Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion.

Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Movement has long been considered the most obvious expression of brain activity and its correlative, mental activity. By studying movement, the neurophysiologist hopes to penetrate the interior of the living being and uncover the hidden source of action and its clues to the origin of life. We presume a role for the brain in movement—but should the brain be viewed simply as a machine that reacts to diverse stimuli, or is it an intelligent machine that organizes and controls not only itself but also the world around it?

Drawing upon the many disciplines that have contributed to brain research—anatomy, physiology, clinical neurology, psychology, psychiatry—Marc Jeannerod traces three centuries of ideas about movement and the brain. His critique of neural science takes into account the work of thinkers ranging from Descartes and Willis to Held, Hubel and Wiesel, Piaget and Chomsky. In his historical survey Jeannerod sees parallels between the influential neurological theories and dominating philosophical questions of the time: What is the nature of the soul? How does knowledge originate? What is the relation between the living organism and its milieu? Jeannerod's elegant arguments demonstrate that the “brain-movement problem” is the essential paradigm of the “brain-mind problem.” He advances a view of the neural organization of movement that has far-reaching implications for psychology and all neural sciences.

In exploring the origins and character of the American liberal tradition, Myra Jehlen begins with the proposition that the decisive factor that shaped the European settlers’ idea of “America” or the “American” was material rather than conceptual—it was the physical fact of the land. European settlers came to a continent on which they had no history, bringing the ideology of liberal individualism, which they projected onto the land itself. They believed the continent proclaimed that individuals were born in nature and freely made their own society. An insurgent ideology in Europe, this idea worked in America paradoxically to empower the individual and to restrict social change.

Jehlen sketches the evolution of the concept of incarnation through comparisons of American and European eighteenth-century naturalist writings, particularly Emerson’s Nature. She then explores the way incarnation functions ideologically—to both enable and curtail action—in the writing of fiction. Her examination of Hawthorne and Melville shows how the myth of the New World both licensed and limited American writers who set out to create their own worlds in fiction. She examines conflicts between the exigencies of narrative form and the imperatives of ideology in the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and others. Jehlen concludes with a speculation on the implication of this original construction of “America” for the United States today, when such imperial concepts have been called into question.

Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down.

Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient "nude dancing," and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment.

Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances--as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt.

This book gives us a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

In a fervent appeal for clearer thinking on social issues, Christopher Jencks reexamines the way Americans think about race, poverty, crime, heredity, welfare, and the underclass. Arguing that neither liberal nor conservative ideas about these issues withstand close scrutiny, he calls for less emphasis on political principles and more attention to specific programs. Jencks describes how welfare policy was dominated in the early 1980s by conservatives who promoted ideas that justified cutting back sharply on the social programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. They believed that a period of sustained economic growth, with low taxes and free markets, would do more to help poor people than coddling them with government assistance.

Despite the economic expansion of the later Reagan years, however, the problems of persistent poverty grew even more serious. The liberals took the initiative in the late 1980s, but their proposals failed to win broad popular support. With clarity and a gift for apt analogy, Jencks analyzes influential books on such subjects as affirmative action (Thomas Sowell), the “safety net” (Charles Murray), the effects of heredity on learning and propensity to commit crime (James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein), ghetto culture and the underclass (William J. Wilson). His intention throughout is “to unbundle the empirical and moral assumptions that traditional ideologies tie together, making the reader's picture of the world more complicated”—in other words, to force us (readers and policymakers) to look at the way various remedial plans actually succeed or fail.

For example, he believes that until we transform AFDC so that it reinforces rather than subverts American ideals about work and marriage, efforts to build a humane welfare state will never succeed. Other prescriptions, initially surprising and sometimes shocking, show demonstrable good sense once they are examined. As the author says, “If this book encourages readers to think about social policy more concretely, it will have served its primary purpose.”

Documenting the evolution of economic development and fiscal policies in Taiwan over the last four decades, this work explores the effectiveness of specific tax and trade policies. The authors make a major revision to the previously accepted role played by the export processing zones and the protection of domestic producers from foreign competition. The extensive use of duty exemption systems enabled the government to create competition among the exporting firms, and the innovative design of economic policies and administrative systems helped the private sector generate savings, expand investments, and promote exports.

This work analyzes how unique fiscal policies and administrative practices were designed to foster the rapid growth and development of Taiwan during this period.

From Athens and Arcadia on one side of the Aegean Sea and from Ionia, Lycia, and Karia on the other, this book brings together some of the great monuments of classical antiquity --among them two of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the later temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos.

Drawing on the Greek and Lycian architecture and sculpture in the British Museum--a collection second to none in quality, quantity, and geographical and chronological range--this lavishly illustrated volume tells a remarkable story reaching from the archaic temple of Artemis, the Parthenon, and other temples of the Athenian Acropolis to the temple of Apollo at Bassai, the sculptured tombs of Lycia, the Mausoleum, and the temple of Athena Polias at Priene. Ian Jenkins explains each as a work of art and as a historical phenomenon, revealing how the complex personality of these buildings is bound up with the people who funded, designed, built, used, destroyed, discovered, and studied them. With 250 photographs and specially commissioned line drawings, the book comprises a monumental narrative of the art and architecture that gave form, direction, and meaning to much of Western culture.

The Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum are unrivaled examples of classical Greek art, an inspiration to artists and writers since their creation in the fifth century bce. A superb visual introduction to these wonders of antiquity, this book offers a photographic tour of the most famous of the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece, viewed within their cultural and art-historical context.

Ian Jenkins offers an account of the history of the Parthenon and its architectural refinements. He introduces the sculptures as architecture--pediments, metopes, Ionic frieze--and provides an overview of their subject matter and possible meaning for the people of ancient Athens. Accompanying photographs focus on the pediment sculptures that filled the triangular gables at each end of the temple; the metopes that crowned the architrave surmounting the outer columns; and the frieze that ran around the four sides of the building, inside the colonnade. Comparative images, showing the sculptures in full and fine detail, bring out particular features of design and help to contrast Greek ideas with those of other cultures.

The book further reflects on how, over 2,500 years, the cultural identity of the Parthenon sculptures has changed. In particular, Jenkins expands on the irony of our intimate knowledge and appreciation of the sculptures--a relationship far more intense than that experienced by their ancient, intended spectators--as they have been transformed from architectural ornaments into objects of art.

A leading eighteenth-century composer, Sammartini was a key figure in the creation of the classic style, particularly the classic symphony. His symphonies and sonatas have survived in greatest number, but of equal interest is the sacred vocal music, a product of his lifelong service as a church musician. This volume lists all Sammartini's known orchestral and vocal works, sacred and secular—286 items. The entries give an incipit of each movement; instrumentation; date if known; a list of early manuscript and printed copies; and other significant information about variants, circumstances of performance, singers, copyists, and the like. The appendices list arrangements, contrafacta, and lost, doubtful, and spurious works.

Music collections in more than seventy-five libraries have been examined in gathering this material. Most compositions are listed here for the first time. In their introduction the authors provide a detailed biography, and discuss the composer's style, the major manuscript sources, and problems of authenticity. They have also included an extensive bibliography. Their book is basic to any study of Sammartini and of this pivotal period in the history of Western music.

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.

From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals.

The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful—if morally compromised—haven. They also reflect aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging—from his complex relationship with his father, to his quest for literary mentors, to his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life. Yet as Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. He left the country in 1936 for what became an almost lifelong expatriation, convinced that his role as the voice of Englishness had become an empty one.

Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of his early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism. Auden’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity are of their time. Yet they still resonate profoundly today.

The starting point for Richard Jenkyns’ latest work is his contention that the Victorian age, which we think of as the great age of Gothic, was so shot through with the influence of the classical past that we should instead think of Victorian art and architecture as the continuing flow of two stylistic streams—the Gothic and the classical, side by side. In advancing his argument Jenkyns turns our accepted notions of the Victorians upside down, presenting Ruskin as an admirer of Greek statuary, the Houses of Parliament as a classical rather than a Gothic composition, and Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor among the original Pre–Raphaelite brotherhood, as a neo–Hellenic carver and poet.

Jenkyns moves effortlessly between the general and the particular and is refreshingly unafraid to make judgments. Here are some of the best descriptions of Victorian painting, sculpture, and architecture to have appeared in recent years. From the very gradual changes throughout the paintings of Leighton and Alma–Tadema, to the operettas of Gilber Pater, and even the advertisements for Beecham's pills, Jenkyns shows how what had been merely eclectic became a distinctive fin-de-siècle style and eventually began to point the way for Modernism.

These are the grand themes, presented by a masterly guide. Above all Jenkyns is entertaining: Dignity and Decadence is one of the most illuminating and enjoyable books about the Victorians yet to appear.

Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in existence. National cathedral, coronation church, royal mausoleum, burial place of poets, resting place of the great and of the Unknown Warrior, former home of parliament, backdrop to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales—this rich and extraordinary building unites many functions.

Westminster Abbey is both an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building’s shifting meanings. We hear the voices of those who have described its forms, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James; we see how rulers have made use of it, from medieval kings to modern prime ministers. In a highly original book, classicist and cultural historian Richard Jenkyns teaches us to look at this microcosm of history with new eyes.

In the early years of World War II, thousands of political refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique in the French Caribbean, en route to what they hoped would be safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer from the colony, the exiles formed influential ties—with one another and with local black dissidents. Escape from Vichy recounts this flight from the refugees’ perspectives, using novels, unpublished diaries, archives, memoirs, artwork, and other materials to explore the unlikely encounters that fueled an anti-fascist artistic and intellectual movement.

The refugees included Spanish Republicans, anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, anti-fascist Italians, Jews from across Europe, and others fleeing violence and repression. They were met with hostility by the Vichy government and rejection by the nations where they hoped to settle. Martinique, however, provided a site propitious for creative ferment, where the revolutionary Victor Serge conversed with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Surrealist André Breton met Negritude thinkers René Ménil and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. As Eric T. Jennings shows, these interactions gave rise to a rich current of thought celebrating blackness and rejecting racism.

What began as expulsion became a kind of rescue, cut short by Washington’s fears that wolves might be posing in sheep’s clothing.

A revelatory intellectual biography of Tocqueville, told through his wide-ranging travels—most of them, aside from his journey to America, barely known.

It might be the most famous journey in the history of political thought: in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville sailed from France to the United States, spent nine months touring and observing the political culture of the fledgling republic, and produced the classic Democracy in America.

But the United States was just one of the many places documented by the inveterate traveler. Jeremy Jennings follows Tocqueville’s voyages—by sailing ship, stagecoach, horseback, train, and foot—across Europe, North Africa, and of course North America. Along the way, Jennings reveals underappreciated aspects of Tocqueville’s character and sheds new light on the depth and range of his political and cultural commentary.

Despite recurrent ill health and ever-growing political responsibilities, Tocqueville never stopped moving or learning. He wanted to understand what made political communities tick, what elite and popular mores they rested on, and how they were adjusting to rapid social and economic change—the rise of democracy and the Industrial Revolution, to be sure, but also the expansion of empire and the emergence of socialism. He lauded the orderly, Catholic-dominated society of Quebec; presciently diagnosed the boisterous but dangerously chauvinistic politics of Germany; considered England the freest and most unequal place on Earth; deplored the poverty he saw in Ireland; and championed French colonial settlement in Algeria.

Drawing on correspondence, published writings, speeches, and the recollections of contemporaries, Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America is a panoramic combination of biography, history, and political theory that fully reflects the complex, restless mind at its center.

This is the first study of Mendoza, the importance of whose position as Ambassador to France from 1584 to 1591--crucial in the liaison between Philip II and the French Catholic League--was long recognized but not explored. A religious zealot and military crusader who carried his uncompromising attitude into his diplomatic career, Mendoza made the connections between his master Philip and the French Catholic League much more intimate and functional than was previously suspected. In the spring of 1588, for instance, Mendozamanipulated the League and the Duke of Guise into a position of open rebellion against the King of France, thus ensuring that the Armada could sail for England without the danger of French harassment along the channel coast, and also that there would be no threat of French occupation of the Spanish Netherlands when Parma's troops should embark for the invasion of England.

Throughout the book, Spanish policies and techniques and their influence on international affairs are exemplified as they were not before. Showing how Continental diplomacy was dominated by religious zeal in the late sixteenth century, and how the fanaticism of the French religious wars formed a prelude to a reaction toward political absolutism, Jensen draws on a fund of untapped manuscript and printed sources, including Mendoza's coded letters, some of which he was the first to decipher.

In this volume, Michael Jensen and his collaborators present the foundations of an integrated theory of organizations. The theory assumes that organizations are equilibrium systems that, like markets, can be influenced, but cannot be told what to do; that human beings are rational and self-interested for the most part; and that information is costly to produce and transfer among agents. The theory also treats business organizations as entities existing in a system of markets (including financial, product, labor, and materials markets) that must be considered in the formulation of organizational strategy.

Jensen argues that the cost of transferring information makes it necessary to decentralize some decision rights in organizations and in the economy. This decentralization in turn requires organizations to solve the control problem that results when self-interested persons do not behave as perfect agents.

Capitalist economies solve these control problems through the institution of alienable decision rights. But because organizations must suppress the alienability of decision rights, they must devise substitute mechanisms that perform its functions. Jensen argues that three critical systems, which he calls the organizational rules of the game, are necessary to substitute for alienability in organizations: (1) a system for allocating decision rights among agents in the firm, (2) a system for measuring and evaluating performance in the firm, and (3) a system for rewarding and punishing individuals for their performance. These concepts offer a major competitive advantage for organizations.

This collection examines the forces, both external and internal, that lead corporations to behave efficiently and to create wealth. Corporations vest control rights in shareholders, the author argues, because they are the constituency that bear business risk and therefore have the appropriate incentives to maximize corporate value. Assigning control to any other group would be tantamount to allowing that group to play poker with someone else's money, and would create inefficiencies. The implicit denial of this proposition is the fallacy of the so-called stakeholder theory of the corporation, which argues that corporations should be run in the interests of all stakeholders. This theory offers no account of how conflicts between different stakeholders are to be resolved, and gives managers no principle on which to base decisions, except to follow their own preferences.

In practice, shareholders delegate their control rights to a board of directors, who hire, fire, and set the compensation of the chief officers of the firm. However, because agents have different incentives than the principals they represent, they can destroy corporate value unless closely monitored. This happened in the 1960s and led to hostile takeovers in the market for corporate control in the 1970s and 1980s. The author argues that the takeover movement generated increases in corporate efficiency that exceeded $1.5 trillion and helped to lay the foundation for the great economic boom of the 1990s.

The cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies—along with the forms of devotion—this central symbol of Christianity inspires.

Jesus’s death on the cross posed a dilemma for Saint Paul and the early Church fathers. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution reserved for slaves and criminals. How could their messiah and savior have been subjected to such an ignominious death? Wrestling with this paradox, they reimagined the cross as a triumphant expression of Christ’s sacrificial love and miraculous resurrection. Over time, the symbol’s transformation raised myriad doctrinal questions, particularly about the crucifix—the cross with the figure of Christ—and whether it should emphasize Jesus’s suffering or his glorification. How should Jesus’s body be depicted: alive or dead, naked or dressed? Should it be shown at all?

Jensen’s wide-ranging study focuses on the cross in painting and literature, the quest for the “true cross” in Jerusalem, and the symbol’s role in conflicts from the Crusades to wars of colonial conquest. The Cross also reveals how Jews and Muslims viewed the most sacred of all Christian emblems and explains its role in public life in the West today.

A death occurs at home, in a hospital, on a street: why? As Jeffrey Jentzen reveals, we often never know. Why is the American system of death investigation so inconsistent and inadequate? What can the events of the assassination of President Kennedy, killing of Bobby Kennedy, and Chappaquiddick reveal about the state of death investigation?

If communities in early America had a coroner at all, he was politically appointed and poorly trained. As medicine became more sophisticated and the medical profession more confident, physicians struggled to establish a professionalized, physician-led system of death investigation. The conflict between them and the coroners, as well as politicians and law enforcement agencies, led to the patchwork of local laws and practices that persist to this day.

In this unique political and cultural history, Jentzen draws on archives, interviews, and his own career as a medical examiner to look at the way that a long-standing professional and political rivalry controls public medical knowledge and public health.

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345–420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He traveled widely in Gaul and in Asia Minor; and turned in the years 373–379 to hermetic life in Syria. Ordained presbyter at Antioch in 379 he went to Constantinople, met Gregory of Nazianzus and advanced greatly in scholarship. He was called to Rome in 382 to help Pope Damasus, at whose suggestion he began his revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (which came to form the core of the Vulgate version). Meanwhile he taught scripture and Hebrew and monastic living to Roman women. Wrongly suspected of luxurious habits, he left Rome (now under Pope Siricius) in 385, toured Palestine, visited Egypt, and then settled in Bethlehem, presiding over a monastery and (with help) translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. About 394 he met Augustine. He died on 30 September 420.

Jerome’s letters constitute one of the most notable collections in Latin literature. They are an essential source for our knowledge of Christian life in the fourth–fifth centuries; they also provide insight into one of the most striking and complex personalities of the time. Seven of the eighteen letters in this selection deal with a primary interest of Jerome’s: the morals and proper role of women. The most famous letter here fervently extols virginity.

Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture.

Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that “tenured radicals” have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science’s celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers.

Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation’s bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s.

Looking at today’s battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists’ claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world.

The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games—and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture.

Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting media consumption.

Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world.

The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games—and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture.

Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting media consumption.

Ellis Joffe has drawn on a lifetime of experience as an analyst of Chinese military affairs in this authoritative assessment of a highly elusive subject: military modernization and the politics of civilian-military relations in the post-Mao period. He has sifted vast amounts of evidence, primary and secondary, to show that during the past few years the Chinese army has been transformed into a relatively modern and professional force that will be the basis for future growth of China’s military power.

The author begins by describing the development of the People’s Liberation Army in the Maoist era and explains the reasons for its decline. He analyzes the political changes and the shifts in strategic outlook of Mao’s successors that have made possible a new policy of military modernization: a policy of raising the combat capability of the PLA through slow improvements of technology—including buying some material abroad—and a thorough upgrading of the nontechnological components of military power.

Joffe examines all aspects of the PLA’s modernization, focusing on the wide-ranging changes in doctrine, weapons, organization, structure, and modes of operation, and concludes with an analysis of the PLA’s political role and the state of civil–military relations. There is a particularly perspicacious chapter dissecting Deng’s maneuvers to remove the military influence in politics that had burgeoned during and after the Cultural Revolution.

A princely tale inspired by Christianity and Buddhism.

One of the best known examples of the hagiographic novel, this is the tale of an Indian prince who becomes aware of the world’s miseries and is converted to Christianity by the monk Barlaam. Barlaam and Josaphat (Ioasaph) were believed to have re-converted India after her lapse from conversion to Christianity, and they were numbered among the Christian saints. Centuries ago likenesses were noticed between the life of Josaphat and the life of the Buddha; the resemblances are in incidents, doctrine, and philosophy, and Barlaam’s rules of abstinence resemble the Buddhist monk’s. But not till the mid-nineteenth century was it recognized that, in Josaphat, the Buddha had been venerated as a Christian saint for about a thousand years.

The origin of the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph—which in itself has little peculiar to Buddhism—appears to be a Manichean tract produced in Central Asia. It was welcomed by the Arabs and by the Georgians. The Greek romance of Barlaam appears separately first in the 11th century. Most of the Greek manuscripts attribute the story to John the Monk, and it is only some later scribes who identify this John with John Damascene (ca. 676–749). There is strong evidence in Latin and Georgian as well as Greek that it was the Georgian Euthymius (who died in 1028) who caused the story to be translated from Georgian into Greek, the whole being reshaped and supplemented. The Greek romance soon spread throughout Christendom, and was translated into Latin, Old Slavonic, Armenian, and Arabic. An English version (from Latin) was used by Shakespeare in his caskets scene in The Merchant of Venice.

David M. Lang’s Introduction traces parallels between the Buddhist and Christian legends, discusses the importance of Arabic versions, and notes influences of the Manichean creed.

The telegraph and the telephone were the first electrical communications networks to become hallmarks of modernity. Yet they were not initially expected to achieve universal accessibility. In this pioneering history of their evolution, Richard R. John demonstrates how access to these networks was determined not only by technological imperatives and economic incentives but also by political decision making at the federal, state, and municipal levels.

In the decades between the Civil War and the First World War, Western Union and the Bell System emerged as the dominant providers for the telegraph and telephone. Both operated networks that were products not only of technology and economics but also of a distinctive political economy. Western Union arose in an antimonopolistic political economy that glorified equal rights and vilified special privilege. The Bell System flourished in a progressive political economy that idealized public utility and disparaged unnecessary waste.

The popularization of the telegraph and the telephone was opposed by business lobbies that were intent on perpetuating specialty services. In fact, it wasn’t until 1900 that the civic ideal of mass access trumped the elitist ideal of exclusivity in shaping the commercialization of the telephone. The telegraph did not become widely accessible until 1910, sixty-five years after the first fee-for-service telegraph line opened in 1845.

Network Nation places the history of telecommunications within the broader context of American politics, business, and discourse. This engrossing and provocative book persuades us of the critical role of political economy in the development of new technologies and their implementation.

In the seven decades from its establishment in 1775 to the commercialization of the electric telegraph in 1844, the American postal system spurred a communications revolution no less far-reaching than the subsequent revolutions associated with the telegraph, telephone, and computer. This book tells the story of that revolution and the challenge it posed for American business, politics, and cultural life.

During the early republic, the postal system was widely hailed as one of the most important institutions of the day. No other institution had the capacity to transmit such a large volume of information on a regular basis over such an enormous geographical expanse. The stagecoaches and postriders who conveyed the mail were virtually synonymous with speed.

In the United States, the unimpeded transmission of information has long been hailed as a positive good. In few other countries has informational mobility been such a cherished ideal. Richard John shows how postal policy can help explain this state of affairs. He discusses its influence on the development of such information-intensive institutions as the national market, the voluntary association, and the mass party. He traces its consequences for ordinary Americans, including women, blacks, and the poor. In a broader sense, he shows how the postal system worked to create a national society out of a loose union of confederated states. This exploration of the role of the postal system in American public life provides a fresh perspective not only on an important but neglected chapter in American history, but also on the origins of some of the most distinctive features of American life today.

Archaeological evidence of truly domestic dogs dates back to the Stone Age, when humans lived as bands of hunter-gatherers. The long association that followed, with dogs living alongside people as hunters and companions, guardians and guides, has a treasured place in history and myth—and in a wealth of art and artifacts that document and celebrate this ancient relationship.

Dogs: History, Myth, Art explores these cultural expressions and reflections of our deep and long-standing interest in dogs. Here, in exquisite reproductions, are life-size sculptures and tiny engraved gems, ceramic floor tiles and stone wall-reliefs, gold ornaments and ceramic vessels, pocketknife handles and miniature paintings, all depicting dogs from prehistory to the present. Through these illustrations—drawn from the collections of the British Museum—author Catherine Johns considers the evolution of the species, its earliest interactions with human communities, its importance in history and culture, and its role in symbolism, mythology, and legend. Dogs’ wild cousins, wolves, jackals, and foxes, also play a role in this story, and so appear alongside their domestic counterparts in this book’s engaging tour of cultural perceptions and depictions of dogs.

The juxtaposition and explanation of images as diverse as Greek pottery, Victorian jewelry, Assyrian sculpture, and Japanese netsuke, as well as drawings and paintings from 1850 bc to the twentieth century, illuminates our understanding of the place of dogs in human society around the world.

The remarkable relationship between people and horses has been evoked in art from the beginning of the bond between them. In this beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Johns explores the horse in art from the ancient world to the modern era.

In early human history, horses were among the wild creatures hunted for meat; they were domesticated comparatively late, around 4000 B.C. As people developed from hunter-gatherers to farmers, the horse offered the potential for a revolution in power and transport—the ability to move farther and faster transformed society. Johns tells the story of the horse and highlights the key roles this animal has played in human warfare, travel, ceremony, hunting, racing, and in myth and symbolism.

The themes are presented in stunning four-color illustrations of British Museum objects that trace our perceptions of the horse through time and space, and convey the wide variety of images that have been created of this magnificent creature: in colossal and life-sized sculpture, in paintings, and in minuscule form on coins, gems, and jewelry; and from the world of ancient Greece and Rome to the arts of India, Africa, China, and Japan.

Horses appear in stone and metal, ceramic, wood, bone, ivory, and textiles. From the Horse of Selene and a gold model chariot from the Oxus treasure to Persian miniatures and prints by Duerer, Stubbs, and Hokusai, this book will inform, entertain, and delight horse lovers and all readers interested in this inspiring animal and its profound contribution to human culture.

“A fitting biography of one of the most brilliant, acerbic, and under-appreciated astrophysicists of the twentieth century. John Johnson has delved deeply into a rich and eventful life, and produced a rollicking account of how Fritz Zwicky split his time between picking fights with his colleagues and discovering amazing things about our universe.”—Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture

Fritz Zwicky was one of the most inventive and iconoclastic scientists of his time. He predicted the existence of neutron stars, and his research pointed the way toward the discovery of pulsars and black holes. He was the first to conceive of the existence of dark matter, the first to make a detailed catalog of thousands of galaxies, and the first to correctly suggest that cosmic rays originate from supernovas.

Not content to confine his discoveries to the heavens, Zwicky contributed to the United States war against Japan with inventions in jet propulsion that enabled aircraft to launch from carriers in the Pacific. After the war, he was the first Western scientist to interview Wernher von Braun, the Nazi engineer who developed the V-2 rocket. Later he became an outspoken advocate for space exploration, but also tangled with almost every leading scientist of the time, from Edwin Hubble and Richard Feynman to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

In Zwicky, John Johnson, Jr., brings this tempestuous maverick to life. Zwicky not only made groundbreaking contributions to science and engineering; he rose to fame as one of the most imaginative science popularizers of his day. Yet he became a pariah in the scientific community, denouncing his enemies, real and imagined, as “spherical bastards” and “horses’ asses.” Largely forgotten today, Zwicky deserves rediscovery for introducing some of the most destructive forces in the universe, and as a reminder that genius obeys no rules and has no friends.

In a field choked with seemingly impenetrable jargon, Philip N. Johnson-Laird has done the impossible: written a book about how the mind works that requires no advance knowledge of artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, or psychology. The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.

The author begins with a brief account of the history of psychology and the birth of cognitive science after World War II. He then describes clearly and simply the nature of symbols and the theory of computation, and follows with sections devoted to current computational models of how the mind carries out all its major tasks, including visual perception, learning, memory, the planning and control of actions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and the formation of new concepts and new ideas. Other sections discuss human communication, meaning, the progress that has been made in enabling computers to understand natural language, and finally the difficult problems of the conscious and unconscious mind, free will, needs and emotions, and self-awareness. In an envoi, the author responds to the critics of cognitive science and defends the computational view of the mind as an alternative to traditional dualism: cognitive science integrates mind and matter within the same explanatory framework.

This first single-authored introduction to cognitive science will command the attention of students of cognitive science at all levels including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists--as well as all readers curious about recent knowledge on how the mind works.

Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of mind: comprehension, inference, and consciousness. In spirited and graceful prose, Johnson-Laird argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a digital computer. This book provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.

In several key areas of cognition, Johnson-Laird shows how an explanation based on mental modeling is clearly superior to previous theory. For example, he argues compellingly that deductive reasoning does not take place by tacitly applying the rules of logic, but by mentally manipulating models of the states of affairs from which inferences are drawn. Similarly, linguistic comprehension is best understood not as a matter of applying inference rules to propositions derived from sentences, but rather as the mind's effort to construct and update a model of the situation described by a text or a discourse. Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird's theory of consciousness: the mind's necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition.

This an extraordinarily rich book, providing a coherent account of much recent experimental work in cognitive psychology, along with lucid explanations of relevant theory in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy Not since Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's classic Plans and the Structure of Behavior has a book in cognitive science combined such sweep, style, and good sense. Like its distinguished predecessor, Mental Models may well serve to fix a point of view for a generation.

Embattled and belittled, demonized and deemed passé, feminism today seems becalmed without being calm. This is as true in literary criticism as elsewhere in the culture--yet it is in literary criticism that these essays locate the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought. In fresh readings of a wide array of texts--legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical--renowned literary theorist Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning-point.

Employing surprising juxtapositions, The Feminist Difference looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective; at poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's rich, stimulating, unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--moments that re-emerge here as sources of a revitalized critical awareness.

In the final analysis, Johnson argues, literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. In her book literature appears not as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of making readable those impossible and necessary things that cannot yet be spoken.

Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Plath make up the odd trio on which this book is based. It is in the surprising and revealing links between them--links pertaining to troublesome mothers, elusive foreign languages, and professional disappointments--that Barbara Johnson maps the coordinates of her larger claims about the ideal of oneness in every area of life, and about the damage done by this ideal.

The existence of sexual difference precludes an original or ultimate "one" who would represent all of mankind; the plurality of languages makes it impossible to think that one doesn't live in translation; and the plurality of the sexes means that every human being came from a woman's body, and some will reproduce this feat, while others won't. In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons.

In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.

The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.

Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Opponents rarely go to war without thinking they can win--and clearly, one side must be wrong. This conundrum lies at the heart of the so-called "war puzzle": rational states should agree on their differences in power and thus not fight. But as Dominic Johnson argues in Overconfidence and War, states are no more rational than people, who are susceptible to exaggerated ideas of their own virtue, of their ability to control events, and of the future. By looking at this bias--called "positive illusions"--as it figures in evolutionary biology, psychology, and the politics of international conflict, this book offers compelling insights into why states wage war.

Johnson traces the effects of positive illusions on four turning points in twentieth-century history: two that erupted into war (World War I and Vietnam); and two that did not (the Munich crisis and the Cuban missile crisis). Examining the two wars, he shows how positive illusions have filtered into politics, causing leaders to overestimate themselves and underestimate their adversaries--and to resort to violence to settle a conflict against unreasonable odds. In the Munich and Cuban missile crises, he shows how lessening positive illusions may allow leaders to pursue peaceful solutions.

The human tendency toward overconfidence may have been favored by natural selection throughout our evolutionary history because of the advantages it conferred--heightening combat performance or improving one's ability to bluff an opponent. And yet, as this book suggests--and as the recent conflict in Iraq bears out--in the modern world the consequences of this evolutionary legacy are potentially deadly.

How do people decide which country came out ahead in a war or a crisis? Why, for instance, was the Mayaguez Incident in May 1975--where 41 U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens more wounded in a botched hostage rescue mission--perceived as a triumph and the 1992-94 U.S. humanitarian intervention in Somalia, which saved thousands of lives, viewed as a disaster? In Failing to Win, Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney dissect the psychological factors that predispose leaders, media, and the public to perceive outcomes as victories or defeats--often creating wide gaps between perceptions and reality.

To make their case, Johnson and Tierney employ two frameworks: "Scorekeeping," which focuses on actual material gains and losses; and "Match-fixing," where evaluations become skewed by mindsets, symbolic events, and media and elite spin. In case studies ranging from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the current War on Terror, the authors show that much of what we accept about international politics and world history is not what it seems--and why, in a time when citizens offer or withdraw support based on an imagined view of the outcome rather than the result on the ground, perceptions of success or failure can shape the results of wars, the fate of leaders, and the "lessons" we draw from history.

Ernest Gruening is perhaps best known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, where he set himself apart by casting one of two votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. However, as Robert Johnson shows in this political biography, it's Gruening's sixty-year public career in its entirety that provides an opportunity for historians to explore continuity and change in dissenting thought, on both domestic and international affairs, in twentieth-century America.

Gruening's outlook on domestic affairs took shape in the intellectual milieu of Progressive-era Boston, where he first devoted attention to foreign affairs in crusades against aggressive U.S. policies toward Haiti and Mexico. In the late 1920s, he was appointed editor of a reform newspaper in Portland, Maine, and moved from there to The Nation. By the early 1930s he had built a national reputation as an expert on Latin American affairs, prompting Franklin Roosevelt to appoint him chief U.S. policymaker for Puerto Rico. In 1939, Roosevelt named Gruening governor of Alaska, where for fourteen years he played a key role in the political development of the territory. In 1958 Alaskan voters elected him to the U.S. Senate, where he articulated a dissenting outlook in inter-American affairs, foreign aid policy, and the relationship between the federal government, the economy, and the issue of monopoly.

Throughout his life, Gruening struggled to reconcile his ideological perspective, which drew on dissenting ideas long embedded in American history, with a desire for political effectiveness.

This intensively researched volume covers a previously neglected aspect of American history: the foreign policy perspective of the peace progressives, a bloc of dissenters in the U.S. Senate, between 1913 and 1935. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations is the first full-length work to focus on these senators during the peak of their collective influence. Robert David Johnson shows that in formulating an anti-imperialist policy, the peace progressives advanced the left-wing alternative to the Wilsonian agenda.

The experience of World War I, and in particular Wilson’s postwar peace settlement, unified the group behind the idea that the United States should play an active world role as the champion of weaker states. Senators Asle Gronna of North Dakota, Robert La Follette and John Blaine of Wisconsin, and William Borah of Idaho, among others, argued that this anti-imperialist vision would reconcile American ideals not only with the country’s foreign policy obligations but also with American economic interests. In applying this ideology to both inter-American and European affairs, the peace progressives emerged as the most powerful opposition to the business-oriented internationalism of the decade’s Republican administrations, while formulating one of the most comprehensive critiques of American foreign policy ever to emerge from Congress.

The Life and Miracles of Thekla offers a unique view on the reception of classical and early Christian literature in Late Antiquity. This study examines the Life and Miracles as an intricate example of Greek writing and attempts to situate the work amidst a wealth of similar literary forms from the classical world. The first half of the Life and Miracles is an erudite paraphrase of the famous second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla. The second half is a collection of forty-six miracles that Thekla worked before and during the composition of the collection.

This study represents a detailed investigation into the literary character of this ambitious Greek work from Late Antiquity.

Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize
Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award

“Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.”
—Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement

“[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.”
—The Nation

“An important, arguably seminal, book…Always trenchant and learned.”
—Wall Street Journal

A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism.

When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.

Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.

But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.

“Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.”
—A. O. Scott, New York Times

“River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’”
—Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

Histories of ancient Rome have long emphasized the ways in which the empire assimilated the societies it conquered, bringing civilization to the supposed barbarians. Yet interpretations of this “Romanization” of Western Europe tend to erase local identities and traditions from the historical picture, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the diverse cultures that flourished in the provinces far from Rome.

The Sons of Remus recaptures the experiences, memories, and discourses of the societies that made up the variegated patchwork fabric of the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Focusing on Gaul and Spain, Andrew Johnston explores how the inhabitants of these provinces, though they willingly adopted certain Roman customs and recognized imperial authority, never became exclusively Roman. Their self-representations in literature, inscriptions, and visual art reflect identities rooted in a sense of belonging to indigenous communities. Provincials performed shifting roles for different audiences, rehearsing traditions at home while subverting Roman stereotypes of druids and rustics abroad.

Deriving keen insights from ancient sources—travelers’ records, myths and hero cults, timekeeping systems, genealogies, monuments—Johnston shows how the communities of Gaul and Spain balanced their local identities with their status as Roman subjects, as they preserved a cultural memory of their pre-Roman past and wove their own narratives into Roman mythology. The Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Romulus, the legendary founder of the eternal city; from the other brother, the provincials of the west received a complicated inheritance, which shaped the history of the sons of Remus.

Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. New gods encountered in foreign lands by merchants and conquerors were sometimes taken home to be adapted and adopted. A full understanding of this complex spiritual world unfolds in Religions of the Ancient World, the first basic reference work that collects and organizes available information to offer an expansive, comparative perspective.

At once sweeping in scope and groundbreaking in format, the Guide eschews the usual encyclopedic approach, instead presenting, side by side, materials from ten cultures and traditions. Thus specific beliefs, cults, gods, and ritual practices that arose and developed in Mediterranean religions--of Egypt, Anatolia and the Near East, Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and the Roman world, from the third millennium to the fourth century C.E.--are interpreted in comparison with one another, and with reference to aspects that crisscross cultural boundaries, such as Cosmology, Myth, Law and Ethics, and Magic. Written by leading scholars of ancient religion, the essays in this guide sketch the various religious histories, raise central theoretical issues, and examine individual topics such as Sacred Times and Spaces; Prayers, Hymns, Incantations, and Curses; Sin, Pollution, and Purity; Death, the Afterlife, and Other Last Things; Divination and Prophecy; Deities and Demons; and Sacred Texts and Canonicity.

Clearly and stylishly written, grandly illustrated, this comprehensive work welcomes readers as never before into the diversity and interconnections of religion in the ancient world.

Greek myths have long been admired as beautiful, thrilling stories but dismissed as serious objects of belief. For centuries scholars have held that Greek epics, tragedies, and the other compelling works handed down to us obscure the “real” myths that supposedly inspired them. Instead of joining in this pursuit of hidden meanings, Sarah Iles Johnston argues that the very nature of myths as stories—as gripping tales starring vivid characters—enabled them to do their most important work: to create and sustain belief in the gods and heroes who formed the basis of Greek religion.

By drawing on work in narratology, sociology, and folklore studies, and by comparing Greek myths not only to the myths of other cultures but also to fairy tales, ghost stories, fantasy works, modern novels, and television series, The Story of Myth reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which these ancient Greek tales forged enduring bonds between their characters and their audiences, created coherent story-worlds, and made it possible to believe in extraordinary gods. Johnston captures what makes Greek myths distinctively Greek, but simultaneously brings these myths into a broader conversation about how the stories told by all cultures affect our shared view of the cosmos and the creatures who inhabit it.

Around the world, more than a million people die by suicide each year. Yet many of us know very little about a tragedy that may strike our own loved ones—and much of what we think we know is wrong. This clear and powerful book dismantles myth after myth to bring compassionate and accurate understanding of a massive international killer.

Drawing on a fascinating array of clinical cases, media reports, literary works, and scientific studies, Thomas Joiner demolishes both moralistic and psychotherapeutic clichés. He shows that suicide is not easy, cowardly, vengeful, or selfish. It is not a manifestation of "suppressed rage" or a side effect of medication. Threats of suicide, far from being idle, are often followed by serious attempts. People who are prevented once from killing themselves will not necessarily try again.

The risk for suicide, Joiner argues, is partly genetic and is influenced by often agonizing mental disorders. Vulnerability to suicide may be anticipated and treated. Most important, suicide can be prevented.

An eminent expert whose own father's death by suicide changed his life, Joiner is relentless in his pursuit of the truth about suicide and deeply sympathetic to such tragic waste of life and the pain it causes those left behind.

In the wake of a suicide, the most troubling questions are invariably the most difficult to answer: How could we have known? What could we have done? And always, unremittingly: Why? Written by a clinical psychologist whose own life has been touched by suicide, this book offers the clearest account ever given of why some people choose to die.

Drawing on extensive clinical and epidemiological evidence, as well as personal experience, Thomas Joiner brings a comprehensive understanding to seemingly incomprehensible behavior. Among the many people who have considered, attempted, or died by suicide, he finds three factors that mark those most at risk of death: the feeling of being a burden on loved ones; the sense of isolation; and, chillingly, the learned ability to hurt oneself. Joiner tests his theory against diverse facts taken from clinical anecdotes, history, literature, popular culture, anthropology, epidemiology, genetics, and neurobiology--facts about suicide rates among men and women; white and African-American men; anorexics, athletes, prostitutes, and physicians; members of cults, sports fans, and citizens of nations in crisis.

The result is the most coherent and persuasive explanation ever given of why and how people overcome life's strongest instinct, self-preservation. Joiner's is a work that makes sense of the bewildering array of statistics and stories surrounding suicidal behavior; at the same time, it offers insight, guidance, and essential information to clinicians, scientists, and health practitioners, and to anyone whose life has been affected by suicide.

Alison Jolly believes that biologists have an important story to tell about being human—not the all-too-familiar tale of selfishness, competition, and biology as destiny but rather one of cooperation and interdependence, from the first merging of molecules to the rise of a species inextricably linked by language, culture, and group living. This is the story that unfolds in Lucy’s Legacy, the saga of human evolution as told by a world-renowned primatologist who works among the female-dominant ringtailed lemurs of Madagascar.

We cannot be certain that Lucy was female—the bones themselves do not tell us. However, we do know, as Jolly points out in this erudite, funny, and informative book, that the females who came after Lucy—more adept than their males in verbal facility, sharing food, forging links between generations, migrating among places and groups, and devising creative mating strategies—played as crucial a role in the human evolutionary process as “man” ever did. In a book that takes us from the first cell to global society, Jolly shows us that to learn where we came from and where we go next, we need to understand how sex and intelligence, cooperation and love, emerged from the harsh Darwinian struggle in the past, and how these natural powers may continue to evolve in the future.

In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa.

Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

The story of how nineteenth-century European rulers conspired with Mexican conservatives in an outlandish plan to contain the rising US colossus by establishing Old World empire on its doorstep.

The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected opportunity for political conservatives across continents. On one side were European monarchs. Mere decades after its founding, the United States had become a threat to European hegemony; instability in the United States could be exploited to lay a rival low. Meanwhile, Mexican antidemocrats needed a powerful backer to fend off the republicanism of Benito Juárez. When these two groups found each other, the Second Mexican Empire was born.

Raymond Jonas argues that the Second Mexican Empire, often dismissed as a historical sideshow, is critical to appreciating the globally destabilizing effect of growing US power in the nineteenth century. In 1862, at the behest of Mexican reactionaries and with the initial support of Spain and Britain, Napoleon III of France sent troops into Mexico and installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as an imperial ruler who could resist democracy in North America. But what was supposed to be an easy victory proved a disaster. The French army was routed at the Battle of Puebla, and for the next four years, republican guerrillas bled the would-be empire. When the US Civil War ended, African American troops were dispatched to Mexico to hasten the French withdrawal.

Based on research in five languages and in archives across the globe, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande fundamentally revises narratives of global history. Far more than a footnote, the Second Mexican Empire was at the center of world-historic great-power struggles—a point of inflection in a contest for supremacy that set the terms of twentieth-century rivalry.

In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction.

In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system.

This narrative left an indelible imprint on China’s literature and popular media, from children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones’s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China’s foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation’s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature’s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism’s role in modern Chinese literature.

Since its founding in 1839, the Harvard College Observatory has pioneered in the development of modern astronomy. Its first directors early recognized the potential of spectroscopy in revealing the constitution of the stars, and of photography in determining the positions and motions of celestial objects; the library of photographic plates made under their direction provides an invaluable history of the stellar universe for the period. The Observatory also pioneered in using the talents of women, several of whom became noted astronomers, and their monumental classification of stars from spectral records constitutes a fundamental contribution to astronomical knowledge.

The authors vividly portray the genesis, growth, and achievements of a major scientific institution and its relations with other observatories. Through the use of photographs and correspondence they also portray the men and women who played essential roles in the development of astronomy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alongside famous long works such as Beowulf, Old English poetry offers a large number of shorter compositions, many of them on explicitly Christian themes. This volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library presents twenty-nine of these shorter religious poems composed in Old and early Middle English between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Among the texts, which demonstrate the remarkable versatility of early English verse, are colorful allegories of the natural world, poems dedicated to Christian prayer and morality, and powerful meditations on death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

Previously edited in many different places and in some instances lacking accessible translations, many of these poems have remained little known outside scholarly circles. The present volume aims to offer this important body of texts to a wider audience by bringing them together in one collection and providing all of them with up-to-date translations and explanatory notes. An introduction sets the poems in their literary-historical contexts, which are further illustrated by two appendices, including the first complete modern English translation of the so-called Old English Benedictine Office.

The fossil fuel revolution is usually rendered as a tale of historic advances in energy production. In this perspective-changing account, Christopher F. Jones instead tells a story of advances in energy access—canals, pipelines, and wires that delivered power in unprecedented quantities to cities and factories at a great distance from production sites. He shows that in the American mid-Atlantic region between 1820 and 1930, the construction of elaborate transportation networks for coal, oil, and electricity unlocked remarkable urban and industrial growth along the eastern seaboard. But this new transportation infrastructure did not simply satisfy existing consumer demand—it also whetted an appetite for more abundant and cheaper energy, setting the nation on a path toward fossil fuel dependence.

Between the War of 1812 and the Great Depression, low-cost energy supplied to cities through a burgeoning delivery system allowed factory workers to mass-produce goods on a scale previously unimagined. It also allowed people and products to be whisked up and down the East Coast at speeds unattainable in a country dependent on wood, water, and muscle. But an energy-intensive America did not benefit all its citizens equally. It provided cheap energy to some but not others; it channeled profits to financiers rather than laborers; and it concentrated environmental harms in rural areas rather than cities.

Today, those who wish to pioneer a more sustainable and egalitarian energy order can learn valuable lessons from this history of the nation’s first steps toward dependence on fossil fuels.

For the early Christians, “pagan” referred to a multitude of unbelievers: Greek and Roman devotees of the Olympian gods, and “barbarians” such as Arabs and Germans with their own array of deities. But while these groups were clearly outsiders or idolaters, who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Pagan and Christian uncovers the ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.

While the emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 was a momentous event in the history of Christianity, the new religion had been gradually forming in the Roman Empire for centuries, as it moved away from its Jewish origins and adapted to the dominant pagan culture. Early Christians drew on pagan practices and claimed important pagans as their harbingers—asserting that Plato, Virgil, and others had glimpsed Christian truths. At the same time, Greeks and Romans had encountered in Judaism observances and beliefs shared by Christians such as the Sabbath and the idea of a single, creator God. Polytheism was the most obvious feature separating paganism and Christianity, but pagans could be monotheists, and Christians could be accused of polytheism and branded as pagans. In the diverse religious communities of the Roman Empire, as Jones makes clear, concepts of divinity, conversion, sacrifice, and prayer were much more fluid than traditional accounts of early Christianity have led us to believe.

The works of the second-century satirist Lucian--of which about seventy survive--have had a marked influence on western literature since the Renaissance. Translated by Erasmus, and called "inimitable" by Gibbon, Lucian is the first to tell the famous story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. His subjects range from the hypocrisy of philosophers to fantastic voyages in space. He is often thought the true father of science fiction and, at the same time, is one of the most important witnesses to early Christianity. C. P Jones examines Lucian's work, setting this brilliant writer in the social and intellectual context of an age that proved pivotal in Greco-Roman history.

Lucian's art has been widely considered bookish, concerned with people and customs he and his readers knew only from literature. Jones argues that on the contrary his attacks on such targets as mercenary Stoics and the snake-god Glycon were aimed with mischievous precision. The result is a fresh portrait of Lucian and a vivid picture of a society whose outward assurance masked uncertainty and the onset of profound change.

Heroic figures such as Heracles, Perseus, and Jason were seen by the Greeks not as mythical figures but as real people who in a bygone age traveled the world, settled new lands, and left descendants who, generation after generation, could trace their ancestry back to the "time of heroes." From the Homeric age to Byzantium, peoples and nations sharing the same fictive ancestry appealed to their kinship when forging military alliances, settling disputes, or negotiating trade connections. In this intriguing study of the political uses of perceived kinship, Christopher Jones gives us an unparalleled view of mythic belief in action.

Throughout the centuries of Greek preeminence, the Roman Republic and Empire, and into the early Christian era, examples of kinship diplomacy abound. Ancient historians report, for instance, that when the forces of Alexander the Great reached what is now southern Pakistan they encountered a people called the Siboi, whom they judged to be descendants of Heracles. Since Alexander was himself a descendant of the same hero, the invading Macedonians and the Siboi were clearly kinsmen and so parted in peace. Examining the very origins of ancient diplomacy, and kinship as one of its basic constituents, Kinship Diplomacy addresses fundamental questions about communal and national identity and sheds new light on the force of Greek mythic traditions.

The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom is a colorful figure, and along with Plutarch one of the major sources of information about Greek civilization during the early Roman Empire. C.P. Jones offers here the first full-length portrait of Dio in English and, at the same time, a view of life in cities such as Alexandria, Tarsus, and Rhodes in the first centuries of our era.

Skillfully combining literary and historical evidence, Mr. Jones describes Dio's birthplace, education, and early career. He examines the civic speeches for what they reveal about Dio's life and art, as well as the life, thought, and language of Greek cities in this period. From these and other works he reinterprets Dio's attitude toward the emperors and Rome. The account is as lucid and pleasantly written as it is carefully documented.

The powerful novelist here turns penetrating critic, giving us—in lively style—both trenchant literary analysis and fresh insight on the art of writing.

“When African American writers began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations,” writes Gayl Jones, they began to transform the European and European American models, and to gain greater artistic sovereignty.” The vitality of African American literature derives from its incorporation of traditional oral forms: folktales, riddles, idiom, jazz rhythms, spirituals, and blues. Jones traces the development of this literature as African American writers, celebrating their oral heritage, developed distinctive literary forms.

The twentieth century saw a new confidence and deliberateness in African American work: the move from surface use of dialect to articulation of a genuine black voice; the move from blacks portrayed for a white audience to characterization relieved of the need to justify. Innovative writing—such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s depiction of black folk culture, Langston Hughes’s poetic use of blues, and Amiri Baraka’s recreation of the short story as a jazz piece—redefined Western literary tradition.

For Jones, literary technique is never far removed from its social and political implications. She documents how literary form is inherently and intensely national, and shows how the European monopoly on acceptable forms for literary art stifled American writers both black and white. Jones is especially eloquent in describing the dilemma of the African American writers: to write from their roots yet retain a universal voice; to merge the power and fluidity of oral tradition with the structure needed for written presentation. With this work Gayl Jones has added a new dimension to African American literary history.

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.

For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.

He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.

As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.

When our children act up--whether they're just moody and rebellious or taking drugs and committing crimes--our solution, so often now, is to send them to a psychiatrist or developmental psychologist for help. What makes us think this will work? How did we come to rely on psychological explanations--and corrections--for juvenile misconduct?

In Taming the Troublesome Child, these questions lead to the complex history of "child guidance," a specialized psychological service developed early in the twentieth century. Kathleen Jones puts this professional history into the context of the larger culture of age, class, and gender conflict. Using the records of Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Center from 1920 to 1945, she looks at the relationships among the social activists, doctors, psychologists, social workers, parents, and young people who met in the child guidance clinic, then follows the clinicians as they adapt delinquency work to the problems of nondelinquent children--an adaptation that often entailed a harsh critique of American mothers. Her book reveals the uses to which professionals and patients have put this interpretation of juvenile misbehavior, and the conditions that mother-blaming has imposed on social policy and private child rearing to this day.

The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.

Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.

The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.

Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.

You are nine years old. Your best friend's father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. You think your neighbors were planning to kill your family. You are eight years old and imprisoned in your home by your father's old friends. You are ten years old and must climb a mountain at night to escape the soldiers trying to shoot you.

What happens to children who grow up with war? How do they live with the daily reality of danger, hunger, and loss--and how does it shape the adults they become?

In Then They Started Shooting, child psychiatrist Lynne Jones draws the reader into the compelling stories of Serbian and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. These children endured hardship, loss, family disruption, and constant uncertainty, and yet in a blow to psychiatric orthodoxy, few showed lasting signs of trauma. Thoughts of their personal futures filled their minds, not memories of war.

And yet, Jones suggests in a chilling conclusion, the war affected them deeply. Officially citizens of the same country, the two communities live separate, wary lives. The Muslims hope for reconciliation but cannot believe in it while so many cannot go home and war criminals are still at large. The Serbs resent the outside world, NATO, and fear the return of their Muslim neighbors. Cynical about politics, all of them mistrust their elected leaders. War may end, but the persistence of corruption and injustice keep wounds from healing.

Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades.

This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond.

Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to participate in campaigns against employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in discriminatory organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.

The Milwaukee movement culminated in the dramatic—and sometimes violent—1967 open housing campaign. A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents. After working-class mobs attacked demonstrators, some called Milwaukee “the Selma of the North.” Others believed the housing campaign represented the last stand for a nonviolent, interracial, church-based movement.

Patrick Jones tells a powerful and dramatic story that is important for its insights into civil rights history: the debate over nonviolence and armed self-defense, the meaning of Black Power, the relationship between local and national movements, and the dynamic between southern and northern activism. Jones offers a valuable contribution to movement history in the urban North that also adds a vital piece to the national story.