. Patrick succeeds in presenting a narrative that reads more like the experience lived by those directly involved in its realization, and although he cannot include every individual accomplishment of the major Christian writers, he illuminates the context in which Christianity was born and how faith grew and allowed itself to be shaped by its participation in the “adventure” and its grasp of objective truth. The Christian mind is, says Patrick, not only inspired and moved by the restless Paraclete, but revolves around the event of Jesus Christ. Christian history is therefore best understood not simply as chronology of events but as the vision of “the new heart in time,” one that strives to be like that of the one who sent the Spirit into history.
Patrick writes with a voice of a teacher, and although this work is very well referenced and accurate he does not intend this work to be a scholarly presentation of data and careful arguments, nor does he include every aspect of this intellectual faith journey of Christianity found in writing. As a comprehensive review, Patrick acknowledges the limitations of his own project to tell a complete story. Nevertheless, The Making of the Christian Mind accomplishes the no less formidable feat of illustrating the vivacious quality of the authentic Christian intellectual life. “Christianity is a survivor, not because it possessed the instruments of power but because, as Jesus of Nazareth said before Pilate, the foundation of the Kingdom is truth, its instruments of conquest are its renewing gifts, its consequences are the substitution of truth for error and ignorance, of faith for skepticism, humility for pride, and of charity and friendship for emulation, all this realized never perfectly but always as possibilities having the power to make all things new.”
This work is divided into three volumes, of which the present work is the first. Highlights of this first volume, The Waiting World, include following revelation as it first moved uncertain hearts to write and then to offer explicit witness. In this first installment, Patrick sets the groundwork for following the faith and history of Israel to Justin Martyr’s great claim that what is true belongs to Christians.
The second installment presents the parallel struggle to build heart and mind, as heresy and temporal demands challenge the memory and vitality of what Christians have received. The writing mind in this sense sustains and gives purpose to the heart, pressed under the burden of doubt and worldly expectation. The reader knows that Christianity endures, but how did this happen? Patrick at every turn discloses the role of the Paraclete who remains the unseen protagonist. In this sense, Patrick surprises even those who think they know the story, and no one is safe from being exposed to a bit of the same inspiration that moves the characters in history passed. Indeed, the reader will feel like a part of this same narrative, in a new unwritten chapter but encountering the same Paraclete who has meddled in and marked events with holy breath that even Patrick cannot fully represent.
Highlights of Fire and Witness are Patrick’s presentation of pivotal yet forgotten works such as The Shepherd of Hermes, and his treatment of Origen and Athanasius in their respective social and spiritual contexts. This volume grants the reader a glimpse into a time when resolutions needed to be made and defended with argument, but also with silent witness and the flame of a resolve dimmed not even by death. Patrick’s description of imperial Christianity and the Christian imagination that ultimately fashions the proper image of Christian places is likewise stunning and not to be missed.
This wide-ranging book is a comparative study of the civil law, primarily the legal systems of western continental Europe and Latin America. It attempts to account for the distinctive features of civil law systems and hence to contribute to an understanding of the forces that cause law to change. The author contends that the basic differences between civil-law and common-law systems derive from legal history rather than from social, economic, or political developments. Above all, he argues, it was the acceptance of the authority of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis that determined the future nature of civil-law systems and gave them their distinctive character.
Mr. Watson outlines the features of Roman law as codified by Justinian that made it adaptable in countries with widely differing political systems, social structures, and local court practices. His learned and lucid exposition encompasses the role and influence of professors of Roman law in medieval universities; the manner and extent to which the case law of various countries drew upon the Corpus Juris; the role of the Institutes as a model for the institutes of local law which were the immediate ancestors of most of the national codes; and the effect of the Corpus Juris on basic features of the civil law, such as the fundamental division between public and private law, with different courts for the two, and the separation of commercial law from the rest of private law.
Scholars may debate his thesis, but none will dispute Alan Watson's command of the sources and his mastery of legal material spanning many centuries and countries. His book will present a challenge to legal historians and students of comparative law, and it will provide Anglo-American lawyers with insight into the nature of civil-law systems.
This comprehensive study of Nathaniel Hawthorne's early writings analyzes the development of Hawthorne's work over the first twenty-five years of his career. Alison Easton studies that process in relation to current critical debates on subjectivity. By examining Hawthorne's novels, sketches, tales, letters, notebooks, reviews, and children's books up to the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Easton shows how Hawthorne tried to understand the complexities of the clash between desire (that which is unrecognized by the social order) and circumstance (the conditions under which one must live in society). The Hawthorne who emerges from this study proves to be a sophisticated theorist of subjectivity, whose project was central to his times.
The author contends that over the first half of his career Hawthorne explored, experimented, and negotiated his way toward a better model of the human subject than the ones that are usually seen as his cultural inheritance. This approach implies a complex, dialectic development in Hawthorne's work, arising from twenty-five years of accumulated experimentation and ongoing debate. Nearly all critics of Hawthorne have ignored this element of development, thus missing the complex evolution of the subject and the revealing intertextual play of meaning that is evident in everything Hawthorne wrote during this period. Easton's study is the first to supply a full chronology for the works written during these years, and the only one to consider in close detail the full and bewilderingly diverse range of his writing throughout this period and to find an overall pattern in the several stages of his intellectual and artistic enterprise.
Easton brings to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature a study of Hawthorne's work that is unique in both scope and perspective. The Making of the Hawthorne Subject offers a substantial and original contribution to the way we think about Hawthorne's work and the relationship of the human subject to the social order of mid-nineteenth-century America.
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