Foreword by Adam Zamoyski

Kaleidoscope of Poland is a highly readable volume containing short articles on major personalities, places, events, and accomplishments from the thousand-year record of Polish history and culture. Featuring approximately 900 compact text entries and 600 illustrations, it will be a handy reference at home, a perfect supplement to traditional guide books when traveling, an aid to language study, or simply browsed with enjoyment from cover to cover by anyone with an interest in Poland.
The entries describe essential features of Poland from the mundane to the sublime. Whether it is bagels or the Bug River, Chopin or Madame Curie, the authors offer colorful and often witty snapshots of significant individuals, customs, folklore, historic events, phrases, places, geography, and much, much more. Beginning with the emergence of the Polish state in 966 under Mieszko I, to the resurrection of present-day Poland within the European Union, it’s also a sweeping account of the tumult and triumphs the nation has witnessed through much of its history.
This highly entertaining yet informative book is essentially a “cultural dictionary”—offering a knowledge base that can be referred to time and time again. Kaleidoscope of Poland will be welcomed by readers of Polish descent, students of Polish, or anyone planning to visit Poland—anyone seeking a greater insight into this fascinating land.

Winner of the 2014 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Selected by Joy Harjo

Karankawa is a collection that explores some of the ways in which we (re)construct our personal histories. Rich in family narratives, myths, and creation stories, these are poems that investigate passage—dying, coming out, transforming, being born—as well as the gaps that also reside in our stories, for, as Rocha suggests, the opportunity to create myths is provided by great silences. Much like the Karankawa Indians whose history works in omissions, Karankawa reconfigures such spaces, engaging with the burden and freedom of memory in order to rework and recontextualize private and public mythologies. First and last, these are poems that honor our griefs and desires, for they keep alive the very things we cannot possess.

The first major study of Karl Kautsky, considered the most influential Marxian theoretician in the world, from 1895 to 1914. Outside of Friedrich Engels, Kautsky did more to popularize Marism than any other person. An entire generation of Marxists, including Lenin and Trotsky, learned the doctrine in large part from Kautsky.

This book tells the story of river boating in the West before the invention of the steamboat. In a deft combination of thorough research and interesting narrative, Baldwin recreates life on the keelboats and flatboats that plied the Ohio, Mississippi, and other rivers from revolutionary days until about 1820. No one knows who put the first keel along the bottom of one big, clumsy river craft used by the pioneers. but the change made the boats far easier to manage, and travel in both directions became practical all the way to New Orleans.

Baldwin examines the many types of craft in use, the different methods of locomotion, and the art of navigation on uncharted rivers full of hidden obstacles. But he never loses sight of the picturesque aspects of his subject, especially the boatmen themselves-a tribe of rugged and fearless men whose colorful lives are described in great detail.

The Keelboat Age on Western Waters is a segment cut from the history of the frontier, showing the overwhelming importance of river transportation in the development of the West. The rivers were great arteries, carrying a restless people into a new land. The keelboatman and his craft did much to build a nation.

The poems in Keeper explore, and long for, intimacy: with nature, with others, with the unknown. They delve into purely dark spaces (the insides of birdhouses and mailboxes, caves of prehistoric paintings) and in-between places, searching out, as Paul Eluard put it, the other world inside this one, pointing to the pervasive sensuality that connects all beings, and to the fact that essential goodness and sorrow often walk hand in hand.

This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in  western Pennsylvania.  Many decades passed before a desolate and violent frontier was transformed into a stable region of farms and towns.  Keeping House: Women’s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850  tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes.

Intrigued by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks in the collection of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Virginia Bartlett wanted to find out more about women living in the region during that period.  Quoting from journals, letters, cookbooks, travelers’ accounts - approving and critical - memoirs, documents, and newspapers, she offers us voices of women and men commenting seriously and humorously on what was going on around them.

The text is well-illustrated with contemporaneous art-- engravings, apaintings, drawings, and cartoons.  Of special interest are color and black-and-white photographs of furnishings, housewares, clothing, and portraits from the collections of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

This is not a sentimental account.  Bartlett makes clear how little say women had about their lives and how little protection they could expect from the law, especially on matters relating to property.  Their world was one of marked contrasts: life in a log cabin with bare necessities and elegant dinners in the homes of Pittsburgh’s military and entrepreneurial elite; rural women in homespun and affluent Pittsburgh ladies in imported fashions.  When the book begins, families are living in fear of Indian attacks; as it ends, the word “shawling” has come into use as the polite term for pregnancy, referring to women’s attempt to hide their condition with cleverly draped shawls.  The menacing frontier has given way to American-style gentility.

An introduction by Jack D. Warren, University of Virginia, sets the scene with a discussion of the early peopling of the region and places the book within the context of women’s studies.

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew.

Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.

The 1980s brought a whirlwind of change to Communist Party politics and the Soviet Republic. By mid-decade, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost had opened the door to democratic reform. Later, mounting public unrest over the failed economy and calls for independence among many republics ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Often overlooked in these events, yet monumental to breaking the Communist Party’s institutional stranglehold, were the KGB anti-corruption campaigns of 1982–1987.

Inthis original study,Luc Duhamel examines the KGB at its pinnacle of power. The appointment of former KGB director Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1982 marked the height of KGB influence. For the first time since Stalin, Beria, and the NKVD, there was now an unquestioned authority to pursue violators of Soviet law, including members of the Communist Party. Duhamel focuses on the KGB’s investigation into Moscow’s two largest trade organizations: the Chief Administration of Trade and the Administration of the Moscow Fruit and Vegetable Office. Like many of their Soviet counterparts, these state-controlled institutions were built on a foundation of bribery and favoritism among Communist Party members, workers, and their bosses. This book analyzes the multifarious networks of influence peddling, appointments, and clientelism that pervaded these trade organizations and maintained their ties to party officials.

Through firsthand research into the archives of the Andropov-era KGB and the prosecutor general’s office, Duhamel uncovers the indictment of thousands of trade organization employees, the reprimand of Communist Party members, and the radical change in political ideology manifested by these proceedings. He further reveals that despite aggressive prosecutions, the KGB’s power would soon wither, as the agency came under intense scrutiny because of its violent methods and the ghosts of the NKVD. The reinstatement of Moscow city government control over the trade organizations, the death of Andropov, and the rising tide of democratic reform would effectively end the reign of the KGB and its anticorruption campaigns.

Scott C. Martin examines leisure as a “contested cultural space” in which nineteenth-century Americans articulated and developed ideas about ethnicity, class, gender, and community.  This new perspective demonstrates how leisure and sociability mediated the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society.  Martin argues persuasively that southwestern Pennsylvanians used leisure activities to create identities and define values in a society being transformed by market expansion.  The transportation revolution brought new commercial entertainments and recreational opportunities but also fragmented and privatized customary patterns of communal leisure.

By using leisure as a window on the rapid changes sweeping through the region, Martin shows how southwestern Pennsylvanians used voluntary associations, private parties, and public gatherings to construct social identities better suited to their altered circumstances.  The prosperous middle class devised amusements to distinguish them from workers who, in turn, resisted reformers’ attempts to constrain their use of free time.  Ethnic and racial minorities used holiday observances and traditional celebrations to define their place in American society, while women tested the boundaries of the domestic sphere through participation in church fairs, commercial recreation, and other leisure activities.

This study illuminates the cultural history of the region and offers broader insights into perceptions of free time, leisure, and community in antebellum America.

“These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed reading a book so much.”—David Budbill

As scholars continue to explore the political implications of grass roots religions around the world, Kingdoms Come examines the three main popular religions in Brazil—folk Catholicism, Protestant Pentecostalism, and Afro-Brazilian spiritism—to trace the contrasting patterns of acceptance or rejection of political paradigms within these three groups.  In spite of these differences, Ireland's close analysis of these movements leads him to the conclusion that all three embrace traditions that foster a deepening of Brazil's nascent democracy.

In Knowing and Seeing, Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world, including in Pittsburgh. The essays are also personal discussing family, memories from his childhood, mentoring from his Carnegie Mellon University professors, and his collaborations. They are also instructive. Murals are not walls but provide the appearance as such and require the artist to have a different skill set that is part architect, part painter, and part builder.

The fifteen papers in this volume deal with the two overlapping topics of knowledge and experience from the perspective of analytic philosophical inquiry.  The topics addressed are prominent in the work of such modern philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, C. I. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and John L. Austin. 

Contributors include:  Hector-Neri Castañeda, Newton Garver, Arthur N. Prior, John R. Searle, G. J. Warnock, with commentary by Paul Benacerraf, V. C. Chappell, Carl Ginet, F. A. Siegler, James F. Thomson, Zeno Vendler, and Paul Ziff.

In the second millennium CE, long before English became the language of science, the act of translation was crucial for understanding and disseminating knowledge and information across linguistic and geographic boundaries. This volume considers the complexities of knowledge exchange through the practice of translation over the course of a millennium, across fields of knowledge—cartography, health and medicine, material construction, astronomy—and a wide geographical range, from Eurasia to Africa and the Americas. Contributors literate in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Minnan, Ottoman, and Persian explore the history of science in the context of world and global history, investigating global patterns and implications in a multilingual and increasingly interconnected world. Chapters reveal cosmopolitan networks of shared practice and knowledge about the natural world from 1000 to 1800 CE, emphasizing both evolving scientific exchange and the emergence of innovative science. By unraveling the role of translation in cross-cultural communication, Knowledge in Translation highlights key moments of transmission, insight, and critical interpretation across linguistic and faith communities. 
 

Following the 1992 breakup of Yugoslavia, the region descended into a series of bloody conflicts marked by intense ethnic and religious hatreds. Kosovo emerged at the epicenter of these disputes and the site of innumerable human rights violations, as Serbia, united with Montenegro at the time, sought to remove the Albanian presence. Kosovo (roughly ninety percent Albanian) declared independence in 2008, and although it is recognized by over one hundred UN member states, it is still not recognized by Serbia.
            This volume brings together scholars of Serbian, Albanian, Christian, and Muslim backgrounds to examine the Serbian-Albanian dynamic in Kosovo through historical, political, economic, and social perspectives. The contributors offer fresh insights on the consequences of internationalizing the conflict, the impact of international agencies and institutions since the 1999 intervention, the continuing human rights violations, present day party politics, and the prospects for economic cooperation with Serbia, among other topics. Kosovo and Serbia will inform scholars and students of the region, exploring the nature of a tragic political and strategic struggle that has existed for centuries and drawn the attention of the entire international community.