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P FKN R
How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance
Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Duke University Press, 2026
“Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera / Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera." (Here they killed people for taking out the flag / that’s why I bring it anywhere I want now.)—LA MuDANZA

Global superstar Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.
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P Is For Philadelphia
Susan Korman
Temple University Press, 2005
P Is for Philadelphia is a unique, alphabetic tour of the city and the region, illustrated by the area's public school children, who participated in a city-wide drawing contest. From A is for Athlete to Z is for Zoo, all of the city's rich history is explored. P Is for Philadelphia includes entries on William Penn's arrival and historic treaty with the Delaware Indians, the city's heritage as the cradle of American liberty, as well as its food, sports teams, neighborhoods, and festivals. This book will have the kind of impact on Philadelphia and the region that few children's books ever have. It belongs on the bedside tables of every child in the Delaware Valley and the bookshelves of every visitor.
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Pablo Neruda's Ship Figureheads
A Poet-Collector's Muses and Companions
Carol A. Olsen, Foreword by Fernando Sáez Garcia
University of Alabama Press, 2025

Unlock the stories of Pablo Neruda’s rare nineteenth-century carved-wood ship figurehead collection in Chile, why they mattered in his tumultuous life, and how we benefit from them now.

Poet Pablo Neruda’s nineteenth-century ship figurehead collection in Chile is one of the most significant in the world. Containing carved wood images of dramatically postured men and women, these figures are now better understood due to years of research, a willingness to challenge Neruda’s ever-changing stories about them, and a realization that the names Neruda chose for his figureheads perhaps had more to do with his life than theirs. The rhythm and beauty of Neruda’s worn wood figures is counterpoint to his own tumultuous life as an author, politician, and communist dissident.

Collecting ship figureheads was central to Neruda’s passion for owning things made of wood, a material he said was his best friend, and for standing out among others as he gradually built the public persona that helped move him toward winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. With his choir of immobilized figureheads stationed upright in his living room and facing the Pacific Ocean, Neruda was surrounded by dramatic images from the sea that ignited his most powerful feelings. 

The nineteenth century saw figureheads on the bows of ships of sail and steam, yet when a figurehead was lost or removed, its history soon disappeared. The significant ship figureheads that Neruda avidly collected preserve that history and reveal new dimensions concerning his life and work. Each year, his collection is viewed by thousands of visitors to the Pablo Neruda Foundation’s house museum at Isla Negra.

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Pachacuti
World Overturned
Lori Eshleman
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015

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Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement
Kenneth J. Mijeski
Ohio University Press, 2011

The mobilization of militant indigenous politics is one of the most important stories in Latin American studies today. In this critical work, Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck examine the rise and decline of Ecuador’s leading indigenous party, Pachakutik, as it tried to transform the state into a participative democracy.

Using in-depth interviews with political activists, as well as a powerful statistical analysis of election results, the authors show that the political election game failed to advance the causes of Ecuador’s poor or the movement’s own indigenous supporters. Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement is an extraordinarily valuable case study of Ecuador’s indigenous movement and the challenges it still faces.

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Pachamama Politics
Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador
Teresa A. Velásquez
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change. The extraordinary move coincided with the rise of neoextractivism, where the self-described socialist President Rafael Correa contended that Buen Vivir could be achieved through controversial mining projects on Indigenous and campesino territories, including their watersheds.

Pachamama Politics provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Teresa A. Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement—alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands—to expose the rifts between social movements and the “pink tide” government. When the promise of social change turns to state criminalization of water defenders, Velásquez argues that the contradictions of neoextractivism created the political conditions for campesinos to reconsider their relationship to indigeneity.

The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.
 
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Pachangas
Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing
By Margaret E. Dorsey
University of Texas Press, 2006

A uniquely Tejano version of the old-fashioned political barbeque, the traditional South Texas pachanga allowed politicians to connect with voters in a relaxed setting where all could enjoy live music and abundant food and drink along with political speeches and dealmaking. Today's pachanga still combines politics, music, and votes—along with a powerful new element. Corporate sponsorships have transformed the pachanga into a major marketing event, replete with celebrity performers and product giveaways, which can be recorded and broadcast on TV or radio to vastly increase the reach of the political—and the commercial—messages.

This book explores the growing convergence of politics, transnational marketing, and borderlands music in the South Texas pachanga. Anthropologist Margaret Dorsey has observed some one hundred pachangas and interviewed promoters, politicians, artists, and local people. She investigates how candidates and corporations market their products to Hispanic consumers, as well as how the use of traditional music for marketing is altering traditional forms such as the corrido. Her multifaceted study also shows clearly that the lines of influence run both ways—while corporate culture is transforming the traditions of the border, Tejano voters/consumers only respond to marketing appeals (whether for politicians or products) that resonate with their values and the realities of their lives. Far from being an example of how transnational marketing homogenizes culture, the pachanga demonstrates that local cultures can exert an equally strong influence on multinational corporations.

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Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson
Situated Border Lives
Laura L. Cummings
University of Arizona Press, 2009
When the Zoot Suit Riots ignited in Los Angeles in 1943, they quickly became headline news across the country. At their center was a series of attacks by U.S. Marines and sailors on young Mexican American men who dressed in distinctive suits and called themselves pachucos. The media of the day portrayed these youths as miscreants and hoodlums. Even though the outspoken First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, quickly labeled them victims of race riots, the initial portrayal has distorted images ever since. A surprising amount of scholarship has reinforced those images, writes Laura Cummings, proceeding from what she calls “the deviance school of thought.”

This innovative study examines the pachuco phenomenon in a new way. Exploring its growth in Tucson, Arizona, the book combines ethnography, history, and sociolinguistics to contextualize the early years of the phenomenon, its diverse cultural roots, and its language development in Tucson.

Unlike other studies, it features first-person research with men and women who—despite a wide span of ages—self-identify as pachucos and pachucas. Through these interviews and her archival research, the author finds that pachuco culture has deep roots in Tucson and the Southwest. And she discovers the importance of the pachuco/caló language variety to a shared sense of pachuquismo. Further, she identifies previously neglected pachuco ties to indigenous Indian languages and cultures in Mexico and the United States.

Cummings stresses that the great majority of people conversant with the culture and language do not subscribe to the dynamics of contemporary hardcore gangs, but while zoot suits are no longer the rage today, the pachuco language and sensibilities do live on in Mexican American communities across the Southwest and throughout the United States.
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Pachuco
An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in Tucson, Arizona
George Carpenter Barker
University of Arizona Press, 1969
George Carpenter Barker's first major research project was field work in Tucson, Arizona on the function of language in a situation of culture contact. The results of his doctoral dissertation, "Social Functions of Language in a Mexican-American Community." The data and conclusions presented in his dissertation showed his perceptiveness in cross-cultural situations.

He conducted additional field work on the social functions of language in cross-cultural situations in Tucson in 1947-48. This work centered around interviews with Mexican-American youths. Barker's quiet friendliness and understanding won the confidence of boys who were operating at the fringes, and who were his informants for this Pachuco study.
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Pacific Apostle
The 1920-21 Diary of David O. McKay in the Latter-day Saint Island Missions
David O. McKay, Edited by Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In 1920, David O. McKay embarked on a journey that forever changed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His visits to the Latter-day Saint missions, schools, and branches in the Pacific solidified the Church leadership's commitment to global outreach. As importantly, the trip inspired McKay's own initiatives when he later became Church president. McKay's account of his odyssey brings to life the story of the Church of Jesus Christ’s transformation into a global faith. Throughout his diary, McKay expressed his humanity, curiosity, and fascination with cultures and places--the Maori hongi, East Asian customs, Australian wildlife, and more. At the same time, he and his travel companion, Hugh J. Cannon, detailed the Latter-day Saint missionary life of the era, closely observing logistical challenges and cultural differences, guiding various church efforts, and listening to followers' impressions and concerns. Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher's meticulous notes provide historical, religious, and general context for the reader.Blending travelogue with history, Pacific Apostle illuminates the thought and work of an essential figure in the twentieth-century Church of Jesus Christ.
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Pacific Blitzkrieg
World War II in the Central Pacific
Sharon Tosi Lacey
University of North Texas Press, 2013

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Pacific Citizens
Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era
Edited, with and Introduction and Notes, by Greg Robinson: Foreword by Harry Honda
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Offering a window into a critical era in Japanese American life, Pacific Citizens collects key writings of Larry S. Tajiri, a multitalented journalist, essayist, and popular culture maven. He and his wife, Guyo, who worked by his side, became leading figures in Nisei political life as the central purveyors of news for and about Japanese Americans during World War II, both those confined in government camps and others outside.
 
The Tajiris made the community newspaper the Pacific Citizen a forum for liberal and progressive views on politics, civil rights, and democracy, insightfully addressing issues of assimilation, multiracialism, and U.S. foreign relations. Through his editorship of the Pacific Citizen as well as in articles and columns in outside media, Larry Tajiri became the Japanese American community's most visible spokesperson, articulating a broad vision of Nisei identity to a varied audience.
 
In this thoughtfully framed and annotated volume, Greg Robinson interprets and examines the contributions of the Tajiris through a selection of writings, columns, editorials, and correspondence from before, during, and after the war. Pacific Citizens contextualizes the Tajiris' output, providing a telling portrait of these two dedicated journalists and serving as a reminder of the public value of the ethnic community press.
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Pacific Crossing
California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong
Elizabeth Sinn
Hong Kong University Press, 2014
During the nineteenth century tens of thousands of Chinese men and women crossed the Pacific to work, trade, and settle in California. Drawn initially by the gold rush, they took with them skills and goods and a view of the world which, though still Chinese, was transformed by their long journeys back and forth. They in turn transformed Hong Kong, their main point of embarkation, from a struggling infant colony into a prosperous international port and the cultural center of a far-ranging Chinese diaspora. Making use of extensive research in archives around the world, Pacific Crossing charts the rise of Chinese Gold Mountain firms engaged in all kinds of transpacific trade, especially the lucrative export of prepared opium and other luxury goods. Challenging the traditional view that the migration was primarily a “coolie trade,” Elizabeth Sinn uncovers leadership and agency among the many Chinese who made the crossing. In presenting Hong Kong as an “in-between place” of repeated journeys and continuous movement, Sinn also offers a fresh view of the British colony and a new paradigm for migration studies.
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Pacific Northwest Cheese
A History
Tami Parr
Oregon State University Press, 2013
In this rich and engaging history, Tami Parr shows how regional cheesemaking found its way back to the farm. It’s a lively story that begins with the first fur traders in the Pacific Northwest and ends with modern-day small farmers in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

For years, farmers in the Pacific Northwest made and sold cheese to support themselves, but over time the craft of cheesemaking became a profitable industry and production was consolidated into larger companies and cooperatives. Eventually, few individual cheesemakers were left in the region. In the late sixties and early seventies, influenced by the counterculture and back-to-the-land movements, the number of small farms and cheesemakers began to grow, initiating an artisan cheese renaissance that continues today.

Along with documenting the history of cheese in the region, Parr reveals some of the Pacific Northwest’s untold cheese stories: the fresh cheese made on the Oregon Trail, the region’s thriving blue cheese and regional swiss cheese makers, and the rise of goat’s milk and goat’s milk cheese (not the modern phenomenon many assume it to be).
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The Pacific Northwest Coast
Living with the Shores of Oregon and Washington
Paul D. Komar
Duke University Press, 1998
While the coast of the Pacific Northwest becomes populated with houses, condominiums, motels, and restaurants, its beaches and cliffs continue to be altered by ocean currents and winter storms. A companion volume to Living with the Shore of Puget Sound and the Georgia Strait, The Pacific Northwest Coast serves as a source of information about the coast of the Pacific Northwest, its geological setting, the natural responses of beaches and cliffs to ocean processes, and the ever-present problem of erosion.
In this guide, Paul D. Komar, one of the nation’s leading coastal oceanographers, examines the lessons taught by ages of geological and cultural history. With explanations of the area’s geological evolution, including natural shoreline erosion and sea-cliff landsliding, Komar details human interaction with the coast: erosion caused by early settlers, the development and destruction of Bayocean Spit, the disastrous effects caused by the 1982–1983 El Niño, and the notorious failure of a construction project on the picturesqueæbut unstableæbluffs at Jump-Off Joe. Emphasizing the actual and potential harm to human projects and to the natural heritage of the coast, Komar provides the knowledge necessary for finding a safe home near the shore while preserving the beauty that draws us to it.
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Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925
Lives, Memories, and Writings
Jean M. Ward
Oregon State University Press, 1997

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Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925
Lives, Memories, and Writings
Jean M. Ward
Oregon State University Press, 1995

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Pacific Pioneers
Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80
John E. Van Sant
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Shipwrecked sailors, samurai seeking a material and sometimes spiritual education, and laborers seeking to better their economic situation: these early Japanese travelers to the West occupy a little-known corner of Asian American studies. Pacific Pioneers profiles the first Japanese who resided in the United States or the Kingdom of Hawaii for a substantial period of time and the Westerners who influenced their experiences.
 
Although Japanese immigrants did not start arriving in substantial numbers in the West until after 1880, in the previous thirty years a handful of key encounters helped shape relations between Japan and the United States. John E. Van Sant explores the motivations and accomplishments of these resourceful, sometimes visionary individuals who made important inroads into a culture quite different from their own and paved the way for the Issei and Nisei.
 
Pacific Pioneers  presents detailed biographical sketches of Japanese such as Joseph Heco, Niijima Jo, and the converts to the Brotherhood of the New Life and introduces the American benefactors, such as William Griffis, David Murray, and Thomas Lake Harris, who built relationships with their foreign visitors. Van Sant also examines the uneasy relations between Japanese laborers and sugar cane plantation magnates in Hawaii during this period and the shortlived Wakamatsu colony of Japanese tea and silk producers in California.
 
A valuable addition to the literature, Pacific Pioneers  brings to life a cast of colorful, long-forgotten characters while forging a critical link between Asian and Asian American studies.
 
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Pacific Possessions
The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts
Chris J. Thomas
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Reframes Polynesia and Melanesia through analysis of nineteenth-century travel writing
 
In Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, Chris J. Thomas expands the literary canon on Polynesia and Melanesia beyond the giants, such as Herman Melville and Jack London, to include travel narratives by British and American visitors. These accounts were widely read and reviewed when they first appeared but have largely been ignored by scholars. For the first time, Thomas defines these writings as a significant literary genre.
 
Recovering these works allows us to reconceive of nineteenth-century Oceania as a vibrant hub of cultural interchange. Pacific Possessions recaptures the polyphony of voices that enlivened this space through the writing of these travelers, while also paying attention to their Oceanian interlocutors. Each chapter centers on a Pacific cultural marker, what Thomas refers to as each writer’s “possession”: the Tongan tattoo, the Hawaiian hula, the Fijian cannibal fork, and  Robert Louis Stevenson’s cache of South Seas photographs.
 
Thomas analyzes how westerners formed narratives around these objects and what those objects meant within nineteenth-century Oceanian cultures. He argues that the accounts served to shape a version of Oceanian authenticity that persists today. The profiled traveler-writers had complex experiences, at times promoting exoticized exaggerations of so-called authentic Polynesian and Melanesian cultures and at other times genuinely engaging in cultural exchange. However, their views were ultimately compromised by a western lens. In Thomas’s words, “the authenticity is at once celebrated and written over.”
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Pacific Tremors
Richard Stern
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.
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Pacific Tremors
Richard Stern
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.
[more]

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Pacifica Radio 2E
Matthew Lasar
Temple University Press, 2000
In the public radio landscape, the Pacifica stations stand out as inn0ovators of diverse and controversial broadcasting. Pacifica's fifty years of struggle against social and political conformity began with a group of young men and women who hoped to change the world with a credo of non-violence. Pacifica Radio traces the cultural and political currents that shaped the first listener-supported radio station, KPFA FM in Berkeley, and accompanied Pacifica's gradual expansion into a 5 station network.

In this expanded paperback edition, Lasar provides a postscript ("A Crisis of Containment") that examines the external pressures and organizational problems within the Pacifica Foundation that led, in early 1999, to the police shutdown of network station KPFA. Lasar, an admittedly pro-KPFA partisan in the conflict, gives a first-person account, calling it "the worst crisis in the history of community radio."

Yet Pacifica Radio is about more than just the network's recent troubles. It is the story of visionary Lewis Hill and the small band of pacifists who in 1946, set out to build institutions that would promote dialogue between individuals and nations. KPFA took to the air in 1949 with stunningly unconventional programs that challenged the dreary cultural consensus of the Cold War. No one in the Bay Area, or anywhere else, had heard anything like it on the airwaves.

The first edition of Pacifica Radio, which made the San Francisco Chronicle's non-fiction bestseller list, was praised as "fascinating reading" by In These Times, "Lasar has an eye for paradox, irony and contradiction," wrote the Santa Rose Press Democrat, "but he is first and foremost an able and astute historian."
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Pack the Court!
A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion
Stephen M. Feldman
Temple University Press, 2021

The United States Supreme Court has numbered nine justices for the past 150 years. But that number is not fixed. With the Democrats controlling the House and Senate during the Biden presidency, they could add justices to the Supreme Court. But would court packing destroy the Court as an apolitical judicial institution? This is the crucial question Stephen Feldman addresses in his provocative book, Pack the Court! He uses a historical, analytical, and political argument to justify court-packing in general and Democratic court-packing more specifically.

Republicans and Democrats alike profess to worry that court-packing will destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial institution by injecting politics into a purely legal adjudicative process. But as Feldman’s insightful book shows, law and politics are forever connected in judicial interpretation and decision making. Pack the Court! insists that court packing is not the threat to the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy that many fear. Given this, Feldman argues that Democrats should pack the Court while they have the opportunity. Doing so might even strengthen the American people’s faith in the Court.

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Package Deal
Marriage, Work And Fatherhood In Men'S Lives
Nicholas W. Townsend
Temple University Press, 2002
In this important new work, Nicholas Townsend explores what men say about being fathers, and about what fatherhood means to them. He shows how men negotiate the prevailing cultural values about fatherhood, marriage, employment, and home ownership that he conceptualizes as a "package deal." Townsend identifies the conflicts and contradictions within the gendered expectations of men and fathers, and analyzes the social and economic contexts that make emotionally involved fathering an elusive ideal.Drawing on the lives and life stories of a group of men in their late forties who graduated from high school together in the early 1970s, The Package Deal demystifies culture's image of fatherhood in the United States. These men are depicted as neither villains nor victims, but as making their best efforts to achieve successful adult masculinity. This book shows what fathers really think about fatherhood, the division of labor between fathers and mothers, the gendered difference in expectations, and the privileging of the relationship between fathers and sons.These revealing accounts of how fatherhood fits into the rest of men's lives help us better understand what men can and cannot do as fathers. And they clearly illustrate that women are not alone in trying to "have it all" as they strive to combine work and family.
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Packaged Plants
Seductive Supplements and Metabolic Precarity in the Philippines
Anita Hardon and Michael Lim Tan
University College London, 2024
A tight ethnographic focus on the popularity and impact of overly processed plant-based foods and supplements in the Philippines.

Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Packaged Plants explores the intersectionality between health, economics, and environment in the Philippines, offering an absorbing ethnography and cultural history of how the production and consumption of plants for food and medicine have changed as well as how ultra-processed foods have become linked to health concerns, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity.
 
Part one of the book presents a comprehensive analysis scrutinizing the colonial influences, urbanization, nutritional policies, research programs, and neoliberal marketing strategies in the Philippines that have proliferated packaged plant-based products as food and medicines. Part two interweaves contemporary urban political ecology frameworks with medical anthropological perspectives within Puerto Princesa and elucidates the precarious circumstances compelling individuals to invest in supplements.
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Packaged Pleasures
How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire
Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor
University of Chicago Press, 2014
From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience.  Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction.

In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve into an uncharted chapter of American history, shedding new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience.  In the space of only a few decades, junk foods, cigarettes, movies, recorded sound, and thrill rides brought about a revolution in what it means to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch.  New techniques of boxing, labeling, and tubing gave consumers virtually unlimited access to pleasures they could simply unwrap and enjoy. Manufacturers generated a seemingly endless stream of sugar-filled, high-fat foods that were delicious but detrimental to health.  Mechanically rolled cigarettes entered the market and quickly addicted millions.  And many other packaged pleasures dulled or displaced natural and social delights. Yet many of these same new technologies also offered convenient and effective medicines, unprecedented opportunities to enjoy music and the visual arts, and more hygienic, varied, and nutritious food and drink. For better or for worse, sensation became mechanized, commercialized, and, to a large extent, democratized by being made cheap and accessible. Cross and Proctor have delivered an ingeniously constructed history of consumerism and consumer technology that will make us all rethink some of our favorite things.
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The Packhorseman
Charles Hudson
University of Alabama Press, 2009
In April 1735, twenty-year-old William MacGregor, possessing little more than a bottle of Scotch whiskey and a set of Shakespeare’s plays, arrives in Charles Town, South Carolina, to make his fortune in the New World. The Scottish Highlands, while dear to his heart, were in steep economic decline and hopelessly entangled in dangerous political intrigue. With an uncle in Carolina, the long ocean voyage seemed his best chance for a new start. He soon discovers that the Jacobite politics of Scotland extend to Carolina, and when his mouth gets him in trouble with the Charles Town locals, dimming his employment opportunities, he seizes the one option still open for him and takes a job as a frontier packhorseman.
 
Soon young MacGregor is on the Cherokee trail to Indian country, where he settles in as a novice in the deerskin trade. Along the way William learns not only the arts of managing a pack train and trading with the Indians, but of reading the land and negotiating cultural differences with the Cherokee—whose clan system is much different from the Scottish clans of his homeland. William also learns that the Scottish enlightenment he so admires has not made much headway in the Carolina backcountry, where the real challenges are to survive, day to day, during the tense times after the Yamasee War and to remember that while in Indian country . . . it is their country.
 
A scholar of the native Southeast, Charles Hudson has turned his hand to this work of historical fiction, bringing to life the packhorsemen, Indian traders, and southeastern Indians of the early 18th-century Carolina. With a comfortable and engaging style, Hudson peoples the Carolina frontier with believable characters, all caught up in a life and time that is historically well-documented but little-known to modern popular readers.
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Packrat Middens
The Last 40,000 Years of Biotic Change
Edited by Julio L. Betancourt, Thomas R. Van Devender, and Paul S. Martin
University of Arizona Press, 1990
Over the past thirty years, late Quaternary environments in the arid interior of western North America have been revealed by a unique source of fossils: well-preserved fragments of plants and animals accumulated locally by packrats and quite often encased, amberlike, in large masses of crystallized urine. These packrat middens are ubiquitous in caves and rock crevices throughout the arid West, where they can lie preserved for tens of thousands of years. More than a thousand of these deposits have been dated and analyzed, and middens have supplanted pollen records as a touchstone for studying vegetation dynamics and climatic change in radiocarbon time (the last 40,000 years). Now, similar deposits made by other mammals like hyraxes are being reported from other parts of the world.

This book brings together the findings and views of many of the researchers investigating fossil middens in the United States, Mexico, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. The contributions serve to open a forum for methodological concerns, update the fossil record of various geographic regions, introduce new applications, and display the vast potential for fossil midden analysis in arid regions worldwide. The findings presented here will serve to foster regional research and to promote general studies devoted to global climate change. Included in the text are more than two hundred charts, photographs, and maps.
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Packy Jim
Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border
Ray Cashman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Growing up on a secluded smuggling route along the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic, Packy Jim McGrath regularly heard the news, songs, and stories of men and women who stopped to pass the time until cover of darkness. In his early years, he says, he was all ears—but now it is his turn to talk.

Ray Cashman, who has been interviewing McGrath for more than fifteen years, demonstrates how Packy Jim embellishes daily conversation with stories of ghosts and fairies, heroic outlaws and hateful landlords. Such folklore is a boundless resource that he uses to come to grips with the past and present, this world and the next. His stories reveal an intricate worldview that is both idiosyncratic and shared—a testament to individual intelligence and talent, and a window into Irish vernacular culture.
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The Pact
Jennifer Militello
Tupelo Press, 2021
In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello’s trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.
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Paddle Whispers
Douglas Wood
University of Minnesota Press, 2005

And so begins a journey—not only an exploration of rapids, lakes, and forests, but also an inner journey of discovery. Through poetic text and drawings, woven gracefully with quotes by John Muir, Walking Buffalo, Sigurd F. Olson, Henry David Thoreau, and others, Douglas Wood traces a journey by paddle and canoe that renews the spirit.

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A Paddler's Guide to the Delaware River
Kayaking, Canoeing, Rafting, Tubing
Letcher, Gary
Rutgers University Press, 2012

When Henry Hudson explored the Delaware River in 1609, he dubbed it “one of the finest, best, and pleasantest rivers in the world.” Today, those same qualities make the Delaware one of the most popular rivers for recreational use in the United States. Although in places a near-wilderness, the Delaware is easily accessible to millions of residents. On any summer day there may be thousands of people rushing down its exciting rapids or lazing through its serene eddies.

A Paddler’s Guide to the Delaware River is an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to experience the Delaware River in a kayak, canoe, raft, or tube—or, for that matter, an automobile or an armchair. Reading the book is like travelling down the river with an experienced guide. It charts the non-tidal Delaware 200 miles from Hancock, New York, to Trenton, New Jersey, describing access points, rapids, natural features, villages, historical sites, campgrounds, outfitters, and restaurants. The Delaware comes alive as the author introduces some of the people, places, events, and  controversies that have marked the river from earliest times to the present day.
Completely revised, the third edition offers:

  • An overview of the river including watershed, history, place names, paddlecraft, safety, and fishing.
  • The River Guide: ten sections that can each be paddled in one day (about 20 miles), with a mile-by-mile account of rapids, access, natural features, historic sites, and other features.
  • All new maps, with names for virtually every rapid, eddy, and other river feature, plus detailed diagrams for routes through even the most severe rapids.
  • Features in the River Guide highlight the people, events, natural history, and communities that define the river experience, such as Tom Quick, the infamous “avenger of the Delaware”; the mysterious migration of eels, the battle over Tocks Island Dam; and many others.
  • Appendices of Important Contacts, Outfitters and Campgrounds, River Trip Checklists, and more.

Whether you are a novice out for an afternoon float, a seasoned adventurer on an overnight expedition, or a resident fascinated by the lore of the Delaware Valley, this book is an invaluable guide.

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The Paddy Camps
The Irish of Lowell, 1821-61
Brian C. Mitchell
University of Illinois Press, 1988

The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish community

Disdained by many Yankee residents as Catholic lowlifes, the growing Irish population of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “paddy camps” in the nineteenth century proved a tempting source of cheap labor for local mill owners, who took advantage of the immigrants’ proximity to exploit them to the fullest. Displaced by their cheaper labor, other workers blamed the Irish for job losses and added to their plight through repression and segregation.

Now in paperback and featuring a new preface, Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps demonstrates how the Irish community in Lowell overcame adversity to develop strong religious institutions, an increased political presence, and a sense of common traditions.

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PADRES
The National Chicano Priest Movement
By Richard Edward Martínez
University of Texas Press, 2005

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society.

This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.

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Pagan Christmas
Winter Feasts of the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush
Augusto S. Cacopardo
Gingko, 2017
This authoritative work sheds light on the religious world of the Kalasha people of the Birir valley in the Chitral district of Pakistan, focusing on their winter feasts, which culminate every year in a great winter solstice festival. The Kalasha are not only the last example of a pre-Islamic culture in the Hindu Kush and Karakorum mountains but also practice the last observable example anywhere in the world of an archaic Indo-European religion. In this book, Augusto S. Cacopardo takes readers inside the world of the Kalasha people.
Cacopardo outlines the history and culture of this ancient but still extant people. Exploring an array of relevant literature, he enriches our understanding of their practices and beliefs through illuminating comparisons with both the Indian religious world and the religious folklore of Europe. Bringing together several disciplinary approaches and drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this book offers the first extended study of this little-known but fascinating Kalasha community. It will take its place as a standard international reference source on the anthropology, ethnography, and history of religions in Pakistan and Central South Asia.
 
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Paganism - Christianity - Judaism
A Confession of Faith
Max Brod, translated by William Wolfe, introduction by Eric Gottgetreu
University of Alabama Press, 1970

Now remembered primarily as Franz Kafta's friend and literary executor, Max Brod was an accomplishered thinker and writer in his own right. In this volume, he considers the nature and differences between Judaism and Christianity, addressing some of the most perplexing questions at the heart of human existence.

“One of the most famous and widely discussed books of the 1920’s, Max Brod’s Paganism—Christianity—Judaism, has at last found its way into English translation to confront a new generation of readers. Max Brod is best remembered today as the literary editor and friend of Franz Kafka. In his day, however, he was the more famous of the two by far. A major novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and composer, he was also, as this book demonstrates, a serious thinker on the perennial questions that are at the heart of human existence. . . .Some of his judgments are open to question. Still, with all its limitations, this is a forthright and passionate proclamation of the uniqueness of Judaism. Paganism—Christianity—Judaism was an intellectual and spiritual event when it was first published and it remains a valuable document even now.” —Rabbi Jack Riemer, Hadassah
 

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Pagans and Christians in the Late Roman Empire
New Evidence, New Approaches (4th–8th centuries)
Marianne Sághy
Central European University Press, 2017
Do the terms 'pagan' and 'Christian,' 'transition from paganism to Christianity' still hold as explanatory devices to apply to the political, religious and cultural transformation experienced Empire-wise? Revisiting 'pagans' and 'Christians' in Late Antiquity has been a fertile site of scholarship in recent years: the paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between 'pagans' and 'Christians' replaced the old 'conflict model' with a subtler, complex approach and triggered the upsurge of new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion. This collection of essays, inscribes itself into the revisionist discussion of pagan-Christian relations over a broad territory and time-span, the Roman Empire from the fourth to the eighth century. A set of papers argues that if 'paganism' had never been fully extirpated or denied by the multiethnic educated elite that managed the Roman Empire, 'Christianity' came to be presented by the same elite as providing a way for a wider group of people to combine true philosophy and right religion. The speed with which this happened is just as remarkable as the long persistence of paganism after the sea-change of the fourth century that made Christianity the official religion of the State. For a long time afterwards, 'pagans' and 'Christians' lived 'in between' polytheistic and monotheist traditions and disputed Classical and non-Classical legacies.
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A Page of Madness
Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan
Aaron Gerow
University of Michigan Press, 2008
Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 film A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji) is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema. It was an independently produced, experimental, avant-garde work from Japan whose brilliant use of cinematic technique was equal to if not superior to that of contemporary European cinema. Those studying Japan, focusing on the central involvement of such writers as Yokomitsu Riichi and the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, have seen it as a pillar of the close relationship in the Taisho era between film and artistic modernism, as well as a marker of the uniqueness of prewar Japanese film culture.
But is this film really what it seems to be? Aaron Gerow brings meticulous research to the film’s production, distribution, exhibition, and reception and closely analyzes the film’s shooting script and shooting notes, which were recently made available. He draws a new picture of this complex work, revealing a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and melodrama, the image and the word, cinema and literature, conflicts that play out in the story and structure of the film and its context. A Page of Madness, a film fundamentally about differing perceptions and conflicting worlds, was received at the time in different versions and with varying interpretations, and ironically, the film that exists today is not in fact the one originally released. Including a detailed analysis of the film and translations of contemporary reviews and shooting notes for scenes missing from the current print, Gerow’s book offers provocative insight into the fascinating film A Page of Madness was—and still is—and into the struggles over this work that tried to articulate the place of cinema in Japanese society and modernity.
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Page to Stage
The Craft of Adaptation
Vincent Murphy
University of Michigan Press, 2013

At last, for those who adapt literature into scripts, a how-to book that illuminates the process of creating a stageworthy play. Page to Stage describes the essential steps for constructing adaptations for any theatrical venue, from the college classroom to a professionally produced production. Acclaimed director Vincent Murphy offers students in theater, literary studies, and creative writing a clear and easy-to-use guidebook on adaptation. Its step-by-step process will be valuable to professional theater artists as well, and for script writers in any medium. Murphy defines six essential building blocks and strategies for a successful adaptation, including theme, dialogue, character, imagery, storyline, and action. Exercises at the end of each chapter lead readers through the transformation process, from choosing their material to creating their own adaptations. The book provides case studies of successful adaptations, including The Grapes of Wrath (adaptation by Frank Galati) and the author's own adaptations of stories by Samuel Beckett and John Barth. Also included is practical information on building collaborative relationships, acquiring rights, and getting your adaptation produced.

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Pages from Hopi History
Harry C. James
University of Arizona Press, 1974
"More than half a century of contact between the author and the Hopi people has resulted in an unusual opportunity for long informative talks with friends from the villages. These conversations in a variety of circumstances have helped to give depth to an understanding and appreciation uncommon among persons not born and raised in the Hopi way. . . . This work gives a comprehensive view of the Hopi as a people, in length of time covered as well as in depth and breadth."—Utah Historical Quarterly

"It is personal yet precise, emotional and involved, yet objective and factual. . . . Readers who know something of Hopi history will be fascinated by the new insights and interpretations presented by James."—Arizona and the West

"The author has been an active supporter of Hopi interests for some fifty years and this book is as much a testimony to his unflagging personal devotion to a small and neglected tribe as it is a history of the Hopis' determination to maintain their identity and self-respect."—Journal of Arizona History

"Harry James writes with sympathy and restraint about a proud people who have suffered unjustly in the past, and who today are seeking an identity. He brings into sharp focus the dreams for tomorrow of the Hopi tribe. Let these dreams be shared by others before it is too late."—The American West

"An amazing and gripping account of a very great and intelligent people, concentrating on fact rather than the fantastic legends that have grown up around this unique culture."—The Masterkey

"The Hopi are indeed a most interesting people, and this authentic account of their way of life is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Indian tribes of Arizona."—The Book Exchange

"For an excellent account of the history of the Hopi, the Southwest, typical government intervention into tribal affairs and the lives of the people . . . a must for any library."—Whispering Winds
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The Pages of Day and Night
Adonis
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Calling poetry a "question that begets another question," Adonis sets into motion this stream of unending inquiry with difficult questions about exile, identity, language, politics, and religion. Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry.

Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.
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Paging God
Religion in the Halls of Medicine
Wendy Cadge
University of Chicago Press, 2012
While the modern science of medicine often seems nothing short of miraculous, religion still plays an important role in the past and present of many hospitals. When three-quarters of Americans believe that God can cure people who have been given little or no chance of survival by their doctors, how do today’s technologically sophisticated health care organizations address spirituality and faith?
 
Through a combination of interviews with nurses, doctors, and chaplains across the United States and close observation of their daily routines, Wendy Cadge takes readers inside major academic medical institutions to explore how today’s doctors and hospitals address prayer and other forms of religion and spirituality.  From chapels to intensive care units to the morgue, hospital caregivers speak directly in these pages about how religion is part of their daily work in visible and invisible ways. In Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, Cadge shifts attention away from the ongoing controversy about whether faith and spirituality should play a role in health care and back to the many ways that these powerful forces already function in healthcare today.
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Paging God
Religion in the Halls of Medicine
Wendy Cadge
University of Chicago Press, 2012
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

While the modern science of medicine often seems nothing short of miraculous, religion still plays an important role in the past and present of many hospitals. When three-quarters of Americans believe that God can cure people who have been given little or no chance of survival by their doctors, how do today’s technologically sophisticated health care organizations address spirituality and faith?
 
Through a combination of interviews with nurses, doctors, and chaplains across the United States and close observation of their daily routines, Wendy Cadge takes readers inside major academic medical institutions to explore how today’s doctors and hospitals address prayer and other forms of religion and spirituality.  From chapels to intensive care units to the morgue, hospital caregivers speak directly in these pages about how religion is part of their daily work in visible and invisible ways. In Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, Cadge shifts attention away from the ongoing controversy about whether faith and spirituality should play a role in health care and back to the many ways that these powerful forces already function in healthcare today.
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Paging New Jersey
A Literary Guide to the Garden State
Broderick, James F
Rutgers University Press, 2003

For 300 years, New Jersey writers, books, and historical events have helped shape the cultural landscape of the nation, and yet the state is rarely credited for its numerous contributions to American letters and folklore.  Paging New Jersey is just the book for those interested in uncovering a treasure trove of information about the Garden State’s key role in the creation of U.S. literary and popular culture.  New Jersey writers from Stephen Crane to Toni Morrison are included as well as longtime Camden resident Walt Whitman and Newark native Philip Roth.

James F. Broderick’s unique look at  the state’s literary and cultural history answers intriguing Jersey-related questions such as: how author Peter Benchley got the idea for Jaws; where Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton; why the Hindenberg exploded over Lakehurst in 1937; and where to find help in locating Captain Kidd’s buried treasure along the Jersey Shore.  Most people know that television’s fictional Tony Soprano lives in New Jersey, but what about the state’s other mobsters— The real “goombahs?”  Who are they and what have these particular Jersey devils written?

Full of commentary, biographical information, and history—along with suggested reading lists— Paging New Jersey is a crash course in Jerseyana.  For those who live in the state, expatriots, and yes, even those who think all New Jersey has to offer is the Turnpike, Broderick’s engaging yet learned book provides an entertaining look at the Garden State’s rich cultural heritage.

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Paid to Care
Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture
Rachel Randall
University of Texas Press, 2023

An insight into the struggles of paid domestic workers in Latin America through an exploration of films, texts, and digital media produced since the 1980s in collaboration with them or inspired by their experiences.

Paid domestic work in Latin America is often undervalued, underpaid, and underregulated. Exploring a wave of Latin American cultural texts since the 1980s that draw on the personal experiences of paid domestic work or intimate ties to domestic employees, Paid to Care offers insights into the struggles domestic workers face through an analysis of literary testimonials, documentary and fiction films, and works of digital media.

From domestic workers’ experiences of unionization in the 1980s to calls for their rights to be respected today, the cultural texts analyzed in Paid to Care provide additional insight into public debates about paid domestic work. Rachel Randall examines work made in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The most recent of these texts respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, which put many domestic workers’ health and livelihoods at risk. Engaging with the legal histories of domestic work in multiple distinct national contexts, Randall demonstrates how the legacy of colonialism and slavery shapes the profession even today. Focusing on personal or coproduced cultural representations of domestic workers, Paid to Care explores complex ethical issues relating to consent, mediation, and appropriation.

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Paid to Party
Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales
Mullaney, Jamie L
Rutgers University Press, 2012

On any given night in living rooms across America, women gather for a fun girls’ night out to eat, drink, and purchase the latest products—from Amway to Mary Kay cosmetics. Beneath the party atmosphere lies a billion-dollar industry, Direct Home Sales (DHS), which is currently changing how women navigate work and family.

Drawing from numerous interviews with consultants and observations at company-sponsored events, Paid to Party takes a closer look at how DHS promises to change the way we think and feel about the struggles of balancing work and family. Offering a new approach to a flexible work model, DHS companies tell women they can, in fact, have it all and not feel guilty. In DHS, work time is not measured by the hands of the clock, but by the emotional fulfillment and fun it brings.

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Pain and Profits
The History of the Headache and Its Remedies in America
McTavish, Jan R.
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Pain and Profits tells the story of how a common ailment—the headache—became the center of a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Despite the increasing authority of the medical profession in the twentieth century, treatment of this condition has remained largely in the hands of the public. Using the headache as a case study, and advertising as a significant source of information, Jan McTavish traces the beginnings of the modern over-the-counter industry.

The American pharmaceutical industry developed from nineteenth-century suppliers of plant-derived drugs for both professional and home care. Two branches of the industry evolved over time—the ethical branch, which sold products only with prescriptions, and the nostrum branch, which was noted for its energetic marketing techniques. At the end of the century, they were joined by German companies that combined a strong commitment to science with aggressive salesmanship. Since German drugs were both highly effective in treating headaches and commonly available, sufferers wanting quick relief could easily obtain them. The result was a new kind of “legitimate” pharmaceutical industry that targeted consumers directly.

Historians of medicine as well as more general readers interested in the history of the headache will enjoy this fascinating account of the creation of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

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Pain and Shock in America
Politics, Advocacy, and the Controversial Treatment of People with Disabilities
Jan Nisbet
Brandeis University Press, 2021
The first book to be written on the Judge Rotenberg Center and their use of painful interventions to control the behavior of children and adults with disabilities.

For more than forty years, professionals in the field of disability studies have engaged in debates over the use of aversive interventions (such as electric shock) like the ones used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Advocates and lawyers have filed complaints and lawsuits to both use them and ban them, scientists have written hundreds of articles for and against them, and people with disabilities have lost their lives and, some would say, lived their lives because of them. There are families who believe deeply in the need to use aversives to control their children’s behavior. There are others who believe the techniques used are torture. All of these families have children who have been excluded from numerous educational and treatment programs because of their behaviors. For most of the families, placement at the Judge Rotenberg Center is the last resort.

This book is a historical case study of the Judge Rotenberg Center, named after the judge who ruled in favor of keeping its doors open to use aversive interventions. It chronicles and analyzes the events and people involved for over forty years that contributed to the inability of the state of Massachusetts to stop the use of electric shock, and other severe forms of punishment on children and adults with disabilities. It is a long story, sad and tragic, complex, filled with intrigue and questions about society and its ability to protect and support its most vulnerable citizens.
 
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The Pain and the Itch
A Play
Bruce Norris
Northwestern University Press, 2008

In this brief but staggering two-act, playwright Norris demonstrates his skill at drawing out the dark truth that lurks beneath the surface of the “perfect” family. His crackling satire takes dead aim at the self-satisfied, left-leaning American upper-middle class and its many self-delusions.

On a winter afternoon, Kelly and Clay—an attractive, prosperous, seemingly happy couple with a four-year-old daughter and a newborn baby—must explain to a visitor the events of the previous Thanksgiving, on which, so it seems, someone or something had been gnawing at the avocados on their kitchen table. In the course of this holiday gathering—attended by Clay’s mother, a well-meaning but clueless first-grade teacher who spouts pointless liberal bromides; his brother, a plastic surgeon with a nihilistic streak and a taste for martinis; and his brother's girlfriend, a sexy Balkan immigrant with a love for all things American (racism included)—the recent past is unearthed along with revelations of failed marriages, fraternal hatred, infidelity and venereal disease, in the form of their daughter’s nasty genital infection. And it’s a comedy. As the story is gradually unfolded to their visitor, a Muslim cab driver, his relationship to the events becomes increasingly clear, as does the emptiness of the family’s supposed benevolence and sensitivity.

With its crashing emotion and cutting humor, this vicious dissection of the comfortable progressive life lays bare the lies that people use to feel righteous even as they veer off a genuinely ethical path.

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Pain, Death, and the Law
Austin Sarat, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2001
This collection of essays examines the relationship between pain, death, and the law and addresses the question of how the law constructs pain and death as jurisprudential facts. The empirical focus of these essays enables the reader to delve into both the history and the theoretical complexities of the pain-death-law relationship. The combination of the theoretical and the empirical broadens the contribution this volume will undoubtedly make to debates in which the right to live or die is the core issue at hand.
This volume will be an important read for policy makers and legal practitioners and a valuable text for courses in law, the social sciences, and the humanities.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College.
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Pain in Relation
On Causality, Chronicity, and (Crip) Evidence
Alyson Patsavas
University of Michigan Press, 2026

Pain in Relation: On Causality, Chronicity, and (Crip) Evidence argues that the dominant stories circulating within contemporary US culture are marked by seemingly contradictory certainties: pain is at once subjective yet universal; that pain makes life unlivable and can be overcome with perseverance.  These certainties graft onto pained people into impossible imperatives: the imperatives to live “despite” our pain and to defend the value of lives imagined to be compromised “because of” it. Alyson Patsavas outlines the harm these imperatives cause and draws on feminist, queer, and disability theory to offer alternative frameworks for making sense of and relating to pain.

The study fleshes out “crip autotheory” and experiments with evidencing practices, using anecdotes, journal entries, personal reflections, list-making, and photography to map “cripistemologies of pain,” or critical, disability-informed experiential ways of knowing pain.  Equal parts cultural critique, intimate portrait of pained life, and commentary, Pain in Relation invites readers to challenge what they think they know about pain and explore new ways of relating to pain, pained life, and the futures we imagine for pained people.

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Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good
From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond
Cathy Gere
University of Chicago Press, 2017
How should we weigh the costs and benefits of scientific research on humans? Is it right that a small group of people should suffer in order that a larger number can live better, healthier lives? Or is an individual truly sovereign, unable to be plotted as part of such a calculation?
 
These are questions that have bedeviled scientists, doctors, and ethicists for decades, and in Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good, Cathy Gere presents the gripping story of how we have addressed them over time. Today, we are horrified at the idea that a medical experiment could be performed on someone without consent. But, as Gere shows, that represents a relatively recent shift: for more than two centuries, from the birth of utilitarianism in the eighteenth century, the doctrine of the greater good held sway. If a researcher believed his work would benefit humanity, then inflicting pain, or even death, on unwitting or captive subjects was considered ethically acceptable. It was only in the wake of World War II, and the revelations of Nazi medical atrocities, that public and medical opinion began to change, culminating in the National Research Act of 1974, which mandated informed consent. Showing that utilitarianism is based in the idea that humans are motivated only by pain and pleasure, Gere cautions that that greater good thinking is on the upswing again today and that the lesson of history is in imminent danger of being lost.
 
Rooted in the experiences of real people, and with major consequences for how we think about ourselves and our rights, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good is a dazzling, ambitious history.
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Paint
Grace Tiffany
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013

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Paint and Canvas
A Life of T. C. Steele
Rachel Berenson Perry
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
At the age of fourteen, a young man in Waveland, Indiana, had taken over the family farm after the death of his father. Now responsible for taking care of his widowed mother and supporting his four brothers, he took up the reins on the plow to begin preparing the field for planting. Family legend has it that the young farmer, Theodore Clement Steele, tied “colored ribbons to the handles of the plow so that he could watch the ribbons in the wind and the effect that they had on the [surrounding] colors.” Recognizing Steele’s passion for art, his mother supported his choice to make his living as an artist. T. C. Steele, the eighth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series, traces the path of Steele’s career as an artist from his early studies in Germany to his determination to paint what he knew best, the Indiana landscape. Steele, along with fellow artists William Forsyth, Otto Stark, Richard Gruelle, and J. Ottis Adams, became a member of the renowned Hoosier Group and became a leader in the development of Midwestern art.
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The Painted Canoe
Anthony Winkler
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"You learn dat dis world don't love negar! And negar don't make for dis world!" Zachariah's mother warned him when he was still a boy. Yet, poor and abominably ugly, the Jamaican fisherman grasps lovingly for life, though the worst forces of nature conspire against him. Washed far out to sea in the night, Zachariah is attacked by a hammerhead shark, scorched by the Caribbean sun, hurled about by the sea which both frightens and entices him, and confused by his own encroaching madness. In a rare weave of humor and sadness, Zachariah forces himself to reflect on his life and the strangeness of chance, on anything but his place as a small man in a fragile boat in the boundless sea.

Still on land are the villagers, the woman, and the sons who comprise life for Zachariah. While he struggles with the forces of nature, the natural faith of the villagers encounters the incapacity for belief of the troubled English doctor. As the superstitions and certainties of Jamaican life and the consequences of science meet, Winkler reveals a rich understanding of the precarious balance between thought and reality, between the coincidental and the miraculous.

"This is one of those rare novels that announces its presence with such modest grace that the size of its ambition and accomplishments steals gently into the consciousness."—Michael Thelwell, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Winkler deftly unfurls his exquisitely written story, which is redolent of the colorful patois and chaotic flavor of rural Jamaican culture."—Bob Allen, Baltimore Sun
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The Painted Desert
Land of Wind and Stone
Text by Scott Thybony; Photographs by David Edwards
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Most people who are familiar with the Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona know it only from having pulled off at the Petrified Forest exit on Interstate 40. If they happen to come by it at midday, as most do, they find a landscape drained of color and flattened under the direct sunlight.

But this remote pocket of the Arizona desert, sandwiched between the Little Colorado River on one side and bold escarpments on the other, is much more than most tourists ever experience. An ethereal landscape of sculpted rock, wind-fluted cliffs, and elegantly drifting sand, the Painted Desert is a rich storehouse of natural beauty, colorful history, and scientific wonders. Here the strongest winds in Arizona blow across extensive dunefields, where less than ten inches of rain falls each year and only a few desert-savvy Navajo are able to live.

Now, for the first time award-winning writer Scott Thybony and freelance photographer David Edwards offer an intimate look at a place that remains inhospitable and inaccessible to so many. They share insights about the geology, paleontology, anthropology, and human history of the region as well as personal stories that dispel the misconceptions and mysteries that surround this delicate and difficult landscape.

With fifteen stunning photographs gracing the text, this book offers a vibrant portrait of one of the Southwest’s most barren, and most colorful landscapes.
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The Painted Forest
Krista Eastman
West Virginia University Press, 2019

Council for Wisconsin Writers, Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award winner

In this often-surprising book of essays, Krista Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from. The Painted Forest uncovers strange and little-known “home places”—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the “under-imagined and overly caricatured” Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.

The Painted Forest upends easy narratives of place, embracing tentativeness and erasing boundaries. But it is Eastman’s willingness to play—to follow her curiosity down every odd path, to exude a skeptical wonder—that gives this book depth and distinction. An unlikely array of people, places, and texts meet for close conversation, and tension is diffused with art, imagination, and a strong sense of there being some other way forward. Eastman offers a smart and contemporary take on how we wander and how we belong.

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Painting as a Way of Life
Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660
Richard Neer
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Neer uncovers a key moment in the history of early modern art, when painting was understood to be a tool for self-transformation and for living a philosophical life. 
 
In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer shows how French painters of the seventeenth century developed radically new ways to connect art, perception, and ethics. Cutting across traditional boundaries of classicism and realism, Neer addresses four case studies: Nicolas Poussin, renowned for marrying ancient philosophy and narrative painting; Louise Moillon, who pioneered French still life in the 1630s; Georges de La Tour, a painter of intense and introspective nocturnes; and the Brothers Le Nain, specialists in genre and portraiture who inspired Courbet, Manet, and other painters of modern life. Setting these artists in dialogue with Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and others, ranging from the studios of Rome to the streets of Paris, this book provides fresh accounts of essential artworks—some well-known, others neglected—and new ways to approach the relation of art, theory, and daily life. 
 
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Painting Culture
The Making of an Aboriginal High Art
Fred R. Myers
Duke University Press, 2002
Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often as a participant-observer—the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

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Painting, History and Meaning
Sites of Time
Craig Staff
Intellect Books, 2020

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events, ideas, and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past. Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism, and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela, and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between art and history. 

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Painting History
The Murals of Northern Ireland, 1908–2024
Tony Crowley
Amherst College Press, 2025
Painting History: The Murals of Northern Ireland, 1908–2024 is the first book-length study of the oldest and most enduring tradition of political wall art. Tony Crowley shows how muralism became an important medium for the unionist and loyalist community in its political domination of public space before and after Partition. The text also demonstrates that nationalists and republicans painted few murals before the start of the 1981 Hunger Strike, during which they painted wall art across republican areas of Northern Ireland as a way of publicizing their cause. In the context of a divided society, by the mid 1980s murals had become an established genre for the expression of political demands and aspirations.

In Painting History, Tony Crowley provides a detailed analysis of the complex tradition of muralism in the context of the history that produced it, with particular attention given to the cultural politics of this remarkable form. The book also raises and discusses a series of theoretical questions about murals and muralism that transcend Northern Ireland: issues of propriety and legality, form and content, authority and censorship. The work ends with a consideration of the future of the murals in a still polarized but changing region.

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Painting in Excess
Kyiv's Art Revival, 1985-1993
Olena Martynyuk
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The upheavals of glasnost and perestroika followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union remarkably transformed the art scene in Kyiv, launching Ukrainian contemporary art as a global phenomenon. The previously calm waters of the culturally provincial capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic became radically stirred with new and daring art made publicly visible for the first time since the avant-garde period of the early twentieth century. As artists were freed from the dictates of the fading Communist ideology and the constraints of late socialist realism, an explosion of styles emerged, creating an effect of baroque excess. This exhibition catalogue traces and documents the diverse artistic manifestations of these transitional and exhilarating years in Kyiv while providing some historical artworks for context. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
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The Painting of T'ang Yin
Anne De Coursey Clapp
University of Chicago Press, 1991
+This richly illustrated volume documents the art and fully examines the career of the sixteenth-century Chinese master T'ang Yin. One of the four great painters of the middle Ming period, the ambitious T'ang Yin rose above the merchant class into which he was born to become a member of the elite scholarly circle in the city of Suchou. Deprived by accident of his academic degrees and so forced to paint for a living, T'ang Yin became a social anomaly whose style of life cut across the conventions of his time. His experiences throw into sharp relief the realities faced by a Chinese painter who was both elite Confucian scholar and professional painter.

Anne De Coursey Clapp's work also explores larger issues of Ming painting raised by the artist's turbulent career. She describes the social and intellectual values exalted in Ming Suchou, its system of patronage, the contrast between the professional and amateur artist, and the formative influence of twelfth-century Sung dynasty styles on Suchou painters. Clapp shows how T'ang Yin's artistic inventions were made in the course of leading the revival of Sung dynasty styles in Suchou: tracing T'ang Yin's early studies of ancient and contemporary masters, she describes how he reworked an antique style, converting it into a vehicle of expression that reached fruition in a long series of fresh and powerful paintings of landscapes and birds-and-flowers. In the process, she revises the distorted version of middle Ming painting written by later Chinese art theorists to justify their own social and artistic values, noting especially the role of art patrons and their effect on artistic production.

Clapp analyzes the increasing currency of painting as a means of social exchange in ancient China. In particular, she identifies commemorative painting as a major genre of the later dynasties and explores the role it played in the oeuvres of professional masters with its humanistic implications for the Chinese view of the ideal scholarly man. Her broad view of T'ang Yin's career shows him divided between the professional and amateur camps of his time: in landscape and figural subjects he was aligned with the professionals; in flower subjects with the amateurs. Clap argues that the uneven distribution of styles and genres between this master who was subject to the market, and those who were independent of it, suggests that T'ang deliberately tried to expand the range of his paintings in order to appeal to buyers in the lower educational and social strata. Illustrated by some of T'ang Yin's most celebrated paintings and by some which are published for the first time, her work is of tremendous importance to art, literary, and cultural historians of Ming China.

"In this important work, Anne de Coursey Clapp has drawn a clear picture of T'ang Yin's life, patronage relationships, and contribution to the history of Chinese painting. In the person of T'ang Yin, she has chosen an ideal focus around which to examine some of the misleading stereotypes
which have distorted our understanding of Chinese painting since the seventeenth century. Marked by analytical clarity and scrupulous scholarship, her work is a welcome addition to the few works in English on individual Chinese artists."—Louise Yuhas, Occidental College
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Painting Paranoia
Cold War Art and Anti-Communism
Julia Tatiana Bailey
University of Illinois Press, 2026
During the interwar years, as the USSR was emerging as a formidable new power and the United States was asserting its final independence from Europe, Russian art began to appear in the United States, supported by the influx of émigrés escaping revolutionary turmoil. While revolutionary Russia was viewed with trepidation from across the Atlantic, the country’s creative output was initially entertained as an exotic oddity. Yet this sense of cultural alienation, based on the classical orientalizing narratives of the period, gave way to the fear of the Soviet Union as a cultural Other, which defined US-Soviet artistic relations throughout the twentieth century.

Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Russia, this manuscript contributes to the political history of twentieth-century American art and the revisionist history of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War by charting the politicization of myths of Soviet art. It reveals how those with control over the reception of art in the United States built and sustained a strategy of othering towards Socialist Realism, presents the rhetoric of Soviet artistic otherness in the context of debates surrounding the concept of American art, and reclaims the post-war history of American Social Realism.
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Painting Publics
Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter
Caitlin Frances Bruce
Temple University Press, 2019

Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emotion, creativity, and experimentation. In Painting Publics, Caitlin Bruce explores how various legal graffiti scenes across the United States, Mexico, and Europe provide diverse ways for artists to navigate their changing relationships with publics, institutions, and commercial entities. 

Painting Publics draws on a combination of interviews with more than 100 graffiti writers as well as participant observation, and uses critical and rhetorical theory to argue that graffiti should be seen as more than counter-cultural resistance. Bruce claims it offers resources for imagining a more democratic city, one that builds and grows from personal relations, abandoned or under-used spaces, commercial sponsorship, and tacit community resources. In the case of Mexico, Germany, and France, there is even some state support for the production and maintenance of civic education through visual culture. 

In her examination of graffiti culture and its spaces of inscription, Bruce allows us to see moments where practitioners actively reckon with possibility.

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Painting Texas History to 1900
By Sam D. Ratcliffe
University of Texas Press, 1992

Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1994
T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 1992
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 1993

Dramatic historical events have frequently provided subject matter for artists, particularly in pre-twentieth-century Texas, where works portraying historical, often legendary, events and individuals predominated. Until now, however, these paintings of Texas history have never received the kind of study given to historical, fictional, and film versions of the same events. Painting Texas History to 1900 fills this gap with an interdisciplinary approach that explores these paintings both as works of art and as historical documents.

The author examines the works of more than forty artists, including Henry McArdle, Theodore Gentilz, Robert Onderdonk, William Huddle, Frederic Remington, Friedrich Richard Petri, Arthur T. Lee, Seth Eastman, Sarah Hardinge, Frank Reaugh, W. G. M. Samuel, Carl G. von Iwonski, and Julius Stockfleth. He places each work within its historical and cultural context to show why such subject matter was chosen, why it was depicted in a particular way, and why such a depiction gained popular acceptance. For example, paintings of heroic events of the Texas Revolution were especially popular in the years following the Civil War, when, in Ratcliffe's view, Texans needed such images to assuage the loss of the war and the humiliation of Reconstruction.

Though the paintings cut across traditional art history categories—from the pictographs of early historic Indians to European-inspired oil paintings—they are bound together by their artists' intent for them to function as historically evocative documents. With their visual narratives of events that characterized all of America's westward expansion—Indian encounters, military battles, farming, ranching, surveying, and the closing of the frontier—these works add an important chapter to the story of the American West.

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Painting the City Red
Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
Yomi Braester
Duke University Press, 2010
Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of space and time, representing the future city variously as an ideal socialist city, a metropolis integrated into the global economy, and a site for preserving cultural heritage.

Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester describes how films and stage plays have promoted and opposed official urban plans and policies as they have addressed issues such as demolition-and-relocation plans, the preservation of vernacular architecture, and the global real estate market. He shows how the cinematic rewriting of historical narratives has accompanied the spatial reorganization of specific urban sites, including Nanjing Road in Shanghai; veterans’ villages in Taipei; and Tiananmen Square, centuries-old courtyards, and postmodern architectural landmarks in Beijing. In Painting the City Red, Braester reveals the role that film and theater have played in mediating state power, cultural norms, and the struggle for civil society in Chinese cities.

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Painting the Difference
Sex and Spectator in Modern Art
Charles Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The picture plane of a painting creates boundaries and perspectives. It governs the relationship of daubs of pigment on a canvas to reality, allowing the viewer to connect with the imagined world of a work of art. Charles Harrison's latest endeavor, Painting the Difference, explores the role of the picture plane in modern painting and the relationships it creates among the artist, the subject, and the spectator. One of the most respected teachers and theorists of modern art, Harrison here offers a bold interpretation of the Modernist canon that uncovers the significance of gender to the functioning of the picture plane.

Arguing that the representation of women in art was crucial to the character of modernity, Harrison traces the history of female subjects as they began to gaze out of the picture to confront and engage their viewers. Combining sweeping conceptual history with telling investigations into the details of particular paintings, Painting the Difference deciphers the implications of sexual difference for the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Harrison shows how artists, reflecting the underlying anxieties of the time about gender, used female subjects' gazes both to create a sexualized relationship between these subjects and their viewers, and to simultaneously question that relationship. In considering works by artists such as Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as Rothko, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Harrison incorporates elements of cultural criticism and social history into his arguments, and generous color illustrations permit the reader to test Harrison's claims against the works on which they are based. Rich with detail and compelling analysis, Painting the Difference offers cutting-edge interpretation grounded in the reality of magnificent works of art.
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Painting the Gospel
Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago
Kymberly Pinder
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery.
 
Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.
 
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Painting the Maya Universe
Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period
Dorie Reents-Budet
Duke University Press, 1994
Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world’s great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail.
Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites.
Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections.
Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.
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Painting the Skin
Pigments on Bodies and Codices in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
Edited by Élodie Dupey García and María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Mesoamerican communities past and present are characterized by their strong inclination toward color and their expert use of the natural environment to create dyes and paints. In pre-Hispanic times, skin was among the preferred surfaces on which to apply coloring materials. Archaeological research and historical and iconographic evidence show that, in Mesoamerica, the human body—alive or dead—received various treatments and procedures for coloring it.

Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins in Mesoamerica. Chapters explore the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied to a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices made of hide and vegetal paper, and even building “skins.” Contributors offer physicochemical analysis and compare compositions, manufactures, and attached meanings of pigments and colorants across various social and symbolic contexts and registers. They also compare these Mesoamerican colors with those used in other ancient cultures from both the Old and New Worlds. This cross-cultural perspective reveals crucial similarities and differences in the way cultures have painted on skins of all types.

Examining color in Mesoamerica broadens understandings of Native religious systems and world views. Tracing the path of color use and meaning from pre-Columbian times to the present allows for the study of the preparation, meanings, social uses, and thousand-year origins of the coloring materials used by today’s Indigenous peoples.

Contributors:

María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria
Christine Andraud
Bruno Giovanni Brunetti
David Buti
Davide Domenici
Élodie Dupey García
Tatiana Falcón Álvarez
Anne Genachte-Le Bail
Fabrice Goubard
Aymeric Histace
Patricia Horcajada Campos
Stephen Houston
Olivia Kindl
Bertrand Lavédrine
Linda R. Manzanilla Naim
Anne Michelin
Costanza Miliani
Virgina E. Miller
Sélim Natahi
Fabien Pottier
Patricia Quintana Owen
Franco D. Rossi
Antonio Sgamellotti
Vera Tiesler
Aurélie Tournié
María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual
Cristina Vidal Lorenzo
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Painting the Town Red
Politics and the Arts During the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic
Bob Dent
Pluto Press, 2018
In 1919, in the wake of World War I, for a brief period Hungary was a Soviet Republic. The republic didn’t last, but the incredible effusion of art, music, film, theater, and literature that it generated did. Painting the Town Red offers an in-depth exploration of the incredible artistic flourishing brought about by the 1919 republic, showing how art and politics were intertwined—and how, for a brief time, artists saw themselves as playing a crucial part in the establishment of a new way of living and governing. Through close analyses of the works of a number of creators and a careful recounting of the history and politics of the 1919 republic, Bob Dent brings a largely forgotten moment back to life, with all its glory and, ultimately, disillusion.
 
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Painting US Empire
Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies
Maggie M. Cao
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A fresh look at the global dimensions of US painting from the 1850s to 1898.

Painting US Empire is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Maggie M. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre paintings, and ethnographic portraiture. Revealing how the US empire was “hidden in plain sight” in the art of this period, Cao examines artists including Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer who championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project. She also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, and Yuki Kihara, Cao addresses important contemporary questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity. This book foregrounds an underacknowledged topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire.
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Painting with Fire
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object
Matthew C. Hunter
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the Royal Society of London had studied the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, chemical volatility became central to the ambitious paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds’s unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography.

Tracing the long arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, the book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds’s replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.
 
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Paintings from Mughal India
Andrew Topsfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008

One of the great kingdoms of human history, the Mughal empire is now lost to the relentless sweep of time. But the wealth of art treasures the Mughals left behind is nonetheless a lasting testament to the sumptuousness of their culture. Among the most notable vestiges of their art are the lush miniature paintings of Mughal imperial life, and Andrew Topsfield explores a rich array of these painted works in Paintings from Mughal India.

            Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal emperors presided over a flourishing cultural renaissance, and these miniature paintings vividly depict the splendor of this period. Topsfield examines the paintings’ unique blend of Indian, Islamic, and Persian styles and analyzes their varied subjects—ranging from hunting, royal banquets, and other scenes of imperial life to legendary tales, mythic deities, and battles. Among the paintings featured in the book’s vibrant reproductions are works created between the reign of Akbar and the fall of Shah Jehanan—an era considered to be the height of Mughal painting—and illustrations from the celebrated Baharistan manuscript of 1595. A fascinating and gorgeously illustrated study, Paintings from Mughal India will be an invaluable resource for all art scholars and anyone interested in the legacy of the Mughal Empire.

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Paintings from Mughal India
Andrew Topsfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008
One of the great kingdoms of human history, the Mughal Empire is now lost to the relentless sweep of time. But the wealth of treasures left behind offers a lasting testament to the sumptuousness of its culture. Among the most notable of these treasures are the lush miniature paintings showing the splendor of Mughal imperial life.

Andrew Topsfield examines these paintings that bear the influence of Indian, Islamic, and Persian styles and portray a variety of subjects, from hunting, royal banquets, and other scenes of imperial life to legends, battles, and mythic deities. Among the paintings featured in the book’s vibrant reproductions are illustrations from the celebrated Baharistan manuscript of 1595 and works created between the reign of Akbar and the fall of Shah Jahan in 1658—an era considered to be the height of Mughal art. For this new edition, Topsfield has made corrections and revisions reflecting new research.
A fascinating and gorgeously illustrated study, Paintings from Mughal India will be an invaluable resource for all art scholars and anyone interested in the legacy of the Mughal Empire.

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Pairing STEAM with Stories
46 Hands-On Activities for Children
Elizabeth M. McChesney
American Library Association, 2020

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Pakistan Desires
Queer Futures Elsewhere
Omar Kasmani, editor
Duke University Press, 2023
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Grindr among men, the exploration of homoerotic subject matter in contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed's work, and the story of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy. From Kashmir to the 1947 Partition to the resonances of South Asian gay subjectivity in the diaspora, the contributors attend to narrative and epistemological possibilities for queer lives and loves. By embracing forms of desire elsewhere, ones that cannot correlate to or often fall outside dominant Western theorizations of queerness, this volume gathers other ways of being queer in the world.

Contributors. Ahmed Afzal, Asad Alvi, Anjali Arondekar, Vanja Hamzić, Omar Kasmani, Pasha M. Khan, Gwendolyn S. Kirk, Syeda Momina Masood, Nida Mehboob, Claire Pamment, Geeta Patel, Nael Quraishi, Abdullah Qureshi, Shayan Rajani, Jeffrey A. Redding, Gayatri Reddy, Syma Tariq
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Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws
From Islamic Empires to the Taliban
By Shemeem Burney Abbas
University of Texas Press, 2013

Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad’s Islam, and the Qur’an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur’an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur‘anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari’a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship.

Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime of 1977–1988—motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored “infidel” ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all “infidels” who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet’s peaceful vision of social justice.

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Pakistan's Counterterrorism Challenge
Moeed Yusuf, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2014

Pakistan, which since 9/11 has come to be seen as one of the world’s most dangerous places and has been referred to as “the epicenter of international terrorism,” faces an acute counterterrorism (CT) challenge. The book focuses on violence being perpetrated against the Pakistani state by Islamist groups and how Pakistan can address these challenges, concentrating not only on military aspects but on the often-ignored political, legal, law enforcement, financial, and technological facets of the challenge.

Edited by Moeed Yusuf of the US Institute of Peace, and featuring the contributions and insights of Pakistani policy practitioners and scholars as well as international specialists with deep expertise in the region, the volume explores the current debate surrounding Pakistan’s ability—and incentives—to crack down on Islamist terrorism and provides an in-depth examination of the multiple facets of this existential threat confronting the Pakistani state and people.

The book pays special attention to the non-traditional functions of force that are central to Pakistan’s ability to subdue militancy but which have not received the deserved attention from the Pakistani state nor from western experts. In particular, this path-breaking volume, the first to explore these various facets holistically, focuses on the weakness of political institutions, the role of policing, criminal justice systems, choking financing for militancy, and regulating the use of media and technology by militants. Military force alone, also examined in this volume, will not solve Pakistan’s Islamist challenge. With original insights and attention to detail, the authors provide a roadmap for Western and Pakistani policymakers alike to address the weaknesses in Pakistan’s CT strategy.

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The Palace of Bones
Allison Eir Jenks
Ohio University Press, 2002

The Palace of Bones by Allison Eir Jenks is an often stark and startling vision of the way we live, the places we inhabit, and the relics we make to comfort ourselves.

Haunted by a quiet, unquenchable longing, Jenks expertly and calmly guides the reader through a vivid dreamscape in this first full-length collection of poems.

The Palace of Bones was selected by final judge and Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Kizer. At once dark in its vision and light in its tone, this remarkable book is its author’s self-confident invitation for us to join her in a world she knows intimately and has made almost familiar if not entirely safe.

The Palace of Bones is a stunning debut.

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Palace of Books
Roger Grenier
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For decades, French writer, editor, and publisher Roger Grenier has been enticing readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between the art of living and the work of art. Under Grenier’s wry gaze, clichés crumble, and offbeat anecdotes build to powerful insights.

With Palace of Books, he invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people feel the need to write, or what is involved in putting one’s self on the page, or how a writer knows she’s written her last sentence, Grenier marshals apposite passages from his favorite writers:  Chekhov, Baudelaire, Proust, James, Kafka, Mansfield and many others. Those writers mingle companionably with tales from Grenier’s half-century as an editor and friend to countless legendary figures, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, and Brassai,.

Grenier offers here a series of observations and quotations that feel as spontaneous as good conversation, yet carry the lasting insights of a lifetime of reading and thinking. Palace of Books is rich with pleasures and surprises, the perfect accompaniment to old literary favorites, and the perfect introduction to new ones.
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The Palace of the Snow Queen
Winter Travels in Lapland and Sápmi
Barbara Sjoholm
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An exploration of the winter wonders and entangled histories of Scandinavia’s northernmost landscapes—now back in print with a new afterword by the author
 

After many years of travel in the Nordic countries—usually preferring to visit during the warmer months—Barbara Sjoholm found herself drawn to Lapland and Sápmi one winter just as mørketid, the dark time, set in. What ensued was a wide-ranging journey that eventually spanned three winters, captivatingly recounted in The Palace of the Snow Queen

 

From observing the annual construction of the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, to crossing the storied Finnmark Plateau in Norway, to attending a Sámi film festival in Finland, Sjoholm dives deep into the rich traditions and vibrant creative communities of the North. She writes of past travelers to Lapland and contemporary tourists in Sápmi, as well as of her encounters with Indigenous reindeer herders, activists, and change-makers. Her new afterword bears witness to the perseverance of the Sámi in the face of tourism, development, and climate change.  

 

Written with keen insight and humor, The Palace of the Snow Queen is a vivid account of Sjoholm’s adventures and a timely investigation of how ice and snow shape our imaginations and create a vision that continues to draw visitors to the North.

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Palace Politics
How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico
By Jonathan Schlefer
University of Texas Press, 2008

Bringing rare interviews and meticulous research to the cloaked world of Mexican politics in the mid-twentieth century, Palace Politics provides a captivating look at the authoritarian Mexican state—one of the longest-lived regimes of its kind in recent history—as well as the origins of political instability itself, with revelations that can be applied to a variety of contemporary political situations around the globe.

Culling a trove of remarkable firsthand accounts from former Mexican presidents, finance ministers, interior ministers, and other high officials from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jonathan Schlefer describes a world in which elite politics planted the seeds of a mammoth socioeconomic crisis. Palace Politics outlines the process by which political infighting among small rival factions of high officials drove Mexico to precarious situations at all levels of government. Schlefer also demonstrates how, earlier on, elite cooperation among these factions had helped sustain one of the most stable growth economies in Latin America, until all-or-nothing struggles began to tear the Mexican ruling party apart in the 1970s.

A vivid, seamlessly narrated history, Palace Politics is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand not only the nation next door but also the workings of elite politics in general.

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Palace-Burner
The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt
Edited and with an Introduction by Paula Bernat Bennett
University of Illinois Press, 2001

The unique and powerful voice of an extraordinary nineteenth-century woman poet

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the strongest American woman poet of the nineteenth century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. This selected edition reveals Piatt's other side, a side that contemporary critics found more problematic: ironic, experimental, pushing the limits of Victorian language and the sentimental female persona.

Spanning more than half a century, this collection reveals the "borderland temper" of Piatt's mind and art. As an expatriate southerner, Piatt voices guilt at her own past as the daughter of slave-holders and raw anguish at the waste of war; as an eleven-year "exile" in Ireland, she expresses her dismay at the indifference of the wealthy to the daily suffering of the poor. Her poetry, whether speaking of children, motherhood, marriage, or illicit love affairs, uses conventional language and forms but in ways that greatly broadened the range of what women's poetry could say. Going beyond and even contradicting the genteel aesthetic, Piatt's poetry moves toward an innovative kind of dramatic realism built on dialogue, an approach more familiar to modern readers, acquainted with Faulknerian polyvocal texts, than to her contemporaries, who were as ill at ease with complexity as they were with irony. 

This astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work--much of it never before collected--explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they offer such fertile ground for study today. Illustrated with engravings from Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar, both periodicals in which Piatt's work appeared, Palace-Burner marks the reemergence of one of the most interesting writers in American literary history.

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Palaces and Power in the Americas
From Peru to the Northwest Coast
Edited by Jessica Joyce Christie and Patricia Joan Sarro
University of Texas Press, 2006

Ancient American palaces still captivate those who stand before them. Even in their fallen and ruined condition, the palaces project such power that, according to the editors of this new collection, it must have been deliberately drawn into their formal designs, spatial layouts, and choice of locations. Such messages separated palaces from other elite architecture and reinforced the power and privilege of those residing in them. Indeed, as Christie and Sarro write, "the relation between political power and architecture is a pervasive and intriguing theme in the Americas."

Given the variety of cultures, time periods, and geographical locations examined within, the editors of this book have grouped the articles into four sections. The first looks at palaces in cultures where they have not previously been identified, including the Huaca of Moche Site, the Wari of Peru, and Chaco Canyon in the U.S. Southwest. The second section discusses palaces as "stage sets" that express power, such as those found among the Maya, among the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest, and at El Tajín on the Mexican Gulf Coast. The third part of the volume presents cases in which differences in elite residences imply differences in social status, with examples from Pasado de la Amada, the Valley of Oaxaca, Teotihuacan, and the Aztecs. The final section compares architectural strategies between cultures; the models here are Farfán, Peru, under both the Chimú and the Inka, and the separate states of the Maya and the Inka.

Such scope, and the quality of the scholarship, make Palaces and Power in the Americas a must-have work on the subject.

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Palaeontology in Public
Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time
Edited by Chris Manias
University College London, 2025
An excavation of everything from Victorian fossil hunters to Jurassic Park, Chris Manias explores how paleontology’s greatest discoveries have always been entangled with popular culture.

From towering dinosaurs to early human ancestors, paleontology has long captured the public imagination, yet its scientific standing has often been precarious. Palaeontology in Public studies how paleontology’s public presence has shaped both the field itself and broader cultural understandings of science and nature. Through case studies spanning two centuries, this book explores the deep entanglement between vertebrate paleontology and popular culture, from early fossil discoveries to modern cinematic depictions.

Dinosaurs naturally take center stage, taking Spinosaurus, Jurassic Park, and Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, for instance. However, equally important are the stories of Glyptodons, Mesozoic mammals, and early human fossils like Neanderthals and Australopithecus. The book draws from history, art, literature, archaeology, and science communication to depict how public fascination has fueled scientific discovery while also shaping our collective vision of life’s ancient past.

A compelling read for historians of science, paleontologists, and those with a special interest in prehistoric creatures, Palaeontology in Public highlights the enduring power of fossils also as cultural icons that continue to inspire and spark debate.
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The Palatine Wreck
The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship
Jill Farinelli
University Press of New England, 2017
Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board—sick, frozen, and starving—were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship’s crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do and, in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event had emerged. In one account, the crew murdered the captain, extorted money from the passengers by prolonging the voyage and withholding food, then abandoned ship. In the other, the islanders lured the ship ashore with a false signal light, then murdered and robbed all on board. Some claimed the ship was set ablaze to hide evidence of these crimes, their stories fueled by reports of a fiery ghost ship first seen drifting in Block Island Sound on the one-year anniversary of the wreck. These tales became known as the legend of the Palatine, the name given to the ship in later years, when its original name had been long forgotten. The flaming apparition was nicknamed the Palatine Light. The eerie phenomenon has been witnessed by hundreds of people over the centuries, and numerous scientific theories have been offered as to its origin. Its continued reappearances, along with the attention of some of nineteenth-century America’s most notable writers—among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—has helped keep the legend alive. This despite evidence that the vessel, whose actual name was the Princess Augusta, was never abandoned, lured ashore, or destroyed by fire. So how did the rumors begin? What really happened to the Princess Augusta and the passengers she carried on her final, fatal voyage? Through years of painstaking research, Jill Farinelli reconstructs the origins of one of New England’s most chilling maritime mysteries.
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The Pale Blue Data Point
An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life
Jon Willis
University of Chicago Press, 2025

“Here is Willis’s fundamental argument: The more we learn about Earth—our one ‘pale blue data point’ for a planet on which life has definitively arisen—the more qualified we will be to recognize signs of life elsewhere. . . . [A] joyful account.”—Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal
 
A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.
 
Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs. With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.
 
With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet detection, Willis conjures up alien worlds and unthought-of biological possibilities, speculating what life might look like on other planets by extrapolating from what we can see on Earth, our single “pale blue dot”—as Carl Sagan famously called it—or, in Willis’s reframing, scientists’ “pale blue data point.”

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The Pale Light of Sunset
Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life
Lee Maynard
West Virginia University Press, 2009
Real people don’t run away from. . .But real people can run away to. . .
 
In 1936, a child is born in the mountains of West Virginia. In 2005, he scatters his past into a deep canyon of rock. The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life illuminates the journey of this boy, a constant tourist and visitor, who travels everywhere, yet belongs nowhere. Through tales of swarming hornets and swinging bullies, love affairs with the land and its people, and near death by frostbite and heat stroke, the absurd hilarity and clear, tender voice found within this story navigates a surreal road paved by the experiences of one man.
 
Author of nationally acclaimed and locally banned novels Crum and Screaming with the Cannibals, Lee Maynard details an imaginative account of his journey through seventy years of hard living—from West Virginia, to Mexico, the Arctic Circle, and beyond. Scattered and hallucinated, The Pale Light of Sunset grants a long-awaited glimpse into the bent condition of the Maynard brain.
 
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Pale Morning Dun
Stories
Stories by Richard Dokey
University of Missouri Press, 2004

 When Gramp tied those thin-bodied ephemerella, as he called them, on size-eighteen hooks, their pale green bodies and diaphanous gray wings reminded us of tiny, unmoored sailboats, and when the duns themselves were adrift upon the surface of the pool, we watched as an entire armada of delicate, translucent ships spun and took flight. . . . I couldn't fish right away. I never can when the duns first come up. I have to watch them, suddenly upon the surface, their wings drying for that one day of life above the stream. . . . To have a chance at life, each pale dun for a time must drift, ignorant of the forms that wait below.

In the thirteen stories of Pale Morning Dun, Richard Dokey endeavors to suggest common truths that uncover the human reality any time, in any place. He explores the ephemeral nature of life through an assemblage of characters as diverse as the settings they inhabit: from a beggar on the streets of San Francisco, “The West Coast Coliseum of Consumption,” to a boy and his brother fly-fishing in a peaceful mountain stream, unaware that they have stumbled upon the threshold of a horrific crime; from a desperate husband pursuing his estranged wife into the bloody arena of a bullfight, to a lakeside cottage where two lovers reveal perhaps too much of themselves. Each uniquely rendered character faces a dilemma that leads him beyond what he knows of himself, forcing him to new insights. The characters’ struggles, though distinctively their own, reveal universal truths about human nature and the transient quality of life. Employing an inspired blend of humor, irony, and imagination in seamless narration, Dokey allows one to enter readily into these idiosyncratic lives, inviting the reader to explore his own capacity to be human, to empathize and respond.

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The Paleobiological Revolution
Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology
Edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The Paleobiological Revolution chronicles the incredible ascendance of the once-maligned science of paleontology to the vanguard of a field. With the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.
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Paleoenvironments in the Namib Desert
The Lower Tumas Basin in the Late Cenozoic
M. Justin Wilkinson
University of Chicago Press, 1990

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Paleoethnobotany of the Kameda Peninsula Jomon
Gary W. Crawford
University of Michigan Press, 1983
In this volume, author Gary W. Crawford presents archaeological data he gathered on plant utilization by Jomon populations in southwestern Hokkaido. Using this data, he examines the adaptations of the Initial through Middle Jomon (a period from 8000 BP to 4000 BP). He also considers the success of the Jomon adaptation in northeastern Japan in general.
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The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast
Edited by David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
University of Alabama Press, 1996

The southeastern United States has one of the richest records of early human settlement of any area of North America. This book provides the first state-by-state summary of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research from the region, together with an appraisal of models developed to interpret the data. It summarizes what we know of the peoples who lived in the Southeast more than 8,000 years ago—when giant ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent, and such mammals as elephants, saber-toothed tigers, and ground sloths roamed the landscape. Extensively illustrated, this benchmark collection of essays on the state of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research in the Southeast will guide future studies on the subject of the region's first inhabitants for years to come.

Divided in three parts, the volume includes:

Part I: Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Lifeways in the Southeast

Environmental and Chronological Considerations, David G. Anderson, Lisa D. O'Steen, and Kenneth E. Sassaman
Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast: A Historical Perspective, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman

Models of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Lower Southeast, David G. Anderson
Early Archaic Settlement in the South Carolina Coastal Plain, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast, I. Randolph Daniel Jr.
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement along the Oconee Drainage, Lisa D. O'Steen
Haw River Revisited: Implications for Modeling Terminal Late Glacial and Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the Southeast, John S. Cable
Early Archiac Settlement and Technology: Lessons from Tellico, Larry R. Kimball
Paleoindians Near the Edge: A Virginia Perspective, Michael F. Johnson

Part II: The Regional Record

The Need for a Regional Perspective, Kenneth E. Sassaman and David G. Anderson
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in the South Carolina Area, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
The Taylor Site: An Early Occupation in Central South Carolina, James L. Michie
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Tennessee, John B. Boster and Mark R. Norton
A Synopsis of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Alabama, Eugene M. Futato
Statified Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Deposits at Dust Cave, Northwestern Alabama, Boyce N. Driskell
Bone and Ivory Tools from Submerged Paleoindian Sites in Florida, James S. Dunbar and S. David Webb
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Data from Mississippi, Samuel O. McGahey
Early and Middle Paleoindian Sites in the Northeastern Arkansas Region, J. Christopher Gillam

Part III: Commentary

A Framework for the Paleoindian/Early Archaic Transition, Joel Gunn
Modeling Communities and Other Thankless Tasks, Dena F. Dincauze
An Arkansas View, Dan F. Morse
Comments, Henry T. Wright

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Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains
By Vance T. Holliday
University of Texas Press, 1997

The Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico are rich in Paleoindian archaeological sites, including such well-known ones as Clovis, Lubbock Lake, Plainview, and Midland. These sites have been extensively researched over decades, not only by archaeologists but also by geoscientists, whose studies of soils and stratigraphy have yielded important information about cultural chronology and paleoenvironments across the region.

In this book, Vance T. Holliday synthesizes the data from these earlier studies with his own recent research to offer the most current and comprehensive overview of the geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains during the earliest human occupation. He delves into twenty sites in depth, integrating new and old data on site geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. He also compares the Southern High Plains sites with other sites across the Great Plains, for a broader chronological and paleoenvironmental perspective.

With over ninety photographs, maps, cross sections, diagrams, and artifact drawings, this book will be essential reading for geoarchaeologists, archaeologists, and Quaternary geoscientists, as well as avocational archaeologists who take part in Paleoindian site study throughout the American West.

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Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex
Edward J. Knell
University of Utah Press, 2013

Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex represents the first synthesis in the more than fifty year history of one of the most important Paleoindian cultural traditions in North America. Research on the Cody complex (~10,000–8,000 radiocarbon yrs B.P.) began in the 1940s; however, until now publications have focused almost exclusively on specific sites, issues of projectile point technology and typology, and bison hunting. This volume provides fresh perspectives and cutting-edge research that significantly increases our understanding of the Cody complex by focusing more squarely on the human behaviors that created the archaeological record, rather than on more strictly technical aspects of the artifacts and faunal remains.

Because the Cody complex extends from the central Canadian plains to the Gulf of Mexico and from Nevada to the eastern Great Lakes—making it second only to Clovis in geographical expanse—this volume will appeal to a wide range of North American archaeologists. Across this broad geographic distribution, the contributors address hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies from diverse ecosystems at the onset of the Holocene, which will also make it of interest to human ecologists and paleoenvironmental  researchers. Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex provides an innovative synthesis of a well-known but little-studied cultural tradition that opens the door for a new generation of exciting research.

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The Paleo-Indian Occupation of the Holcombe Beach
James E. Fitting, Jerry DeVisscher and Edward J. Wahla
University of Michigan Press, 1966
The Holcombe site, in Macomb County, Michigan, was occupied about 11,000 years ago. At that time, it was situated on the shore of glacial Lake Clinton. In this volume, the authors describe their excavation of this site and the artifacts they found, including thousands of chipped stone tools. They also describe other Paleoindian sites along the ancient Holcombe beach and compare this site with others in the area.
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Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic?
Great Basin Human Ecology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition
Kelly E Graf
University of Utah Press, 2008
Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel?
 
Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed 'Paleoindian' and 'Archaic' lifeways, referring to them as 'Paleoarchaic.'
 
Recent excavations of rock shelters and caves, coupled with innovative studies of the surface archaeological record have increased our understanding of human organization in the Great Basin during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. When did humans first inhabit the Great Basin? How do we interpret projectile point variability from late Pleistocene and early Holocene contexts? What land-use and foraging strategies characterized the early inhabitants? Did these hunter-gatherers possess a Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic lifeway?
 
This volume offers an updated perspective of human ecology and organization during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Great Basin, 13,000–8,000 years ago.
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