Rainer Maria Rilke 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.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke died in 1926, and interest in his poetry has been mounting ever since. The winds of fashion, taste, or personal bias have shifted several times to affect his audience of readers. There have been, according to previous Rilke criticism, not one but many Rilkes. Thus the critics have pointed to the "early Rilke" and the "late Rilke," to the Prague poet, the Paris poet, and the Muzot poet.

Now, in a fresh approach yet one which takes full cognizance of the varying viewpoints and conflicting purposes of earlier criticism, Professor Wood carefully examines Rilke's entire poetic output. The major concern here is with the poetry itself rather than with the biographical, psychological, or philosophical questions which have dominated most previous criticism.

Through a close textual analysis of the poems, Professor Wood demonstrates that the whole body of Rilke's writing, from beginning to end, is thoroughly interrelated and interdependent. As he points out, many more published materials, both posthumous verse and correspondence, are available now than in the earlier periods of Rilke's fame, a situation which adds significance to this new evaluation.

In addition to analyzing Rilke's own poetry, Professor Wood shows the links between Rilke and such contemporary poets and writers as Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, and Yeats.

The excerpts quoted from Rilke's poetry are given both in the original German text and in standard English translation.

Little has been written about the Spanish film musical, a genre usually associated with the early Franco dictatorship and dismissed by critics as reactionary, escapist fare. A timely and valuable corrective, White Gypsies shows how the Spanish folkloric musical films of the 1940s and ’50s are inextricably tied to anxious concerns about race—especially, but not only, Gypsiness.

Focusing on the processes of identity formation in twentieth-century Spain—with multifaceted readings of the cinematic construction of class, gender, and sexuality—Eva Woods Peiró explores how these popular films allowed audiences to negotiate and imaginatively, at times problematically, resolve complex social contradictions. The intricate interweaving of race and modernity is particularly evident in her scrutiny of a striking popular phenomenon: how the musicals progressively whitened their stars, even as their story lines became increasingly Andalusianized and Gypsified.

White Gypsies reveals how these imaginary individuals constituted a veritable cultural barometer of how racial thinking was projected and understood across a broad swath of popular Spanish cinema.

Guidance Procedures in High School 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.This volume is number 1 in the Modern School Practices series; established in 1950 by the College of Education at the University of Minnesota, and the Bureau of Educational Research. The series is designed as a replacement to two earlier series: the Series on Individualization of Instruction and the Modern School Curriculum series.This monograph presents some recommended practices within the framework of a comprehensive and balanced program proposed for student personnel services in high schools. Topics discussed include: organizing and developing guidance services; orientation of new students; understanding the student through the individual inventory; counseling students; learning from group experience; health services; placement in jobs and in further training; and checking on effectiveness of the guidance program.

Late Quaternary Environments of the United States was first published in 1983. 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 the late 1970s American and Russian scientists met twice in conferences on Quaternary paleoclimates sponsored by the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Bilateral Agreement on the Environment. The conferees agreed to prepare volumes summarizing the current status of research in the two countries. Late-Quaternary Environments of the United States provides a two-volume overview of new and significant information on research of the last fifteen years, since the 1965 publication of Quaternary of the United States,edited by H E. Wright, Jr., and D. G. Frey. The volume on the late Quaternary in the Soviet Union will also be published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Volume 1 of Late-Quaternary Environments of the United States covers the Late Pleistocene, the interval between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago—a time of extreme environmental stress as the world passed from full-glacial conditions of the last ice age into the present interglacial age. The interval of geologic time since the last glacial period—termed the Holocene—is the subject of Volume 2. The complexity of the natural changes occurring in the late Quaternary, and their interrelationships, make it impossible for a single scientific discipline to encompass them. Thus the papers in both volumes come from authors in many research fields—geology, ecology, physical geography, archaeology, geochemistry, geophysics, limnology, soil science, paleontology, and climatology. Many of the hypotheses presented—especially on the dynamic Late Pleistocene environments—are still hotly debated and will require additional testing as scientists strive to reconstruct the changing world of the glacial and postglacial ages.

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”

By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.

Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign 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.

This is a detailed history of the agrarian reforms which took place in Bohemia during the reigns of the Habsburg rulers Maria Theresa, 1740–1780, and Joseph II, 1780–1790. The enactment of the land reforms had far-reaching social, economic, and political effects, and the subject constitutes an important chapter in the history of the nation we now know as Czechoslovakia. The topic has been hardly touched in English, however, and has only recently been properly treated by the Marxist historians of post-World War II Czechoslovakia. Much of Professor Wright's account is based on documents not previously used by historians, particularly materials in the Hofkammerarchiv in Vienna.

The author provides a background by describing the development of serfdom in Bohemia over approximately two hundred years prior to the accession of Maria Theresa to the throne of Austria in 1740. In major sections of the book Professor Wright traces the causes, events, and effects of the program of agrarian reform which Maria Theresa and Joseph II carried out. He shows how the changes in the land system profoundly affected the relationships of the serf, seigneur, and sovereign, and how they paved the way for the much greater social revolution which was to come with the emancipation of 1848.

In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, the account gives a dramatic picture of the plight of the peasant, along with valid glimpses of the personalities of the rulers and their ministers. Specialists in European history, social history, or agrarian history will find the book particularly rewarding.

Intergovernmental Relations in Public Health 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.This volume is number 4 in a series of monographs edited by William Anderson and Edward W. Weidner on intergovernmental relations in the United States as observed in the state of Minnesota. Dr. Wyatt examines the United States Public Health Service, the United States Children’s Bureau, and other federal services related to public health through the study of Minnesota’s state and local health departments and allied agencies. Interstate, state-local, and inter-local relations are described throughout the analysis.