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The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 6
The Correspondence, November 1856-February 1859
Michael D. Barton, Janet Browne, Ken Corbett, and Norman McMillan
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
This sixth volume of Tyndall's correspondence contains 302 letters covering a period of twenty-eight months (1856-1859). It begins shortly after Tyndall returned from his first glacier research in the Alps and follows him as he experimented and lectured on physics in central London at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI), visited friends, joined London’s fashionable social circles, published and reviewed scientific articles, corresponded with fellow men of science on a wide range of topics, and developed his theories about the structure and movement of glaciers. Importantly, volume 6 includes Tyndall’s major expeditions to the Alps and also documents some of his most dangerous mountaineering exploits. In letters to his closest friends, Tyndall captured the excitement and achievement of his expeditions. By the end of the period, his is increasingly respected as a scientist in the wider academic world.
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The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 7
The Correspondence, March 1859-May1862
Diarmid A. Finnegan, Roland Jackson, Nanna Kaalund
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

The 308 letters in this volume cover a critical period in Tyndall’s personal and scientific lives. The volume begins with the difficult ending of his relationship with the Drummond family, disputes about his work in glaciology, and his early seminal work on the absorption of radiant heat by gases. It ends with the start of his championship of Julius Robert Mayer’s work on the mechanical equivalent of heat. In between, Tyndall carefully establishes his own priority for his work on radiant heat, and he accepts the position of professor of physics at the Government School of Mines. The lure of the Alps also becomes ever stronger. In this period comes perhaps Tyndall’s greatest mountaineering achievement, the first ascent of the Weisshorn, and a remarkable winter visit to Chamonix and the Mer de Glace. As his reputation grows, Tyndall continues to make his way in society. He is elected to the elite Athenaeum Club on January 31, 1860.
 

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The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume I
The Correspondence, May 1840–August 1843
Geoffrey Cantor
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
The 230 letters in this inaugural volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall chart Tyndall’s emergence into early adulthood, spanning from his arrival in Youghal in May 1840 as a civil assistant with just a year’s experience working on the Irish Ordnance Survey to his pseudonymous authorship of an open letter to the prime minister, Robert Peel, protesting the pay and conditions on the English Survey in August 1843. The letters, which include Tyndall’s earliest extant correspondence, encompass some of the most significant events of the early 1840s. Tyndall’s correspondents also discuss their experiences of British military expansion in India and economic migration to North America, among other topics. The letters show the development of many of the traits and talents, both mathematical and literary, that would subsequently make Tyndall one of most prominent men of science in Victorian Britain. They also afford broader insights into a period of almost unprecedented social upheaval and cultural and technological change that ultimately shaped Tyndall’s development into adulthood.
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Corruption and Democracy in Latin America
Charles H. Blake
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009

Corruption has blurred, and in some cases blinded, the vision of democracy in many Latin American nations. Weakened institutions and policies have facilitated the rise of corrupt leadership, election fraud, bribery, and clientelism. Corruption and Democracy in Latin America presents a groundbreaking national and regional study that provides policy analysis and prescription through a wide-ranging methodological, empirical, and theoretical survey.

The contributors offer analysis of key topics, including: factors that differentiate Latin American corruption from that of other regions; the relationship of public policy to corruption in regional perspective; patterns and types of corruption; public opinion and its impact; and corruption's critical links to democracy and governance.

Additional chapters present case studies on specific instances of corruption: diverted funds from a social program in Peru; Chilean citizens' attitudes toward corruption; the effects of interparty competition on vote buying in local Brazilian elections; and the determinants of state-level corruption in Mexico under Vicente Fox.

The volume concludes with a comparison of the lessons drawn from these essays to the evolution of anticorruption policy in Latin America over the past two decades. It also applies these lessons to the broader study of corruption globally to provide a framework for future research in this crucial area.
 

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Cosmic Fragments
Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age
Asif A. Siddiqi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
A new volume in the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections Series
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The Cosmos Of Science
Essays of Exploration
John Earman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
The inaugural volume of the series, devoted to the work of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, encompasses the philosophical problems of space, time, and cosmology, the nature of scientific methodology, and the foundations of psychoanalysis.
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The Costa Rican Women's Movement
A Reader
Ilse Abshagen Leitinger
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

This reader reflects the  genesis, scope, and direction of women’s activism in a single Latin American country.  It collects the voices of forty-one diverse women who live in Costa Rica, some radical, others strongly conservative, and most ranging inbetween, as they write about their lives, their problems, their aspirations.

Unlike the comparative studies of women’s issues that look at several different countries, the reader provides an insider’s view of one small, but quintessentially Latin American, society.  These women write of their own experience in organizing and working for change within the Costa Rican community.  Some represent groups fitting into traditional “women’s movement” that wants to improve certain aspects of women’s  and families’ daily lives.  Still others, the “feminists,” argue forcefully that true improvement requires a profound change of power relations in society, of women’s access to power and decision making.

The articles are organized into thematic groups that range from the definitions of Feminism in Costa Rica to women in Costa Rican  history, women’s legal equality, discrimination against women, and the status of Women’s Studies.  The brief biographies that identify each author underscore the leadership of Costa Rican women in  Latin American Feminism.  The founders and editors of Mujer, one of the most influential Feminist journals in Latin America, are among the authors represented in the reader.

The audience for this book will include specialists interested in Latin America, in women in Latin America, and in the international women’s movement.

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Council Fires On the Upper Ohio
Randolph Downes
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968

Told from the viewpoint of the Indians, this account of Indian-white relations during the second half of the eighteenth century is an exciting addition to the historical literature of Pennsylvania.

From the beginning, when the white traders followed the first Shawnee hunters into Pennsylvania, until the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the region’s history was the history of the relationship between the Indians and the whites.  For nearly half a century the Indian maintained a precarious hold upon Western Pennsylvania by playing one white faction off against the anther, first the French against the British, then the British against the Americans.

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A Counter-History of Composition
Toward Methodologies of Complexity
Byron Hawk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

A Counter-History of Composition contests the foundational disciplinary assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and concurrently dismissed as innate, intuitive, and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Counter to this, Byron Hawk identifies vitalism as the ground for producing rhetorical texts-the product of complex material relations rather than the product of chance. Through insightful historical analysis ranging from classical Greek rhetoric to contemporary complexity theory, Hawk defines three forms of vitalism (oppositional, investigative, and complex) and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.

Hawk proposes that complex vitalism will prove a useful tool in formulating post-dialectical pedagogies, most notably in the context of emerging digital media. He relates two specific examples of applying complex vitalism in the classroom and calls for the reexamination and reinvention of current self-limiting pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory.

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The Crack In Everything
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.
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Creating America
George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post
Jan Cohn
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990
Before movies, radio, and television challenged the hegemony of the printed word, the Saturday Evening Post was the preeminent vehicle of mass culture in the United States.  And to the extent that a mass medium can be the expression of a single individual, this magazine, with a peak circulation of almost three million copies a week, was the expression of its editor, George Horace Lorimer.  Cohn shows how Lorimer made the <I>Post</I> into a uniquely powerful magazine that both celebrated and helped form the values of the time.
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Creativity from the Periphery
Trading Zones of Scientific Exchange in Colonial India
Deepanwita Dasgupta
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Science is usually known by its most successful figures and resource-rich institutions. In stark contrast, Creativity from the Periphery draws our attention to unknown figures in science—those who remain marginalized, even neglected, within its practices. Researchers in early twentieth-century colonial India, for example, have made significant contributions to the stock of scientific knowledge and have provided science with new breakthroughs and novel ideas, but to little acclaim. As Deepanwita Dasgupta argues, sometimes the best ideas in science are born from difficult and resource-poor conditions. In this study, she turns our attention to these peripheral actors, shedding new light on how scientific creativity operates in lesser-known, marginalized contexts, and how the work of self-trained researchers, though largely ignored , has contributed to important conceptual shifts. Her book presents a new philosophical framework for understanding this peripheral creativity in science through the lens of trading zones—where knowledge is exchanged between two unequal communities—and explores the implications for the future diversity of transnational science.
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Creature
Poems
Marsha de la O
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.  
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Creatures of Reason
John Herschel and the Invention of Science
Stephen Case
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

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Crisis Cultures
The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil
Brian Whitener
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.

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Crisis In Bethlehem
John Strohmeyer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Pulitzer Prize winner John Strohmeyer’s account of the collapse of Bethlehem Steel.  As editor of the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Globe-Times from 1956 to 1984, Strohmeyer followed the steel industry from the height of its power through its decline.  He evaluates the self-indulgence of both the unions and industry management and movingly describes the human agony caused by the failure of steel.  His account is reinforced by over one hundred interviews with steelworkers, union leaders, steel executives, and industry analysts.  First issued in 1986, the book is more significant than ever.  In this edition, Strohmeyer includes an update on steel today.
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Critical Masses and Critical Choices
Evolving Public Opinion on Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, and Security
Kerry G. Herron
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Critical Masses and Critical Choices examines American attitudes on issues of national and international security. Based on over 13,000 in-depth interviews conducted over a ten-year period, Kerry Herron and Hank Jenkins-Smith have created a unique and rich set of data providing insights into public opinion on nuclear deterrence, terrorism, and other security issues from the end of the Cold War to the present day.  Their goal is to shed light not only on changes in public opinion about a range of security-related policy issues, but also to gauge the depth of the public’s actual understanding of these matters. Prior to this study, the predominant view held that the American people were incapable of articulate and consistent thought on complex political subjects.  This book overturns that notion and demonstrates the sometimes surprisingly cogent positions held by ordinary members of the public on intricate national issues.

The book’s solid data, based on long-term studies, combined with crisp writing and often startling conclusions, will appeal to a wide range of readers: scholars, journalists, and policy makers. Critical Masses and Critical Choices is the definitive account of the change in public perceptions on security threats and reactive strategies from the early 1990s to the post 9/11 period. This broad and highly original study will prove an indispensable tool for policy makers and scholars alike.

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Crossing Borderlands
Composition And Postcolonial Studies
Andrea Lunsford
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

On the surface, postcolonial studies and composition studies appear to have little in common. However, they share a strikingly similar goal: to provide power to the words and actions of those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Postcolonial studies accomplishes this goal by opening a space for the voices of “others” in traditional views of history and literature. Composition studies strives to empower students by providing equal access to higher education and validation for their writing.

For two fields that have so much in common, very little dialogue exists between them. Crossing Borderlands attempts to establish such an exchange in the hopes of creating a productive “borderland” where they can work together to realize common goals.

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Crossing Borders
Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union
Michael David-Fox
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis.
Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light—as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex “intelligentsia-statist” form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates  the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory—one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal.
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Crossroads
Descriptions of Western Pennsylvania 1720–1829
John W. Harpster
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938
Crossroads is a collection of thirty-seven colorful and perceptive writings left by early travelers and settlers who ventured west of the Allegheny Mountains. Traders, surveyors, soldiers, preachers, and immigrants, some of them well known and some obscure, tell of the loneliness, terror, and beauty of the frontier.
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The Crown and the Cosmos
Astrology and the Politics of Maximilian I
Darin Hayton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Despite its popular association today with magic, astrology was once a complex and sophisticated practice, grounded in technical training provided by a university education. The Crown and the Cosmos examines the complex ways that political practice and astrological discourse interacted at the Habsburg court, a key center of political and cultural power in early modern Europe. Like other monarchs, Maximilian I used astrology to help guide political actions, turning to astrologers and their predictions to find the most propitious times to sign treaties or arrange marriage contracts. Perhaps more significantly, the emperor employed astrology as a political tool to gain support for his reforms and to reinforce his own legitimacy as well as that of the Habsburg dynasty. Darin Hayton analyzes the various rhetorical tools astrologers used to argue for the nobility, antiquity, and utility of their discipline, and how they strove to justify their “science” on the grounds that through its rigorous interpretation of the natural world, astrology could offer more reliable predictions. This book draws on extensive printed and manuscript sources from archives across northern and central Europe, including Poland, Germany, France, and England.
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Cuba After the Cold War
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
Ten original essays by an international team of scholars specializing in Cuba, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Latin America focus on the fall of communism in Europe and the transition to a market economy. Major themes of this study are the impact of the USSR's collapse on Cuba, how the historic events in Europe have affected the Central and South American Left, their implications to Cuba, Cuba's policies for confronting the crisis, and potential scenarios for the political and economic transformation of Cuba.
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Cuba Between Empires 1878-1902
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998

Cuban independence arrived formally on May 20, 1902, with the raising of the Cuban flag in Havana - a properly orchestrated and orderly inauguration of the new republic.  But something had gone awry.  Republican reality fell far short of the separatist ideal.  In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century found Cuba enmeshed in a complicated colonial environment, tied to the declining Spanish empire yet economically dependent on the newly ascendant United States.  Rebellion against Spain had involved two generations of Cubans in major but fruitless wars.  By careful examination of the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba, and of the political content of the separatist movement, the author argues that the successful insurrection of 1895-98 was not simply the last of the New World rebellions against European colonialism.  It was the first of a genre that would become increasingly familiar in the twentieth century: a guerrilla war of national liberation aspiring to the transformation of society.

The third player in the drama was the United States.  For almost a century, the United States had pursuedthe acquistion of Cuba.  Stepping in when Spain was defeated, the Americans occupied Cuba ostensibly to prepare it for independence but instead deliberately created institutions that restored the social hierarchy and guaranteed political and economic dependence.  It was not the last time the U.S. intervention would thwart the Cuban revolutionary impulse.

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Cuba, Castro, and the United States
Philip W. Bonsal
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971
Bonsal combines his memoirs of his experiences in Havana with an analysis of the relationship between Cuba and the United States both during the Batista and Castro regimes and during the earlier history of the Cuban Republic.

His discussion of Castro's personality is incisive, portraying the Maximum Leader's increasing animosity toward the United States until the final break-off of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Bonsal's observations of Castro and the sociopolitical climate in Cuba are perhaps the most incisive and accurate of any to date on the subject.

All the events from the Revolution to the termination of diplomatic relations are discussed. Of particular interest are Bonsal's accounts of his attempt to find a basis for a rational relationship between the United States and Castro's Revolution, the rejection of that attempt by Castro, and the abandonment by Washington of the policy of nonintervention in Cuban affairs which the Ambassador had advocated.

Finally, in an evaluation of future relations between the two countries, Bonsal analyzes some of the major problems of the coming years.
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Cuba in the World
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979
Since the 1970s, Cuba has greatly expanded its participation in world affairs. What changes in its leadership, economy, and armed forces explain this increased participation? How do Cuban ties with Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Africa, Israel, and the socialist countries reveal Cuban purposes and affect U.S.-Cuban rapprochement? Cuba in the World addresses these and other important questions in the most comprehensive and authoritative review of Cuban foreign policies since the Revolution.
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Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991
• Choice 1987 Outstanding Academic Book

This book examines the early years of the Cuban Republic, launched in 1902 after the war with Spain. Although no longer a colony, the country was still hobbled by continuing dependence on and exploitation from a foreign power. Pérez shows how U.S. armed intervention in Cuba in 1898 and subsequent military occupation revitalized elements of the colonial system that would serve imperialist interests during independence. The concessions of the Platt Amendment in 1903 became the principal instrument for U.S. expansion in Cuba. The U.S. then gained control over resources and markets.
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the Cuban Economy
Archibald R.M. Ritter
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Cuba faced an economic meltdown of catastrophic proportions in the early 1990s when covert subsidies from the former Soviet Union disappeared. Policies instituted by the island republic's government to handle the worst problems have had inconsistent results.

Opening the economy to foreign enterprise has resulted in positive growth in tourism and  nickel and cigar exports. However, remnants of the older economy, including the sugar and biotechnological industries, have only experienced a decrease in capital and importance. Basic educational and health services have been maintained surprisingly well, but the standard of living is still far below the highs of the 1980s. With contributions from many leading Cuba scholars, <I>The Cuban Economy</I> offers not only an analysis of the economy since 1990, but also a look towards future prospects.

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The Cuban Embargo
The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy
Patrick Haney
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

The United States and Cuba share a complex, fractious, interconnected history. Before 1959, the United States was the island nation's largest trading partner. But in swift reaction to Cuba's communist revolution, the United States severed all economic ties between the two nations, initiating the longest trade embargo in modern history, one that continues to the presentday. The Cuban Embargo examines the changing politics of U.S. policy toward Cuba over the more than four decades since the revolution.

While the U.S. embargo policy itself has remained relatively stable since its origins during the heart of the Cold War, the dynamics that produce and govern that policy have changed dramatically. Although originally dominated by the executive branch, the president's tight grip over policy has gradually ceded to the influence of interest groups, members of Congress, and specific electoral campaigns and goals. Haney and Vanderbush track the emergence of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation as an ally of the Reagan administration, and they explore the more recent development of an anti-embargo coalition within both civil society and Congress, even as the Helms-Burton Act and the George W. Bush administration have further tightened the embargo. Ultimately they demonstrate how the battles over Cuba policy, as with much U.S. foreign policy, have as much to do with who controls the policy as with the shape of that policy itself.

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Cuban Studies 16
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986
This is the first volume of Cuban Studies as an annual book publication; it was previously published as a journal by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies.  A special collection of articles, edited by Enrico Mario Santi, focuses on the emergence of Cuban identity and nationality.  Others discuss the impact of Cuba’s new economic planning system since 1976 and the problems facing joint ventures in Cuba, while the concept of “Cubanology” is scrutinized in a spirited interchange of ideas in the Debate section.
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Cuban Studies 17
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987
The feature section of Cuban Studies 17 focuses on gender inequality.  Topics include ideological limitations on the study of gender, women as workers in pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba and as emigres in the United States, and female characters in Cuban novels, 1950-1967.  A section on Afro-Cubanism explores the African ethnologic and linguistic roots of Cuban blacks and includes a literary analysis of Fernando Ortiz’s Los negros brujos.  Research Notes describes an opinion survey on U.S. policy toward Cuba in the House of Representatives and the relation between size and efficiency in Cuban sugar mills.  The discussion began in Cuban Studies 16 of Cuba’s economic planning and management system is continued in the Debate section.
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Cuban Studies 18
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
Essays in volume 18 include discussions of Cuba’s approach to the Latin American debt crisis, its two-century-old race problem and its impact on Cuba’s relations with Africa, differences between urban and rural living conditions and development, and the recent housing situation in Cuba.  Examinations of scholarly research include a survey of major historical works on Cuba ofver the past twenty-five years and an analysis of how the revolution has affected the scholar’s craft and access to manuscripts and archives.  The Debate section features comments on discussions in Cuban Studies 17 of sex and gender relations in today’s Cuba, as well as the ongoing issue of Cuba’s economic planning and management system.
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Cuban Studies 19
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
Essays in volume 19 approach the provocative issues of religion, freedom of literary expression, and women’s health care.  The Catholic church in Cuba today is discussed in terms of its historic role, the current detente in its relations with the government, and the influence of national and international pressures.  Protestantism in Cuba is represented by the experience of the Baptist church since Independence.  The claim that official censorship toward Cuban artists and intellectuals has been relaxed is rebutted by charges that the situation has grown worse and that the mediocrity rules.  U.S. opposition to the Cuban Revolution is interpreted as consistent with a century of North American involvement in Cuban affairs rather than a concern for U.S. national security.  Finally, a discussion of health education for women argues that while public health has been greatly improved in Cuba, many myths about women and health remain and continue to shape gender attitudes.
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Cuban Studies 20
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is tahe preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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Cuban Studies 21
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
Volume 21, edited by Louis A. Perez, Jr., highlights Cuban history from the late colonial period to the twentieth century, featuring Cuba’s relations with the United States, uprisings among Afro-Cubans, and the emigre experience.  The Debate section continues the controversy over the Rectification process in Cuba.
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Cuban Studies 22
Jorge I. Dominguez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is tahe preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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Cuban Studies 23
Jorge Perez-Lopez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Economic issues dominate this volume of Cuban Studies.  The lead article describes possible future economic scenarios for Cuba, while other essays discuss the island’s role in a changing world economy, Cuba’s drive to restore and expand the tourist industry, problems confronting Cuba’s educated labor force, and selected aspects of the Fourth Party Congress.
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Cuban Studies 24
Enrico Mario Santi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
Masterworks of Cuban literature, an early formulation of the concept of “Cubanidad,” Cuban-American music that reflects today’s Cuba, the revisionist interpretation of Jose Marti in Cuba, and a study of women’s rights under Cuba’s 1940 constitution are highlights of the latest volume of Cuban Studies.
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Cuban Studies 25
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Cuban Studies XXV has a historical focus, emphasizing labor history, race relations, and the role of women.  Of special interest is an overview by Jorge I. Dominguez, one of the journal’s four rotating editors, of the contents and evolving mission of Cuban Studies.
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Cuban Studies 26
Jorge I. Dominguez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 27
Cuban Studies 27
Jorge Perez-Lopez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 28
Cuban Studies 28
Enrico Mario Santi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 29
Cuban Studies 29
Enrico Mario Santi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 30
Cuban Studies 30
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 31
Cuban Studies 31
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 32
Cuban Studies 32
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
The essays, research notes, book reviews, and bibliography in this volume continue the multidisciplinary journal’s tradition as the premier publication in the field. In addition to four articles on Cuban literature—focusing on the poetry of Amando Fernández and Ena Lucía Portela,, the novels of Roberto G. Fernández, and the "dirty realism" of Pedro Juan Gutierrez—there are essays examining the political afterlife of Eduardo Chibás, the spread and prevention of AIDS among Cuban-American women, and the Cuban Constitutions promulgated over the past forty years. A research note based upon recently declassified documents on the U.S.’s covert war against Cuba in the early 1960s completes the collection.
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Cuban Studies 33
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003
For nearly three decades, Cuban Studies has been the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. This volume continues the journal’s interdisciplinary tradition, with articles on race, class, and the Revolution of 1895; the role of literature in the formation of Cuban nationalism; and Spanish fiscal policies and Cuban tobacco in the nineteenth century, among others. A comprehensive archival report on the manuscript collection at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, a large book review section, and a thorough bibliography of works published in the field during the past year round out the volume.
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Cuban Studies 34
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004
Cuban Studies has an established tradition of publishing excellent scholarship across a wide range of disciplines and specialties. A special section on women in Cuban history forms the centerpiece of this volume, with articles that explore women's roles as political actors, as symbols, and in religion. The Archives section contains an overview of the growing resources for the study of Cuba available in Miami's libraries. As always, Cuban Studies includes a large book review section and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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Cuban Studies 35
Lisandro Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.
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Cuban Studies 36
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985.  Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba.  Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.

Widely praised for its interdisciplinary approach, and trenchant analysis of an array of topics, each volume features the best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.  Cuban Studies 36 includes articles on economics, politics, racial and gender issues, and the exodus of Cuban Jewry in the early 1960s, among others.  Contributing authors are:  Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, Beatriz Calvo Peña, Mary Speck, Luz Mena, Gema R. Guevara and Dana Evan Kaplan.

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Cuban Studies 37
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.

Widely praised for its interdisciplinary approach and trenchant analysis of an array of topics, each volume features the best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Cuban Studies 37 includes articles on environmental law, economics, African influence in music, irreverent humor in postrevolutionary fiction, international education flow between the United States and Cuba, and poetry, among others.

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Cuban Studies 38
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.

Widely praised for its interdisciplinary approach and trenchant analysis of an array of topics, each volume features the best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Cuban Studies 38 includes essays on the politics of liberation, including: the competing strands of liberalism emanating from Havana in the early nineteenth century; Jose Martí's theory of psychocoloniality; and the relationship between sugar planters, insurgents, and the Spanish military during the revolution.  This volume also reflects on cultural themes, such as the new aesthetics of the everyday in Cuban cinema, the “recovery” of poet José Angel Buesa, and the meaning of Elián Gonzales in the context of life in Miami.

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Cuban Studies 40
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field.

Cuban Studies 40 features a broad spectrum of articles, including essays on: the role of race in the revolution of 1933; the subject of disaster in eighteenth-century Cuban poetry; developments in Cuban historiography over the past fifty years; a profile of the work of historian José Vega Suñol; and a remembrance of essayist and literary critic Nara Araújo, who also contributed an article on travel in Cuba for this volume.

Beginning with Cuban Studies 34  (2003), the publication is available electronically through Project MUSE®. More information can be found at http://muse.jhu.edu/publishers/pitt_press/.
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Cuban Studies 41
Catherine Krull
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Cuban Studies 41 presents topics from across the cultural and political spectrum, including essays on: the ideology behind United States foreign policy toward Cuba; a gendered study of Cubans who migrate to other countries; Cuban social policy on inequality; fifty years of Cuban medical diplomacy; the fifty-year relationship between Havana and Moscow; film posters from ICAIC (Cuban Institute for Cinematographic Arts) that promoted the exhibition of Cuban and foreign films for the first time, created a new graphic movement, and transformed the look of Cuban cities and buildings; national cultural policy and the visual arts in the aftermath of the “Grey Years;” and a look at the global influence of Havana cigars.

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Cuban Studies 42
Catherine Krull
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press beginning with volume 16 in 1985.
    Cuban Studies 42 focuses on gender and equality issues in post-1959 Cuba, and their impact on cultural and institutional change. It views subjects such as politics, labor, food and diet, race, ethnicity, HIV/AIDS, sex education, tourism and prostitution, masculinity, and feminism, among others.
Beginning with Cuban Studies 34, the publication is available electronically through Project MUSE®. More information can be found at http://muse.jhu.edu/publishers/pitt_press/.

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Cuban Studies 43
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Cuban Studies 43 is the first volume of the Cuban Studies series produced under a new editorial team based at Harvard University.
 
In addition to papers in history, culture and politics, this volume contains a central dossier on demography. This dossier charts some of the important changes experienced by the Cuban population—a concept that of course includes those living abroad—and some of the challenges posed by those changes (such as aging, or the changing composition of the expatriate community). A paper in the dossier looks carefully at infant mortality figures and raises poignant questions concerning methodologies and results.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 44
Cuban Studies 44
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.
Cuban Studies 44 features a dossier on the Cuban economy that covers economic problems and causation since 2010 and their possible remedy; tax reform from 2010 to 2014; the reconfiguration of social and economic actors since 2011 and the prospects of a market economy; the functioning of state-owned companies within current restructuring policies; and changes in Cuba’s trade deficit since 2009. Other topics include the consequences of the “Special Period” and the de/reconstruction of the “New Socialist Man”; public health care policies in the post-Soviet era; the Wallace Stevens poem “Academic Discourse at Havana”; U.S. General Fitzhugh Lee’s role in Cuban independence; José Martí’s death as a myth of the Cuban nation-building project; “Operation Pedro Pan” and the framing of childhood memories in the Cuban American community; and the social and political control of nonconformists in 1960s Cuba.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 45
Cuban Studies 45
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.

Cuban Studies 45 features two special dossiers: the first discusses the history and workings of the Cuban constitution and the need to revisit it along with civil and political rights; the second offers new perspectives on the history of health, medicine, and disease in Cuba, and views race as a factor in both infant mortality and tuberculosis from the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Additional essays discuss culture through poetry, higher education reform, the narratives of Lordes Casal, and filmmaker Jesús Díaz as an ‘unintentional deviationist.’ History is discussed vis-a-vis the radio politics of young Eddy Chibás, the slave abolitionist rhetoric of the Countess of Merlin, and the creole appropriation of Afro-Cuban dance and music to create sabor during the late nineteenth century.
 
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front cover of Cuban Studies 46
Cuban Studies 46
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.
            Cuban Studies 46 includes a critical dossier on poet Lourdes Casal, with individual essays viewing the issues of race, feminism, and diaspora in her work. Additional essays address voices of economic change from the nonstate sector; cinema and church during the Special Period; and race, identity, and Cuban women’s activism in historic and cultural contexts.
 
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front cover of Cuban Studies 47
Cuban Studies 47
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. Cuban Studies 47 includes a dossier on cultural politics and political cultures of the Cuban Revolution.
 
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Cuban Studies 48
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.  In this special issue, Cuban Studies 48 explores Afro-Cuban issues.  
 
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front cover of Cuban Studies 49
Cuban Studies 49
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.

Cuban Studies 49 includes dossiers on gender and feminism, economy, and history of education.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 50
Cuban Studies 50
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente’s editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more.

Cuban Studies 50 includes dossiers on new challenges in the private sector and communities of digital media sharing, along with reviews of nearly twenty new books.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 51
Cuban Studies 51
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente’s editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more. Cuban Studies 51 includes a dossier on Cuban social history.
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front cover of Cuban Studies 52
Cuban Studies 52
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente’s editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more. Issue 52 contains three dossiers: two on urban Habana and one on understandings of the Cuban Revolution in 1960s Latin America.
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Cuban Studies 53
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente’s editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more. Issue 53 contains twelve articles and two sections of primary sources. 
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Cuban Studies 54
Alejandro de la Fuente
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

front cover of Cuban Sugar Policy from 1963 to 1970
Cuban Sugar Policy from 1963 to 1970
Translated by Marguerite Borchardt and H. F. Broch de Rothermann
Heinrich Brunner
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977
In 1963 Cuba launched a program to develop its economy by expanding its sugar production and export trade. Cuban economists believed that through intensive development of this leading sector, they could generate capital to invest in manufacturing and thus move away from a one-crop economy.

After providing background information on Cuba's prerevolutionary economy, Brunner explores the effects of Communist ideology and the U.S. embargo on the country's resources and trade, and analyzes the problems Cuba faced in shifting from trade with the U.S. to trade with the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc.  He evaluates their implementation of the development plan, assessing the sugar industry within Cuba as well as how its accelerated development affected the rest of the domestic economy.
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The Cult of Pythagoras
Math and Myths
Alberto A. Martinez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
In this follow-up to his popular Science Secrets, Alberto A. Martínez discusses various popular myths from the history of mathematics: that Pythagoras proved the hypotenuse theorem, that Archimedes figured out how to test the purity of a gold crown while he was in a bathtub, that the Golden Ratio is in nature and ancient architecture, that the young Galois created group theory the night before the pistol duel that killed him, and more. Some stories are partly true, others are entirely false, but all show the power of invention in history. Pythagoras emerges as a symbol of the urge to conjecture and “fill in the gaps” of history. He has been credited with fundamental discoveries in mathematics and the sciences, yet there is nearly no evidence that he really contributed anything to such fields at all. This book asks: how does history change when we subtract the many small exaggerations and interpolations that writers have added for over two thousand years?

The Cult of Pythagoras is also about invention in a positive sense. Most people view mathematical breakthroughs as “discoveries” rather than invention or creativity, believing that mathematics describes a realm of eternal ideas. But mathematicians have disagreed about what is possible and impossible, about what counts as a proof, and even about the results of certain operations. Was there ever invention in the history of concepts such as zero, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, quaternions, infinity, and infinitesimals?

Martínez inspects a wealth of primary sources, in several languages, over a span of many centuries. By exploring disagreements and ambiguities in the history of the elements of mathematics, The Cult of Pythagoras dispels myths that obscure the actual origins of mathematical concepts. Martínez argues that an accurate history that analyzes myths reveals neglected aspects of mathematics that can encourage creativity in students and mathematicians.

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Cultivating Victory
The Women's Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement
Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
During the First and Second World Wars, food shortages reached critical levels in the Allied nations. The situation in England, which relied heavily on imports and faced German naval blockades, was particularly dire. Government campaigns were introduced in both Britain and the United States to recruit individuals to work on rural farms and to raise gardens in urban areas. These recruits were primarily women, who readily volunteered in what came to be known as Women’s Land Armies. Stirred by national propaganda campaigns and a sense of adventure, these women, eager to help in any way possible, worked tirelessly to help their nations grow “victory gardens” to win the war against hunger and fascism. In vacant lots, parks, backyards, between row houses, in flowerboxes, and on farms, groups of primarily urban, middle-class women cultivated vegetables along with a sense of personal pride and achievement. 

In Cultivating Victory, Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant presents a compelling study of the sea change brought about in politics, society, and gender roles by these wartime campaigns. As she demonstrates, the seeds of this transformation were sown years before the First World War by women suffragists and international women’s organizations. Gowdy-Wygant profiles the foundational organizations and significant individuals in Britain and America, such as Lady Gertrude Denman and Harriet Stanton Blatch, who directed the Women’s Land Armies and fought to leverage the wartime efforts of women to eventually win voting rights and garner new positions in the workforce and politics.

In her original transnational history, Gowdy-Wygant compares and contrasts the outcomes of war in both nations as seen through changing gender roles and women’s ties to labor, agriculture, the home, and the environment. She sheds new light on the cultural legacies left by the Women’s Land Armies and their major role in shaping national and personal identities.
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The Cultural Geography of Health Care
Wilbert M. Gesler
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

In health care delivery and health care research, basic concepts of cultural behavior are ignored—at a high personal and financial cost—because both fields are dominated by technical solutions and quantitative analysis. They have little use for what is often regarded as irrelevant information.
In this wide-ranging book, written for students and non-specialists, Gesler applies cultural geography to health care and shows that throughout the world, in western and developing countries alike, the social sciences can inform the medical sciences nd make them more effective and less expensive.

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Cultural Landscapes of India
Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed
Amita Sinha
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Winner, 2022 J. B. Jackson Book Prize
Winner, 2022 Landscape Studies Initiative Award


Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes of India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing—transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes of India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.
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Culture and Society
Twenty-Four Essays
George Peter Murdock
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965

Twenty four essays cover a broad range of topics in cultural anthropology, and represent the best writings of George Peter Murdock and reveal his theoretical orientation and his many landmark contributions to the field.

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Cultures of the City
Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America
Richard Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Cultures of the City explores the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.


Addressing a broad spectrum of phenomena and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this volume analyze lived urban experiences and their symbolic representation in cultural texts. Individual chapters explore Havana in popular music; Mexico City in art; Buenos Aires, Recife, and Salvador in film; and Asuncion and Buenos Aires in literature. Others focus on particular events, conditions, and practices of urban life including the Havana book fair, mass transit in Bogotá, the restaurant industry in Los Angeles, the media in Detroit, Andean festivals in Lima, and the photographic record of a visit by members of the Zapatista Liberation Army to Mexico City.


    The contributors examine identity and the sense of place and belonging that connect people to urban environments, relating these to considerations of ethnicity, social and economic class, gender, everyday life, and cultural practices. They also consider history and memory and the making of places through the iterative performance of social practices. As such, places are works in progress, a condition that is particularly evident in contemporary Latin/o American cities where the opposition between local and global influences is a prominent facet of daily life.


These core issues are theorized further in an afterword by Abril Trigo, who takes the chapters as a point of departure for a discussion of the dialectics of identity in the Latin/o American global city.

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Curative Powers
Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia
Paula Michaels
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

Finalist, PEN Center USA Literary Awards, Research Nonfiction

Rich in oil and strategically located between Russia and China, Kazakhstan is one of the most economically and geopolitically important of the so-called Newly Independent States that emerged after the USSR's collapse. Yet little is known in the West about the region's turbulent history under Soviet rule, particularly how the regime asserted colonial dominion over the Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities.

Grappling directly with the issue of Soviet colonialism, Curative Powers offers an in-depth exploration of this dramatic, bloody, and transformative era in Kazakhstan's history. Paula Michaels reconstructs the Soviet government's use of medical and public health policies to change the society, politics, and culture of its outlying regions. At first glance the Soviets' drive to modernize medicine in Kazakhstan seems an altruistic effort to improve quality of life. Yet, as Michaels reveals, beneath the surface lies a story of power, legitimacy, and control. The Communist regime used biomedicine to reshape the function, self-perception, and practices of both doctors and patients, just as it did through education, the arts, the military, the family, and other institutions.

Paying particular attention to the Kazakhs' ethnomedical customs, Soviet authorities designed public health initiatives to teach the local populace that their traditional medical practices were backward, even dangerous, and that they themselves were dirty and diseased. Through poster art, newsreels, public speeches, and other forms of propaganda, Communist authorities used the power of language to demonstrate Soviet might and undermine the power of local ethnomedical practitioners, while moving the region toward what the Soviet state defined as civilization and political enlightenment.

As Michaels demonstrates, Kazakhs responded in unexpected ways to the institutionalization of this new pan-Soviet culture. Ethnomedical customs surreptitiously lived on, despite direct, sometimes violent, attacks by state authorities. While Communist officials hoped to exterminate all remnants of traditional healing practices, Michaels points to evidence that suggests the Kazakhs continued to rely on ethnomedicine even as they were utilizing the services of biomedical doctors, nurses, and midwives. The picture that ultimately emerges is much different from what the Soviets must have imagined. The disparate medical systems were not in open conflict, but instead both indigenous and alien practices worked side by side, becoming integrated into daily life.

Combining colonial and postcolonial theory with intensive archival and ethnographic research, Curative Powers offers a detailed view of Soviet medical initiatives and their underlying political and social implications and impact on Kazakh society. Michaels also endeavors to link biomedical policies and practices to broader questions of pan-Soviet identity formation and colonial control in the non-Russian periphery.

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The Curse of Nemur
In Search of the Art, Myth and Ritual of the Ishir
Ticio Escobar
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

The Tomáraho, a subgroup of the Ishir (Chamacoco) of Paraguay, are one of the few remaining indigenous populations who have managed to keep both their language and spiritual beliefs intact. They have lived for many years in a remote region of the Gran Chaco, having limited contact with European or Latin American cultures. The survival of the Tomáraho has been tenuous at best; at the time of this writing there were only eighty-seven surviving members.

Ticio Escobar, who lived extensively among the Tomáraho, draws on his acquired knowledge of Ishir beliefs to confront them with his own Western ideology, and records a unique dialogue between cultures that counters traditional anthropological interpretation. The Curse of Nemur--which is part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology—offers us a view of the world from an entirely new perspective, that of the Ishir. We acquire deep insights into their powerful and enigmatic narrative myths, which find expression in the forms of body painting, feather decoration, dream songs, shamanism, and ritual.

Through dramatic photographs, native drawings, extensive examination of color and its importance in Ishir art, and Escobar’s lucid observation, The Curse of Nemur illuminates the seamless connection of religious practice and art in Ishir culture. It offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other,” and in so doing, causes us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, belief, and Native American culture.

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