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Jack London - American Writers 57
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Charles Child Walcutt
University of Minnesota Press, 1966

Jack London - American Writers 57 was first published in 1966. 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.

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James Agee - American Writers 95
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Erling Larsen
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

James Agee - American Writers 95 was first published in 1971. 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.

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James Carey
A Critical Reader
Eve Stryker Munson
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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James Fenimore Cooper - American Writers 48
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Robert E. Spiller
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

James Fenimore Cooper - American Writers 48 was first published in 1965. 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.

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The James Ford Bell Library
A List of Additions, 1965-1969
John Parker
University of Minnesota Press, 1970
The James Ford Bell Library: A List of Additions, 1965-1969 was first published in 1970. 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 a listing of the 891 books, manuscripts and other materials which were added to the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota from 1965 through 1969. The Bell Library is an endowed collection of rare items related to the history of European trade and expansion. Three earlier volumes similar to this one record the acquisitions from 1951 through 1964. The Lists of Additions are useful to librarians, research scholars, booksellers, and book and manuscript collectors.
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James Gould Cozzens - American Writers 58
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Granville Hicks
University of Minnesota Press, 1966

James Gould Cozzens - American Writers 58 was first published in 1966. 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.

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James T. Farrell - American Writers 29
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Edgar M. Branch
University of Minnesota Press, 1963

James T. Farrell - American Writers 29 was first published in 1963. 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.

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James Whale
A New World Of Gods And Monsters
James Curtis
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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The Japan of Pure Invention
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado
Josephine Lee
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Long before Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, long before Barthes explicated his empire of signs, even before Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikadopresented its own distinctive version of Japan. Set in a fictional town called Titipu and populated by characters named Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, and Pooh-Bah, the opera has remained popular since its premiere in 1885.
 
Tracing the history of The Mikado’s performances from Victorian times to the present, Josephine Lee reveals the continuing viability of the play’s surprisingly complex racial dynamics as they have been adapted to different times and settings. Lee connects yellowface performance to blackface minstrelsy, showing how productions of the 1938–39 Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado, among others, were used to promote African American racial uplift. She also looks at a host of contemporary productions and adaptations, including Mike Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy and performances of The Mikado in Japan, to reflect on anxieties about race as they are articulated through new visions of the town of Titipu.
 
The Mikado creates racial fantasies, draws audience members into them, and deftly weaves them into cultural memory. For countless people who had never been to Japan, The Mikado served as the basis for imagining what “Japanese” was.
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Japanese and Americans
Cultural Parallels and Paradoxes
Charles Cleaver
University of Minnesota Press, 1976
Japanese and Americans was first published in 1976.Long periods of residence, study, and teaching in Japan have given Professor Cleaver an opportunity to observe its culture and to compare it with that of the United States, where he is a specialist in American studies. He reaches the conclusion that differences in the two cultures have been emphasized so much that similarities have been overlooked. Further, he points out, when differences have been discovered, a moral judgment has often been implied. In this book he provides a balanced view which will, it is hoped, contribute to a better understanding between the two countries.Since an exhaustive comparison of the two cultures is out of the question within the limits of a single volume, he has chosen the method of an oil prospector, drilling down here and there, where science or hunch suggests there might be a payoff. In his study he uses the word culture in the manner of the anthropologist as meaning the whole way of life. He places more emphasis, however, than the ordinary anthropologist does on the clues which the arts provide. Thus, among the subjects he discusses at some length are fictional writing and architecture. Among his other subjects are political and military nationalism, international economic reputations of the two countries, attitudes toward nature, and the organization of work and leisure. In his concluding chapter he discusses current tendencies toward local and international loyalties as opposed to those which are national, and the growing interest in cultural nationalism which accompanies a distrust of political and military nationalism. Finally, he makes a plea for an international community with cultural diversity.
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Japanese Counterculture
The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji
Steven C. Ridgely
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, film director, and photographer known for his highly provocative work. In this inventive and revealing work, Steven Ridgely examines Terayama's life and art to show that a conventional notion of him does not do full justice to the meaning and importance of his wide-ranging, often playful body of work.

Ridgely places Terayama at the center of Japanese and global counterculture and finds in his work a larger story about the history of postwar Japanese art and culture. He sees Terayama as reflecting the most significant events of his day: young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama experimenting with form and content after the cultural shift to television around 1960, young assistant directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, underground theatre in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through the 1970s after both the studio system and art house cinema had collapsed.

Featuring close readings of Terayama's art, Ridgely demonstrates how across his oeuvre there are patterns that sidestep existing power structures, never offering direct opposition but nevertheless making the opposition plain. And, he claims, there is always in Terayama's work a broad call for seeking out or creating pockets of fiction-where we are made aware that things are not what they seem-and to use otherness in those spaces to take a clearer view of reality.
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Japanese Documentary Film
The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima
Abe Mark Nornes
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Among Asian countries—where until recently documentary filmmaking was largely the domain of central governments—Japan was exceptional for the vigor of its nonfiction film industry. And yet, for all its aesthetic, historical, and political interest, the Japanese documentary remains little known and largely unstudied outside of Japan. This is the first English-language study of the subject, an enlightening close look at the first fifty years of documentary film theory and practice in Japan. Beginning with films made by foreigners in the nineteenth century and concluding with the first two films made after Japan’s surrender in 1945, Abé Mark Nornes moves from a “prehistory of the documentary,” through innovations of the proletarian film movement, to the hardening of style and conventions that started with the Manchurian Incident films and continued through the Pacific War. Nornes draws on a wide variety of archival sources—including Japanese studio records, secret police reports, government memos, letters, military tribunal testimonies, and more—to chart shifts in documentary style against developments in the history of modern Japan. Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program in Film and Video Studies.
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Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction
Jerome B. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction was first published in 1949. 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.

Dr. Cohen's substantial monograph is a carefully documented account of Japan's economic development from 1937 to 1949. It describes with much statistical evidence a remarkable experiment in planned industrial expansion prior to 1941, then continues with a survey of the war years, showing both the successes and failures of the planning, controlling, financing, and developing of Japan's war industries.

The last part of the book deals with the post-war problems of Japan from the war's end to the latter part of 1948—three years of occupation by the Allied Powers. Dr. Cohen discusses the three key economic factors: the basic reforms, the rapidly mounting inflation, and the slowly increasing, but still low level of production.

Dr. Cohen's first chapter is devoted to the careful planning of the years before the war. The next chapters discuss Japan's efforts to cope with the problems of munitions, food supply, and labor as the Allied war effort gradually wore her down. There are detailed studies of separate industries, shipping, and agriculture, and a discussion of the parts played respectively by air, sea, and land operations in the destruction of Japan's ability to wage successful war.

One of the main theses of these chapters is that the increasingly enveloping blockade of Japan shut off necessary industrial raw materials, and so brought Japanese war production to a virtual standstill before the main weight of the strategic air attack was delivered, and so made it impossible for Japan to continue the war.

The author's grim picture of inter-service quarrels and overlapping and inconsistent controls demonstrates that the Japanese army, navy, and civil service, in spite of their reputation for exact and strict organization, in practice failed to make good use of their unlimited powers.

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J.D. Salinger - American Writers 51
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
James E. Miller Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

J.D. Salinger - American Writers 51 was first published in 1965. 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.

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Jesuit Letters From China, 1583-84
M. Howard Rienstra, EditorTranslated by M. Howard Rienstra
University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Jesuit Letters From China, 1583–84 was first published in 1986. 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 first eight letters from Jesuit missionaries on mainland China were written in 1583–84 and published in Europe in 1586. M Howard Rienstra's translated marks their first appearance in English. The letters chronicle the patient efforts of Michele Ruggieri and the famed Matteo Ricci to learn Chinese, to gain acceptance in Chinese society, and to explain Christianity to a highly sophisticated non-Christian culture. They also described the China of the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a country whose immense size and population had excited the imagination of Europeans for generations.

It was Francis Xavier's dream that this mighty kingdom and civilization be opened to the Christian gospel. His dream was at least tentatively fulfilled when Michele Ruggieri was granted residence first in Canton and then in Chao-ch'ing in 1583. Accompanied first by Francesco Pasio and later by Matteo Ricci, Ruggieri initiated the Christian mission in China. Their letters, published initially as an appendix to a volume of Jesuit letters from Japan, were abbreviated and censored by their European editor. In edited form, the letters appeared in 1586 in one French, on German, and three Italian editions.

The China of Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci had remained, however, both suspicious of, and closed to, foreigners - a fact which the original letters do not gloss over. Rienstra was carefully compared the abbreviated and censored versions of these letters in their originals, still preserved in the Jesuit archives in Rome. The letters in general indicate how tenuous the Jesuits' situation was and note candidly that only two baptisms had been performed on the mainland during their stay. These results stand in marked contracts to the reports from Japan of tens of thousands of baptisms and to the reports from Portuguese Macao, where Chinese converts were compelled to wear European cloths and to take European names.

Such Europeanization was thought to be inappropriate to a successful Christian mission in China. Though criticized at the time by their colleagues in Macao, Ruggieri, Pasio, and Ricci committed themselves to a program of cultural respect and accommodation. They learned both written and spoken Chinese, ingratiated themselves with the ruling classes by exhibiting their learning and courtesy, and appeared to have become Chinese themselves. When Matteo Ricci became Ruggieri's successor and his name became synonymous with the success of the Jesuit mission in China, it was to these methods that its success was owed. Unfortunately, the prevailing European ethnocentrism could not accept the concept of cultural accommodation. The editors thus censored the letters to convey the impression of a triumphant and culturally superior Christian mission in China.

Jesuit Letters From China is a publication of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

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Jews and Other Differences
The New Jewish Cultural Studies
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Jobless Future
Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work
Stanley Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
Essential reading for those seeking solutions to the new jobless economy. This widely reviewed and highly successful book examines the job market of tomorrow. Aronowitz and DiFazio take you behind the headlines to challenge the idea that a high-tech economy will provide high-paying jobs for all who want them. Instead, they demonstrate that we're more likely to see continued layoffs and job displacement. "Imagine a Brave New Work World in which unemployment is so rampant that more than a third of the adult population can't find a job and millions of others have stopped looking. Another third works only part-time, or at temporary or dead-end jobs. Meanwhile, the number of those still holding full-time positions steadily diminishes, their wages depressed because of the premium placed simply on having a job. . . . 'People need to start thinking about a jobless future,' insist [Aronowitz and DeFazio] . . . . Tha authors attribute rising unemployment to economic stagnation coupled with revolutionary technological change that has fostered workplace trends such as downsizing, re-engineering, with part-time jobs, temporary jobs and job-sharing replacing full-time work." --Washington Post "Looks beyond the shadow play of welfare politics to the real source of that anxiety-the modern workplace. . . . Aronowitz and DiFazio are quite right to look beyond the dismal realities of today's workplace and envision a society that uses the fruits of technology to abolish-or at least diminish-what the left used to call wage slavery." --The Nation "Replete with such futuristic concepts as cybernetics, technoculture, de-skilling, and informatics, this book is as timely as today's headlines announcing the latest round of layoffs and down-sizing. . . an important and thought-provoking work." --Library Journal Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. William DiFazio is professor of sociology at St. John's University
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The Jobless Future
Second Edition
Stanley Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
High technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. This grim prediction was first published in the 1994 edition of The Jobless Future, an eerily accurate title that could have been written for today's dismal economic climate. Fully updated and with a new introduction by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future warns that jobs as we know them-long-term, with benefits-are an endangered species.
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John A. Johnson
The People’s Governor
Winifred G. Helmes
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

John A. Johnson was first published in 1949. 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 first native-born governor of Minnesota, and the only Democrat to have been elected to that office three times, was also the first Minnesotan to have a presidential nomination within his grasp.

This study of a man who was, perhaps, the state's most beloved chief executive is a warm, fast-moving personal biography and an engrossing piece of political history.

The issues, personalities, shifting political currents, and party cleavages, state and national, of the early 1900s live again in the full recounting of the political campaigns of that era. One chapter is devoted to the 1908 Democratic National Convention at which Johnson's name was place in nomination for the presidency—the convention which chose William Jennings Bryan as its standard-bearer for the third and last time.

Johnson was a man of buoyant spirit and great personal charm, and the story of his life again dramatizes the American tradition that by force of character a man can lift himself from the humblest beginnings. At the time of his death in 1909 the warships in New York harbor dropped their flags to half-mast, and hundreds of memorial services were held throughout the nation. Many believed that, had he lived, Johnson would have won the presidential nomination and election in 1912.

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John Barth - American Writers 91
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Gerhard Joseph
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

John Barth - American Writers 91 was first published in 1970. 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.

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John Berryman - American Writers 85
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
William J. Martz
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

John Berryman - American Writers 85 was first published in 1969. 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.

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John Crowe Ransom - American Writers 18
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
John L. Stewart
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

John Crowe Ransom - American Writers 18 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.

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John Donne’s Lyrics
The Eloquence of Action
Arnold Stein
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

John Donne's Lyrics 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.

Combining modern insight with historical perspective, Professor Stein offers a fresh interpretation of Donne's lyric poems. His method is cumulative; it includes cross references to the religious writing, analysis of individual poems, and their relationship to larger patterns which reflect Donne's poetic mind. Among the specific problems he deals with are those which concern metaphor, symbol, myth, wit, "fictions." "negative theology," consciousness-and-simplicity, "binary" and "ternary" form in poetry, meter and meaning, rationalism and affective language, the visual and the auditory.

Professor Stein demonstrates that to gain insight into the integrity of Donne's poetic mind it is necessary to take seriously two propositions: that Donne is a poetic logician endowed with a talent and love for the unity of imaginative form; and that Donne's poetry, though it is not simple, nevertheless deeply and persistently engages important problems which concern "simplicity." In one of his sermons, Donne wrote: "The eloquence of inferiours is in words, the eloquence of superiours is in action." Professor Stein maintains that in his best poems Donne aspires to the eloquence of action and never to the eloquence of words.

Although the study is focused on Donne's lyrics, the interpretation is based on a long study of all the poems and the prose and on background and foreground materials. In a postscript the author discusses Donne's "modern career."

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John Dos Passos - American Writers 20
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Robert Gorham Davis
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

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.

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John Dryden
A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies, 1895-1974
David J. Latt and Samuel Holt Monk
University of Minnesota Press, 1976

John Dryden 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 annotated bibliography represents a comprehensive updating of Samuel Holt Monk's earlier work, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, John Dryden: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1948 (out of print). Since the publication of that earlier bibliography, the number of studies devoted to Dryden has more than tripled, and thus this new bibliography is essential for scholars of Dryden or related aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. This volume contains four times as many entries as the earlier volume, and there is an extensive introduction by Professor Latt which surveys the historical shifts in critical opinion of Dryden. The new volume incorporates all of the listings contained in the first one.

The entries include works that focus directly on Dryden, those that discuss Dryden's works in the context of other writers, and those that investigate material of general importance to Dryden studies. Dissertations from American, German, English, and French universities are included.

Complete bibliographic information is provided for virtually every entry. The listings are grouped in nine categories, and there is an additional section which covers festschriften and other collections of essays. Works of exceptional value and those which develop new points of view are so designated. The publishing history of each item is included along with the standard bibliographic information. The index includes topical as well as author entries.

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John O’Hara - American Writers 80
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Charles Child Walcutt
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

John O'Hara - American Writers 80 was first published in 1969. 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.

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John P. Marquand - American Writers 46
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
C. Hugh Holman
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

John P. Marquand - American Writers 46 was first published in 1965. 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.

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John Steinbeck - American Writers 94
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
James Gray
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

John Steinbeck - American Writers 94 was first published in 1971. 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.

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John Updike - American Writers 79
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Charles Thomas Samuels
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

John Updike - American Writers 79 was first published in 1969. 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.

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John Wesley North and the Reform Frontier
Merlin Stonehouse
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

John Wesley North and the Reform Frontier was first published in 1965. 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 biography is the absorbing and significant story of a frontier life in America in the nineteenth century. John Wesley North was a carpetbagger in the best sense of the word, and professor Stonehouse points out that no fallacy is more persistent in American history than the generalization that carpetbaggers were evil opportunists peculiar to the southward movement after the Civil War. North's aims, ambitions, and ideas were typical of many carpetbaggers whose common aspiration was the evangelical humanism that flourished in all of the English-speaking world at that time except in the slave-holding South.

Born in upstate New York in 1815, North migrated westward. For the rest of his life he pursued business and political interests with equal zest and championed many social causes. He went to Minnesota, Nevada, and California without enough money to live on, yet contributed significantly to their early history. He was a founder of Minneapolis, proprietor of Fairbault and Northfield, a founder of the University of Minnesota and of the Republican party in Minnesota, and a leader in the state's constitutional convention. In Nevada he helped shape land policy and mining law and found its cities and was president of the 1863 constitutional convention. He helped develop Southern California, where he established Oleander and Riverside. These three states welcomed him as a penniless dreamer, and he added much to the development of each. But in Tennessee, where he arrived with a fortune, eager to help rebuild the war-torn state, his best efforts resulted only in recrimination and his financial ruin. Thus North's life illustrates the sorry truth of General Sherman's comment that the carpetbaggers built the West but were not permitted to build the South.

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A Joint Enterprise
Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay
Preeti Chopra
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
It was the era of the Raj, and yet A Joint Enterprise reveals the unexpected role of native communities in the transformation of the urban fabric of British Bombay from 1854 to 1918. Preeti Chopra demonstrates how British Bombay was, surprisingly, a collaboration of the colonial government and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite who shaped the city to serve their combined interests.

Chopra shows how the European and Indian engineers, architects, and artists worked with each other to design a city—its infrastructure, architecture, public sculpture—that was literally constructed by Indian laborers and craftsmen. Beyond the built environment, Indian philanthropists entered into partnerships with the colonial regime to found and finance institutions for the general public. Too often thought to be the product of the singular vision of a founding colonial regime, British Bombay is revealed by Chopra as an expression of native traditions meshing in complex ways with European ideas of urban planning and progress.

The result, she argues, was the creation of a new shared landscape for Bombay’s citizens that ensured that neither the colonial government nor the native elite could entirely control the city’s future.
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Jonathan Edwards - American Writers 97
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Edward M. Griffin
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

Jonathan Edwards - American Writers 97 was first published in 1971. 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.

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Journal and Letter Book of Nicholas Buckeridge, 1651-1654
John Jenson
University of Minnesota Press, 1973
Journal and Letter Book of Nicholas Buckeridge, 1651-1654 was first published in 1973. 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.Nicholas Buckeridge was an employee of the East India Company from the 1640’s into the 1660’s, and his journal and letter book provide an account of English trade with India, Persia and East Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, a period for which few records of this kind have survived. Many logbooks and journals of the early years of the company have been preserved at the India office but materials for the general period of 1645 to 1660 are very scant. Buckeridge describes the places he visited, the problems of trading, the goods traded, and some of the prices obtained in the trading. The journal complements the early records of the Assada plantation venture of the East India Company and also provides a picture of the perilous life of a merchantman in his endeavors for the company. The editor, a former rare-book librarian at the University of Minnesota, provides a general introduction as well as brief introductions to each of the eighteen pieces from the letter book and journal. There are a facsimile reproduction of a page from the Buckeridge account and two maps. This is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.
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The Journal of Otto Peltonen
A Finnish Immigrant Story
William Durbin
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A portrait of the Finnish immigrant experience in Minnesota during the early twentieth century—now in paperback

After journeying across the Atlantic with his mother and two sisters, young Otto Peltonen joins his father in the iron ore mines of northern Minnesota, experiencing the harsh labor conditions that were common at the time, as mining companies cared more about making a profit than for their workers’ safety. Writing in his journal about his family’s struggles and the hard life Finnish immigrants endured in the early twentieth century, Otto ultimately strengthens his resolve to find the freedom his family had first sought in America.

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Journeys from Scandinavia
Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000
Elisabeth Oxfeldt
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
For all of the scholarship done on postcolonial literatures, little has been applied to Scandinavian writing. Yet, beginning with the onset of tourism beyond Scandinavia in the 1840s, a compelling body of prose works documents Scandinavian attitudes toward foreign countries and further shows how these Scandinavian travelers sought to portray themselves to uncharted cultures.
 
Focusing on Danish and Norwegian travelogues, Elisabeth Oxfeldt traces the evolution of Scandinavian travel writing over two centuries using pivotal texts from each era, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Oxfeldt situates each one in its historical and geopolitical context, and her close readings delineate how each travelogue reflects Scandinavia’s ongoing confrontation between Self and the non-European cultural Other.
 
A long-overdue examination of travel literature produced by some of Denmark and Norway’s greatest writers, Journeys from Scandinavia unpacks the unstable constructions of Scandinavian cultural and national identity and, in doing so, complicates the common assumption of a homogeneous, hegemonic Scandinavia.
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A Jumble of Needs
Women’s Activism and Neoliberalism in the Colonias of the Southwest
Rebecca Dolhinow
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Many immigrant communities along the U.S. border with Mexico are colonias, border settlements lacking infrastructure or safe housing. A Jumble of Needs examines the leadership of Mexican women immigrants in three colonias in New Mexico, documenting the role of NGOs in shaping women’s activism in these communities. Ethnographer Rebecca Dolhinow, who worked in the colonias, uncovers why such attempts to exercise political agency are so rarely successful.
 
Central to the relationship between NGOs and women activists in colonias, Dolhinow argues, is the looming presence of the neoliberal political project. In particular, the discourses of caretaking that NGOs use to recruit women into leadership positions simultaneously naturalize and depoliticize the activist work that these women do in their communities. Dolhinow discovers the connections between colonias as isolated communities and colonia leaders as political subjects who unintentionally reinforce neoliberal policy. In the long run, she finds, any politicization that might take place is limited to the women leaders and seldom involves the community as a whole.
 
Surprisingly, Dolhinow reveals, many NGOs promote neoliberal ideals, resulting in continued disenfranchisement, despite the women’s activism to better their lives, families, and communities.
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Junkware
Thierry Bardini
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Are we made of junk? Thierry Bardini believes we are. Examining an array of cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, he explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed primarily of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise known as "junk."
 
Bardini unravels the presence of junk at the interface between science fictions and fictions of science, showing that molecular biology and popular culture since the early 1960s belong to the same culture-cyberculture-which is essentially a culture of junk. He draws on a wide variety of sources, including the writings of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, interviews with scientists as well as "crackpots," and work in genetics, cybernetics, and physics to support his contention that junk DNA represents a blind spot in our understanding of life.

At the same time, Junkware examines the cultural history that led to the encoding and decoding of life itself and the contemporary turning of these codes into a commodity. But he also contends that, beyond good and evil, the essential "junkiness" of this new subject is both the symptom and the potential cure.
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Just Gaming
Jean-Francois Lyotard
University of Minnesota Press, 1985

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Justice and the American Metropolis
Clarissa Rile Hayward
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.

Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Essays focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.

Contributors: Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard U; Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford U; Gerald Frug, Harvard U; Loren King, Wilfrid Laurier U; Margaret Kohn, U of Toronto; Stephen Macedo, Princeton U; Douglas W. Rae, Yale U; Clarence N. Stone, George Washington U; Margaret Weir, U of California, Berkeley; Thad Williamson, U of Richmond.

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Justice at Work
The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
Marc Doussard
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities

 

In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.

Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. 

Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities. 

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Justice For Marlys
A Family’s Twenty Year Search for a Killer
John S. Munday Munday
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Marlys Wohlenhaus was an animated, energetic eighteen-year-old girl. Then, one afternoon, everything changed. She should have been safe working at the town restaurant. She should have been safe in her own home. She should still be alive today. But in May 1979, Marlys became the victim in every parent’s most horrific nightmare.

At once a gripping story and an in-depth look at the grief of losing a child, Justice for Marlys relates the true account of a serial killer, Joseph Ture Jr., who slipped past the law again and again during a three-year-long crime spree. It was Ture who brutally murdered Marlys Wohlenhaus in her own home. John S. Munday, the husband of Marlys’s mother, reconstructs the murder and the seventeen-year investigation that led to the capture and conviction of Ture, allowing the reader to explore the horror, obsession, dedication, and finally the peace that he and his wife experienced in the search for and eventual conviction of her daughter’s killer. Justice for Marlys generates suspense and sympathy as Munday recounts how Marlys’s case was solved through the efforts of the victim’s tenacious family, supportive news media, and persistent investigators.

 Munday gives readers a terrifying sense of the unimaginable grief and despair in the hearts of those who lose a child, yet he also shares his intensely personal exploration of the resilience and power within the human spirit.

John S. Munday is an intellectual property attorney who lives with his wife Fran in Isanti County, Minnesota. He is also the author of Surviving the Death of a Child, a contributing editor for Grief Digest, and a member of the board of directors of the Other Side Magazine.
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Juárez Girls Rising
Transformative Education in Times of Dystopia
Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Working-class girls in Ciudad Juárez grow up in a context marked by violence against women, the devastating effects of drug cartel wars, unresponsive and abusive authorities, and predatory U.S. capitalism: under constantly precarious conditions, these girls are often struggling to shape their lives and realize their aspirations. Juárez native Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon explores the vital role that transformative secondary education can play in promoting self-empowerment and a spirit of resistance to the violence and social injustice these girls encounter.

Bringing together the voices of ten female students at Preparatoria Altavista, an innovative urban high school founded in 1968 on social justice principles, Cervantes-Soon offers a nuanced analysis of how students and their teachers together enact a transformative educational philosophy that promotes learning, self-authorship, and hope. Altavista’s curriculum is guided by the concept of autogestión, a holistic and dialectical approach to individual and collective identity formation rooted in the students’ experiences and a critical understanding of their social realities. Through its sensitive ethnography, this book shows how female students actively construct their own meaning of autogestión by making choices that they consider liberating and empowering.

Juárez Girls Rising provides an alternative narrative to popular and often simplistic, sensationalizing, and stigmatizing discourses about those living in this urban borderland.  By merging the story of Preparatoria Altavista with the voices of its students, this singular book provides a window into the possibilities and complexities of coming of age during a dystopic era in which youth hold on to their critical hope and cultivate their wisdom even as the options for the future appear to crumble before their eyes.

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