James L. Calderwood offers a lively exploration of the ways in which Shakespeare dramatizes the strategies people employ to deal with and transcend the inevitability of death. In keeping with the views of Ernest Becker, Norman O. Brown, and others, Calderwood argues that the denial of death is fundamental to both individuals and their cultures. By drawing on a fascinating range of examples, he suggests how often and how variously Shakespeare dramatizes this desire for symbolic immortality.

The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanings, the editors of this volume conceptualize the ghetto as a "memory space that travels" through both time and space.

This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosí­n.

In addition to the volume editors, The Venice Ghetto features a foreword from James E. Young and contributions from Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgarten, Margaux Fitoussi, Dario Miccoli, Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Federica Ruspio, Michael Shapiro, Clive Sinclair, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, sobriety movements have flourished in America during periods of social and economic crisis. From the boisterous working-class temperance meetings of the 1840s to the quiet beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s, alcoholics have banded together for mutual support. Each time they have developed new ways of telling their stories, and in the process they have shaped how Americans think about addiction, the self, and society.

In this book Eoin Cannon illuminates the role that sobriety movements have played in placing notions of personal and societal redemption at the heart of modern American culture. He argues against the dominant scholarly perception that recovery narratives are private and apolitical, showing that in fact the genre's conventions turn private experience to public political purpose. His analysis ranges from neglected social reformer Helen Stuart Campbell's embrace of the "gospel rescue missions" of postbellum New York City to William James's use of recovery stories to consider the regenerative capabilities of the mind, to writers such as Upton Sinclair and Djuna Barnes, who used this narrative form in much different ways.

Cannon argues that rather than isolating recovery from these realms of wider application, the New Deal–era Alcoholics Anonymous refitted the "drunkard's conversion" as a model of selfhood for the liberal era, allowing for a spiritual redemption story that could accommodate a variety of identities and compulsions. He concludes by considering how contemporary recovery narratives represent both a crisis in liberal democracy and a potential for redemptive social progress.

If the 1930s was the Swing Era, then the years from 1937 on might well be called the Jump Era. That summer Count Basie recorded "Jumping at the Woodside," and suddenly jump tunes seemed to be everywhere. Along with the bouncy beat came a new dance step—the high-flying aerials of the jitterbuggers—and the basketball games that took place in the dance halls of African America became faster, higher, and flashier. Duke Ellington and a cast of hundreds put the buoyant spirit of the era on stage with their 1941 musical revue, Jump for Joy, a title that captured the momentum and direction of the new culture of exuberance.

Several high-profile public victories accompanied this increasing optimism: the spectacular successes of African American athletes at the 1936 Olympics, the 1937 union victory of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Joe Louis's 1937 and 1938 heavyweight championship fights. For the first time in history, black Americans emerged as cultural heroes and ambassadors, and many felt a new pride in citizenship.

In this book, Gena Caponi-Tabery chronicles these triumphs and shows how they shaped American music, sports, and dance of the 1930s and beyond. But she also shows how they emboldened ordinary African Americans to push for greater recognition and civil liberties—how cultural change preceded and catalyzed political action.

Tracing the path of one symbolic gesture—the jump—across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, Caponi-Tabery provides a unique political, intellectual, and artistic analysis of the years immediately preceding World War II.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah has become an epicenter of geopolitical conflict, where foreign powers and non-state actors have repeatedly waged war in residential neighborhoods with staggering humanitarian consequences. The Sacking of Fallujah is the first comprehensive study of the three recent sieges of this city, including those by the United States in 2004 and the Iraqi-led operation to defeat ISIS in 2016.

Unlike dominant military accounts that focus on American soldiers and U.S. leaders and perpetuate the myth that the United States "liberated" the city, this book argues that Fallujah was destroyed by coalition forces, leaving public health crises, political destabilization, and mass civilian casualties in their wake. This meticulously researched account cuts through the propaganda to uncover the lived experiences of Fallujans under siege and occupation, and contextualizes these events within a broader history of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Relying on testimony from Iraqi civilians, the work of independent journalists, and documentation from human rights organizations, Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn place the experiences of Fallujah's residents at the center of this city's recent history.

In 1966, the most destructive flood in the history of Venice temporarily submerged the city and threatened its extraordinary art and architecture. Among the organizations that mobilized to protect this fragile heritage was Save Venice Inc. Founded in Boston and now headquartered in New York City, this nonprofit has become the largest and most active committee dedicated to preserving the artistic legacy of Venice.

Christopher Carlsmith tells the fascinating story of Save Venice Inc., from its origins to its fiftieth anniversary. It continues to provide an influential model for philanthropy in the cultural sector, raising substantial funds to conserve and restore paintings, sculptures, books, mosaics, and entire buildings at risk from human and environmental impacts. Employing extensive archival research, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts, Save Venice Inc. explores a range of topics, including leadership, conservation projects, fundraising, and educational outreach. Using a range of methodologies from cultural history and art history, Carlsmith traces the achievements and challenges faced by this and other historic preservation organizations and by this unique city on the sea.

Throughout this collection, which was plucked from a pile of 300 manuscripts and awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction becomes a dominant theme. . . . Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people—it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters—question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen up close.New York Times Book Review

Books and other texts have not always been read in the way that we read them today. The modern practice of reading—privately, silently, with the eyes alone—is only one way of reading, which for many centuries existed alongside other forms. In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages, and as late as the seventeenth century, many texts were written for the voice. They were addressed to the ear as much as the eye, and they used forms that were oriented toward the demands of oral performance. This is one of the themes explored in this landmark volume. Written by a distinguished group of international contributors, it analyzes the transformations of reading methods and materials over the ages, showing that revolutions of reading have generally preceded revolutions of the book. The authors examine not only the technical innovations that changed physical aspects of books and other texts, but also the evolving forms of reading and the growth and transformation of the reading public. The volume will be invaluable to students of cultural history and to all those who want a fresh perspective on the history of books and their uses.

This book offers the first full-scale analysis of the Pequot War (1636-37), a pivotal event in New England colonial history. Through an innovative rereading of the Puritan sources, Alfred A. Cave refutes claims that settlers acted defensively to counter a Pequot conspiracy to exterminate Europeans. Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological evidences to trace the evolution of the conflict, he sheds new light on the motivations of the Pequots and their Indian allies. He also provides a reappraisal of the interaction of ideology and self- interest as motivating factors in the Puritan attack on the Pequots.

Much has been written about the ways in which Columbus's "discovery" of America began a process of inventing a new world in European consciousness. But far less has been published about those on the margins of the dominant European discourse--Amerindians, Africans, and women--whose experience is reflected in documents written during the early years of European rule in Latin America. This volume brings together essays by leading scholars of colonial Latin America who address a series of topics relating to both the marginal and European-dominant discourses. The book is divided into five sections: "Representing the New World," "The Institutionalization of the Colony," "Amerindian Texts," "Women in Colonial Latin America," and "The Later Colony and the Caribbean Experience." The essays range from a consideration of Amerindian codes of mapmaking to the career of a transvestite nun, from confessional "sin lists" used by priests to examine the transgressions of their American charges to a new view of colonial women's lives based on birth records, dowry agreements, and wills. Contributors include Walter Mignolo, Maureen Ahern, Abel Alves, Rolena Adorno, Lúcia Helena Santiago Costigan, Pedro Lasarte, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Regina Harrison, Asunción Lavrin, Stephanie Merrim, Nina M. Scott, Antonio Carreño, Julie Greer Johnson, Karen Stolley, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo.

In this collection of literary portraits, Jules Chametzky shares his recollections of more than forty notable Jewish writers, from Alfred Kazin to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Cynthia Ozick, Leslie Fiedler, Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Brodsky, and Amos Oz—to name a few. Also included are cameo appearances by non-Jewish authors, such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Jose Yglesias. Not only do these various writers emerge as interesting and often complicated human beings, but Chametzky reveals himself to be a warm and gracious storyteller.

How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature—how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, When Will the Joy Come? focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.

Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women’s struggle.

Available for the first time in paperback, this book is a succinct distillation of the work and thought of William Charvat, a pioneer in the study of the history of the American book. This burgeoning field of inquiry investigates the social and cultural context of the act of literary creation by relating it to the modes of its production and distribution. This new edition of Literary Publishing in America contains an afterword by Michael Winship that discusses scholarship in the field since publication of Charvat's groundbreaking work.

A study of military tactics and strategy before the War of Independence, this book reexamines the conquest of the North American wilderness and its native peoples by colonial settlers. Historians have long believed that the peculiar conditions of the New World, coupled with the success of Indians tactics, forced the colonists to abandon traditional European methods of warfare and to develop a new "American" style of combat. By combining firearms with guerrilla-like native tactics, colonial commanders were able not only to subdue their Indian adversaries but eventually to prevail against more conventionally trained British forces during the American Revolution. Yet upon closer scrutiny, this common understanding of early American warfare turns out to be more myth than reality. As Guy Chet reveals, clashes between colonial and Indian forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of conventional military doctrine. On the contrary, the poor performance of the settlers during King Philip's War (1675–76) and King William's War (1689–1697) prompted colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British troops and imperial administrators. Thus, as the eighteenth century wore on, growing military success in the New England colonies reflected an increasing degree of British planning, administration, participation, and command. The colonies' military and political leadership, Chet argues, never rejected the time-tested principles of European warfare, and even during the American War of Independence, the republic's military leadership looked to Europe for guidance in the art of combat.

Historians have long maintained that the rise of the British empire brought an end to the great age of piracy, turning the once violent Atlantic frontier into a locus of orderly commerce by 1730. In this book, Guy Chet reassesses that view by documenting the persistence of piracy, smuggling, and other forms of illegal trade throughout the eighteenth century despite ongoing governmental campaigns to stamp it out. The failure of the Royal Navy to police oceanic trade reflected the state's limited authority and legitimacy at port, in the courts, and in the hearts and minds of Anglo-American constituents.

Chet shows how the traditional focus on the growth of the modern state overlooked the extent to which old attitudes and cultural practices continued to hold sway. Even as the British government extended its naval, legal, and bureaucratic reach, in many parts of the Atlantic world illegal trade was not only tolerated but encouraged. In part this was because Britain's constabulary command of the region remained more tenuous than some have suggested, and in part because maritime insurance and wartime tax policies ensured that piracy and smuggling remained profitable. When Atlantic piracy eventually waned in the early nineteenth century, it had more to do with a reduction in its profitability at port than with forceful confrontation at sea.

Challenging traditional accounts that chronicle forces of civilization taming a wild Atlantic frontier, this book is a valuable addition to a body of borderlands scholarship reevaluating the relationship between the emerging modern state and its imperial frontiers.

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and enslavement. Controversial in its own time, the Appeal surveyed the institution of slavery from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives and advocated for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved without compensation to their enslavers. By placing American slavery in historical context and demonstrating how slavery impacted—and implicated—Americans of all regions and races, the Appeal became a central text for the abolitionist movement that continues to resonate in the present day.

This revised and updated edition is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s illuminating introduction, a chronology of Child’s life, and a list of books for further reading.

The twelve stories of Veterans Crisis Hotline offer a meditation on the relationship between war and righteousness and consider the impossible distance between who men are and who they want to be. A veteran working at the hotline listens to the stories men tell when they need someone to hear their voices, when they need to access a language for their pain. Two men search for the head of a decapitated Iraqi civilian so that they might absolve themselves of the atrocities of war, a Marine hunts for the man who raped his girlfriend, and a teenage son replaces his dead father on the battlefield. With a quick wit and offbeat humor, Jon Chopan takes us from the banks of the Euphrates to the bars and VFW halls of the Rust Belt, providing insight into the Iraq War and its enduring impact on those who volunteered to fight in it.

This book seeks to reformulate the canon of writings on what is called "the Viet Nam War" in America and "the American War" in Viet Nam. Until recently, the accepted canon has consisted almost exclusively of American white male combat narratives, which often reflect and perpetuate Asian stereotypes. Renny Christopher introduces material that displays a bicultural perspective, including works by Vietnamese exile writers and by lesser-known Euro-Americans who attempt to bridge the cultural gap.

Christopher traces the history of American stereotyping of Asians and shows how Euro-American ethnocentricity has limited most American authors' ability to represent fairly the Vietnamese in their stories. By giving us access to Vietnamese representations of the war, she creates a context for understanding the way the war was experienced from the "other" side, and she offers perceptive, well-documented analyses of how and why Americans have so emphatically excised the Vietnamese from narratives about a war fought in their own country.

In the American book trade, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and its inimitable logo featuring a borzoi wolfhound have come to signify the pinnacle of prestigious publishing. Launched in 1915 by a dynamic twenty-two-year-old and his refined fiancée, Blanche Wolf, the firm soon developed a reputation for excellence, quickly overcoming outsider status to forge a unique identity that has endured well past its founders' lifetimes.

Capturing the little-known early history of Knopf, The Art of Prestige explores the origins of the company's rise to success during the Jazz Age, when Alfred and Blanche established themselves as literary impresarios on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on key archival documents from all phases of the publishing process, Amy Root Clements reconstructs the turning points and rhetorical exchanges that made Knopf's initial books noteworthy, from the acquisitions process to design, consumer marketing, and bookselling.

Lasting cornerstones of the young firm include alliances with pivotal figures in the world of graphic arts and book production and with European publishers who brought numerous Nobel Prize winners to the Borzoi list during the company's first fifteen years. Other featured luminaries include the American authors Willa Cather, Dashiell Hammett, and Langston Hughes. The Art of Prestige also examines Alfred Knopf's ancestry, up-bringing, and formal education at Columbia, as well as his apprenticeships with Frank Nelson Doubleday and Mitchell Kennerley—factors that would influence his business decisions for years to come.

The result is a portrait of innovative branding that seamlessly merged book production with book promotion in a literary landscape that was ripe for transformation.

In Nadine Gordimer's view, the novel can present history as historians cannot. Moreover, this presentation is not fictional in the sense of being "untrue." Rather, fiction deals with an area of activity usually inaccessible to the sciences of greater externally: the area in which historical process is registered as the subjective experience of individuals in society; fiction give us "history from the inside." Gordimer's novels give us an extraordinary and unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she writes.

For hundreds of years, farmers and fishing communities maintained the inlet to Ellisville Marsh, a picturesque piece of coastline ten miles south of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Recognized as one of the most environmentally sensitive and ecologically valuable places in the state, the salt marsh and estuary are home to a diverse array of wildlife and a range of habitats, including low-tide mudflats, a saltwater pond, intertidal zone, and fields of tall marsh grass.

After agricultural and fishing activities faded away in the late twentieth century, it soon became apparent that protecting the marsh and its surroundings from development would not be enough to restore the natural equilibrium that had been lost when the inlet became blocked. Having witnessed government inaction over the years, Eric P. Cody and four other locals founded the Friends of Ellisville Marsh in 2007 to address erosion, revive tidal flows, and revitalize fisheries and wildlife in the face of climate change. Rescuing Ellisville Marsh presents the powerful case study of backyard activism, telling the story of a community that bonded with a natural place and decided to fight for it.

Between the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to destroy this anti-capitalist movement. The result was an escalating class conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy.

In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American social movements.

Perhaps best known for Broadside, the influential magazine they founded in 1962, Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen have long been renowned figures on the American left. In this book, these two dedicated social activists—Sis the folk musician and Gordon the radical journalist—offer a spirited account of their personal and political odyssey. The story is illustrated with numerous photographs and drawings. Born into poverty in rural Oklahoma, further shaped by the hardships of the "dustbowl" Depression years, Sis and Gordon were already committed to radical causes when they met and married in 1941. A short time later they moved to New York City, where they befriended Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Sis joined the folk protest group the Almanac Singers, and Gordon continued his work as a journalist. Although blacklisted for their political views during the McCarthy era, Sis and Gordon persevered and eventually launched Broadside, which they continued to produce for almost twenty years. The magazine was instrumental in promoting the careers of many singer-songwriters, publishing the first works of such artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Tom Paxton, as well as the works of more established figures, including Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger. Indeed, Broadside gave birth to a musical revival that energized the country and forged a vital link between the folk music of the 1930s and 1940s and the urban folk revivalists of the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial "erotic" works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative "ignorance," which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.

Every spring and summer of her forty-four years as queen, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) insisted that her court go "on progress," a series of royal visits to towns and aristocratic homes in southern England. These trips provided the only direct contact most people had with a monarch who made popularity a cornerstone of her reign. Public appearances gave the queen a stage on which to interact with her subjects in a calculated effort to keep their support. The progresses were both emblematic of Elizabeth's rule and intrinsic to her ability to govern.

In this book, Mary Hill Cole provides a detailed analysis of the progresses. Drawing on royal household accounts, ministerial correspondence, county archives, corporation records, and family papers, she examines the effects of the visits on the queen's household and government, the individual and civic hosts, and the monarchy of the Virgin Queen.

Cole places the progresses in the sixteenth-century world of politics and images, where the queen and her hosts exchanged ceremonial messages that advanced their own agendas. The heart of the progresses was the blend of politics, socializing, and ceremony that enabled the queen to accomplish royal business on the move while satisfying the needs of those courtiers, townspeople, and country residents who welcomed her into their communities.

While all Renaissance monarchs engaged in occasional travel, in Elizabeth's case the progresses provided the settings in which she crafted her royal authority. Although the trips inconvenienced the government and strained her treasury, Elizabeth found power in the turmoil of an itinerant court and in a continuing ceremonial dialogue with her subjects.

From 1890 to 1960, some of Anglo-America's most heated cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but abroad in the City of Light. Paris, with its extraordinary liberties of expression, became a special place for interrogating the margins of sexual culture and literary censorship, and a wide variety of English language "dirty books" circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution networks.

A Publisher's Paradise explores the political and literary dynamics that gave rise to this expatriate cultural flourishing, which included everything from Victorian pornography to the most daring and controversial modernist classics. Colette Colligan tracks the British and French politicians and diplomats who policed Paris editions of banned books and uncovers offshore networks of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. She looks closely at the stories the "dirty books" told about this publishing haven and the smut peddlers and literary giants it brought together in transnational cultural formations. The book profiles an eclectic group of expatriates living and publishing in Paris, from relatively obscure figures such as Charles Carrington, whose list included both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the pornographic novel Randiana, to bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, famous for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.

A Publisher's Paradise is a compelling exploration of the little-known history of foreign pornography in Paris and the central role it played in turning the city into a modernist outpost for literary and sexual vanguardism, a reputation that still lingers today in our cultural myths of midnight in Paris.

When one looks out on the quiet waters and forested hills of Quabbin Reservoir in west central Massachusetts, it is hard to imagine that the area was once dotted with buildings and farmlands or that it echoed with the activity of several villages and towns. Today, the daytime silence may be broken only by the cry of a hawk overhead or the slap of a plunging fish, and the evening calm, by the lonesome howl of a coyote. But in the nineteenth century, things were quite different.

In 1895, engineers for the Metropolitan Water Board began to search the state of Massachusetts for a site on which to construct a reservoir to supply water for the growing city of Boston. Sixty-five miles west of the city, in a region of high hills and running streams known as the Swift River Valley, they found what they were looking for. When Quabbin Reservoir was finally completed and filled in 1946, the engineers had created the third largest body of fresh water in New England and hand accomplished one of the larger public works projects of its time. They had also uprooted and displaced the valley's inhabitants, leveled and flooded four towns and six villages--and formed a magnificent wilderness on some 85,000 acres.

The valley that was once known for its picturesque villages and mill ponds is now, over forty years later, home to a wide array of wildlife. Coyote, bobcat, and deer flourish, and Quabbin's eagle restoration project, begun in 1982, produced the first nesting pair of bald eagles in Massachusetts in almost a century. Today, the bald eagle population at Quabbin is estimated at forty-one birds.

But this accidental wilderness is being increasingly threatened. As early as the 1950s, the sounds of power boats occasionally intruded on the peaceful silence of the waters. In more recent years, acid rain, ozone and other pollutants, the ravages of a herd of hungry deer, and demands for increased recreational use are all jeopardizing Quabbin's waters and forests.

This book tells the story of Quabbin, tracing Quabbin's history, describing its natural resources, and discussing the environmental challenges it currently faces. The original edition, issued by the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1981, has now been expanded and updated.

In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums—places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts.

In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans—an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions—Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent.

"I may dare to speak, and I intend to speak and write what I think," wrote a New York volunteer serving in the Mexican War in 1848. Such sentiments of resistance and confrontation run throughout the literature produced by veteran Americans in the nineteenth century—from prisoner-of-war narratives and memoirs to periodicals, adventure pamphlets, and novels. Military men and women were active participants in early American print culture, yet they struggled against civilian prejudice about their character, against shifting collective memories that removed military experience from the nation's self-definition, and against a variety of headwinds in the uneven development of antebellum print culture.

In this new literary history of early American veterans, Benjamin Cooper reveals how soldiers and sailors from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War demanded, through their writing, that their value as American citizens and authors be recognized. Relying on an archive of largely understudied veteran authors, Cooper situates their perspective against a civilian monopoly in defining American citizenship and literature that endures to this day.

Writer, teacher, and outspoken feminist, Fuller (1810-1850) was a dynamic presence in American intellectual life through her work as the editor of The Dial, the first woman journalist for the New York Tribune, author of the influential Woman in the 19th Century, and her relationships with Emerson, Thoreau, Sand, and others. This biography follows her on her journey through Boston's social and intellectual circles, New York's literary world, to Rome as an expatriate journalist, and to her untimely demise in a shipwreck at age 40.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite this historical ebb in its national and international presence, it still possessed the infrastructure—superb educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT, world-class sports teams like the Celtics and Red Sox, powerful media outlets like The Boston Globe, and extensive shipping capacity—required to eventually thrive in an age of global trade and mass communication.

In Boston Mass-Mediated, Stanley Corkin explores the power of mass media to define a place. He examines the tensions between the emergent and prosperous city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its representation in a range of media genres such as news journalism, professional sports broadcasting, and popular films like Mystic River and The Departed. This mass media, with its ever-increasing digital reach, has emphasized a city restricted by tropes suggestive of an earlier Boston—racism, white ethnic crime, Catholicism, and a pre-modern insularity—even as it becomes increasingly international and multicultural. These tropes mediate our understanding and experience of the city. Using Boston as a case study, Corkin contends that our contemporary sense of place occurs through a media saturated world, a world created by the explosion of digital technology that is steeped in preconceptions.

On the final day of its 2008 term, a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-to-4 decision striking down the District of Columbia's stringent gun control laws as a violation of the Second Amendment. Reversing almost seventy years of settled precedent, the high court reinterpreted the meaning of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" to affirm an individual right to own a gun in the home for purposes of self-defense. The landmark ruling not only opened a new chapter in the contentious history of gun rights and gun control but also revealed both the strengths and problems of originalist constitutional theory and jurisprudence.

This volume brings together some of the best scholarship on the Heller case, with essays by legal scholars and historians representing a range of ideological viewpoints and applying different interpretive frameworks. Following the editors' introduction, which describes the issues involved and the arguments on each side, the essays are organized into four sections. The first includes two of the most important historical briefs filed in the case, while the second offers different views of the role of originalist theory. Section three presents opposing interpretations of the ruling and its relationship to modern constitutional doctrine. The final section explores historical research post-Heller, including new findings on patterns of gun ownership in colonial and Revolutionary America.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Nelson Lund, Joyce Lee Malcolm, Jack Rakove, Reva B. Siegel, Cass R. Sunstein, Kevin M. Sweeney, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III.

This book reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673–1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies. A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Coit and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences.

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin combs through these writings to create a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. Coughlin documents the activities of daily life as well as dramas occasioned by war, epidemics, and political upheaval. Though Coit's opportunities were circumscribed by gender norms of the day, she led a rich and varied life, not only running a household and raising a family, but reading, writing, traveling, transacting business, and maintaining a widespread network of social and commercial connections. She also took a lively interest in the world around her and played an active role in her community.

Coit's long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous—and sometimes surprising—ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. It also provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.

The Hidden Force is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer, L. Couperus. In the novel, the protagonist, Van Oudijck, a Dutch resident, faces his own demise as a result of his inability to see past his Western rationalism. The East Indian people and countryside have no effect on him, and the ambiance of Java, coupled with the adverse behavior of their Javanese subjects, prove more powerful than the might and power of the colonials.

It's been decades since Mara's family was last together, decades since the day her sister Allison drowned at Silver Beach.

After the family tragedy, Mara's father took her to the opposite end of the country, where she made a tidy life for herself in western Massachusetts, with a good education, stable job, and loving girlfriend. Her half-sister, Shannon, was left behind with their mother in San Diego. Surviving on disability checks and handouts from family, Shannon can't remember a time when Linda wasn't drunk.

When a heart attack lands Linda in the hospital, Shannon's first impulse is to skip town—to finally escape her mother's orbit and make her sister step up. While Mara gave up on Linda years ago and couldn't have less in common with her sister, an unemployed stoner, it's time for her to stop running from everything that makes her have feelings. This is a novel about the persistent, mystifying ties of family, the extravagant mess of addiction, and what it means to actually live inside your own life.

In 1935, a group of journalists and theater artists embarked on an unusual collaboration. With funds from the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a Depression-era employment initiative established by President Roosevelt’s New Deal, they set out to produce news for the theatrical stage. Over the next four years, the New York–based team created six productions, known as the Living Newspapers. Covering a variety of public issues that included affordable housing, the plight of Dust Bowl farmers, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and labor law, Living Newspaper productions would reach hundreds of thousands of spectators and inspire adaptations across the country.

Staged News interprets the Living Newspaper’s process and repertoire amid journalists’ changing conceptions of their profession. Jordana Cox spotlights marginalized “newsmakers,” particularly Black artists, who challenged the parameters of public knowledge and assumptions surrounding newsworthiness. This timely analysis reveals how a vital theatrical form sprouted from a changing news landscape and reimagined what journalism could do for people seeking democratic change.

Provides an introductory analysis of attempts to combine cycle analytical and social theory. Starting from a discussion of the work of Freud, the book goes on to look at more recent attempts to combine the two in the work of members of the Frankfurt school and others such as Christopher Badcock, Christopher Lasch, Talcott Parsons and Eric Erickson. The analysis also covers modern feminist approaches to Freud, notably through the writings of Nancy Chodorow and Juliet Mitchell. The author argues that there is no simple way of combining psychoanalytical and social theory, and that both approaches are limited in scope.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic.

Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.

In May 1725, during a three-year conflict between English colonists and the Eastern Abenaki Nation, a thirty-four-man expedition led by Captain John Lovewell set out to ambush their adversaries, acquire some scalp bounties, and hasten the end of the war. Instead, the Abenakis staged a surprise attack of their own at Pigwacket, Maine, that left more than a third of the New Englanders dead or severely wounded. Although Lovewell himself was slain in the fighting, he emerged a martyred hero, celebrated in popular memory for standing his ground against a superior enemy force.

In this book, Robert E. Cray revisits the clash known as "Lovewell's Fight" and uses it to illuminate the themes of war, death, and memory in early New England. He shows how a military operation plagued from the outset by poor decision-making, and further marred by less-than-heroic battlefield behavior, came to be remembered as early America's version of the Alamo. The government of Massachusetts bestowed payouts, pensions, and land on survivors and widows of the battle, while early chroniclers drafted a master narrative for later generations to emboss. William Henry Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau kept the story alive for later generations. Although some nineteenth-century New Englanders disapproved of Lovewell's notoriety as a scalp hunter, it did not prevent the dedication of a monument in his honor at the Fryeburg, Maine, battlesite in 1904.

Even as the actual story of "Lovewell's Fight" receded into obscurity—a bloody skirmish in a largely forgotten war—it remained part of New England lore, one of those rare military encounters in which defeat transcends an opponent's victory to assume the mantle of legend.

At the end of World War II, many Americans longed for a return to a more normal way of life after decades of depression and war. In fact, between 1945 and 1963 the idea of "normality" circulated as a keyword in almost every aspect of American culture. But what did this term really mean? What were its parameters? Whom did it propose to include and exclude?

In Perfectly Average, Anna Creadick investigates how and why "normality" reemerged as a potent homogenizing category in postwar America. Working with scientific studies, material culture, literary texts, film, fashion, and the mass media, she charts the pursuit of the"normal" through thematic chapters on the body, character, class, sexuality, and community.

Creadick examines such evidence as the "Norm and Norma" models produced during the war by sexologists and anthropologists—statistical composites of"normal" American bodies. In 1945, as thousands of Ohio women signed up for a Norma Look-Alike contest, a "Harvard Study of Normal Men" sought to define the typical American male according to specific criteria, from body shape to upbringing to blood pressure. By the early 1950s, the "man in the gray flannel suit" had come to symbolize what some regarded as the stultifying sameness of the "normalized" middle class. Meanwhile, novels such as From Here to Eternity and Peyton Place both supported and challenged normative ideas about gender, race, and sexuality, even as they worked to critique the postwar culture of surveillance—watching and being watched—through which normalizing power functioned.

As efforts to define normality became increasingly personal, the tensions em-bedded in its binary logic multiplied: Was normal descriptive of an average or prescriptive of an ideal? In the end, Creadick shows, a variety of statistics, assumptions, and aspirations converged to recast "normality" not as something innate or inborn, but rather as a quality to be actively pursued—a standard at once highly seductive and impossible to achieve because it required becoming perfectly average.

Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.

In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.

Early in her tenure as president of Mount Holyoke College, Joanne V. Creighton faced crises as students staged protests and occupied academic buildings; the alumnae association threatened a revolt; and a distinguished professor became the subject of a major scandal. Yet Creighton weathered each storm, serving for nearly fifteen years in office and shepherding the college through a notable revitalization.

In her autobiography, The Educational Odyssey of a Woman College President, Creighton situates her tenure at Mount Holyoke within a life and career that have traversed breathtaking changes in higher education and social life. Having held multiple roles in academia spanning undergraduate, professor, and president, Creighton served at small colleges and large public universities and experienced the dramatic changes facing women across the academy. From her girlhood in Wisconsin to the presidency of a storied women's college, she bears witness to the forces that have reshaped higher education for women and continues to advocate for the liberal arts and sciences.

W. D. Howells (1837-1920) occupies a peculiar position in our current literary history. Situated on the periphery, he is one of whose "marginality" seems, nevertheless, to be a necessary counterpart to the "centrality" of other writers--such as his friends Henry James and mark Twin--who are more securely fixed in the canon. Paradoxically, Howells has been an indispensable man in the middle, linking such binary pairs as East/West, romance/realism, elitism/socialism, patriarchal canon/women writers. This volume brings together nine related essays by John W. Crowley. The first four center respectively on Howells and the Civil War, his attitudes toward women, his friendship with a homosexual writer, and the tragically short life of his daughter Winifred. Crowley's overarching purpose here is to establish Howells as perhaps the representative male writer of his time, within the gender codes of Victorian America. The last five chapters discuss Howell's later fiction, focusing on its intense concern with psychology an psychic phenomena. Crowley not only brings this relatively neglected work more fully into view, but also argues that Howells used the writing of this fiction as a process of psychological self-healing that resembles the self-analysis of Sigmund Freud during the same years.

C.L.R. James (1901-1989) made important contributions in a host of fields--literature, criticism, cultural studies, political theory, history, and philosophy. One of the most astute minds of this century, he served as mentor for two generations of international intellectuals. He contributed enormously to their understanding of the colonial question, the Negro question, the Russian question, the role of dialectics in proletarian struggle, and the theory and practice of Marxism in the Americas. In addition to The Black Jacobins, his incisive account of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s, and Notes on Dialectics, James published a range of other books, including a classic work on the game of cricket and a study of Herman Melville.

This collection of essays offers a variety of fresh perspectives on James's life and writings. Included are reminiscences of those who knew James well and critical essays by eminent scholars. The book is the first to offer a full treatment of James's many contributions to twentieth-century intellectual life.

An anthology of essays collected from the first international conference on Caribbean women writers, 1988.