In this far-ranging and penetrating work, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage?

Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion, Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Looking at the United States and Brazil, she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments—historicity and globality—which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial, respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative, Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals—namely, universality and self-determination.

By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globality,Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego.

In late 1946, Stig Dagerman was assigned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen to report on life in Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war—their guilt and suffering. Dagerman was already a prominent writer in Sweden, but the publication and broad reception of German Autumn throughout Europe established him as a compassionate journalist and led to the long-standing international influence of the book.

Presented here in its first American edition with a compelling new foreword by Mark Kurlansky, Dagerman’s essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today amid current global conflict as they were sixty years ago.

Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

One of the central problems in recent moral philosophy is the apparent tension between the "practical" or "action-guiding" side of moral judgments and their objectivity. That tension would not exist if practical reason existed (if reason played a substantial role in producing motivation) and if recognition of obligation were one of the areas in which practical reason operated. In Practical Reason, Aristotle, and the Weakness of the Will,Norman Dahl argies that, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, Aristotle held a position on practical reason that both provides an objective basis for ethics and satisfies an important criterion of adequacy—that it acknowledges genuine cases of weakness of the will. In arguing for this, Dahl distinguishes Aristotle's position from that of David Hume, who denied the existence of practical reason. An important part of his argument is an account of the role that Aristotle allowed the faculty nous to play in the acquisition of general ends. Relying both on this argument and on an examination of passages from Aristotle's ethics and psychology, Dahl argues that Aristotle recognized that a genuine conflict of motives can occur in weakness of the will. This provides him with the basis for an interpretation that finds Aristotle acknowledging genuine cases of weakness of the will.

Dahl's arguments have both a philosophical and a historical point. He argues that Aristotle's position on practical reason deserves to be taken seriously, a conclusion he reinforces by comparing that position with more recent attempts, by Kant, Nagel, and Rawls, to base ethics on practical reason.

Alms for Oblivion was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume makes available in book form a collection of seventeen essays by Edward Dahlberg, who has been called one of the great unrecognized writers of our time. Some of the selections have never been published before; others have appeared previously only in magazines of limited circulation. There is a foreword by Sir Herbert Read.

The individual essays are on a wide range of subjects: literary, historical, philosophical, personal. The longest is a discussion of Herman Melville's work entitled "Moby-Dick - A Hamitic Dream." The fate of authors at the hands of reviewers is the subject of the essay called "For Sale." In "No Love and No Thanks" the author draws a characterization of our time. He presents a critique of the poet William Carlos Williams in "Word-Sick and Place- Crazy," and a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Peopleless Fiction." In "My Friends Stieglitz, Anderson, and Dreiser" he discusses not only Alfred Stieglitz, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser but other personalities as well. He also writes of Sherwood Anderson in "Midwestern Fable." In "Cutpurse Philosopher" the subject is William James. "Florentine Codex" is about the conquistadores. Other essays in the collection are the following: "Randolph Bourne," "Our Vanishing Cooperative Colonies," "Chivers and Poe," "Domestic Manners of Americans," "Robert McAlmon: A Memoir," "The Expatriates: A Memoir," and an essay on Allen Tate.

Vocational Interest Measurement was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Many years of clinical experience at the University of Minnesota, using the Strong Vocational Interest Bank in counseling services, form the basis for this book. The work will help other counselors to understand the meaning of the interest scores which they obtain with this test. In successive chapters, the authors discuss the meaning of work and jobs in our society, deal with the anatomy of interests, analyze interest patterns and outline a normative framework for their system of analysis, discuss personality factors as related to interests, review theories of origin and development of interests, and illustrate the use of interest measurement in counseling through a series of case studies. A volume in the Minnesota Library on Student Personnel Work.

Redrawing the Lines was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Since 1970 literary theory has experienced a period of rich interaction with both Anglo-American analytic and Continental philosophy, particularly deconstruction. Yet these two philosophical schools have regarded each other with hostility, if at all, as in the 1977 exchange between John Searle and Jacques Derrida over the work of J. L. Austin. Since then, the two philosophical traditions have begun to interact as each has influenced literary theory, and some suggest that they are not diametrically opposed.

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental philosophy. The editor's introduction establishes the debate's historical context, and his annotated bibliography directs the interested reader to virtually everything written on this issue.

The contributors: Reed Way Dasenbrock, Henry Staten, Michael Fischer, Charles Altieri, Richard Shusterman, Samuel C. Wheeler III, Jules David Law, Steven Winspur, Christopher Norris, Richard Rorty, and Anthony J. Cascardi.

Reed Way Dasenbrock is associate professor of English at New Mexico State University. He is the author of The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Toward the Condition of Painting.

African Literature in the Twentieth Century was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This paperback makes available the major part of Professor Dathorne's The Black Mind.It concentrates on the writings of Africans in various African and European languages and provides insight, both broad and deep, into the Black intellect. Professor Dathorne examines the literature of Africans as spoken or written in their local languages and in French, Portuguese, and English. This extensive survey and interpretation gives the reader a remarkable pathway to an understanding of the Black imagination and its relevance to thought and creativity throughout the world.

The author himself lived in Africa for ten years, and his view is not that of an outsider, since it is as a Black man that he speaks about Black people. Throughout the book, a major theme is the demonstration that, despite slavery and colonialism, Africans remained very close to their own cultures. Professor Dathorne shows that African writers may be, like some Afro-American writers, "marginal men," but that they are Black men and it is as Black men that they feel the nostalgia of their past and the corrosive influences of their present.

O. R. Dathorne is a member of the Department of Black Studies and of the Department of English at Ohio State University. He has taught at universities in Nigeria and Sierra Leone and served as a UNESCO adviser in Sierra Leone. He also has taught at Ohio State University, Howard University, and the University of Wisconsin and lectured at Yale, Federal City College, Michigan State, and other universities in and out of the United States. He is the author of two novels and editor of a number of anthologies of Black literature, and has written widely in journals on his subject.

The Black Mind was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The comprehensive account of the development of African literature from its beginnings in oral tradition to its contemporary expression in the writings of Africans in various African and European languages provides insight, both broad and deep, into the Black intellect. Professor Dathorne examines the literature of Africans as spoken or written in their local languages and in Latin, French, Portuguese, and English. This extensive survey and interpretation gives the reader a remarkable pathway to an understanding of the Black imagination and its relevance to thought and creativity throughout the world.

The author himself lived in Africa for ten years, and his view in not that of an outsider, since it is as a Black man that he speaks about Black people. Throughout the book, a major theme is the demonstration that, despite slavery and colonialism, Africans remained very close to their own cultures. Professor Dathorne shows that African writers may be, like some Afro-American writers, "marginal men," but that they are Black men and it is as Black men that they feel the nostalgia of their past and the corrosive influences of their present.

The chapters are divided into sections: Tradition; Heritage; The Presence of Europe; and Crosscurrents. In the final chapters the author extends the thread of continuity to the New World—Africa as present in the work of Black writers in the United States and in the Caribbean.

“The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia,” Malcolm X declared in a 1962 speech, “is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.” Four decades later, the hip-hop artist Talib Kweli gave voice to a similar Pan-African sentiment in the song “K.O.S. (Determination)”: “The African diaspora represents strength in numbers, a giant can't slumber forever.”

Linking discontent and unrest in Harlem and Los Angeles to anticolonial revolution in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, Black leaders in the United States have frequently looked to the anti-imperialist movements and antiracist rhetoric of the Muslim Third World for inspiration. In Black Star, Crescent Moon, Sohail Daulatzai maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, showing how Black artists and activists imagined themselves not as national minorities but as part of a global majority, connected to larger communities of resistance. Daulatzai traces these interactions and alliances from the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era to the “War on Terror,” placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression.

From Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali to contemporary artists and activists like Rakim and Mos Def, Black Star, Crescent Moon reveals how Muslim resistance to imperialism came to occupy a central position within the Black radical imagination, offering a new perspective on the political and cultural history of Black internationalism from the 1950s to the present.

The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest political films of all time. With an artistic defiance that matched the boldness of the anticolonial struggles of the time, it was embraced across the political spectrum—from leftist groups like the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization to right-wing juntas in the 1970s and later, the Pentagon in 2003. With a philosophical nod to Frantz Fanon, Sohail Daulatzai demonstrates that tracing the film’s afterlife reveals a larger story about how dreams of freedom were shared and crushed in the fifty years since its release. As the War on Terror expands and the “threat” of the Muslim looms, The Battle of Algiers is more than an artifact of the past—it’s a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In his preface the author writes: "Europe's style was both courageous and ignoble, Europe's achievement both magnificent and appalling. There is less need now that Europe's hegemony is over, for pride or shame to color historical judgments." In that candid vein Mr. Davies provides a balanced and impartial history of British, French, and Dutch beginnings in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa to the end of the seventeenth century. He contrasts two styles of empire: the planting of trading posts in order to gather fur, fish, and slaves; and the planting of people in colonies of settlement to grow tobacco and sugar. He shows that the first style, involving little outlay of capital, was favored by European merchants; the second, by rulers and landlords. In his conclusion he examines the impact made by the Europeans on the people they traded with and expropriated, and assesses the diplomatic, economic, and cultural repercussions of the North Atlantic on Europe itself.

"Should provide valuable supplementary reading in courses in British imperial and American colonial history, as well as a source of information for those who teach them." –History.

In the late 1960s, Indian families in Minneapolis and St. Paul were under siege. Clyde Bellecourt remembers, “We were losing our children during this time; juvenile courts were sweeping our children up, and they were fostering them out, and sometimes whole families were being broken up.” In 1972, motivated by prejudice in the child welfare system and hostility in the public schools, American Indian Movement (AIM) organizers and local Native parents came together to start their own community school. For Pat Bellanger, it was about cultural survival. Though established in a moment of crisis, the school fulfilled a goal that she had worked toward for years: to create an educational system that would enable Native children “never to forget who they were.”

While AIM is best known for its national protests and political demands, the survival schools foreground the movement’s local and regional engagement with issues of language, culture, spirituality, and identity. In telling of the evolution and impact of the Heart of the Earth school in Minneapolis and the Red School House in St. Paul, Julie L. Davis explains how the survival schools emerged out of AIM’s local activism in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice and its efforts to achieve self-determination over urban Indian institutions. The schools provided informal, supportive, culturally relevant learning environments for students who had struggled in the public schools. Survival school classes, for example, were often conducted with students and instructors seated together in a circle, which signified the concept of mutual human respect. Davis reveals how the survival schools contributed to the global movement for Indigenous decolonization as they helped Indian youth and their families to reclaim their cultural identities and build a distinctive Native community.

The story of these schools, unfolding here through the voices of activists, teachers, parents, and students, is also an in-depth history of AIM’s founding and early community organizing in the Twin Cities—and evidence of its long-term effect on Indian people’s lives.

John Dos Passos - American Writers 20 was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. In Speculative Security, Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These “precrime” measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspect monies is not simply an issue of financial regulation, she shows, but a broad political, social, and even cultural phenomenon with profound effects on everyday life.

Speculative Security offers a range of examples that illustrate the types of security interventions employed today, including the extralegal targeting and breaking up of the al-Barakaat financial network that was accompanied by raids in the United States, asset freezes in Sweden, and the incarceration of a money remitter at Guantánamo Bay. De Goede develops the paradigm of “speculative security” as a way to understand the new fusing of finance and security, denoting the speculative nature of both the means and the ends of the war on terrorist financing.

Ultimately, de Goede reveals how the idea of creating “security” appeals to multiple imaginable—and unimaginable—futures in order to enable action in the present.

In the tradition of great American rags to riches stories, Seven Iron Men weaves together the history of how the seven Merritt brothers discovered iron ore on the Mesabi Range. In 1890 they were poised to become one of the wealthiest families in America but lost it all to industrialist John D. Rockefeller.

“The tale of their long and furious quest makes for one of the most melodramatic stories in American history. . . . The Merritts leap from the chronicle in all the colors of life—especially Lon, the king of them all, with his maudlin poetizing, his childlike faith in mankind, and his incredible tropical hat. It is a tale full of thrills, shot with sardonic humors.” —H. L. Mencken, The Nation

“Certainly it is no small contribution to the history of the American people to unfold the tale of the discovery and development of those huge iron deposits of the Mesabi Range flanking much of Lake Superior. To these perhaps quite as much as to any other one factor the country owes its industrial supremacy in the ago of steel.” —New York Herald Tribune

Paul de Kruif (1890–1971) was a microbiologist, served as a contributing editor to Reader’s Digest, and was the best-selling author of Microbe Hunters.

The Obedience of a King of Portugal was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Especially designed as an example of fine book making, this volume presents a facsimile reproduction and a translation of a fifteen-century publication. The original upon which this publication is based is in the James Ford Bell Collection in the University of Minnesota library. The text is that of the obedience oration of Vasco Fernandes de Lucena, delivered for John II of Portugal to Pope Innocent VIII in 1485. Scholars consider the work a magnificent example of the Latin oratorical prose of the period.

Opacity and the Closet interrogates the viability of the metaphor of “the closet” when applied to three important queer figures in postwar American and French culture: the philosopher Michel Foucault, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the pop artist Andy Warhol. Nicholas de Villiers proposes a new approach to these cultural icons that accounts for the queerness of their works and public personas.

Rather than reading their self-presentations as “closeted,” de Villiers suggests that they invent and deploy productive strategies of “opacity” that resist the closet and the confessional discourse associated with it. Deconstructing binaries linked with the closet that have continued to influence both gay and straight receptions of these intellectual and pop celebrities, de Villiers illuminates the philosophical implications of this displacement for queer theory and introduces new ways to think about the space they make for queerness.

Using the works of Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol to engage each other while exploring their shared historical context, de Villiers also shows their queer appropriations of the interview, the autobiography, the diary, and the documentary—forms typically linked to truth telling and authenticity.

Eighty delicious, imaginative recipes from the Star Tribune’s beloved annual cookie contest, with mouth-watering pictures and bakers’ stories

It’s cold in Minnesota, especially around the holidays, and there’s nothing like baking a batch of cookies to warm the kitchen and the heart. A celebration of the rich traditions, creativity, and taste of the region, The Great Minnesota Cookie Book collects the best-loved recipes and baking lore from fifteen years of the Star Tribune’s popular holiday cookie contest. 

Drop cookies and cutouts, refrigerator cookies and bars; Swedish shortbread, Viennese wafers, and French–Swiss butter cookies; almond palmiers; chai crescents and taffy treats; snowball clippers, cherry pinwheels, lime coolers, and chocolate-drizzled churros: a dizzying array and all delightful, the recipes in this book recall memories of holidays past and inspire the promise of happy gatherings to come. 

These are winning cookies in every sense, the best of the best chosen by the contest’s judges, accompanied by beautiful photographs as instructive as they are enticing. A treat for any occasion, whether party, bake sale, or after-school snack, each time- and taste-tested recipe is perfect for starting a tradition of one’s own.

The Career of a Tsarist Officer was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

General Anton I. Denikin served as an officer in the Russian army throughout a notable career until 1920 when, as commander in chief of the White Russian armies, he was forced to flee from Bolshevik forces at Novorossiisk. In these memoirs, which cover his childhood, youth, and military service up to 1916, we have an unusually candid autobiography and one which illuminates some little-known aspects of Russian social as well as military history.

General Denikin was born in 1872 in the Warsaw province of Russian Poland. He was a graduate of the prestigious General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg, and during his years at the academy he launched a literary career which continued for the rest of his life, enabling him to support his family in their later exile.

Distinguished service in the Russo-Japanese War earned his promotion to colonel in the army, and from that time in 1905 to his tragic fate in 1920 when he left Russia never to return, he served his country with a deep and abiding loyalty, matched only by his devotion to the Orthodox religion. After living in exile in several European countries, principally in France, he moved in 1945 to the United States, where he died in 1947.

The present volume is a translation from the Russian-language edition which was published in 1953 by the Chekhov Publishing house in New York. In this, General Denikin's last work, he provides the social and intellectual background for an understanding of the traits of the Russian officer corps which enabled them to continue the fight for a unified, non-Bolshevik Russia even after the tsar was dead and the cause obviously lost. Through Denikin's eyes one sees also a revealing picture of the efforts of Russo-Japanese War participants to renovate the Russian army in the interwar period, their recognition of the growing threat from Germany as well as from the revolutionaries, and the futility they felt as they entered prematurely into World War I.

Limits and Possibilities was first published in 1990. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The nature of the Eastern European Socialist state and its potential for transformation without sacrificing its specific identity is the subject of extensive current debate. Limits and Possibilities is the first book to be written that deals conceptually and historically with the myriad kinds of change a state might undergo. Bogdon Denitch has chosen the Yugoslavian model to frame his analysis because it initiated these "modernizing" changes in the 1960s and can therefore provide a case study of the limits of reforms possible in Communist regimes. In using the Yugoslav case paradigmatically, the volume addresses in a more general sense the issues of decentralization, autonomy for nonparty and nonstate institutions, multi-ethnicity, new social movements, including the "greens," and the role of women and women's movements.

The End of the Cold War was first published in 1990. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Against the backdrop of unprecedented change in the world political and social order, Bogdan Denitch charts the unique opportunities and potential pitfalls that accompany the increased economic and political integration of the European Community. Historically, any move toward unification has had broad ramifications. This, coming as it does in the wake of recent democratic upheavals in Europe, will bring to a close an entire era -- an era of a world dominated by superpowers and the cold war that defined there confrontations.

Conrad Aiken - American Writers 38 was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The American Writer and the European Tradition was first published in 1950. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In a series of perceptive essays by twelve scholars this volume brings a fresh viewpoint to the study of American literature. From the colonial gentlemen-scholars to contemporary poets and novelists, the American writer is seen in relation to the cultural influences that flowed from Europe to America, intermingled with native tendencies, and then flowed from America to Europe.

Three themes bind the essays together: What was the American writer's original heritage of European ideas? What ideas, moods, manners in American writers were indigenous, or mostly so, to America? And finally, what has been the influence of American letters abroad?

American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939 was first published in

Scholars concerned with the diplomatic history of the United States have largely neglected the subject of American relations with the Middle East during the four decades before World War I. With this study, Professor DeNovo fills the gap by describing and assessing the United States' cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations with Turkey, Persia, and the Arab East in that period. He traces, chronologically and topically, the activities of such American interest groups as Protestant missionaries, educators, philanthropists, archaeologists, businessmen, and technical advisers, as well as the official actions of their government.

The account falls roughly into three chronological periods. The first section traces the interest groups through the pre-World War I years of political and cultural stirring in the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Special attention is given to the Chester Project for railroad development in Turkey. The second part deals with the upheavals accompanying World War I and the tasks of peacemaking from the Mudros armistice through the Lausanne settlement of 1923. The latter chapters detail the rise of the Turkish national movement, the deepening Persian and Arab nationalism, and the accommodation of American cultural and economic groups to these conditions. The author points out that before World War II began, Americans had acquired a significant interest in Middle Eastern oil and had become emotionally involved in the Arab-Zionist tension. In 1939 the United States was on the verge of a new phase in its Middle Eastern relations when that region would become more intimately linked to America's national security.

“More than fifteen years ago,” Jacques Derrida writes in the prologue to this remarkable and uniquely revealing book, “a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me. . . . It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: ‘cinders there are’ (il y a là cendre). . . . I had to explain myself to it, respond to it—or for it.”

In Cinders Derrida ranges across his work from the previous twenty years and discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. For Derrida, cinders or ashes—at once fragile and resilient—are “the better paradigm for what I call the trace—something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself.”

In a style that is both highly condensed and elliptical, Cinders offers probing reflections on the relation of language to truth, writing, the voice, and the complex connections between the living and the dead. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust (both a word—from the Greek hólos, “whole,” and kaustós, “burnt”—and a historical event that invokes ashes) in contemporary poetry and philosophy. In turning from the texts of other philosophers to his own, Cinders enables readers to follow the trajectory from Derrida’s early work on the trace, the gramma, and the voice to his later writings on life, death, time, and the spectral.

Among the most accessible of this renowned philosopher’s many writings, Cinders is an evocative and haunting work of poetic self-analysis that deepens our understanding of Derrida’s critical and philosophical vision.

From the cultural critic Wired called “provocative and cuttingly humorous” comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—Mark Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century.

Here are essays on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Hitler’s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001’s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna’s big toe.

Dery casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers. Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously interdisciplinary, Dery’s writing is a generalist’s guilty pleasure in an age of nanospecialization and niche marketing. From Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which Dery turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual ride through American dreams and American nightmares.

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes. 

Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. 

An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.

Newspaper Reference Methods was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the first detailed account in English of the German anti-Nazi plot of September 1939 - May 1940, a conspiracy which involved the services of Pope Pius XII as in intermediary. Much new information is presented, and the book puts the whole story of the German resistance movement in a clearer light than has been possible before.

Much of the account is based on the testimony of over fifty witnesses whom Professor Deutsch interviewed or interrogated, comprising virtually all the participants or observers who survived the period. He also had access to previously unavailable French and Belgian documents as well as to diaries and other private material.

As the author explains, there were four major rounds of opposition to the Hitler regime, the conspiracy described in this volume being the second. IN many ways it was the round in which circumstances were the most favorable for success. High military quarters were the most fully committed, it was the only plan in which a foreign power at odds with Germany (britain) took a supporting position, and it was the only instance in which a notable outside figure, Pius XII, made his good offices available as an intermediary.

The role of the Pope in this conspiracy has been known in a general way since 1946, but Professor Deutsch's investigation is the first intensive study were at the core of the affair, Josef Muller, the Opposition agent who dealt with the Pope and who later became the Bavarian Minister o Justice, and Rev. Robert Leiber, S.F., the Pope's confidential aide.

In his conclusion Professor Deutsch points out that the story of this conspiracy clearly testifies to the moral nature of the German resistance movement. The author writes: "No term recurred more often in these months to define the conflict with the Third Reich then 'the decent Germany.'"

Hitler and His Generals was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The author, who told the story of second of four conspiratorial rounds in his earlier book The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War,describes here the situations and events leading up to the first round of conspiracy. The present volume deals with the virtual coup d'etat by which Hitler sought to establish ascendancy over the Wehrmacht early in 1938.

Interracial Housing was first published in 1951. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

One of the most crucial strains on democracy today is the practice of racial segregation. In the press, in local, state, and federal government agencies, in fact, wherever people thrash out the problems of democratic living, the question is being discussed.

This book offers facts which throw new light on an important issue in the overall problem of racial segregation. Here are the results of a study comparing two kinds of public housing—segregated and non-segregated.

Two low-rent, public housing projects in which Negroes and whites live as next door neighbors were compared with two similar housing developments in which Negroes and whites are assigned to separate buildings or areas. The study reveals how the people living in these contrasting ways differ in their social relations, community morale, racial attitudes, and other significant social aspects. The research procedures used are explained, and general conclusions about changing prejudices are offered.

Social scientists, psychologists, housing officials, and community leaders concerned with the problems not only of housing but of race relations in general will find helpful guidance here.

In addition to providing much-needed data on an important social problem, the book offers a valuable demonstration of research techniques in social science.

Epicurus and His Philosophy was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this volume, the first comprehensive book in English about Epicurus, existing data on the life of the ancient philosopher is related to the development of his doctrine. The result is a fascinating account that challenges traditional theories and interpretations of Epicurean philosophy. Professor DeWitt demonstrates the fallacy of centuries of abuse of Epicurus and the resulting distortion of most discussions of Epicureanism that appear in standard philosophical works. Of major significance to students of philosophy and theology are the findings that show the importance of Epicureanism as a source of numerous Christian beliefs.

St. Paul and Epicurus was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Everyone who is interesting in the meaning of the Bible will find this a revealing study, for it opens up a new window on the New Testament, a window that was walled up centuries ago by prejudice. Professor DeWitt throws new light on the writings of the Apostle Paul by showing how they were influenced by the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

The Epicureanism could have a place in Christian religion may come as a surprise to those familiar with the conventional concept of the philosophy of Epicurus. As demonstrated in the meaning of the English word epicure,derived from the name of the ancient philosopher, the modern world has long associated Epicurus with the indulgence of sensual pleasure in food and drink.

But, as Professor DeWitt makes clear both in this volume and in its predecessor, Epicurus and His Philosophy, the pleasures which the ancient Greek espoused as constituting the chief good of life were not the pleasures of the flesh. The merit and the lure, however, of the Epicurean ethic, which allied happiness with pleasure, were so appealing and so widely acknowledged that Paul had no choice but to adopt it and bless it for his followers with the sanction of religion. He could not, though, admit indebtedness to a philosopher who had long been accused of sensualism and atheism, and there was no choice, therefore, but to consign Epicurus to anonymity.

Through his scholarly investigation into the Epicurean source of certain portions of the Epistles, Professor DeWitt provides new explanations or translations for seventy-six biblical verses. The close scrutiny of biblical passages is carried out, not in a spirit of vandalism, but in a quest for accuracy, and the result is a challenging, readable, and absorbing book.

Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness—particularly AIDS or cancer—have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today.

In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.” She further reveals how narratives written by doctors Abraham Verghese and Rafael Campo about treating people with AIDS can disrupt the doctor–patient hierarchy, and she explores practices of witnessing that emerge in writing by Paul Monette and John Bayley.

Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these “scenes of loss” and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure—the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die.

Lisa Diedrich is assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University.

Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This account traces the history of the Portuguese overseas discoveries, following the expansion into the Atlantic island, the Madeiras, and the Azores. It continues the account with the history of Portuguese discoveries along the African coast, at Guinea, the Congo, and Good Hope, then follows the voyages of Vasco da Gama to India and to Cabra, Brazil, and the expansion in the early years of the sixteen century to Malacca, China, and the East Indies. The volume presents not only a useful narrative of the spread of Portuguese empire but also new interpretations and analyses of the Portuguese overseas history.

How has the dominant social scientific paradigm limited our understanding of the impact of inherited economic resources, social privilege, and sociocultural practices on multigenerational inequality? In what ways might multiple forces of social difference haunt quantitative measurements of ability such as the SAT? Building on new materialist philosophy, Inheriting Possibility rethinks methods of quantification and theories of social reproduction in education, demonstrating that test performance results and parenting practices convey the impact of materially and historically contingent patterns of differential possibility.

Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román explores the dualism of nature and culture that has undergirded theories of inheritance, social reproduction, and human learning and development. Research and debate on the reproduction of power relations have rested on a premise that nature is made up of fixed universals on which the creative, intellective, and discursive play of culture are based. Drawing on recent work in the physical and biological sciences, Dixon-Román argues that nature is culture. He contends that by assuming a rigid nature/culture binary, we ultimately limit our understanding of how power relations are reproduced. 

Through innovative analyses of empirical data and cultural artifacts, Dixon-Román boldly reconsiders how we conceptualize the processes of inheritance and approach social inquiry in order to profoundly sharpen understanding and address the reproducing forces of inequality.

Islands and Empires was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the first one-volume account of the massive impact of Western civilization on the Pacific Islands and the Far East, principally China and Japan. The effects on the two areas were very different since, in the case of the islands, contact was with peoples who were still in the Stone Age, while in the Far East Westerners came up against sophisticated civilizations more ancient and mature than their own. Because of these differences, the book is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the Pacific Islands and the second with the East Asian mainland. Reverse influences—those of the Eastern cultures on the West—are also discussed.

The Cookie Jar and Other Plays was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The scripts of three plays by John Clark Donahue, artistic director of the Children's Theatre Company of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, are published in this volume along with background material and illustrations which, together, provide a look behind the scenes at the company, its personnel, methods, and productions. The company, which has achieved notable success, is regarded as a leading exponent of children's theater in this country.

The plays included in this volume are The Cookie Jar, How Could You Tell?,and Old King of Malfi.All by been presented by the Children's Theatre Company.

Under Mr. Donahue's direction the company has evolved an ensemble approach to production, in which script, music, and acting develop simultaneously throughout the rehearsal period. The dominant theme in his work with the company has been an educational one, based on his belief that the theater should be an educational environment which helps young persons to develop their creative abilities.

Five Plays from the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis was first published in

Among the notable productions of the Children's Theatre Company of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, a leading exponent of children's theater in this country, have been plays that are adaptations of classics in children's literature. This volume makes available the scripts of five of these adaptations, along with illuminating information about the productions and the company itself.

The plays include two adaptations by Frederick Gaines, two by Timothy Mason, and one by Richard Shaw. Mr. Gaines's plays are based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.One of Mr. Mason's plays, Kidnapped in London, is an adaptation of part of Master Skylark by John Bennett, and the other, Robin Hood: A Story of the Forest, is based on part of the Robin Hood legend. Mr. Shaw's play is an adaptation in Kabuki form of the Grimms' fairy tale Sleeping Beauty.

Linda Walsh Jenkins writes a general introduction and commentary. Background information about each play includes excerpts from discussions among directors, composers, designers, and playwrights about the plays themselves and about various phases of the development of the productions. Highlights of the history of the Children's Theatre Company and of the aims and accomplishments of its director, John Clark Donahue, are given, and these will be of particular interest to anyone in the children's theater field.

The photographic illustrations, which include a number in color, show various aspects of Children's Theatre Company productions. There are also musical examples from the original scores for the plays.