“Children see and hear what is there; adults see and hear what they are expected to and mainly remember what they think they ought to remember,” David Lowenthal wrote in The Past Is a Foreign Country. It is on this fraught foundation that Fred Lanzing builds this memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists in the East Indies during the World War II.
When published in the Netherlands in 2007, the book triggered controversy, if not vitriol, for Lanzing’s assertion that his time in the camp was not the compendium of horrors commonly associated with the Dutch internment experience. Despite the angry reception, Lanzing’s account corresponds more closely with the scant historical record than do most camp memoirs. In this way, Lanzing’s work is a substantial addition to ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and to the legacies of the past.
Lanzing relates an aspect of the war in the Pacific seldom discussed outside the Netherlands and, by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, expands our understanding of World War II in general. His compact, beautifully detailed account will be accessible to undergraduate students and a general readership and, together with the introduction by William H. Frederick, is a significant contribution to literature on World War II, the Dutch colonial experience, the history of childhood, and Southeast Asian history.
The Cape Herders provides the first comprehensive picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily.
Combining the insights of archaeology, history, and anthropology, this account ranges from the origins of the Khoikhoi in Southern Africa to the contemporary politics of the Namaqualand “reserves.” Its authors have produced a scholarly, yet accessible, book, lavishly illustrated and supplemented with short biographies and fascinating detail.
The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths—not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the “Hottentot” and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now “a vanished people.” The story it tells instead is one of enduring interest—the history of a herding people in Southern Africa, its society, economy, and culture, its relationship to the indigenous hunters of the Cape, its encounters with European expeditions, and its subsequent exposure to the first effects of colonization. It is a story of change and adaptation, and it confirms the Khoikhoi’s central role in the making of today’s South Africa.
The job seems simple enough: Reporter Lee Hershey needs protection for a couple of weeks as he pursues the biggest story of his career with all eyes on swing state Ohio in the midst of a presidential election. Columbus private eye Andy Hayes, broke as usual, doesn’t have much choice but to sign on, even with his girlfriend falling for the charming journalist.
Then murder strikes at the Statehouse and Andy finds himself partly responsible for the death. With an innocent man behind bars, a mysterious vehicle following Andy around the city, and more lives in danger, the detective has his hands full trying to solve a killing in a poisonous political environment where everyone has a motive for murder and anyone could be the next target.
El Salvador is widely considered one of the most successful United Nations peacebuilding efforts, but record homicide rates, political polarization, socioeconomic exclusion, and corruption have diminished the quality of peace for many of its citizens. In Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador, Christine J. Wade adapts the concept of elite capture to expand on the idea of “captured peace,” explaining how local elites commandeered political, social, and economic affairs before war’s end and then used the peace accords to deepen their control in these spheres.
While much scholarship has focused on the role of gangs in Salvadoran unrest, Wade draws on an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how day-to-day violence is inextricable from the economic and political dimensions. In this in-depth analysis of postwar politics in El Salvador, she highlights the local actors’ primary role in peacebuilding and demonstrates the political advantage an incumbent party—in this case, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA—has throughout the peace process and the consequences of this to the quality of peace that results.
After four decades of British rule in colonial Kenya, a previously unknown ethnic name—“Luyia”—appeared on the official census in 1948. The emergence of the Luyia represents a clear case of ethnic “invention.” At the same time, current restrictive theories privileging ethnic homogeneity fail to explain this defiantly diverse ethnic project, which now comprises the second-largest ethnic group in Kenya.
In Cartography and the Political Imagination, which encompasses social history, geography, and political science, Julie MacArthur unpacks Luyia origins. In so doing, she calls for a shift to understanding geographic imagination and mapping not only as means of enforcing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for articulating new political communities and dissent. Through cartography, Luyia ethnic patriots crafted an identity for themselves characterized by plurality, mobility, and cosmopolitan belonging.
While other historians have focused on the official maps of imperial surveyors, MacArthur scrutinizes the ways African communities adopted and adapted mapping strategies to their own ongoing creative projects. This book marks an important reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, investigates the geographic imaginations of African communities, and challenges contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.
This is the first digital version of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a collection of three historical novels by noted American writer Janet Lewis. For the first time, these works have been brought together in a single edition, each with a new introduction by Kevin Haworth:
The Wife of Martin Guerre
Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, The Wife of Martin Guerre follows Bertrande de Rois and her lost-and-returned husband through a tale of impersonation, conspiracy, and small-town intrigue. Their fascinating story has also inspired a bestselling historical study and two films, including The Return of Martin Guerre.
The Trial of Sören Qvist
Although set in seventeenth-century Denmark, The Trial of Sören Qvist has a contemporary feel and has been praised for its intriguing plot and for Lewis’s powerful writing. In this second novel in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, Lewis recounts the story of a murder, an investigation, and a pious town pastor who confesses to the crime, driven perhaps more by a recognition of his own moral flaws than by guilt for the acts of which he stood accused.
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
The court of Louis XIV and a modest Paris street provide the incongruous settings for this tale of a humble bookbinder, his wife, and the young craftsman who seduces her and blackmails her husband into covering up a terrible crime. This third and last case of circumstantial evidence bristles with character, the smell of blood, and considerable suspense against a backdrop of national political unrest in the cruel and dingy Paris of the seventeenth century.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.
In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.
Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.
Contributors:
Richard B. Allen
David Arnold
A. L. Beier
Andrew Burton
Vincent DiGirolamo
Andrew A. Gentes
Robert Gordon
Frank Tobias Higbie
Thomas H. Holloway
Abby Margolis
Paul Ocobock
Aminda M. Smith
Linda Woodbridge
In neighborhoods, schools, community centers, and workplaces, people are using oral history to capture and collect the kinds of stories that the history books and the media tend to overlook: stories of personal struggle and hope, of war and peace, of family and friends, of beliefs, traditions, and values—the stories of our lives.
Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History is a clear and comprehensive introduction for those with little or no experience in planning or undertaking oral history projects. Opening with the key question, “Why do oral history?” the guide outlines the stages of a project from idea to final product—planning and research, the interviewing process, basic technical principles, and audio and video recording techniques. The guide covers interview transcribing, ethical and legal issues, archiving, funding sources, and sharing oral history with audiences.
Intended for teachers, students, librarians, local historians, and volunteers as well as individuals, Catching Stories is the place to start for anyone who wants to document the memories and collect the stories of community or family.
“The people who lived in what became the seventeenth state in the American Union in 1803 were not only at the center of a great empire, they were at the center of the most important historical developments in the revolutionary Atlantic World.”
—From the introduction
Nowhere did the revolutions in politics, commerce, and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occur more quickly or more thoroughly than in the Ohio country. A forested borderland dominated by American Indians in 1780, Ohio was a landscape of farms and towns inhabited by people from all over the world by 1830. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic chronicles this dramatic and all-encompassing change.
Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs have assembled an impressive collection of articles by established and rising scholars. They address the conquest of Native Americans, the emergence of a democratic political culture, the origins of capitalism, the formation of public culture, the growth of evangelical Protestantism, the ambiguous status of African Americans, and social life in a place that most regarded as the cutting edge of human history.
For The Center of a Great Empire, distinguished historians of the American nation in its first decades question conventional wisdom. They emphasize contingency rather than inevitability and contention rather than progress. Downplaying the frontier character of Ohio, they offer new interpretations and open new paths of inquiry through investigations of race, education, politics, religion, family, commerce, colonialism, and conquest. As it underscores key themes in the history of the United States, The Center of a Great Empire pursues issues that have fascinated people for two centuries.
In 1877 the thirty-year-old artist Mary Louise McLaughlin wrote China Painting, the first manual on the subject in the United States written by a woman for women. Extremely successful, it is now accepted as the book that launched the china painting movement in America.
When in 1898 McLaughlin decided to produce porcelain, the most difficult of ceramics, she showed the determination and exactitude that were her trademarks. Already renowned as a ceramicist, she became the first to produce studio porcelain in America and the first to discover the technique for decorating under the glaze. Her work was welcomed with enthusiasm in New York and Paris.
Despite the enormous influence of Mary Louise McLaughlin on the history of American ceramics, Anita Ellis’s The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is the first definitive study dedicated to her accomplishments.
Anita Ellis depicts the many challenges McLaughlin encountered in pursuit of her ultimately successful career. Not the least of these was her rivalry with the formidable Maria Longworth Nichols, fellow Cincinnatian and founder of the Rookwood Pottery Company. Another was that of being a woman in the arts: her primary goal had been to paint portraits on canvas, but Victorian society did not afford opportunities in what was considered a male sphere.
Replete with historic photos and color illustrations of many of McLaughlin’s works, The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is a tribute to a woman artist who rose to one of the most esteemed positions in her field.
E.H. Carr said: “Before you study the history, study the historian.” Written history often tells us more about the historian’s own times than it does of the times about which he is writing. The historians and the way in which each generation has rewritten history in the light of its own preoccupations is the subject of The Changing Past. This is the first book-length survey in English that covers all the main trends in South African historiography. Starting with the first documents and histories, it goes on to trace the 19th century. British and settler “schools,” Afrikaans historiography from its pre-academic 19th century phase to the present, and the liberal historians who struck out in a new direction from the 1920s. The book highlights the break with the past that historians of the “new radical school” have made in the last 15 years, and surveys the position of historical writing to the present.
The canvas is delineated in bold strokes that sketch in the main outlines rather than seek an exhaustive treatment of all existing literature. This, together with a conscious effort to minimize theoretical discussion, makes it a highly readable text.
E.H. Carr said: “Before you study the history, study the historian.” Written history often tells us more about the historian’s own times than it does of the times about which he is writing. The historians and the way in which each generation has rewritten history in the light of its own preoccupations is the subject of The Changing Past. This is the first book-length survey in English that covers all the main trends in South African historiography. Starting with the first documents and histories, it goes on to trace the 19th century. British and settler “schools,” Afrikaans historiography from its pre-academic 19th century phase to the present, and the liberal historians who struck out in a new direction from the 1920s. The book highlights the break with the past that historians of the “new radical school” have made in the last 15 years, and surveys the position of historical writing to the present.
The canvas is delineated in bold strokes that sketch in the main outlines rather than seek an exhaustive treatment of all existing literature. This, together with a conscious effort to minimize theoretical discussion, makes it a highly readable text.
Yoweri Museveni battled to power in 1986. His government has impressed many observers as Uganda’s most innovative since it gained independence from Britain in 1962. The Economist recommended it as a model for other African states struggling to develop their resources in the best interests of their peoples.
But where was change to start? At the bottom in building resistance committees, or at the top in tough negotiations with the IMF? How was it to continue? Was it in the restructuring of the national army, in increasing respect for human rights, in the reform of education, in tackling AIDS, or in getting Ugandans to speak a common language? Was it in building more viable survival strategies for the poorest Ugandans or in restructuring the national constitution? The last five years have shown a radical approach to Uganda’s dilemmas.
Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle previously edited Uganda Now. It was brought together at a significant moment just as President Museveni was gaining power in 1985-6. It was so much in demand that it even entered the magendo market on the streets of Kampala. The book, which is still in print, was described by The Canadian Journal of African Studies as ‘virtually a mini-encyclopedia of Uganda’ and by The African Studies Review as ‘the best overview of Uganda’s trauma in the last two decades.’
The editors have assembled another team of Ugandan and international scholars to review the dilemmas of introducing revolutionary changes in an African country deeply affected by structural adjustment plans which have been imposed from outside.
Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative models of social conciliation. In the literary work of authors like Dickens, Eliot, and Tennyson, and in the writing of reformers like Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett, condescension—once a sign of the power and value of charity—became an emblem of charity’s limitations.
This book argues that, despite Victorian charity’s reputation for idealistic self-assurance, it frequently doubted its own operations and was driven by creative self-critique. Through sophisticated and original close readings of important Victorian texts, Daniel Siegel shows how these important ideas developed even as England struggled to deal with its growing underclass and an expanding notion of the state’s responsibility to its poor.
Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century. It contributes to the growing recognitionthat the stereotypical bonded male slave was in fact a rarity.
Nine of the studies are historical, with five located in Africa and three covering Latin America from the British Caribbean to Chile. One study follows the children liberated in the famousAmistad incident (1843). The remaining essays cover contemporary forms of child slavery, from prostitution to labor to forced soldiering.
Child Slaves in the Modern World adds historical depth to the current literature on contemporary slavery, emphasizing the distinctive vulnerabilities of children, or effective equivalents,that made them particularly valuable to those who could acquire and control them. The studies also make clear the complexities of attempting to legislate or decree regulations limiting practices that appear to have been—and continue to be —ubiquitous around the world.
Contributors: Benjamin N. Lawrance, Gwyn Campbell, Cecily Jones, Sue Taylor, Nara Milanich, Martin Klein, Bernard Moitt, Trevor R. Getz, William G. Clarence-Smith, Jonathan Blagbrough, Philip Whalen, Malika Id’ Salah, Zosa de Sas Kropiwnicki, Sarah Maguire, and Mike Dottridge.
Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas. Children in Slavery through the Ages examines the children among the enslaved across a significant range of earlier times and other places; its companion volume will examine the children enslaved in recent American contexts and in the contemporary/modern world.
This is the first collection to focus on children in slavery. These leading scholars bring our thinking about slaving and slavery to new levels of comprehensiveness and complexity. They further provide substantial historical depth to the abuse of children for sexual and labor purposes that has become a significant humanitarian concern of governments and private organizations around the world in recent decades.
The collected essays in Children in Slavery through the Ages fundamentally reconstruct our understanding of enslavement by exploring the often-ignored role of children in slavery and rejecting the tendency to narrowly equate slavery with the forced labor of adult males. The volume’s historical angle highlights many implications of child slavery by examining the variety of children’s roles—as manual laborers and domestic servants to court entertainers and eunuchs—and the worldwide regions in which the child slave trade existed.
The second novel in Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior series, Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (as Nin’s father did) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (like Nin’s) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
Between 1933 and 1945, National Socialists enacted a focused effort to propagandize children’s literature by distorting existing German values and traditions with the aim of creating a homogenous “folk community.” A vast censorship committee in Berlin oversaw the publication, revision, and distribution of books and textbooks for young readers, exercising its control over library and bookstore content as well as over new manuscripts, so as to redirect the cultural consumption of the nation’s children. In particular, the Nazis emphasized Nordic myths and legends with a focus on the fighting spirit of the saga heroes, their community loyalty, and a fierce spirit of revenge—elements that were then applied to the concepts of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Führer and the fatherland. They also tolerated select popular series, even though these were meant to be replaced by modern Hitler Youth camping stories.
In this important book, first published in 1984 and now back in print, Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates how Nazis used children’s literature to selectively shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview that was intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their efforts corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting an enthusiastic following for Hitler.
In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era. Burtt spent six months on São Tomé and Príncipe and a year in Angola. His five-month march across Angola in 1906 took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism and ultimately helped change labor recruiting practices in colonial Africa.
This beautifully written and engaging travel narrative draws on collections in Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Africa to explore British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism. In a story still familiar a century after Burtt’s sojourn, Chocolate Islands reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Cadbury Bros. Ltd. was a successful, Quaker-owned chocolate manufacturer in Birmingham, England, celebrated for its model village, modern factory, and concern for employees. In 1901 the firm learned that its cocoa beans, purchased from Portuguese plantations on the island of São Tomé off West Africa, were produced by slave labor.
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business is a lively and highly readable account of the events surrounding the libel trial in which Cadbury Bros. sued the London Standard over the newspaper’s accusation that the firm was hypocritical in its use of slave-grown cocoa. Lowell J. Satre probes issues as compelling now as they were a century ago: globalization, corporate social responsibility, journalistic sensationalism, and devious diplomacy.
Satre illuminates the stubborn persistence of the institution of slavery and shows how Cadbury, a company with a well-regarded brand name from the nineteenth century, faced ethical dilemmas and challenges to its record for social responsibility. Chocolate on Trial brings to life the age-old conflict between economic interests and regard for the dignity of human life.
Christianity and Public Culture in Africa takes readers beyond familiar images of religious politicians and populations steeped in spirituality. It shows how critical reason and Christian convictions have combined in surprising ways as African Christians confront issues such as national constitutions, gender relations, and the continuing struggle with HIV/AIDS.
The wide-ranging essays included here explore rural Africa and the continent’s major cities, colonial and missionary legacies, and mass media images in the twenty-first century. They also reveal the diversity of Pentecostalism in Africa and highlight the region’s remarkable denominational diversity. Scholars and students alike will find these essays timely and impressive.
The contributors demonstrate how the public significance of Christianity varies across time and place. They explore rural Africa and the continent’s major cities, and colonial and missionary situations, as well as mass-mediated ideas and images in the twenty-first century. They also reveal the plurality of Pentecostalism in Africa and keep in view the continent’s continuing denominational diversity. Studentsand scholars will find these topical studies to be impressive in scope.
Contributors: Barbara M. Cooper, Harri Englund, Marja Hinfelaar, Nicholas Kamau-Goro, Birgit Meyer, Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo, Damaris Parsitau, Ruth Prince, James A. Pritchett, Ilana van Wyk
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.
Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti’s illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author’s lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s reading of Rossetti’s illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti’s poetics. Her exhaustive archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti’s commitment to illustration and attitudes to copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced. Janzen Kooistra also tracks the poet’s reception in the twentieth century through a complex web of illustrated books produced for a wide range of audiences.
Analyzing an impressive array of empirical data, Janzen Kooistra shows how Rossetti’s packaging for commodity consumption—by religious presses, publishers of academic editions and children’s picture books, and makers of erotica and collectibles—influenced the reception of her work and her place in literary history.
No chuck wagon feed is complete without its basic ingredients of beans, beef, hot biscuits, apple pie, and lots of coffee. Beth McElfresh shows you how to host the all–time chuck wagon feed with easy–to–follow recipes.
Included are original recipes for boiled apple dumplings, lima beans baked with steak, and general, everyday useful tips, all from the renowned Western cook, Hi Pockets. She describes various health remedies learned from the old–timers on the range, that are as useful today as they were then.
Also included are recipes showing you how to create actual hand lotion and soaps like those used in the rugged west; wines, tea, punch, even candy and ice cream are included.
In the summer of 1943, as World War II raged overseas, the United States also faced internal strife. Earlier that year, Detroit had erupted in a series of race riots that killed dozens and destroyed entire neighborhoods. Across the country, mayors and city councils sought to defuse racial tensions and promote nonviolent solutions to social and economic injustices. In Cincinnati, the result of those efforts was the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, later renamed the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission (CHRC).
The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission: A History, 1943–2013, is a decade-by-decade chronicle of the agency: its accomplishments, challenges, and failures. The purpose of municipal human relations agencies like the CHRC was to give minority groups access to local government through internal advocacy, education, mediation, and persuasion—in clear contrast to the tactics of lawsuits, sit-ins, boycotts, and marches adopted by many external, nongovernmental organizations.
In compiling this history, Phillip J. Obermiller and Thomas E. Wagner have drawn on an extensive base of archival records, reports, speeches, and media sources. In addition, archival and contemporary interviews provide first-person insight into the events and personalities that shaped the agency and the history of civil rights in this midwestern city.
Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.
Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.
Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.
Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river.
The full impact of Anaïs Nin’s genius is only to be found through reading the novels in context and in succession. They form a rich, luminous tapestry whose overall theme Nin has called “woman at war with herself.” Characters, symbols appear and reappear: now one, now another unfolding, gradually revealing, changing, struggling, growing, and Nin had forged an evocative language all her own for the telling.
“The diary taught me that there were no neat ends to novels, no neat denouement, no neat synthesis,” she explains. “So I began an endless novel, a novel in which the climaxes consisted of discoveries in awareness, each step in awareness becoming a stage in the growth like the layers in trees.”
Cities of the Interior fulfills a long–time desire on the part of readers, publisher, and Anaïs Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.
Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and the past, between political theory and political practice, and between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past.
Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa provides a critical reflection on citizenship in Africa by bringing together scholars working with very different case studies and with very different understandings of what is meant by citizenship. By bringing historians and social scientists into dialogue within the same volume, it argues that a revised reading of the past can offer powerful new perspectives on the present, in ways that might also indicate new paths for the future.
The project collects the works of up-and-coming and established scholars from around the globe. Presenting case studies from such wide-ranging countries as Sudan, Mauritius, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia, the essays delve into the many facets of citizenship and agency as they have been expressed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In so doing, they engage in exciting ways with the watershed book in the field, Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject.
Contributors: Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, Frederick Cooper, Solomon M. Gofie, V. Adefemi Isumonah, Cherry Leonardi, John Lonsdale, Eghosa E.Osaghae, Ramola Ramtohul, Aidan Russell, Nicole Ulrich, Chris Vaughan, and Henri-Michel Yéré.
The American Civil War was a crucial event in the development of Chicago as the metropolis of the heartland. Not only did Chicagoans play an important role in the politics of the conflict, encouraging emancipation and promoting a “hard war” policy against Southern civilians, but they supported the troops materially through production of military supplies and foodstuffs as well as morally and spiritually through patriotic publications and songs. The Civil War transformed Chicago from a mere commercial center to an industrial power as well as the nation’s railroad hub and busiest port. The war also divided Chicago, however, between Lincoln supporters and Copperheads, whites and blacks, workers and owners, natives and newcomers.
The city played a key role in elevating Abraham Lincoln to the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, yet only four years later a Chicago politician’ s influence was key in declaring the war a failure and promoting a platform of peace with the Confederacy. Using seldom seen or newly uncovered sources, this book tells the story of the Civil War through the eyes of those who lived that history. Photographs throughout the book effectively convey the geography of events in this pivotal period of Chicago’s history, and the editors have provided a useful driving guide to Civil War sites in and around the city.
Most literature on the Civil War focuses on soldiers, battles, and politics. But for every soldier in the United States Army, there were nine civilians at home. The war affected those left on the home front in many ways. Westward expansion and land ownership increased. The draft disrupted families while a shortage of male workers created opportunities for women that were previously unknown.
The war also enlarged the national government in ways unimagined before 1861. The Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, civil rights legislation, the use of paper currency, and creation of the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes to pay for the war all illustrate how the war fundamentally, and permanently, changed the nation.
The essays in this book, drawn from a wide range of historical expertise and approaching the topic from a variety of angles, explore the changes in life at home that led to a revolution in American society and set the stage for the making of modern America.
Contributors: Jean H. Baker, Jenny Bourne, Paul Finkelman, Guy Gugliotta, Daniel W. Stowell, Peter Wallenstein, Jennifer L. Weber.
In 1985, the Sohio oil company commissioned Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to design and construct a large outdoor sculpture for its new corporate headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. The result was Free Stamp, a bold and distinctive installation that captured both a Pop Art sensibility and a connection to the city’s industrial past. Sohio executives approved the design, and work was already underway, when British Petroleum acquired the company. The new owners quickly decided that the sculpture was “inappropriate” for their building and attempted to rid themselves of Free Stamp by donating it to the city of Cleveland—a gift that the city initially had no desire to accept. After much debate and public protest, the sculpture found a home in Willard Park, where it stands today.
This is the first study of any sculpture by Oldenburg and van Bruggen to examine the genesis of their art from conception to installation. Edward J. Olszewski has put together a fascinating narrative based on interviews with the artists, archival material from city records, and in-house corporate memoranda, as well as letters to the editor and political cartoons. He traces the development of the sculpture from the artists’ first sketches and models to the installation of the completed work in its urban environment.
These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices. Her work reveals an allegory of relation and negotiation between “intelligentsia” and subaltern peoples as well as the need for a more socially extensive literature, not exclusive of more elite “magical literatures.”
The essays in the fist section frame Alegría’s discourses within sociohistorical, political, and literary contexts in order to illuminate the author’s singular place in the literary and political history of Central America. The essays in the second section engage in a feminist dialogic in which the reader encounters various critical validations and valorizations of Alegría’s many female voices. The third section involves the reader in the pursuit of extratextual or extraliterary resonances in Alegría’s work.
The May 1926 coup d’état in Poland inaugurated what has become known as the period of sanacja or “cleansing.” The event has been explored in terms of the impact that it had on state structures and political styles. But for both supporters and opponents of the post-May regime, the sanacja was a catalyst for debate about Polish national identity, about citizenship and responsibility to the nation, and about postwar sexual morality and modern gender identities.
The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the coup. Eva Plach shifts the focus from strictly political contexts and examines instead the sanacja’s open-ended and malleable language of purification, rebirth, and moral regeneration.
In tracking the diverse appropriations and manipulations of the sanacja concept, Plach relies on a wide variety of texts, including the press of the period, the personal and professional papers of notable interwar women activists, and the official records of pro-sanacja organizations, such as the Women’s Union for Citizenship Work.
The Clash of Moral Nations introduces an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city.
From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification—a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.
Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America’s greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Some have traced Darrow’s lifelong campaign against capital punishment to his boyhood terror at seeing a Civil War soldier buried—and no client of Darrow’s was ever executed, not even black men who were accused of murder for killing members of a white mob.
Closing Arguments: Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society collects, for the first time, Darrow’s thoughts on his three main preoccupations, revealing a carefully conceived philosophy expressed with delightful pungency and clarity. His thoughts on social issues, especially on the dangers of religious fundamentalism, are uncannily prescient. A dry humor infuses his essays, and his reflections on himself and his philosophy reveal a quiet dignity at the core of a man better known for provoking Americans during an era of unprecedented tumult. From the wry “Is the Human Race Getting Anywhere?” to the scornful “Patriotism” and his elegiac summing up, “At Seventy-two,” Darrow’s writing still stimulates, pleases and challenges.
A rebel who always sided intellectually and emotionally with the minority, Darrow remains a figure to contend with sixty-seven years after his death. “Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet,” Darrow once said. Closing Arguments demonstrates that, in his case, that statement is true.
Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.
In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.
Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.
This new edition of Clouds without Rain features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.
In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.
Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.
This new edition of Clouds without Rain features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region. Many aspects of American life converged in the opera house.
Coal and Culture: Opera Houses in Appalachia is a critical appreciation of the opera house in the coal-mining region of Appalachia from the mid-1860s to the early 1930s. Author William Faricy Condee demonstrates that these were multipurpose facilities that were central to the life of their communities. In the era before radio, movies, television, and malls, these buildings were essential. They housed little, if any, opera, but were used for almost everything else, including traveling theater, concerts, religious events, lectures, commencements, boxing matches, benefits, union meetings, and—if the auditorium had a flat floor—skating and basketball.
The only book on opera houses that stresses their cultural context, Condee’s unique study will interest cultural geographers, scholars of Appalachian studies, and all those who appreciate the gaudy diversity of the American scene.
In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. Although Guinea’s stance vis-à-vis the 1958 constitution has been recognized as unique, until now the historical roots of this phenomenon have not been adequately explained.
Clearly written and free of jargon, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea argues that Guinea’s vote for independence was the culmination of a decade-long struggle between local militants and political leaders for control of the political agenda. Since 1950, when RDA representatives in the French parliament severed their ties to the French Communist Party, conservative elements had dominated the RDA. In Guinea, local cadres had opposed the break. Victimized by the administration and sidelined by their own leaders, they quietly rebuilt the party from the base. Leftist militants, their voices muted throughout most of the decade, gained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party’s women’s and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to endorse a “No” vote. Thus, Guinea’s rejection of the proposed constitution in favor of immediate independence was not an isolated aberration. Rather, it was the outcome of years of political mobilization by activists who, despite Cold War repression, ultimately pushed the Guinean RDA to the left.
The significance of this highly original book, based on previously unexamined archival records and oral interviews with grassroots activists, extends far beyond its primary subject. In illuminating the Guinean case, Elizabeth Schmidt helps us understand the dynamics of decolonization and its legacy for postindependence nation-building in many parts of the developing world.
Examining Guinean history from the bottom up, Schmidt considers local politics within the larger context of the Cold War, making her book suitable for courses in African history and politics, diplomatic history, and Cold War history.
From 1850 to 1867, Charles Dickens produced special issues (called “numbers”) of his journals Household Words and All the Year Round, which were released shortly before Christmas each year. In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success.
Klimaszewski uncovers connections among and between the stories in each Christmas collection. She thus reveals ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and his collaborators on topics important to the Victorians, including race, empire, supernatural hauntings, marriage, disability, and criminality. Stories from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and understudied women writers such as Amelia B. Edwards and Adelaide Anne Procter interact provocatively with Dickens’s writing. By restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, Klimaszewski demonstrates that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of the most popular texts Dickens published.
“Collages began with an image which had haunted me. A friend, Renate, had told me about her trip to Vienna where she was born, and of her childhood relationships to statues. She told me stories of her childhood, her relationship to her father, her first love.
I begin the novel with:
Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, law down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone. They adorned cornices like the figureheads of old ships. They stood in the heart of fountains glistening with water as if they had just been born. They sat under the trees in the parks summer and winter. Some wore costumes of other periods, and some no clothes at all. Men, women, children, kings, dwarfs, gargoyles, unicorns, lions, clowns, heroes, wise men, prophets, angels, saints, and soldiers preserved for Vienna a vision of eternity.
As a child Renate could see them from her bedroom window. At night, when the white muslin curtains fluttered out like ballooning wedding dresses, she heard them whispering like figures which had been petrified by a spell during the day and came alive only at night. Their silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages of deaf mutes. On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with soot.
Renate would never allow anyone to tell her the history of the statues, or to identify them. This would have situated them in the past. She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues. They were people under a spell and if she were watchful enough they would tell her who they were and how they lived now.
If I had been asked then what was going to follow the description of the statues, I could not have answered. I was fascinated by the image of these many statues and of the child Renate inventing stories about them and dialoguing with them. It may have been that this image expressed the feeling I often had that people appear to us as a one-dimensional statue until we go deeper into their life story. People are like mute statues under a spell of appearance, and static, until we let them whisper their secrets. And this only happens at night. That is, when we are able to dream, imagine, and explore the unconscious. We see the external self. Because Collages took its images from painting and sculpture, I liked the idea that sculpture and painting could become animated, speaking, confessing, and then in daylight returning to their previous forms as statues or paintings. They spoke only to the artist. To me it meant dramatizing our relation to art, one feeding the other, the interrelation between human beings and the artist’s conception of them. In daylight (consciousness) we catch them all only in one attitude, one form. At night, we discover their lives.”
—Anaïs Nin, “The Novel of the Future,” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 128
Gissing’s career, which spanned the period of about 1877 to his death in 1903, was characterized by prodigious output (almost a novel a year in the early days), modest recognition, and modest income. He wrote of poverty, socialism, class differences, social reform, and later on, about the problems of women and industrialization. His best known works are New Grub Street (1891) and Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), rich sources of social commentary that reflect a literary transition from the Victorian to the modern period.
For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. Now the editors have culled widely scattered sources—private and public collections, journals, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, and sales catalogs—to gather and organize Gissing’s correspondence, including letters to him, and to provide an editorial context.
The years 1892-1895 saw an increase in the bulk and scope of Gissing’s literary production, coinciding with his new and cordial association with publishers Bullen and Lawrence. During this period, the partners published Denzil Quarrier, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, ad Eve’s Ransom, while A. and C. Black brought out Born in Exile. Gissing’s correspondence with his publishers, some of which is printed here for the first time, is matched in significance by his letters to his literary agent William Morris Colles and to editors such as Clement Shorter, who were instrumental in turning Gissing to the short story. His domestic life remained grim: his unfortunate marriage ruled out the possibility of satisfactory social relationships, and his anxiety over the care of his son Walter was eased only by sending the infant away to stay with strangers. New friends, especially Clara Collet and Edward Clodd, were a precious asset—in their presence he could be his better self, a highly cultured, joy-loving individual whose work was finding greater favor with the public.
George Herbert Mead, one of America’s most important and influential philosophers, a founder of pragmatism, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism, was also a keen observer of American culture and early modernism. In the period from the 1870s to 1895, Henry Northrup Castle maintained a correspondence with family members and with Mead—his best friend at Oberlin College and brother-in-law—that reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought in that complex era. Close friends of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and other leading Chicago Progressives, the author of these often intimate letters comments frankly on pivotal events affecting higher education, developments at Oberlin College, Hawaii (where the Castles lived), progressivism, and the general angst that many young intellectuals were experiencing in early modern America.
The letters, drawn from the Mead-Castle collection at the University of Chicago, were collected and edited by Mead after the tragic death of Henry Castle in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Working with his wife Helen Castle (one of Henry’s sisters), he privately published fifty copies of the letters to record an important relationship and as an intellectual history of two progressive thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. American historians, such as Robert Crunden and Gary Cook, have noted the importance of the letters to historians of the late nineteenth century.
The letters are made available here using the basic Mead text of 1902. Additional insights into the connection between Mead, John Dewey, Henry and Harriet Castle, and Hawaii’s progressive kindergarten system are provided by the foundation’s executive director Alfred L. Castle. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, has added additional comments on the importance of the letters to understanding the intellectual relationship that flourished at Oberlin College.
Published with the support of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation.
The inaugural volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is composed of two of his earliest books, Four Aspects of Civic Duty and Present Day Problems. Based on a series of lectures delivered at Yale in 1906, Four Aspects of Civic Duty is an attempt by then Secretary of War Taft to bring to the attention of his audience the importance of civic duty from the perspective of the university graduate, the judge on the bench, the colonial administrator, and the national executive branch of government. His remarks were drawn from his own experience, while at the same time he laid down the principles of citizenship with which all people could identify. In Present Day Problems, William Howard Taft demonstrates the depth of his knowledge and the seriousness of his reflections on a wide range of topics including Sino-American relations and the ongoing contest between capital and labor in America’s increasingly industrial socioeconomy. The problems he takes up are met head-on and discussed in a fashion likely to persuade his audience that he is well prepared to tackle the burdens of the presidency.
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, in eight volumes, will include Taft’s complete published works as well as his presidential and state addresses and selected court opinions from his days as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The second volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is dedicated to the speeches and writings that displayed his thinking in the autumn of 1908 and the following winter.
At this time he was campaigning for the presidency against the well-known William Jennings Bryan, and in Taft’s writings is evidence of the contrast in style between Taft and Bryan and between Taft and his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt. as well. Although uncomfortable with campaigning, he thoughtfully addresses the concerns of the day that framed the election, including race, the Philippines, and socialism.
Political Issues and Outlooks also contains speeches made after the election and leading up to his inauguration as the twenty-seventh president of the United States. Introduced by a commentary from the general series editor Professor David H. Burton, the second volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is a revealing look at the machinations of United States politics at the beginning of the twentieth century and a glimpse into the mind of one of the century’s most influential political architects.
The third volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft imparts an appreciation of the range of the twenty-seventh president’s interests. Beginning with his inaugural address and concluding with a detailed exposition of governmental expenses and needed economies, President William Howard Taft showed himself willing to tackle the routine as well as the rarified responsibilities of executive rule.
Whether he was addressing the issue of strikes and labor unions or conservation, President Taft consistently demonstrated that, in word and action, he was prepared to be a modern president. What impresses the reader of these remarks is Taft’s willingness to administer to virtually every part of the nation, thereby proving that he was not a mere figurehead but a chief executive truly concerned about problems across the country. Perhaps, as his words here indicate, Taft was not a good politician after all but a kind man who saw himself as president of all the people. As the first of two volumes directly related to Taft’s tenure as president, Presidential Addresses and State Papers documents a pivotal time in the public life of this man from Ohio. Introduced by a commentary from the general series editor Professor David H. Burton, the third volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft underscores the presidential stature of William Howard Taft.
“A time when panics seem far removed is the best time to prepare our financial system to withstand a storm. The most crying need this country has is a proper banking and currency system. The existing one is inadequate, and everyone who has studied the question admits it.”—William Howard Taft
The interaction between President William Howard Taft and the Congress provides a window on his leadership. Volume IV of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is devoted to his messages to the legislative branch and concerns some of the pressing issues of the day, issues that have relevance still.
Oftentimes President Taft was at odds with a somewhat reactionary Congress, causing him to veto legislation that he thought unwise. For example, his commitment to the independence of elected judges led him to reject statehood for Arizona until its constitution was altered to address his objection.
His messages also touched on subjects for which he led the way over the objections of Congress, such as his recommendation of a federal law to protect resident aliens against denial of their civil rights and his advocacy of free trade with Canada.
In his commentary to the volume, Professor Burton points out: “There is exhibited time after time concern for the American people, for men and women from different walks of life. Taft comes across less as a judge, which he had been, or the chief justice he was to become, and more as a sitting president of all the people.”
Taft’s Presidential Messages to Congress provides the documentary evidence to support that claim.
The fifth volume of The Complete Works of William Howard Taft presents two publications Taft wrote as Kent Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University, the position he assumed in 1913 after he was defeated in his bid for re-election as U.S. president. The first, Popular Government, was prepared for a series of lectures, but was motivated by Taft’s passion over the issue of constitutional interpretation, which had been hotly contested during the campaign. Organized around the preamble of the Constitution, the lectures and later the book were opportunities for Taft to restate his opposition to the direct democracy movement and to reveal the workings of a conservative mind.
In the second, The Anti-trust Act and the Supreme Court, Taft articulates his position in the ongoing debate over the conventional nineteenth-century notion of “laissez faire” and the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Taft had pursued a policy of vigorous antitrust enforcement during his presidency. In this book he intended to demonstrate that restraint of trade was part of the common law, thereby arguing to good effect in favor of reasonable restraint of trade in his own time.
Taft's careful distinction between predatory monopolistic practices and the reasonable business practices of well-behaved corporations continues to inform today's chambers of government.
Volume VI of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft follows the career of William Howard Taft upon his leaving the White House. It consists of two short publications from 1914 and 1915.
The first, The President and His Powers, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University and draws on Taft’s experience in the presidency and the executive branch. It speaks particularly to the nature of executive power and its place in the American system and is rooted in his disagreement with Theodore Roosevelt regarding presidential power. Taft believed all presidential power must be traced to some specific grant of power or be necessary to its exercise, while Roosevelt saw the presidency as a position of “steward of the people” limited only by some express provision of the Constitution.
The second, The United States and Peace, reflects Taft’s interest in foreign policy, which was intensified by his years as governor of the Philippines and as secretary of war, as well as by his presidency. Originally four lectures delivered in 1914, The United States and Peace discusses the Monroe Doctrine, the threat to peace presented by incidents of violence to foreigners in the United States, the maintenance of peace through international arbitration, and the trend toward federation in international affairs. Taft hoped to see the latter result in the establishment of an independent judiciary to resolve international disputes.
Taft’s reasoned arguments, supplemented by the commentaries of Professors McWilliams and Gerrity, will stimulate interest among historians, lawmakers, political activists, and the general public.
Eager to turn the congressional election of 1918 into a confirmation of his foreign policy, President Woodrow Wilson was criticized for abandoning the spirit of the popular slogan “Politics adjourned!”
His predecessor, William Howard Taft, found Wilson difficult to deal with and took issue with his version of the League of Nations, which Taft felt was inferior to the model proposed by the League to Enforce Peace. Rather than join the massive Republican opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, however, Taft instead supported Wilson’s controversial decision to travel to Paris as the head of the American peace delegation, and he defended the critical tenth article in the covenant, which detractors saw as a surrender of American sovereignty. He also counseled Wilson to insert a clause concerning the Monroe Doctrine that would pacify the Senate’s group of “reservationists,” whose votes were essential to approval of the treaty.
Volume VII in The Collected Works of William Howard Taft consists of the Taft Papers on League of Nations originally published in 1920. This is a collection ofTaft’s speeches, newspaper articles, and complementary documents that reflect his consistent support for a league of nations and, eventually, for the Covenant of the League of Nations emanating from the Paris Peace Conference.
Although the failure of the treaty and its League of Nations can probably be laid at the feet of an obstinate Wilson and a wily Henry Cabot Lodge, William Howard Taft can be credited with rising above partisanship to emerge as the League’s most consistent supporter.
As in the rest of the Collected Works, Taft Papers on League of Nations provides a window on the machinations surrounding some of the most significant decisions of the era.
William Howard Taft’s presidency (1909-1913), succeeding Theodore Roosevelt’s, was mired in bitter partisan fighting, and Taft sometimes blundered politically. However, this son of Cincinnati assumed his true calling when President Warren G. Harding appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1921. Taft remains the only person to have served both as president of the United States and as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VIII, consists of “Liberty under Law” and selected Supreme Court opinions, among the most instructive accomplishments of Taft’s ten years at the helm of the court. The writings reveal the sober judgments of a federalist who viewed state regulation with suspicion, championed national government, and saw an independent and powerful judiciary as the bulwark protecting the “vested rights” that the framers of the U.S. Constitution sought to guarantee.
Whatever his failings as a politician, Taft was an intellectual powerhouse who knew how to use the law as a lever to encourage society to move toward more stable and productive ends. Although Taft is considered an average president at best, historians and political scientists rank him among fifteen “near greats” who have served on the high court. His ability and his love for the law shine through in Volume VIII, the concluding volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft. As Taft reportedly said to President Harding upon his appointment as chief justice, “I love judges and I love courts. They are my ideals on earth of what we shall meet afterward in heaven under a just God.”
Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region’s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. Collisions with History shows how “fictional histories” of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions. These collisions occurred only because of El Boom, thus making Latin America’s greatest literary movement a historical phenomenon as well. Frederick M. Nunn discusses the cataclysmic view of history conveyed in Boom novels and examines the thought and self-perception of selected authors whose political activism enhanced the appeal of their works—historical and otherwise: Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos; Julio Cortázar, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Darcy Ribeiro.
Collisions with History demonstrates how their commentary on history, literature, politics, and international affairs reveals a conscious sense of purpose. From between the lines of their nonfiction emerges a consensus that outside forces have defined as well as controlled Latin America’s history.
Professor Nunn also suggests that, with novelists now no longer very interested in colliding with history, it may fall to social scientists to speak for what remains of the region’s past in the New World Order.
In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.
Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression. Colonial Meltdown explores the unraveling of British colonial power at a moment of global economic crisis.
Ochonu shows that the economic downturn made colonial exploitation all but impossible and that this dearth of profits and surpluses frustrated the colonial administration which then authorized a brutal regime of grassroots exactions and invasive intrusions. The outcomes were as harsh for Northern Nigerians as those of colonial exploitation in boom years.
Northern Nigerians confronted colonial economic recovery measures and their agents with a variety of strategies. Colonial Meltdown analyzes how farmers, women, laborers, laid-off tin miners, and NorthernNigeria’s emergent elite challenged and rebelled against colonial economic recovery schemes with evasive trickery, defiance, strategic acts of revenge, and criminal self-help and, in the process, exposed the weak underbelly of the colonial system.
Combined with the economic and political paralysis of colonial bureaucrats in the face of crisis, these African responses underlined the fundamental weakness of the colonial state, the brittleness of its economicmission, and the limits of colonial coercion and violence. This atmosphere of colonial collapse emboldened critics of colonial policies who went on to craft the rhetorical terms on which the anticolonial struggle of the post–World War II period was fought out.
In the current climate of global economic anxieties, Ochonu’s analysis will enrich discussions on the transnational ramifications of economic downturns. It will also challenge the pervasive narrative of imperial economic success.
California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.
In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.
With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.
By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.
The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator?
Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee—to consider violence in the context of apartheid and colonialism and their inherent patriarchies.
Jolly also discusses the violence attendant upon the act of narration in the broader context of critiques of Kafka, Freud, Hegel, the postcolonial critics Jan Mohamed and Bhabha, and feminists such as Susan Suleiman.
The vast Colorado River collects water from the highest Rocky Mountain peaks and traverses the widest plateaus, the deepest canyons, and the lowest deserts before emptying into the delta of northern Mexico. This austere land and mighty river resist exploration, settlement, and description. But in the hands of one of the West’s great writers, Frank Waters, the history and lore of its past make irresistible reading and a resounding case for mankind’s respect for the environment.
From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.
Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). With this wealth of sources, Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.
The modern comic book shop was born in the early 1970s. Its rise was due in large part to Phil Seuling, the entrepreneur whose direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers. Stores could then better customize their offerings and independent publishers could access national distribution. Shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants.
Comic Shop is the first book to trace the history of these cultural icons. Dan Gearino brings us from their origins to the present-day, when the rise of digital platforms and a changing retail landscape have the industry at a crossroads. When the book was first published in 2017, Gearino had spent a year with stores around the country, following how they navigated the business. For this updated and expanded paperback edition, he covers the wild retail landscape of 2017 and 2018, a time that was brutal for stores and rich for comics as an art form.
Along the way he interviews pioneers of comics retailing and other important players, including many women; top creators; and those who continue to push the business in new directions. A revised guide to dozens of the most interesting shops around the United States and Canada is a bonus for fans.
The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective.
Women are at the center of these stories, and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century.
Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family photographs complement the stories.
This engaging illustrated guidebook reveals the fascinating mosses and lichens that homeowners, outdoorspeople, and nature lovers encounter every day in Ohio and the Midwest.
In this guide to the most common and distinctive moss, liverwort, and lichen species in Ohio, readers will find concise physical descriptions, facts about natural history and ecology, and tips to distinguish look-alike species, all presented in a friendly, conversational tone.
Featuring detailed photographs of the plant and plantlike species in their natural settings, the book covers 106 mosses, thirty liverworts, and one hundred lichens and offers several avenues to match a specimen to its description page. “Where They Grow” chapters spotlight species commonly encountered on field outings, and field keys to help readers quickly identify unfamiliar samples.
While designed primarily as an identification tool, this guide also frames moss and lichen spotting in a scientific context. The two main sections—bryophytes and lichens—detail their respective taxonomic kingdoms, explain their life cycles and means of reproduction, and illustrate variation in the traits used for identification. The book is an introduction to the biology of these intriguing but too-often-overlooked organisms and a means to enjoy, identify, and catalog the biodiversity all around us.
Twice in this century popular revolts against colonial rule have occured in the Banten district of West Java. These revolts, conducted largely under an Islamic leadership, also proclaimed themselves Communist. Islamic Communism is seemingly a paradox. This is especially the case when one considers that probably no religion has proved more resistant to Communist ideology than Islam.
Michael Williams here details the complicated history of the Bantenese revolts in the twentieth century and probes the ideological riddle of Islamic Communism. Modern history is replete with examples of regions with a long history of organizing themselves politically to resist intrusion on their territory, resources, and people. This book establishes that in Indonesia, the Bantenese were among the most practiced exponents of resistance.
The image of rural America portrayed in this illuminating study is one that is vibrant, regionally varied, and sometimes heroic. Communities of Work focuses on the ways in which rural people and places are affected by political, social, and economic forces far outside their control and how they sustain themselves and their communities in response.
Bringing together the two fundamental concepts of community—where the relationships and practices of daily life occur—and work, in which an elementary exchange occurs, Communities of Work bridges several fields of study. Presented here is the contextual and embedded nature of social relations and the complexity involved in understanding them. Through the use of multiple case studies, the authors apply diverse theories and methods in seeking an integrated outcome, one captured by “communities of work.”
Beginning with a description of the broad changes in work and economic activities across the United States, ranging from the Ohio River Valley to a western boomtown, the book shifts its focus to the interplay of work, family, and local networks in time and place. Activities range from fishing in the Mississippi Delta to farming and family life in the Midwest. The authors then highlight how rural people and places respond to extra-local, increasingly global forces in settings as diverse as rural South Carolina and Wisconsin.
A certain communitarian theme runs through Communities of Work. It is about people and communities not merely reacting, but instead responding in ways that reflect their local culture, while being cognizant of the larger world within which they live.
In resource-challenged Athens County, Ohio, staff and volunteers at the nonprofit Athens County Foundation came up with a daring idea: to host a locally sourced, gourmet dinner for four hundred people. The meal would be held on the brick-paved main street of the city of Athens, to raise funds for the food bank, and increase awareness of the persistent local struggle with food insecurity, as well as raise the visibility of the foundation. The logistical challenges were daunting, but the plan would unite the community around the common theme of providing for its own.
Since then, Bounty on the Bricks has become a touchstone event that raises close to one hundred thousand dollars for the food bank. In The Community Table, Athens County Foundation executive director Susan Urano translates her years of nonprofit experience with large-scale annual fundraisers into a step-by-step guide for development professionals, community leaders, and volunteers.
Urano guides readers to consider when to mount a fundraiser, who the stakeholders are, what social and financial value the event will bring to the community, and how partnerships might augment the payoff. Using real-life examples, she explains how organizers can learn from mistakes and illustrates methods of team building, conflict resolution, and problem solving. Sample ideas, timelines, budgets, publicity plans, and committee structures round out The Community Table.
The poems of Compass and Clock take their inspiration from the intersection of the natural world and the human, exploring the landscapes in which those intersections occur. Those landscapes range from David Sanders’s native midwestern countryside to the caves of Lascaux and an enchanted lake where relics of lost lives are washed ashore. Yet, the true source of the poems’ vitality is Sanders’s attention to the missed or misread moments, those times when the act fails, and the perceived clashes with the actual.
Here, the satisfying pairing of elegance and vulnerability invites the reader to tour those uncanny landscapes from which one returns irrevocably changed—refreshed, but wistful. In a review of his earlier limited-edition work, Time in Transit, the Hudson Review called David Sanders “a poet to watch.” With the Swallow Press publication of Compass and Clock, we have the realization of that promise.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume I contains two dramatic poems, Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession and Paracelsus, along with a sonnet, “Eyes Calm Beside Thee.” Pauline was written in 1832 and published in March 1833, London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street.
Browning’s principal source material for Paracelsus was Frederick Bitiskius’s edition of the works of Paracelsus, the early Renaissance alchemist, mystic, and physician; as well as the article on Paracelsus in the Biographie Universelle. E. D. H. Johnson wrote that in Paracelsus, “Browning first attacks the problem of communication, while still insisting on the primacy of the intuitions over the rational intellect. Paracelsus is a study of intellectual pride and its humbling.”
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume II contains Browning’s play, Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837), and the long poem, Sordello (1840). Strafford was Browning’s first play, based on the tragic life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The editors note that the play had only four performances, “undoubtedly due… to its esoteric subject and bad acting.” Sordello is a fictionalized version of the life of Sordello da Goito, a 13th century Italian troubadour. The poem itself was famously known for being “difficult.”
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume III contains Browning’s dramatic piece, Pippa Passes (1841), which Arthur Symons said was “Browning’s most perfect work”; another play King Victor and King Charles; A Tragedy, which Browning described as “the first artistic consequence of what Voltaire termed ‘a terrible event without consequences‘“; the “Essay on Chatterton,” which appeared anonymously in the Foreign Quarterly Review in July, 1842; the play The Return of the Druses: A Tragedy (1843); and the short pieces of Dramatic Lyrics, which contain some of Browning’s finest and most popular works such as “My Last Duchess,” “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume V contains:
A Soul’s Tragedy
Poems
Christmas-Eve and Easter Day
Essay on Shelley
Men and Women, Vol. I
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
The sixth in the projected seventeen-volume work, this volume covers the second half of Men and Women (1855), perhaps Browning’s most famous collection, and the entirety of Dramatis Personae (1864), the first book Browning produced after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861.
Men and Women II contains several great dramatic poems on which Browning’s reputation still depends, including “Andrea del Sarto,” “Saul,” and “Cleon.” It also includes the more intimate and personal works “The Guardian Angel” and “One Word More,” as well as the mysterious “Women and Roses.” The Brownings‘ shared interests in Renaissance art and nineteenth-century Italian politics inform the challenging “Old Pictures in Florence.”
The publication of Dramatis Personae was a key event in the rapid rise of Browning’s fame in the 1860s, though the collection is marked by a welter of conflicting impulses that arose after the poet left Italy and his married life behind. The classic monologues “Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “Abt Vogler” are here, but beside them Browning placed the nearly surreal “Caliban upon Setebos” and the achingly self-regarding “James Lee’s Wife,” one of the volume’s handful of dramatic lyrics about betrayed or failed relationships. Also included are “A Death in the Desert,” which contributed to the intense Victorian debate about scriptural validity and religious authority; and “Mr Sludge, ’The Medium,‘” Browning’s ferocious, pyrotechnic exposé of a spiritualist fraud.
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
The first complete edition of the works of Robert Browning with variant readings and annotations contains: 1. The entire contents of the first editions of Browning’s work; 2. All prefaces and dedications which Browning wrote for his own works and for those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others; 3. The two prose essays: The Essay on Chatterton and The Essay on Shelley; 4. The front matter and tables of contents of each of the collected editions (1849, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888–1889) which Browning himself saw through the press; 5 Poems by Browning published during his lifetime but not collected by him; 9. Poems not published during Browning’s lifetime which have come to light since his death; 7. John Forster’s Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford to which Browning contributed significantly, though to what precise extent has not been determined.
The edition provides a full apparatus, including variant readings and annotations.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume XI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning contains two strikingly disparate long poems from the 1870s, Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. In Fifine at the Fair, Browning creates an idiosyncratic version of the Don Juan figure, a distinctly post-Romantic and intellectual Don Juan who derives little from any literary predecessor. The legendary character is realized in a modern French setting, the village of Pornic, a favorite vacation spot for Browning. The poem is a sustained exercise in self-justification and casuistry, with Don Juan persuading himself that he can reconcile his love of his wife with his carnal love for a gipsy girl.
Though Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is similarly concerned with a struggle between spirit and flesh, the poem is entirely based in contemporary events. Using newspaper accounts and legal documents, Browning tells the strange and shocking tale of a rich and devout Frenchman who throws himself from the roof of his chateau, convinced that heaven will deliver him from death. Upon the question of his sanity hinges the disposition of his considerable estate, and the poet traces the claims and counterclaims to their settlement in court only a few months before he wrote the poem.
As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
Volume XIV of The Complete Works of Robert Browning records a transition in the poet’s career. With The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), Browning ended his experiments with classical sources, creating his “transcript” — not quite a translation — of the Greek original and providing an intriguing explanation for his approach. La Saisiaz, the deeply personal expression of Browning’s shock at the sudden death of a dear friend, was published in 1878 with The Two Poets of Croisic, an extended ironic meditation on literary fame. Browning’s collection of six poems under the title Dramatic Idyls (1879) marks the poet’s return to the dramatic forms he perfected in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, and a revival of his interest in the psychology of motives.
As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
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