front cover of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries
Literary and Intellectual Contexts
Edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Considers Gilman’s place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era

By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that “humanity is a relation.”
 
Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost.
 
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
New Texts, New Contexts
Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
During her lifetime, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a popular writer, public speaker, and social reformer whose literary interests ranged from short stories, novels, and nonfiction philosophical studies to poetry, newspaper columns, plays, and many other genres. Though she fell into obscurity after her death, there has been a resurgence of interest in Gilman’s works among literary scholars.
 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts represents a new phase of feminist scholarship in recovery, drawing readers’ attention to Gilman’s lesser-known works from fresh perspectives that revise what we thought we knew about the author and her work. Volume contributors consider an array of texts that have not yet enjoyed adequate critical scrutiny, including Gilman’s short fiction, drama, and writing for periodicals, as well as her long fiction. Similarly, incorporating careful archival, biographical, and historical research, contributors explore Gilman’s life and writings—including her most famous story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”—through strikingly new critical lenses. Other essays included here assess Gilman’s place in a longer historical trajectory and within multiple rhetorical traditions, from the genre of feminist humor to the canon of African American women’s literary production.
 
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Charlottengrad
Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin
Roman Utkin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation.

By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states.

Utkin provides insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.
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Chasing Newsroom Diversity
From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action
Gwyneth Mellinger
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Social change triggered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s sent the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) on a fifty-year mission to dismantle an exclusionary professional standard that envisioned the ideal journalist as white, straight, and male. In this book, Gwyneth Mellinger explores the complex history of the decades-long ASNE diversity initiative, which culminated in the failed Goal 2000 effort to match newsroom demographics with those of the U.S. population.
 
Drawing upon exhaustive reviews of ASNE archival materials, Mellinger examines the democratic paradox through the lens of the ASNE, an elite organization that arguably did more than any other during the twentieth century to institutionalize professional standards in journalism and expand the concepts of government accountability and the free press. The ASNE would emerge in the 1970s as the leader in the newsroom integration movement, but its effort would be frustrated by structures of exclusion the organization had embedded into its own professional standards. Explaining why a project so promising failed so profoundly, Chasing Newsroom Diversity expands our understanding of the intransigence of institutional racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia within democracy.

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Chatham Village
Pittsburgh's Garden City
Angelique Bamberg
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014

Chatham Village, located in the heart of Pittsburgh, is an urban oasis that combines Georgian colonial revival architecture with generous greenspaces, recreation facilities, surrounding woodlands, and many other elements that make living there a unique experience. Founded in 1932, it has gained international recognition as an outstanding example of the American Garden City planning movement and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2005.
      Chatham Village was the brainchild of Charles F. Lewis, then director of the Buhl Foundation, a Pittsburgh-based charitable trust. Lewis sought an alternative to the substandard housing that plagued low-income families in the city. He hired the New York–based team of Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright, followers of Ebenezer Howard’s utopian Garden City movement, which sought to combine the best of urban and suburban living environments by connecting individuals to each other and to nature.
      Angelique Bamberg provides the first book-length study of Chatham Village, in which she establishes its historical significance to urban planning and reveals the complex development process, social significance, and breakthrough construction and landscaping techniques that shaped this idyllic community. She also relates the design of Chatham Village to the work of other pioneers in urban planning, including Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., landscape architect John Nolen, and the Regional Planning Association of America, and considers the different ways that Chatham Village and the later New Urbanist movement address a common set of issues. Above all, Bamberg finds that Chatham Village’s continued viability and vibrance confirms its distinction as a model for planned housing and urban-based community living.

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Cheap Amusements
Kathy Peiss
Temple University Press, 1987
What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? Cheap Amusements is a fascinating discussion of young working women whose meager wages often fell short of bare subsistence and rarely allowed for entertainment expenses.

Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. By examining the rituals and styles they adopted and placing that culture in the larger context of urban working-class life, she offers us a complex picture of the dynamics shaping a working woman's experience and consciousness at the turn-of-the-century. Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure.

The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of "heterosocial companionship" as a dominant ideology of gender, affirming mixed-sex patterns of social interaction, in contrast to the nineteenth century's segregated spheres. Cheap Amusements argues that a crucial part of the "reorientation of American culture" originated from below, specifically in the subculture of working women to be found in urban dance halls and amusement resorts.
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The Chekhovian Intertext
Dialogue with a Classic
Lyudmila Parts
The Ohio State University Press

In The Chekhovian Intertext Lyudmila Parts explores contemporary Russian writers’ intertextual engagement with Chekhov and his myth. She offers a new interpretative framework to explain the role Chekhov and other classics play in constructing and maintaining Russian national identity and the reasons for the surge in the number of intertextual engagements with the classical authors during the cultural crisis in post-perestroika Russia.   

The book highlights the intersection of three distinct concepts: cultural memory, cultural myth, and intertextuality. It is precisely their interrelation that explains how intertextuality came to function as a defense mechanism of culture, a reaction of cultural memory to the threat of its disintegration.

In addition to offering close readings of some of the most significant short stories by contemporary Russian authors and by Chekhov, as a theoretical case study the book sheds light on important processes in contemporary literature: it explores the function of intertextuality in the development of Russian literature, especially post-Soviet literature; it singles out the main themes in contemporary literature, and explains their ties to national cultural myths and to cultural memory. The Chekhovian Intertext may serve as a theoretical model and impetus for examinations of other national literatures from the point of view of the relationship between intertextuality and cultural memory.

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Che's Travels
The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America
Paulo Drinot, ed.
Duke University Press, 2010
Ernesto “Che” Guevara twice traveled across Latin America in the early 1950s. Based on his accounts of those trips (published in English as The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road), as well as other historical sources, Che’s Travels follows Guevara, country by country, from his native Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and then from Argentina through Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Each essay is focused on a single country and written by an expert in its history. Taken together, the essays shed new light on Che’s formative years by analyzing the distinctive societies, histories, politics, and cultures he encountered on these two trips, the ways they affected him, and the ways he represented them in his travelogues. In addition to offering new insights into Guevara, the essays provide a fresh perspective on Latin America’s experience of the Cold War and the interplay of nationalism and anti-imperialism in the crucial but relatively understudied 1950s. Assessing Che’s legacies in the countries he visited during the two journeys, the contributors examine how he is remembered or memorialized; how he is invoked for political, cultural, and religious purposes; and how perceptions of him affect ideas about the revolutions and counterrevolutions fought in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Contributors
Malcolm Deas
Paulo Drinot
Eduardo Elena
Judith Ewell
Cindy Forster
Patience A. Schell
Eric Zolov
Ann Zulawski

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Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer
The Army PX in World War II
James J. Cooke
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Veterans of World War II have long sung the praises of the PX—a little piece of home in far-flung corners of the world. Though many books on that war tell of combat operations and logistics in detail, this is the first to tell the full story of the Army Exchange System.

The AES was dedicated to providing soldiers with some of the comforts they had enjoyed in civilian life—candy, beer, cigarettes, razor blades, soap—whether by operating an exchange close to where they were fighting or by sending goods forward to the lines, free of charge. The beer may have been only “3.2,” but it was cheap and, unlike British beer, was served cold, thanks to PX coolers. And a constant supply of cigarettes and chewing gum gave GIs an advantage when flirting with the local girls.

In chronicling the history of the AES, James J. Cooke harks back to the Civil War, in which sutlers sold basic items to the Yankee troops for exorbitant prices, and to the First World War, when morale-building provisions were brought in by agencies such as the Red Cross. He then traces the evolution of the PX through World War II from the point of view of those who ran the service and that of the soldiers who used it, blending administrative history with colorful anecdotes and interspersing letters from GIs.

Cooke views the PX as a manifestation of American mobility, materialism, and the cultural revolution of mass consumerism that flourished in the 1920s, serving soldiers who were themselves products of this new American way of retail and expected a high level of material support in time of war. He emphasizes the accomplishments of Major General Joseph W. Byron, chief PX officer from 1941 to 1943, and his deputy, Colonel Frank Kerr. He also tells how the PX dealt with the presence of large numbers of women in uniform and the need to meet their demands in exchange offerings.

By 1945, General Byron could boast that the Army Exchange Service operated the world’s largest department store chain, serving the grandest army the United States had ever put in the field, and today the PX is still a central factor of military life. Yet as Cooke shows, the key to the AES’s importance was ultimately the way it bolstered morale—and helped give our fighting men the will to keep fighting.
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Chicago '68
David Farber
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Entertaining and scrupulously researched, Chicago '68 reconstructs the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—an epochal moment in American cultural and political history. By drawing on a wide range of sources, Farber tells and retells the story of the protests in three different voices, from the perspectives of the major protagonists—the Yippies, the National Mobilization to End the War, and Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police. He brilliantly recreates all the excitement and drama, the violently charged action and language of this period of crisis, giving life to the whole set of cultural experiences we call "the sixties."

"Chicago '68 was a watershed summer. Chicago '68 is a watershed book. Farber succeeds in presenting a sensitive, fairminded composite portrait that is at once a model of fine narrative history and an example of how one can walk the intellectual tightrope between 'reporting one's findings' and offering judgements about them."—Peter I. Rose, Contemporary Sociology
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The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism
Anne Meis Knupfer
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Following on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance was a resonant flourishing of African American arts, literature, theater, music, and intellectualism, from 1930 to 1955. Anne Meis Knupfer's The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism demonstrates the complexity of black women's many vital contributions to this unique cultural flowering.

The book examines various groups of black female activists, including writers and actresses, social workers, artists, school teachers, and women's club members to document the impact of social class, gender, nativity, educational attainment, and professional affiliations on their activism. Together, these women worked to sponsor black history and literature, to protest overcrowded schools, and to act as a force for improved South Side housing and employment opportunities. Knupfer also reveals the crucial role these women played in founding and sustaining black cultural institutions, such as the first African American art museum in the country; the first African American library in Chicago; and various African American literary journals and newspapers. As a point of contrast, Knupfer also examines the overlooked activism of working-class and poor women in the Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens housing projects.

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Chicago Dreaming
Midwesterners and the City, 1871-1919
Timothy B. Spears
University of Chicago Press, 2005
During the late nineteenth century, Chicago's population grew at an astonishing rate, with an estimated growth of 900,000 people between 1860 and 1890. Drawn to the opportunities generated by an expansive economy, hinterland migrants from the rural Midwest flocked to the city, their visions of prosperity creating a thriving modern urban culture. The hopes of these newcomers are the subject of Timothy B. Spears's book Chicago Dreaming—the story of Chicago's growth and the transplanted Midwesterners who so decisively shaped the young city's identity.

Through innovative readings of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Richard Wright, Spears argues that the migratory perspective was crucial to the rise of Chicago's emerging literary culture. In following the paths of several well-known migrants, including Jane Addams, cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, and businessman John Glessner, Spears also shows how the view from the hinterland permeated urban culture and informed the development of key Chicago institutions. Further exploring the notion of dreaming, he brings to light the internal desires that lured Midwestern migrants to the city as well as the nostalgia that led them to dream of the homes they left behind.

With this fascinating new take on the rise of Chicago, Chicago Dreaming blurs the line between country and city to reveal the provincial character of modern urban culture.
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Chicago Makes Modern
How Creative Minds Changed Society
Edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Chicago is a city dedicated to the modern—from the skyscrapers that punctuate its skyline to the spirited style that inflects many of its dwellings and institutions, from the New Bauhaus to Hull-House. Despite this, the city has long been overlooked as a locus for modernism in the arts, its rich tradition of architecture, design, and education disregarded. Still the modern in Chicago continues to thrive, as new generations of artists incorporate its legacy into fresh visions for the future. Chicago Makes Modern boldly remaps twentieth-century modernism from our new-century perspective by asking an imperative question: How did the modern mind—deeply reflective, yet simultaneously directed—help to dramatically alter our perspectives on the world and make it new?

Returning the city to its rightful position at the heart of a multidimensional movement that changed the face of the twentieth century, Chicago Makes Modern applies the missions of a brilliant group of innovators to our own time. From the radical social and artistic perspectives implemented by Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Buckminster Fuller to the avant-garde designs of László Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, the prodigious offerings of Chicago's modern minds left an indelible legacy for future generations. Staging the city as a laboratory for some of our most heralded cultural experiments, Chicago Makes Modern reimagines the modern as a space of self-realization and social progress—where individual visions triggered profound change. Featuring contributions from an acclaimed roster of contemporary artists, critics, and scholars, this book demonstrates how and why the Windy City continues to drive the modern world.

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Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986
How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City
Thomas Leslie
University of Illinois Press, 2023
From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie’s comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city’s appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes.

Illustrated with more than 140 photographs, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934–1986 tells the fascinating stories of the people, ideas, negotiations, decision-making, compromises, and strategies that changed the history of architecture and one of its showcase cities.

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Chicago Transformed
World War I and the Windy City
Joseph Gustaitis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
WINNER, Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2017!

It’s been called the “war that changed everything,” and it is difficult to think of a historical event that had a greater impact on the world than the First World War. Events during the war profoundly changed our nation, and Chicago, especially, was transformed during this period. Between 1913 and 1919, Chicago transitioned from a nineteenth-century city to the metropolis it is today. Despite the importance of the war years, this period has not been documented adequately in histories of the city. In Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City, Joseph Gustaitis fills this gap in the historical record, covering the important wartime events, developments, movements, and people that helped shape Chicago.
 
Gustaitis attributes many of Chicago’s changes to the labor shortage caused by the war. African Americans from the South flocked to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Mexican immigration increased as well. This influx of new populations along with a wave of anti-German hysteria—which nearly extinguished German culture in Chicago—changed the city’s ethnic composition. As the ethnic landscape changed, so too did the culture. Jazz and blues accompanied African Americans to the city, and Chicago soon became America’s jazz and blues capital. Gustaitis also demonstrates how the nation’s first sexual revolution occurred not during the 1960s but during the World War I years, when the labor shortage opened up unprecedented employment opportunities for women. These opportunities gave women assertiveness and freedom that endured beyond the war years. In addition, the shortage of workers invigorated organized labor, and determined attempts were made to organize in Chicago’s two leading industrial workplaces—the stockyards and the steel mills—which helped launch the union movement of the twentieth century. Gustaitis explores other topics as well: Prohibition, which practically defined the city in the 1920s; the exploits of Chicago’s soldiers, both white and black; life on the home front; the War Exposition in Grant Park; and some of the city’s contributions to the war effort. The book also contains sketches of the wartime activities of prominent Chicagoans, including Jane Addams, Ernest Hemingway, Clarence Darrow, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, John T. McCutcheon, “Big Bill” Thompson, and Eunice Tietjens.
 
Although its focus is Chicago, this book provides insight into change nationwide, as many of the effects that the First World War had on the city also affected the United States as a whole. Drawing on a variety of sources and written in an accessible style that combines economic, cultural, and political history, Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City portrays Chicago before the war, traces the changes initiated during the war years, and shows how these changes still endure in the cultural, ethnic, and political landscape of this great city and the nation.
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Chicago under Glass
Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News
Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan in association with the Chicago History Museum
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When the Chicago Daily News closed its doors in March 1978 after over a century of publication, the city mourned the loss of an American original. The Daily News boasted the inventive, aggressive writing of such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht. It was also one of the first newspapers in the country to feature black-and-white photography. In 1900, staffers from the paper’s art department began lugging bulky cameras, heavy glass plates, and explosive flash powder throughout the city. A labor strike, a boxing match, or a crime scene—it was all in a day’s work for the Daily News photographer.

These cameramen helped sell papers, but, as Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan reveal, they also made art. Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News is the first collection of images from the photo staff’s early years, 1901 to 1930. Jacob and Cahan, seasoned journalists themselves, have selected more than 250 images—many of which have never before been published—from the nearly 57,000 glass negatives housed at the Chicago History Museum. They include rare photographs of a young Buster Keaton with his wife and child, waiting to board a train and the notorious Al Capone outside a courtroom, smoking a cigar and consulting with his lawyer. Each thematic section begins with a fascinating introduction by the authors, and each image is accompanied by insightful historical commentary.

These fragile glass records are a remarkable piece of American history. Together, they capture a time of massive change and stark contrasts, the defining years in a place Nelson Algren called “Hustlertown.” From candid shots of the Eastland steamer disaster to the glittering electric lights of the White City amusement park and the grim aftermath of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the history these images reveal is not simply the story of Chicago, but the history of the modern American city.
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The Chicagoan
A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age
Neil Harris
University of Chicago Press, 2008
While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan.  Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles.  He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory.
 
Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. In its own words, the Chicagoan claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees.” Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, it sought passionately to redeem the Windy City’s unhappy reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest.  Harris’s substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s.  The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features—and even one issue reprinted in its entirety.
 
Recalling a vivid moment in the life of the Windy City, the Chicagoan is a forgotten treasure, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy.
 
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Chicagoland Dream Houses
How a Mid-Century Architecture Competition Reimagined the American Home
Siobhan Moroney
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Chicagoland Dream Houses is an engaging addition to the growing body of scholarship concerning Chicago’s twentieth-century residential landscape characterized by a diverse group of architects and builders.”--Michelangelo Sabatino, coauthor of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975
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Chicago’s Modern Mayors
From Harold Washington to Lori Lightfoot
Edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Political profiles of five mayors and their lasting impact on the city

Chicago’s transformation into a global city began at City Hall. Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy edit in-depth analyses of the five mayors that guided the city through this transition beginning with Harold Washington’s 1983 election: Washington, Eugene Sawyer, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel, and Lori Lightfoot. Though the respected political science, sociologist, and journalist contributors approach their subjects from distinct perspectives, each essay addresses three essential issues: how and why each mayor won the office; whether the City Council of their time acted as a rubber stamp or independent body; and the ways the unique qualities of each mayor’s administration and accomplishments influenced their legacy.

Filled with expert analysis and valuable insights, Chicago’s Modern Mayors illuminates a time of transition and change and considers the politicians who--for better and worse--shaped the Chicago of today.

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Chicago's North Michigan Avenue
Planning and Development, 1900-1930
John W. Stamper
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Since its opening in the 1920s, Chicago's North Michigan Avenue has been one of the city's most prestigious commerical corridors, lined by some of its most architecturally distinctive business, residential, and hotel buildings. Planned by Daniel Burnham in 1909, the avenue became the principal connecting link between downtown and the wealthy, residential "Gold Coast" north of the Loop. Some thirty buildings were constructed along its path in the ten-year period before the Depression, an urban expansion comparable in significance to that of Pennsylvania and Park Avenues.

John W. Stamper traces the complex development of North Michigan Avenue from the 1880s to the 1920s building boom that solidified its character and economic base, describing the initiation of the planning process by private interests to its execution aided by the city's powerful condemnation and taxation proceedings. He focuses on individual buildings constructed on the avenue, including the Renaissance- and Gothic-inspired Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, and Drake Hotel, and places them within the context of factors governing their construction—property ownership, financing, zoning laws, design theory, and advertising.

Stamper compares this stylistically diverse mixture of low- and high-rise structures with earlier, rejected planning proposals, all of which had prescribed a uniformly designed, European-like avenue of continuous cornice heights, consistent facade widths, and complementary stylistic features. He analyzes the drastically different character the avenue took by 1930, with high-rise towers reaching thirty stories and beyond, in terms of the clash among economic, political, and architectural interests. His argument—that the discrepancies between the rejected plans and reality illustrate the developers' choice of economic return on their investment over aesthetic community—is extended through to the present avenue and the virtual disregard of the urban qualities proposed at its inception. Generously illustrated, with an epilogue condensing the avenue's history between the end of World War II and the present, this is an exhaustive account of an important topic in the history of modern architecture and city planning.
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Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-40
The Times, the "Trib," and the Clap Doctor
Suzanne Poirier
University of Illinois Press, 1995
  "An eye for colorful vignettes and anecdotes. On target! She recognizes
        the importance of her subject." -- Thomas N. Bonner, author of To
        the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine
      Those struggling to deal with the AIDS epidemic might learn valuable
        lessons from the earlier struggle of the U.S. to deal with syphilis. Here,
        Suzanne Poirier tells the story of the Chicago Syphilis Control Program
        launched in 1937 by the Chicago Board of Health and the U.S. Public Health
        Service and severely limited from the start because of the refusal of
        government, the press, and the public to confront directly the issues
        underlying the problem.
      Poirier's narrative is memorable for its vivid scenes, colorful characters
        that include Chicago's "clap doctor," Dr. Ben Reitman, and its
        account of the heated debate that surrounded the effort. In an epilogue,
        the author discusses similarities between current efforts against AIDS
        and the handling and politics of the syphilis problem in the late 1930s.
 
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Chicana Art
The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities
Laura E. Pérez
Duke University Press, 2007
In Alma Lopez’s digital print Lupe & Sirena in Love (1999), two icons—the Virgin of Guadalupe and the mermaid Sirena, who often appears on Mexican lottery cards—embrace one another, symbolically claiming a place for same-sex desire within Mexican and Chicano/a religious and popular cultures. Ester Hernandez’s 1976 etching Libertad/Liberty depicts a female artist chiseling away at the Statue of Liberty, freeing from within it a regal Mayan woman and, in the process, creating a culturally composite Lady Liberty descended from indigenous and mixed bloodlines. In her painting Coyolxauhqui Last Seen in East Oakland (1993), Irene Perez reimagines as whole the body of the Aztec warrior goddess dismembered in myth. These pieces are part of the dynamic body of work presented in this pioneering, lavishly illustrated study, the first book primarily focused on Chicana visual arts.

Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Pérez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recording, interactive CD-ROM, altars and other installation forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. While key works from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, most of the pieces considered were produced between 1985 and 2001. Providing a rich interpretive framework, Pérez describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality to challenge racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia. They make use of, and often radically rework, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and other non-Western notions of art and art-making, and they struggle to create liberating versions of familiar iconography such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Sacred Heart. Filled with representations of spirituality and allusions to non-Western visual and cultural traditions, the work of these Chicana artists is a vital contribution to a more inclusive canon of American arts.


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Chicana Movidas
New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era
Edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell
University of Texas Press, 2018

Winner, Best Multiauthor Nonfiction Book, International Latino Book Awards, 2019

With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance.

These are the technologies of resistance documented in Chicana Movidas, a volume that brings together critical biographies of Chicana activists and their bodies of work; essays that focus on understudied organizations, mobilizations, regions, and subjects; examinations of emergent Chicana archives and the politics of collection; and scholarly approaches that challenge the temporal, political, heteronormative, and spatial limits of established Chicano movement narratives. Charting the rise of a field of knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Chicano studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era offers a transgenerational perspective on the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.

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Chicana Ways
Conversations With Ten Chicana Writers
Karin Rosa Ikas
University of Nevada Press, 2001
Karin Rosa Ikas offers probing and insightful interviews with ten Chicana writers of diverse backgrounds: Denise Chávez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lucha Corpi, Cherríe Moraga, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Mary Helen Ponce, Jamie Lujan, Demetria Martinez, Estela Portillo-Trambley, and Pat Mora. The interviews address such topics as personal background, education, sense of ethnic and gender identity, the origins and intention of published works, and general views on writing, culture, and art, revealing a rich multiplicity of Chicana voices and views in diverse genres including poetry, drama, and fiction. For each of these women, though, her identity as a Chicana and as a woman is critically important to her evolution and purpose as a writer. Chicana Ways documents the rich diversity and brilliance of contemporary Mexican American writing and is essential reading for anyone interested in multicultural and feminist literature.
 
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Chicanas of 18th Street
Narratives of a Movement from Latino Chicago
Leonard G. Ramirez
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform.
 
Highlighting the women's motivations, initiatives, and experiences in politics during the 1960s and 1970s, these rich personal accounts reveal the complexity of the Chicano movement, conflicts within the movement, and the importance of teatro and cultural expressions to the movement. Also detailed are vital interactions between members of the Chicano movement with leftist and nationalist community members and the influence of other activist groups such as African Americans and Marxists.
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Chicano Authors
Inquiry by Interview
By Bruce-Novoa
University of Texas Press, 1980

The need for this book became apparent to Bruce-Novoa when he first taught a Chicano culture course in 1970. His students could find no source to satisfy their curiosity about Chicano writers' backgrounds, opinions, and attitudes. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview provides that information.

Fourteen leading Chicano authors respond to questions about their personal and educational backgrounds, their perception of the role of the Chicano writer, and their evaluation of the literary, linguistic, and sociocultural significance of Chicano literature. The authors included are José Antonio Villarreal, Rolando Hinojosa, Sergio Elizondo, Miguel Méndez M., Abelardo Delgado, José Montoya, Tomás Rivera, Estela Portillo, Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bernice Zamora, Ricardo Sánchez, Ron Arias, Tino Villanueva, and Alurista.

Each interview is preceded by a brief introductory note which locates the author in the context of Chicano literature and provides a sense of his or her writing. Also included are a general introduction to Chicano literature, a chronological chart of publications by genre, and a selected bibliography. The volume will be an essential research tool for the student of Chicano literature and culture and a useful introduction for the general reader.

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Chicano Poetry
A Response to Chaos
By Bruce-Novoa
University of Texas Press, 1982

Alurista. Gary Soto. Bernice Zamora. José Montoya. These names, luminous to some, remain unknown to those who have not yet discovered the rich variety of late twentieth century Chicano poetry.

With the flowering of the Chicano Movement in the mid-1960s came not only increased political awareness for many Mexican Americans but also a body of fine creative writing. Now the major voices of Chicano literature have begun to reach the wider audience they deserve. Bruce-Novoa's Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos—the first booklength critical study of Chicano poetry—examines the most significant works of a body of literature that has grown dramatically in size and importance in less than two decades.

Here are insightful new readings of the major writings of Abelardo Delgado, Sergio Elizondo, Rodolfo Gonzales, Miguel Méndez, J. L. Navarro, Raúl Salinas, Ricardo Sánchez, and Tino Villanueva, as well as Alurista, Soto, Zamora, and Montoya. Close textual analyses of such important works as I Am Joaquín, Restless Serpents, and Floricanto en Aztlán enrich and deepen our understanding of their imagery, themes, structure, and meaning.

Bruce-Novoa argues that Chicano poetry responds to the threat of loss, whether of hero, barrio, family, or tradition. Thus José Montoya elegizes a dead Pachuco in "El Louie," and Raúl Salinas laments the disappearance of a barrio in "A Trip through the Mind Jail." But this elegy at the heart of Chicano poetry is both lament and celebration, for it expresses the group's continuing vitality and strength.

Common to twentieth-century poetry is the preoccupation with time, death, and alienation, and the work of Chicano poets—sometimes seen as outside the traditions of world literature—shares these concerns. Bruce-Novoa brilliantly defines both the unique and the universal in Chicano poetry.

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Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century
Edited by David Montejano
University of Texas Press, 1999

The various protest movements that together constituted the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s urged a "politics of inclusion" to bring Mexican Americans into the mainstream of United States political and social life. This volume of ten specially commissioned essays assesses the post-movement years, asking "what went wrong? what went right? and where are we now?" Collectively, the essays offer a wide-ranging portrayal of the complex situation of Mexican Americans as the twenty-first century begins.

The essays are grouped into community, institutional, and general studies, with an introduction by editor Montejano. Geographically, they point to the importance of "Hispanic" politics in the Southwest, as well as in Chicago wards and in the U.S. Congress, with ramifications in Mexico and Central America. Thematically, they discuss "non-traditional" politics stemming from gender identity, environmental issues, theatre production, labor organizing, university policymaking, along with the more traditional politics revolving around state and city government, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and various advocacy organizations.

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Chicano Renaissance
Contemporary Cultural Trends
Edited by David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Among the lasting legacies of the Chicano Movement is the cultural flowering that it inspired--one that has steadily grown from the 1960s to the present. It encompassed all of the arts and continues to earn acclaim both nationally and internationally. Although this Chicano artistic renaissance received extensive scholarly attention in its initial phase, the post-Movimiento years after the late 1970s have been largely overlooked. This book meets that need, demonstrating that, despite the changes that have taken place in all areas of Chicana/o arts, a commitment to community revitalization continues to underlie artistic expression.

This collection examines changes across a broad range of cultural forms--art, literature, music, cinema and television, radio, and theater--with an emphasis on the last two decades. Original articles by both established and emerging scholars review such subjects as the growth of Tejano music and the rise of Selena, how films and television have affected the Chicana/o experience, the evolution of Chicana/o art over the last twenty years, and postmodern literary trends.

In all of the essays, the contributors emphasize that, contrary to the popular notion that Chicanas/os have succumbed to a victim mentality, they continue to actively struggle to shape the conditions of their lives and to influence the direction of American society through their arts and social struggle. Despite decades usually associated with self-interest in the larger society, the spirit of commitment and empowerment has continued to infuse Chicana/o cultural expression and points toward a vibrant future.

CONTENTS
All Over the Map: La Onda Tejana and the Making of Selena, Roberto R. Calderón
Outside Inside-The Immigrant Workers: Creating Popular Myths, Cultural Expressions, and Personal Politics in Borderlands Southern California, Juan Gómez-Quiñones
"Yo soy chicano": The Turbulent and Heroic Life of Chicanas/os in Cinema and Television, David R. Maciel and Susan Racho
The Politics of Chicano Representation in the Media, Virginia Escalante
Chicana/o and Latina/o Gazing: Audiences of the Mass Media, Diana I. Ríos
An Historical Overview/Update on the State of Chicano Art, George Vargas
Contemporary Chicano Theater, Arturo Ramírez
Breaking the Silence: Developments in the Publication and Politics of Chicana Creative Writing, 1973-1998, Edwina Barvosa-Carter
Trends and Themes in Chicana/o Writings in Postmodern Times, Francisco A. Lomelí, Teresa Márquez, and María Herrera-Sobek
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Chicano Sketches
Short Stories by Mario Suárez
Mario Suárez; Edited by Francisco A. Lomelí, Cecilia Cota-Robles Suárez, and Juan Casillas-Núñez
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Mario Suárez will tell you: Garza’s Barber Shop is more than razors, scissors, and hair. It is where men, disgruntled at the vice of the rest of the world, come to get things off their chests. The lawbreakers come in to rub elbows with the sheriff’s deputies. And when zoot-suiters come in for a trim, Garza puts on a bit of zoot talk and "hep-cats with the zootiest of them."

A key figure in the foundation of Chicano literature, Mario Suárez (1923–1998) was among the first writers to focus not only on Chicano characters but also on the multicultural space in which they live, whether a Tucson barbershop or a Manhattan boxing ring. Many of his stories have received wide acclaim through publication in periodicals and anthologies; this book presents those eleven previously published stories along with eight others from the archive of his unpublished work. It also includes a biographical introduction and a critical analysis of the stories that will broaden readers’ appreciation for his place in Chicano literature.

In most of his stories, Suárez sought to portray people he knew from Tucson’s El Hoyo barrio, a place usually thought of as urban wasteland when it is thought of at all. Suárez set out to fictionalize this place of ignored men and women because he believed their human stories were worth telling, and he hoped that through his depictions American literature would recognize their existence. By seeking to record the so-called underside of America, Suárez was inspired to pay close attention to people’s mannerisms, language, and aspirations. And by focusing on these barrio characters he also crafted a unique, mild-mannered realism overflowing with humor and pathos.

Along with Fray Angélico Chávez, Suárez stands as arguably the mid-twentieth century’s most important short story writer of Mexican descent. Chicano Sketches reclaims Suárez as a major figure of the genre and offers lovers of fine fiction a chance to rediscover this major talent.
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Chicanx Utopias
Pop Culture and the Politics of the Possible
Luis Alvarez
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Honorable Mention Best History Book, International Latino Book Awards

Broad and encompassing examination of Chicanx popular culture since World War II and the utopian visions it articulated


Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences.

In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.

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Chick Lit 2
No Chick Vics
Chris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elisabeth Sheffield
University of Alabama Press, 1996
The follow-up volume to Mazza and DeShell’s hugely popular Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction
 
Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers.
 
Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women’s fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, “Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive.”
 
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The Chieftain and the Chair
The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar America
Maggie Taft
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of how Danish design rose to prominence in the postwar United States, becoming shorthand for stylish modern comfort.

Today, Danish Modern design is synonymous with clean, midcentury cool. During the 1950s and ‘60s, it flourished as the furniture choice for Americans who hoped to signal they were current and chic. But how did this happen? How did Danish Modern become the design movement of the times? In The Chieftain and the Chair, Maggie Taft tells the tale of our love affair with Danish Modern design. Structured as a biography of two iconic chairs—Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair and Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, both designed and first fabricated in 1949—this book follows the chairs from conception and fabrication through marketing, distribution, and use.

Drawing on research in public and private archives, Taft considers how political, economic, and cultural forces in interwar Denmark laid the foundations for the postwar furniture industry, and she tracks the deliberate maneuvering on the part of Danish creatives and manufacturers to cater to an American market. Taft also reveals how American tastemakers and industrialists were eager to harness Danish design to serve American interests and how furniture manufacturers around the world were quick to capitalize on the fad by flooding the market with copies.

Sleek and minimalist, Danish Modern has experienced a resurgence of popularity in the last few decades and remains a sought-after design. This accessible and engaging history offers a unique look at its enduring rise among tastemakers.

 
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Child Survivors of the Holocaust
The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience
Cohen, Beth B
Rutgers University Press, 2018
2017 Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize (WLEFP) Finalist

The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and “saved,” they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as “survivors” eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard. 
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Childhood
Nathalie Sarraute
University of Chicago Press, 2013
As one of the leading proponents of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute is often remembered for her novels, including The Golden Fruits, which earned her the Prix international de litterature in 1964. But her carefully crafted and evocative memoir Childhood may in fact be Sarraute’s most accessible and emotionally open work. Written when the author was eighty-three years old, but dealing with only the first twelve years of her life, Childhood is constructed as a dialogue between Sarraute and her memory. Sarraute gently interrogates her interlocutor in search of her own intentions, more precise accuracy, and indeed, the truth. Her relationships with her mother in Russia and her stepmother in Paris are especially heartbreaking: long-gone actions are prodded and poked at by Sarraute until they yield some semblance of fact, imbuing these maternalistic interactions with new, deeper meaning. Each vignette is bristling with detail and shows the power of memory through prose by turns funny, sad, and poetic. Capturing the ambience of Paris and Russia in the earliest part of the twentieth century, while never giving up the lyrical style of Sarraute’s novels, this book has much to offer both memoir enthusiasts and fiction lovers.

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Childhood Years
A Memoir
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro; Translated by Paul McCarthy
University of Michigan Press, 2017
In Childhood Years, originally published serially in a literary magazine between 1955 and 1956, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) takes a meandering look back on his early life in Tokyo. He reflects on his upbringing, family, and the capital city with a conversational—and not necessarily honest—eye, offering insights into his later life and his writing. 
 
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Children as Treasures
Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan
Mark Jones
Harvard University Press, 2010

Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades.

This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond.

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Children of the Occupation
Japan's Untold Story
Hamilton, Walter
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Following World War II, the Allied Powers occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952, leaving a human legacy: thousands of children of Japanese mothers fathered by men from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, India, and Britain. These mixed-race offspring, and often their mothers, faced intense discrimination.

Based on interviews with or research on 150 konketsuji—a now-taboo word for "mixed-blood" Japanese—journalist Walter Hamilton presents vivid first-person accounts of these adults as they remember their experiences of childhood loss. Using archival material from organizations dedicated to assisting the children, he combines moving personal tales with historical and political analyses of international race relations and immigration policy, particularly in North America and Australia.

Not only were attitudes and behaviors of the Japanese biased against the mixed-race children, but so were the restrictive and prejudicial immigration policies of the fathers’ native countries. Japan’s racial intolerance was fully matched in the nations it fought against. Hamilton examines how attitudes about race relations have evolved and traces the impact of racial ideology on national policy and cultural identity in Australia, Japan, and the United States.
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Chilean New Song
The Political Power of Music, 1960s - 1973
J Patrice McSherry
Temple University Press, 2015
Chilean New Song (la Nueva Canción chilena) entranced and uplifted a country that struggled for social change during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s, until the 1973 coup that overthrew democratic socialist president Salvador Allende. This powerful musical style—with its poetic lyrics and haunting blend of traditional indigenous wind and stringed instruments—was born of and expressed the aspirations of rising classes. It promised a socially just future as it forged social bonding.  
 
In Chilean New Song, J. Patrice McSherry deftly combines a political-historical view of Chile with a narrative of its cultural development. She examines the democratizing power of this music and, through interviews with key protagonists, the social roles of politically committed artists who participated in a movement for change. McSherry explores the impact of Chilean New Song and the way this artistic/cultural phenomenon related to contemporary politics to capture the passion, pain, and hope of millions of Chileans. 
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China at War
Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China
Hans van de Ven
Harvard University Press, 2018

China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told.

Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution.

In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.

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China in the World
Culture, Politics, and World Vision
Ban Wang
Duke University Press, 2022
In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning “all under heaven,” has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China’s worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country’s pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world.
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China Made
Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
Karl Gerth
Harvard University Press, 2003

“Chinese people should consume Chinese products!” This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.” From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message—patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese.

In China Made, Karl Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world—nationalism and consumerism—developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.

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China Under Mao
A Revolution Derailed
Andrew G. Walder
Harvard University Press, 2015

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

“Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today…[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others).”
—Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator

“Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful…Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart…What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.”
—Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement

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China with a Cut
Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music
Jeroen de Kloet
Amsterdam University Press, 2010
In the wake of intense globalisation and commercialisation in the 1990s, China saw the emergence of a vibrant popular culture. Drawing on sixteen years of research, Jeroen de Kloet explores the popular music industry in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, providing a fascinating history of its emergence and extensive audience analysis, while also exploring the effect of censorship on the music scene in China.China with a Cut pays particular attention to the dakou culture: so named after a cut nicked into the edge to render them unsellable, these illegally imported Western CDs still play most of the tracks. They also played a crucial role in the emergence of the new music and youth culture. De Kloet’s impressive study demonstrates how the young Chinese cope with the rapid economic and social changes in a period of intense globalisation, and offers a unique insight into the socio-cultural and political transformations of a rising global power.
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China's Avant-Garde Fiction
An Anthology
Jing Wang, ed.
Duke University Press, 1998
Filled with mirages, hallucinations, myths, mental puzzles, and the fantastic, the contemporary experimental fiction of the Chinese avant-garde represents a genre of storytelling unlike any other. Whether engaging the worn spectacle of history, expressing seemingly unmotivated violence, or reinventing outlandish Tibetan myths, these stories are defined by their devotion to theatrics and their willful apathy toward everything held sacred by the generation that witnessed the Cultural Revolution.
Jing Wang has selected provocative examples of this new school of writing, which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contradicting many long-cherished beliefs about Chinese writers—including the alleged tradition of writing as a political act against authoritarianism—these stories make a dramatic break from conventions of modern Chinese literature by demonstrating an irreverence toward history and culture and by celebrating the artificiality of storytelling. Enriched by the work of a distinguished group of translators, this collection presents an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded readers in China, but one that also occupies an important place in the canon of Chinese literature. China’s Avant-Garde Fiction brings together a group of exceptional writers (including Raise the Red Lantern author Su Tong) to the attention of an English-speaking audience.
This book will be enjoyed by those interested in Chinese literature, culture, and society—particularly readers of contemporary fiction.

Contributors
. Bei Cun, Can Xue, Gei Fei, Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua

Translators. Eva Shan Chou, Michael S. Duke, Howard Goldblatt, Ronald R. Janssen, Andrew F. Jones, Denis C. Mair, Victor H. Mair, Caroline Mason, Beatrice Spade, Kristina M. Torgeson, Jian Zhang, Zhu Hong
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China's Global Identity
Considering the Responsibilities of Great Power
Hoo Tiang Boon
Georgetown University Press, 2018

China is today regarded as a major player in world politics, with growing expectations for it to do more to address global challenges. Yet relatively little is known about how it sees itself as a great power and understands its obligations to the world.

In China’s Global Identity, Hoo Tiang Boon embarks on the first sustained study of China’s great power identity. Focus is drawn to China’s positioning of itself as a responsible power and the underestimated role played by the United States in shaping this face. In 1995 President Bill Clinton notably called for China to become a responsible great power, one that integrates itself into existing international institutions and becomes a leader in solving global problems. Chinese leaders were at that time already debating their future course and obligations to the world. Hoo examines this ongoing internal debate through Chinese sources and reveals the underestimated role that the United States has in this dialogue. Unraveling the big power politics, history, events, and ideas behind the emergence and evolution of China’s great power identity, the book provides fresh insights into the real-world issues of how China might use its power as it grows. The question of China’s role as a responsible power has real-world implications for its diplomacy and trajectory, as well as the responses of states adjusting to these shifts. The book offers a new lens for scholars, policy professionals, diplomats, and students in the fields of international relations and Asian affairs to make sense of China’s rise and its impact on America and global order.

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China's Sent-Down Generation
Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao's Rustication Program
Helena K. Rene
Georgetown University Press, 2012

During China’s Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong’s "rustication program" resettled 17 million urban youths, known as "sent downs," to the countryside for manual labor and socialist reeducation. This book, the most comprehensive study of the program to be published in either English or Chinese to date, examines the mechanisms and dynamics of state craft in China, from the rustication program’s inception in 1968 to its official termination in 1980 and actual completion in the 1990s.

Rustication, in the ideology of Mao's peasant-based revolution, formed a critical component of the Cultural Revolution's larger attack on bureaucrats, capitalists, the intelligentsia, and "degenerative" urban life. This book assesses the program’s origins, development, organization, implementation, performance, and public administrative consequences. It was the defining experience for many Chinese born between 1949 and 1962, and many of China's contemporary leaders went through the rustication program.

The author explains the lasting impact of the rustication program on China's contemporary administrative culture, for example, showing how and why bureaucracy persisted and even grew stronger during the wrenching chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She also focuses on the special difficulties female sent-downs faced in terms of work, pressures to marry local peasants, and sexual harassment, predation, and violence. The author’s parents were both sent downs, and she was able to interview over fifty former sent downs from around the country, something never previously accomplished.

China's Sent-Down Generation demonstrates the rustication program’s profound long-term consequences for China's bureaucracy, for the spread of corruption, and for the families traumatized by this authoritarian social experiment. The book will appeal to academics, graduate and undergraduate students in public administration and China studies programs, and individuals who are interested in China’s Cultural Revolution era.

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Chinese American Literature since the 1850s
Xiao-huang Yin
University of Illinois Press, 2000

The writings of immigrants from China and their descendants in the United States reflect the changes and continuity in the Chinese American experience. Xiao-huang Yin combines literary and historical scholarship to trace the origins and development of this extensive, neglected body of literature. 

Chinese American Literature since the 1850s covers representative works from the 1850s to the present. Selections include journalism and autobiography by nineteenth-century Chinese authors; writings on the walls of Angel Island, the main Asian immigrant arrival point on the West Coast; writings of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century "cultivated Chinese," students and scholars who came to America to advance their educations; important writing by immigrants such as Chen Ruoxi, Yu Lihua, and Zhang Xiguo; and the works of more recent authors like Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. 

An essential introduction and guide to the field, Chinese American Literature since the 1850s enlarges the available body of literature and provides new insights into the Chinese American immigrant experience and the writing inspired by it.

[more]

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Chinese Communist Materials at the Bureau of Investigation Archives, Taiwan
Peter Donovan, Carl E. Dorris, and Lawrence R. Sullivan
University of Michigan Press, 1976
During the long years of civil strife in China the Nationalist authorities amassed extensive materials on their Communist adversaries. Now stored in government institutions on Taiwan, these materials are an excellent source for the study of the Chinese Communist movement. Among them is the Bureau of Investigation Collection (BIC), which holds over 300,000 volumes of primary documents on the Chinese Communist movement.
The purpose of Chinese Communist Materials is, without any attempt at comprehensive listing of the Bureau’s holdings, to give scholars a representative description of the collection, to point out its implications for research, and suggest new areas for research at the Bureau in the fields of political science and history [1, 4].
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Chinese Modern
The Heroic and the Quotidian
Xiaobing Tang
Duke University Press, 2000
Chinese Modern examines crucial episodes in the creation of Chinese modernity during the turbulent twentieth century. Analyzing a rich array of literary, visual, theatrical, and cinematic texts, Xiaobing Tang portrays the cultural transformation of China from the early 1900s through the founding of the People’s Republic, the installation of the socialist realist aesthetic, the collapse of the idea of utopia in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and the gradual cannibalization of the socialist past by consumer culture at the century’s end. Throughout, he highlights the dynamic tension between everyday life and the heroic ideal.
Tang uncovers crucial clues to modern Chinese literary and cultural practices through readings of Wu Jianren’s 1906 novel The Sea of Regret and works by canonical writers Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Ba Jin. For the midcentury, he broadens his investigation by considering theatrical, cinematic, and visual materials in addition to literary texts. His reading of the 1963 play The Young Generation reveals the anxiety and terror underlying the exhilarating new socialist life portrayed on the stage. This play, enormously influential when it first appeared, illustrates the utopian vision of China’s lyrical age and its underlying discontents—both of which are critical for understanding late-twentieth-century China. Tang closes with an examination of post–Cultural Revolution nostalgia for the passion of the lyrical age.
Throughout Chinese Modern Tang suggests a historical and imaginative affinity between apparently separate literatures and cultures. He thus illuminates not only Chinese modernity but also the condition of modernity as a whole, particularly in light of the postmodern recognition that the market and commodity culture are both angel and devil. This elegantly written volume will be invaluable to students of China, Asian studies, literary criticism, and cultural studies, as well as to readers who study modernity.


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Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms
Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema
Xudong Zhang
Duke University Press, 1997
Blending history and theory, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China’s post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979–1989) through a critical reading of the various “new waves” of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse.
In examining the aesthetic and philosophical formulations of the New Era’s intellectual elites, Zhang first analyzes the intense cultural and intellectual debates, known as the “Great Cultural Discussion” or “Cultural Fever” that took place in Chinese urban centers in the mid- and late 1980s. Chinese literary modernism is then explored, specifically in relation to Deng Xiaoping’s sweeping reforms and with a focus on the changing literary sensibility and avant-garde writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong. Lastly, Zhang looks at the the making of New Chinese Cinema and films such as Yellow Earth, Horse Thief, and King of the Children—films through which Fifth Generation filmmakers first developed a style independent from socialist realism. By tracing the origins and contemporary elaboration of the idea of Chinese modernism, Zhang identifies the discourse of modernism as one of the decisive formal articulations of the social dynamism and cultural possibilities of post-Mao China.
Capturing the historical experience and the cultural vision of China during a crucial decade in its emergence as a world power, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms will interest students and scholars of modernism, Chinese literature and history, film studies, and cultural studies.
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The Chinese Postmodern
Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction
Xiaobin Yang
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The Chinese Postmodern is a pioneering study of today's Chinese experimental fiction, exploring the works of such major writers as Can Xue, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Xu Xiaohe, and Yu Hua from the perspective of cultural and literary postmodernity. Focusing on the interplay between historical psychology and representational mode, and between political discourse and literary rhetoric, it examines the problem of Chinese postmodernity against the background of the cultural-political reality of twentieth-century China.
The book seeks to redefine Chinese modernity and postmodernity through the analyses of both orthodox and avant-garde works. In doing so, the author draws on a number of theories, psychoanalysis and deconstruction in particular, revealing the hidden connection between the deconstructive mode of writing and the experience of history after trauma and showing how avant-garde literature brings about a varied literary paradigm that defies the dominant, subject-centered one in twentieth-century China.
The distinctiveness of The Chinese Postmodern is also found in its portrayal of the changes of literary paradigms in modern Chinese literature. By way of characterizing avant-garde fiction, it provides an overview of twentieth-century Chinese literature and offers a theorization of the intellectual history of modern China. Other issues concerning literary theory are explored, including the relationships between postmodernity and totalitarian discourse, between historical trauma and literary writing, and between psychic trauma and rhetorical irony. This book will appeal to readers in the fields of Chinese literature and culture, modern Chinese history, literary theory, and comparative literature.
Xiaobin Yang is Croft Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi.
[more]

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A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall
The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia
TJ Cheng, Uradyn E. Bulag, and Mark Selden
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A striking first-person account of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, embedded in a close examination of the historical evidence on China’s minority nationality policies to the present.
 
During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia’s longtime leader, Ulanhu, was purged. With the military in control, and with deepening conflict with the Soviet Union and its ally Mongolia on the border, Mongols were accused of being nationalists and traitors. A pogrom followed, taking more than 16,000 Mongol lives, the heaviest toll anywhere in China.

At the heart of this book are Cheng’s first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are complemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era from the three coauthors. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework for Inner Mongolia’s repression. The repression’s goal, the authors show, was not to destroy the Mongols as a people or as a culture—it was not a genocide. It was, however, a “politicide,” an attempt to break the will of a nationality to exercise leadership of their autonomous region. This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary source material to understand the events of the Cultural Revolution, while also  offering a novel explanation of contemporary Chinese minority politics involving the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols.
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Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting
Yi Gu
Harvard University Press, 2020

How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China?

Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there.

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Chinese Whispers
Toward a Transpacific Poetics
Yunte Huang
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning.
 
In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. “Chinese whispers” refers to an American children’s game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values.

The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa’s famous essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language.
 
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The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich
Allan Chavkin
University of Alabama Press, 1999
This volume of new essays provides the first book-length critical assessment of the fiction of America's best-known contemporary writer of Native American heritage.

Louise Erdrich is arguably the most prolific and prominent contemporary writer of American Indian descent in North America today. Her novels and short stories have won great critical acclaim and are widely taught in American and world literature courses.

This collection of original ssays focuses on Erdrich's writings rooted in the Chippewa experience. Premier scholars of Native American literature investigate narrative structure, signs of ethnicity, the notions of luck and chance in Erdrich's narrative cosmology, her use of hunting metaphors, her efforts to counter stereotypes of American Indian women, her use of comedy in exploring American Indians' tragic past, her intentions underlying the process of revision in Love Medicine, and other subjects. 

Including a variety of theoretical approaches, this book provides a comprehensive examination of Erdrich's work, making it more accessible to new readers and richer to those already familiar with her work.

 

[more]

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Choosing to Lead
Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs
Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott
Duke University Press, 2009
Shedding new light on how U.S. foreign policy is made, Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott focus on “congressional foreign policy entrepreneurs,” the often unrecognized representatives and senators who take action on foreign policy matters rather than waiting for the executive branch to do so. These proactive members of Congress have undertaken many initiatives, including reaching out to Franco’s Spain, promoting détente with the Soviet Union, proposing the return of the Panama Canal, seeking to ban military aid to Pinochet’s regime in Chile, pushing for military intervention in Haiti, and championing the recognition of Vietnam. In Choosing to Lead, Carter and Scott examine the characteristics, activities, and impact of foreign policy entrepreneurs since the end of the Second World War. In so doing, they show not only that individual members of Congress have long influenced the U.S. foreign policy-making process, but also that the number of foreign policy entrepreneurs has grown over time.

Carter and Scott combine extensive quantitative analysis, interviews with members of Congress and their staff, and case studies of key foreign policy entrepreneurs, including Frank Church, William Fulbright, Jesse Helms, Edward Kennedy, Pat McCarran, and Curt Weldon. Drawing on their empirical data, the authors identify the key variables in foreign policy entrepreneurship, including membership in the Senate or House, seniority and committee assignments, majority or minority party status, choice of foreign policy issues, and the means used to influence policy. By illuminating the roles and impact of individual members of Congress, Carter and Scott contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the broader U.S. foreign policy-making process.

[more]

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The Christian Right in American Politics
Marching to the Millennium
John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2003

From the first rumblings of the Moral Majority over twenty years ago, the Christian Right has been marshalling its forces and maneuvering its troops in an effort to re-shape the landscape of American politics. It has fascinated social scientists and journalists as the first right-wing social movement in postwar America to achieve significant political and popular support, and it has repeatedly defied those who would step up to write its obituary. In 2000, while many touted the demise of the Christian Coalition, the broader undercurrents of the movement were instrumental in helping George W. Bush win the GOP nomination and the White House. Bush repaid that swell of support by choosing Senator John Ashcroft, once the movement's favored presidential candidate, as attorney general.

The Christian Right in American Politics, under the direction of three of the nation's leading scholars in the field of religion and politics, recognizing the movement as a force still to be reckoned with, undertakes the important task of making an historical analysis of the Christian Right in state politics during its heyday, 1980 to the millennium. Its twelve chapters, written by outstanding scholars, review the impact and influence of the Christian Right in those states where it has had its most significant presence: South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Maine, and Oregon and Washington.

Since 1980, scholars have learned a good deal about the social characteristics, religious doctrine, and political beliefs of activists in and supporters of the Christian Right in these states, and each contribution is based on rigorous, dispassionate scholarship. The writers explore the gains and losses of the movement as it attempts to re-shape political landscapes. More precisely, they provide in-depth descriptions of the resources, organizations, and the group ecologies in which the Christian Right operates-the distinct elements that drove the movement forward.

As the editors state, "the Christian Right has been engaged in a long and torturous 'march toward the millennium,' from outsider status into the thick of American politics." Those formative years, 1980-2000, are essential for any understanding of this uniquely American social movement. This rigorous analysis over many states and many elections provides the clearest picture yet of the goals, tactics, and hopes of the Christian Right in America.

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Christian
The Politics of a Word in America
Matthew Bowman
Harvard University Press, 2020

A Publishers Weekly Best Religion Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title


For many Americans, being Christian is central to their political outlook. Political Christianity is most often associated with the Religious Right, but the Christian faith has actually been a source of deep disagreement about what American society and government should look like. While some identify Christianity with Western civilization and unfettered individualism, others have maintained that Christian principles call for racial equality, international cooperation, and social justice. At once incisive and timely, Christian delves into the intersection of faith and political identity and offers an essential reconsideration of what it means to be Christian in America today.

“Bowman is fast establishing a reputation as a significant commentator on the culture and politics of the United States.”
Church Times

“Bowman looks to tease out how religious groups in American history have defined, used, and even wielded the word Christian as a means of understanding themselves and pressing for their own idiosyncratic visions of genuine faith and healthy democracy.”
Christian Century

“A fascinating examination of the twists and turns in American Christianity, showing that the current state of political/religious alignment was not necessarily inevitable, nor even probable.”
Deseret News

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The Christian Tradition
A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 5: Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700)
Jaroslav Pelikan
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Jaroslav Pelikan begins this volume with the crisis of orthodoxy that confronted all Christian denominations by the beginning of the eighteenth century and continues through the twentieth century in its particular concerns with ecumenism. The modern period in the history of Christian doctrine, Pelikan demonstrates, may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated for most of Christian history were themselves called into question: the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very transcendence of God.

"Knowledge of the immense intellectual effort invested in the construction of the edifice of Christian doctrine by the best minds of each successive generation is worth having. And there can hardly be a more lucid, readable and genial guide to it than this marvellous work."—Economist

"This volume, like the series which it brings to a triumphant conclusion, may be unreservedly recommended as the best one-stop introduction currently available to its subject."—Alister E. McGrath, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Professor Pelikan's series marks a significant departure, and in him we have at last a master teacher."—Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Commonweal

"Pelikan's book marks not only the end of a dazzling scholarly effort but the end of an era as well. There is reason to suppose that nothing quite like it will be tried again."—Harvey Cox, Washington Post Book World
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Christian Wolff
Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work.
 
Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint.
 
Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond.
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Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas
Peterson, Anna L
Rutgers University Press, 2001
This volume resulted from a collaborative research project into responses of Protestant and Catholic religious communities in the Americas to the challenges of globalization. Contributors from the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and sociology draw on fieldwork in Peru, El Salvador, and the United States to show the interplay of economic globalization, migration, and growing religious pluralism in Latin America.

Organized around three central themes-family, youth, and community; democratization, citizenship, and political participation; and immigration and transnationalism-the book argues that, at the local level, religion helps people, especially women and youths, solidify their identities and confront the challenges of the modern world. Religious communities are seen as both peaceful venues for people to articulate their needs, and forums for building participatory democracies in the Americas. Finally, the contributors examine how religion enfranchises poor women, youths, and people displaced by war or economic change and, at the same time, drives social movements that seek to strengthen family and community bonds disrupted by migration and political violence.

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Chromatic Algorithms
Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code
Carolyn L. Kane
University of Chicago Press, 2014
These days, we take for granted that our computer screens—and even our phones—will show us images in vibrant full color. Digital color is a fundamental part of how we use our devices, but we never give a thought to how it is produced or how it came about.
           
Chromatic Algorithms reveals the fascinating history behind digital color, tracing it from the work of a few brilliant computer scientists and experimentally minded artists in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through to its appearance in commercial software in the early 1990s. Mixing philosophy of technology, aesthetics, and media analysis, Carolyn Kane shows how revolutionary the earliest computer-generated colors were—built with the massive postwar number-crunching machines, these first examples of “computer art” were so fantastic that artists and computer scientists regarded them as psychedelic, even revolutionary, harbingers of a better future for humans and machines. But, Kane shows, the explosive growth of personal computing and its accompanying need for off-the-shelf software led to standardization and the gradual closing of the experimental field in which computer artists had thrived.
           
Even so, the gap between the bright, bold presence of color onscreen and the increasing abstraction of its underlying code continues to lure artists and designers from a wide range of fields, and Kane draws on their work to pose fascinating questions about the relationships among art, code, science, and media in the twenty-first century.
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Chronicles of a Two-Front War
Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press
Lawrence Allen Eldridge
University of Missouri Press, 2011
During the Vietnam War, young African Americans fought to protect the freedoms of Southeast Asians and died in disproportionate numbers compared to their white counterparts. Despite their sacrifices, black Americans were unable to secure equal rights at home, and because the importance of the war overshadowed the civil rights movement in the minds of politicians and the public, it seemed that further progress might never come.  For many African Americans, the bloodshed, loss, and disappointment of war became just another chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.  Lawrence Allen Eldridge explores this two-front war, showing how the African American press grappled with the Vietnam War and its impact on the struggle for civil rights.
Written in a clear narrative style, Chronicles of a Two-Front War is the first book to examine coverage of the Vietnam War by black news publications, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in the spring of 1973 and the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975.

Eldridge reveals how the black press not only reported the war but also weighed its significance in the context of the civil rights movement.
The author researched seventeen African American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New Courier, and two magazines, Jet and Ebony.  He augmented the study with a rich array of primary sources—including interviews with black journalists and editors, oral history collections, the personal papers of key figures in the black press, and government documents, including those from the presidential libraries of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—to trace the ups and downs of U.S. domestic and wartime policy especially as it related to the impact of the war on civil rights.

Eldridge examines not only the role of reporters during the war, but also those of editors, commentators, and cartoonists. Especially enlightening is the research drawn from extensive oral histories by prominent journalist Ethel Payne, the first African American woman to receive the title of war correspondent. She described a widespread practice in black papers of reworking material from major white papers without providing proper credit, as the demand for news swamped the small budgets and limited staffs of African American papers.  The author analyzes both the strengths of the black print media and the weaknesses in their coverage.

The black press ultimately viewed the Vietnam War through the lens of African American experience, blaming the war for crippling LBJ’s Great Society and the War on Poverty.  Despite its waning hopes for an improved life, the black press soldiered on.
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Chuck Noll
His Life's Work
Michael MacCambridge
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls and presided over one of the greatest football dynasties in history, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the ‘70s. Later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his achievements as a competitor and a coach are the stuff of legend. But Noll always remained an intensely private and introspective man, never revealing much of himself as a person or as a coach, not even to the players and fans who revered him.
            Chuck Noll did not need a dramatic public profile to be the catalyst for one of the greatest transformations in sports history. In the nearly four decades before he was hired, the Pittsburgh Steelers were the least successful team in professional football, never winning so much as a division title. After Noll’s arrival, his quiet but steely leadership quickly remolded the team into the most accomplished in the history of professional football.  And what he built endured well beyond his time with the Steelers – who have remained one of America’s great NFL teams, accumulating a total of six Super Bowls, eight AFC championships, and dozens of division titles and playoff berths.
            In this penetrating biography, based on deep research and hundreds of interviews, Michael MacCambridge takes the measure of the man, painting an intimate portrait of one of the most important figures in American football history. He traces Noll’s journey from a Depression-era childhood in Cleveland, where he first played the game in a fully integrated neighborhood league led by an African-American coach and then seriously pursued the sport through high school and college.  Eventually, Noll played both defensive and offensive positions professionally for the Browns, before discovering that his true calling was coaching.  MacCambridge reveals that Noll secretly struggled with and overcame epilepsy to build the career that earned him his place as “the Emperor” of Pittsburgh during the Steelers’ dynastic run in the 1970s, while in his final years, he battled Alzheimer’s in the shelter of his caring and protective family.
            Noll’s impact went well beyond one football team. When he arrived, the city of steel was facing a deep crisis, as the dramatic decline of Pittsburgh’s lifeblood industry traumatized an entire generation. “Losing,” Noll said on his first day on the job, “has nothing to do with geography.” Through his calm, confident leadership of the Steelers and the success they achieved, the people of Pittsburgh came to believe that winning was possible, and their recovery of confidence owed a lot to the Steeler’s new coach. The famous urban renaissance that followed can only be understood by grasping what Noll and his team meant to the people of the city. The man Pittsburghers could never fully know helped them see themselves better.
            Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work tells the story of a private man in a very public job. It explores the family ties that built his character, the challenges that defined his course, and the love story that shaped his life. By understanding the man himself, we can at last clearly see Noll’s profound influence on the city, players, coaches, and game he loved. They are all, in a real sense, heirs to the football team Chuck Noll built.
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Church and State in the City
Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco
William Issel
Temple University Press, 2012

Church and State in the City provides the first comprehensive analysis of the city’s long debate about the public interest. Historian William Issel explores the complex ways that the San Francisco Catholic Church—and its lay men and women—developed relationships with the local businesses, unions, other community groups, and city government to shape debates about how to define and implement the common good. Issel’s deeply researched narrative also sheds new light on the city’s socialists, including Communist Party activists—the most important transnational challengers of both capitalism and Catholicism during the twentieth century.

Moreover, Church and State in the City is revisionist in challenging the notion that the history of urban politics and policy can best be understood as the unfolding of a progressive, secular modernization of urban political culture. Issel shows how tussles over the public interest in San Francisco were both distinctive to the city and shaped by its American character.

In the series Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy, edited by Zane L. Miller, David Stradling, and Larry Bennett

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The Church and the Left
Adam Michnik
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Writing in The New Republic, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz said of Adam Michnik, "Before his unbending will, which pushes him to pay with his own person every time he encounters injustice. I feel what probably was felt by an average Hindu confronted by the devotion of Gandhi: admiration mixed with incredulity and hope. . . . Michnik is one of those who bring honor to the last two decades of the twentieth century."

Years in advance of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Poland underwent one of the most radical and painful social and political upheavals of our century. Through a wide body of writing and an unswerving political commitment that took him from prison to parliament, Adam Michnik was a central figure in these events—culminating in 1989 with his role in formulating the political deal that brought Solidarity to power. Michnik's writings, most of them smuggled out of prison, have been translated into many languages; but until now, only isolated essays have appeared in English.

In The Church and the Left, Michnik gives full expression to the ideas that have shaped the drama of Poland and of our time. The unlikely alliance of the Catholic Church and the dissident Left is one of the most fascinating and confusing features of the Polish revolutionary movement. No other book better explains the logic of this powerful coalition—or its future implications. In superb discussions of liberalism and nationalism, of secularism and clericalism, Michnik illuminates the unique makeup and direction of Poland's social revolution and, at the same time, offers unparalleled insight into the internal struggles still present in Eastern Europe.

Today, as religious revivals proliferate and secular progress, whether liberal or communist, comes under suspicion, the relationship of religion to politics has become a pressing issue far beyond the boundaries of Poland. As none has done before, Michnik's clear and thoughtful book gives us the means to understand this volatile mix as it has transformed Poland and as it figures in the future we see taking shape.
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The Church Confronts Modernity
Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
The Church Confronts Modernity assesses the history of Roman Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and the Canadian province of Quebec
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Church History in an Age of Uncertainty
Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1906 - 1990
Henry Warner Bowden
Southern Illinois University Press

Essential to Catholic, Protestant, and even secular scholars of American religious history this is the first historiographical analysis of the work of Henry K. Rowe, James H. Nichols, Leonard J. Trinterud, H. Shelton Smith, John T. McNeill, Herbert W. Schneider, Robert T. Handy, John T. Ellis, and Jaroslav Pelikan.

Aware that every generation rewrites history, Bowden bases his investigation of major twentieth-century church historians on two questions: Why are young historians dissatisfied with earlier treatments? What leads them to believe their version is better?

Henry Warner Bowden’s extensive bibliography includes A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff.

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Church Militant
Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai
Paul P. Mariani
Harvard University Press, 2011

By 1952 the Chinese Communist Party had suppressed all organized resistance to its regime and stood unopposed, or so it has been believed. Internal party documents—declassified just long enough for historian Paul Mariani to send copies out of China—disclose that one group deemed an enemy of the state held out after the others had fallen. A party report from Shanghai marked “top-secret” reveals a determined, often courageous resistance by the local Catholic Church. Drawing on centuries of experience in struggling with the Chinese authorities, the Church was proving a stubborn match for the party.

Mariani tells the story of how Bishop (later Cardinal) Ignatius Kung Pinmei, the Jesuits, and the Catholic Youth resisted the regime’s punishing assault on the Shanghai Catholic community and refused to renounce the pope and the Church in Rome. Acting clandestinely, mirroring tactics used by the previously underground CCP, Shanghai’s Catholics persevered until 1955, when the party arrested Kung and 1,200 other leading Catholics. The imprisoned believers were later shocked to learn that the betrayal had come from within their own ranks.

Though the CCP could not eradicate the Catholic Church in China, it succeeded in dividing it. Mariani’s secret history traces the origins of a deep split in the Chinese Catholic community, where relations between the “Patriotic” and underground churches remain strained even today.

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The Churches of Christ in the 20th Century
Homer Hailey's Personal Journey of Faith
David Edwin Harrell
University of Alabama Press, 2002
The story of one of this country's major religious movements is told through the spiritual odyssey of one of its prominent spokesmen.

When Homer Hailey sparked controversy within Churches of Christ congregations over his stand on divorce and remarriage, he spoke to a movement already sundered. Historian David Edwin Harrell tells Hailey's story as a means of presenting the larger drama of faith and feuding within those churches.

A nondenominational movement of autonomous congregations, Churches of Christ have been among the fastest-growing religious bodies in the 20th century. Throughout the movement's history, church leaders debated issues ranging from missionary societies to the use of instrumental music in worship. Although some disagreements affected only the ties between congregations, others led to the creation of three distinct groups calling themselves Churches of Christ identified by their sociological and theological positions.

This book shows how the story of the Churches of Christ is reflected by Homer Hailey, a preacher, educator, and author whose life puts in perspective the personal journeys traveled by members in this century. Writing from the perspective of the non-institutional wing within the movement, Harrell avoids mainstream biases to describe the various dissenting views as fully and fairly as possible.

Combining institutional history and biography, Harrell's book is the first to bring the story of the Churches of Christ to century's end. It provides new insight into how this movement realigned itself and shows how one man's career reflected a century of spiritual growth and change for the church as a whole.


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Churchill
Sebastian Haffner
Haus Publishing, 2003
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, KG 1953) Conservative politician, Prime Minister 1940-5 and 1951-5. Perhaps the most determined and inspirational war leader in Britain's history, it was during that darkest summer of 1940 that Churchill's astonishing oratory seemed to rally the nation, from his opening statement to the House of Commons on May 13th that he had 'nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat'. Each successive crisis produced phrases that have resounded ever since, from the danger of invasion after the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk ('their finest hour') to the Battle of Britain (his tribute to the 'Few'). However, he lost the general election in June 1945. But he returned to Downing Street in 1951, finally retiring in 1955.
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The CIA in Ecuador
Marc Becker
Duke University Press, 2021
In The CIA in Ecuador Marc Becker draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, Becker details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted. He shows how leftist groups, including the Communist Party of Ecuador, navigated disagreements over tactics and ideology, and how these influenced shifting strategies in support of rural Indigenous communities and urban labor movements. He outlines the CIA's failure to understand that the Ecuadorian left was rooted in local social struggles rather than bankrolled by the Soviet Union. By decentering US-Soviet power struggles, Becker shows that the local patterns and dynamics that shaped the development of the Ecuadorian left could be found throughout Latin America during the cold war.
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Cien años de identidad
Introducción a la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX
Kelly Comfort
Georgetown University Press, 2018

Cien años de identidad: Introducción a la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX [One Hundred Years of Identity: Introduction to Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature] is an advanced Spanish textbook and Latin American literature anthology, guiding students through the critical analysis of fourteen literary and filmic texts published between 1889 and 1995, including works from Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez that represent some of the seminal works of Latin America. The textbook is designed to introduce students to the richness of twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture while building their skills in textual analysis through an examination of the theme of identity. The featured texts examine the complex and multifaceted topic of identity as the authors and protagonists struggle to understand themselves, determine their relationship to the world and others, and give meaning and significance to their existence. The textbook guides students step-by-step through critical analysis by presenting a range of tools and progressing from simple to more complex exercises and activities throughout the book. It is divided into four units based on various types of identity formation: (1) racial, ethnic, gender, and class identity; (2) existential(ist) identity; (3) temporal and spatial identity; (4) political and sexual identity. Serving as both a Latin American literature anthology and an upper-level Spanish textbook, Cien años de identidad aims to hone reading and interpretive strategies while also improving Spanish vocabulary and comprehension, oral and written communication, and cultural competency.

Features:

•Complete unabridged works from the following authors: Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Julio Cortázar, Rubén Darío, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, José Martí, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Sergio Vodanovic•Complete pedagogy included for the novel El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig and the film Fresa y chocolate by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, although these two works are not anthologized in the textbook•Additional cultural contexts and author biographies for each text, as well as appropriate glosses and numbered lines for easy reference in class discussions•Four end-of-unit chapters focused on comparative literature strategies that are designed to coach students on how to compare authors and texts across common themes and further improve critical analysis strategies•Seventeen post-reading quizzes or homework assignments as well as a final examination, available to instructors only through the publisher's website

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The Cigarette
A Political History
Sarah Milov
Harvard University Press, 2019

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize
Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History
Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist
A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year


“Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.”
New York Times Book Review

From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated.

After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers’ rights. Activists took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco’s rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science.

“A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism.”
New Republic

“An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework…A well-told story.”
Wall Street Journal

“If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

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Cinema '62
The Greatest Year at the Movies
Stephen Farber
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Lawrence of Arabia, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate, Gypsy, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Longest Day, The Music Man, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and more.

Most conventional film histories dismiss the early 1960s as a pallid era, a downtime between the heights of the classic studio system and the rise of New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and Altman in the 1970s. It seemed to be a moment when the movie industry was floundering as the popularity of television caused a downturn in cinema attendance. Cinema ’62 challenges these assumptions by making the bold claim that 1962 was a peak year for film, with a high standard of quality that has not been equaled since.
 
Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan show how 1962 saw great late-period work by classic Hollywood directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, as well as stars like Bette Davis, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Barbara Stanwyck. Yet it was also a seminal year for talented young directors like Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, and Stanley Kubrick, not to mention rising stars like Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Peter O’Toole, and Omar Sharif. Above all, 1962—the year of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Manchurian Candidate—gave cinema attendees the kinds of adult, artistic, and uncompromising visions they would never see on television, including classics from Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. Culminating in an analysis of the year’s Best Picture winner and top-grossing film, Lawrence of Arabia, and the factors that made that magnificent epic possible, Cinema ’62 makes a strong case that the movies peaked in the Kennedy era.

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Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles
Origins to 1960
Horak, Jan-Christopher
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere. 
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Cinema Civil Rights
Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era
Scott, Ellen C
Rutgers University Press, 2015
From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.

Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.

Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.
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Cinema is the Strongest Weapon
Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy
Lorenzo Fabbri
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance
 

Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism. 

 

Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology. 

 

Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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Cinema of Actuality
Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics
Yuriko Furuhata
Duke University Press, 2013
During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of image politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.
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The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded
Edited by Wanda Strauven
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies.
            The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games.
            With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.
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The Cinema of Urban Crisis
Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City
Lawrence Webb
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
In the 1970s, cities across the United States and Western Europe faced a deep social and political crisis that challenged established principles of planning, economics and urban theory. At the same time, film industries experienced a parallel process of transition, the effects of which rippled through the aesthetic and narrative form of the decade's cinema. The Cinema of Urban Crisis traces a new path through the cinematic legacy of the 1970s by drawing together these intertwined histories of urban and cultural change. Bringing issues of space and place to the fore, the book unpacks the geographical and spatial dynamics of film movements from the New Hollywood to the New German Cinema, showing how the crisis of the seventies and the emerging 'postindustrial' economy brought film and the city together in new configurations. Chapters cover a range of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, from New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco to London, Paris and Berlin. Integrating analysis of film industries and production practices with detailed considerations of individual texts, the book offers strikingly original close analyses of a wide range of films, from New Hollywood (The Conversation, The King of Marvin Gardens, Rocky) to European art cinema (Alice in the Cities, The Passenger, Tout va Bien) and popular international genres such as the political thriller and the crime film. Focusing on the aesthetic and representational strategies of these films, the book argues that the decade's cinema engaged with - and helped to shape - the passage from the 'urban crisis' of the late sixties to the neoliberal 'urban renaissance' of the early eighties. Splicing ideas from film studies with urban geography and architectural history, the book offers a fresh perspective on a rich period of film history and opens up new directions for critical engagement between film and urban studies.
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Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom
Decades of Decline, 1945–1965
Sam Manning
University of London Press, 2020
Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the United Kingdom during the first half of the twentieth century, with attendance growing significantly during World War II and peaking in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though “going to the pictures” remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the forties, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the fifties, a range of factors led to rapid declines in attendance, and by 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million.

Cinema attendance fell in all regions, but the speed, nature, and extent of this decline varied widely across the United Kingdom. By presenting detailed case studies of two similarly-sized industrial cities, Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance and detail to the discussion of regional variations in film exhibition and audience habits. Using a wide range of sources, such as oral testimony, box-office data, newspapers, and trade journals, Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom conveys the diverse and ever-changing nature of the cinema industry.
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Cine-Mobility
Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation
Han Sang Kim
Harvard University Press, 2022

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages. In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position.

From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.

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A Circle of Trust
Remembering SNCC
Greenberg, Cheryl L
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Activists and historians reflect together on the civil rights movement and its meanings, and on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's place in American history.

"The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America." --Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida

On the occasion of the SNCC's 25th anniversary, more than 500 people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. More than 40 SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits and legacies of the movement in A Circle of Trust. Engaging in spirited debate with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. With increasing racial tension and the continued debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever.

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renunciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes celebratory account of one of the most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures.

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Circle of Winners
How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture
Denise Von Glahn
University of Illinois Press, 2023

An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization’s prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II.

Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization’s ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.

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Circles without Center
Paths to the Discovery and Creation of Self in Modern Literature
Enrico Garzilli
Harvard University Press, 1972

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Circling Dixie
Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens
Helen Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2000
For Europeans looking across the Atlantic, American culture is often the site of desire, fascination, and envy. In Britain, the rich culture of the American South has made a particularly strong impact. Helen Taylor explores the ways in which contemporary Southern culture has been enthusiastically produced and reproduced in a British context.

Taylor examines some of the South's most significant cultural exports in discussions that range across literature, music, film, television, theater, advertising, and tourism to focus on how and why Southern themes and icons have become so deeply embedded in British cultural life. The enduring legacy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind can be seen today in the popularity of sequels, revisions, and reworkings of the novel. The conversation between these cultures is further explored in British responses to Alex Haley's Roots, the British theater's special affection for Tennessee Williams's plays, and the marketing of New Orleans as a preferred destination for European tourists. The transformation of Southern culture--itself a hybrid of the European, African, and American--as it circulates back across the Atlantic suggests not only new views of the history, racial politics, music and art of both Britain and the American South, but also an enhanced understanding of the dynamic flow of culture itself.
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Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey
Oyman Basaran
University of Texas Press, 2023

An investigation of how the expansion of modern medicine in Turkey transformed young boys’ experiences of circumcision.

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.

Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.

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Citadel Culture
Otto Karl Werckmeister
University of Chicago Press, 1991
"Citadel" evokes a rich mixture of associations—from images of urban centers of commerce and culture to war and the need to defend what is fortified within. Preserving its layered meanings, O. K. Werckmeister plucks the word from its usual moorings and employs it as a compelling metaphor in a brilliant retrospective of contemporary Western culture.
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Cities and Nature in the American West
Char Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2010
In less than a century, the American West has transformed from a predominantly rural region to one where most people live in metropolitan centers. Cities and Nature in the American West offers provocative analyses of this transformation. Each essay explores the intersection of environmental, urban, and western history, providing a deeper understanding of the com- plex processes by which the urban West has shaped and been shaped by its sustaining environment. The book also considers how the West’s urban development has altered the human experience and perception of nature, from the administration and marketing of national parks to the consumer roots of popular environ- mentalism; the politics of land and water use; and the challenges of environmental inequities. A number of essays address the cultural role of wilderness, nature, and such activities as camping. Others examine the increasingly per- vasive power of the West’s urban areas and urbanites to redefine the very foundations and future of the American West.
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Citizen Critics
Literary Public Spheres
Rosa A. Eberly
University of Illinois Press, 2000

The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the state of our democracy. Classrooms, newspapers, magazines, Internet forums, and many other places grant citizens a place to hold public discourses—and claim a voice on national artistic matters. 

Rosa A. Eberly looks at four censorship controversies where professionals asserted their authority to deny citizen critics a voice—and effectively removed discussion of literature from the public sphere. Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates—and undercut the authority of citizen critics—by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity.

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Citizen, Invert, Queer
Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Deborah Cohler
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.
 
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
 
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
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Citizen of the World
The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois
Edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In his 1952 book In Battle for Peace, published when W. E. B. Du Bois was eighty-three years old, the brilliant black scholar announced that he was a “citizen of the world.” Citizen of the World chronicles selected chapters of Du Bois’s final three decades between the 1930s and 1960s. It maps his extraordinarily active and productive latter years to social, cultural, and political transformations across the globe.

From his birth in 1868 until his death in 1963, Du Bois sought the liberation of black people in the United States and across the world through intellectual and political labor. His tireless efforts documented and demonstrated connections between freedom for African-descended people abroad and black freedom at home.

In concert with growing scholarship on his twilight years, the essays in this volume assert the fundamental importance of considering Du Bois’s later decades not as a life in decline that descended into blind ideological allegiance to socialism and communism but as the life of a productive, generative intellectual who responded rationally, imaginatively, and radically to massive mid-century changes around the world, and who remained committed to freedom’s realization until his final hour.
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Citizens of Scandal
Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico
Vanessa Freije
Duke University Press, 2020
In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions—between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy—that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.
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Citizenship in Cold War America
The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent
Andrea Friedman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In the wake of 9/11, many Americans have deplored the dangers to liberty posed by a growing surveillance state. In this book, Andrea Friedman moves beyond the standard security/liberty dichotomy, weaving together often forgotten episodes of early Cold War history to reveal how the obsession with national security enabled dissent and fostered new imaginings of democracy.

The stories told here capture a wide-ranging debate about the workings of the national security state and the meaning of American citizenship. Some of the participants in this debate—women like war bride Ellen Knauff and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss—were able to make their own experiences compelling examples of the threats posed by the national security regime. Others, such as Ruth Reynolds and Lolita Lebrón, who advocated an end to American empire in Puerto Rico, or the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sought to change the very definition of national security, were less successful. Together, however, they exposed the gap between democratic ideals and government policies.

Friedman traverses immigration law and loyalty boards, popular culture and theoretical treatises, U.S. court-rooms and Puerto Rican jails, to demonstrate how Cold War repression made visible in new ways the unevenness and limitations of American citizenship. Highlighting the ways that race and gender shaped critiques and defenses of the national security regime, she offers new insight into the contradictions of Cold War political culture.
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The City at Its Limits
Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima
Daniella Gandolfo
University of Chicago Press, 2009
In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori’s increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city’s cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. The City at Its Limits employs a novel and fluid interweaving of essays and field diary entries as Daniella Gandolfo analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city’s conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas’s writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—The City at Its Limits is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.
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City Behind Fence
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946
Charles W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the U.S. government during World War II to aid in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Drawing on oral history and previously classified material, this book portrays the patterns of daily life in this unique setting.


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The City Creative
The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America
Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In the wake of the Great Recession, American cities from Philadelphia to San Diego saw an upsurge in hyperlocal placemaking—small-scale interventions aimed at encouraging greater equity and community engagement in growth and renewal. But the projects that were the most successful at achieving these lofty ambitions weren’t usually established by politicians, urban planners, or real estate developers; they were initiated by community activists, artists, and neighbors. In order to figure out why, The City Creative mounts a comprehensive study of placemaking in urban America, tracing its intellectual history and contrasting it with the efforts of people making positive change in their communities today.

Spanning the 1950s to the post-recession 2010s, The City Creative highlights the roles of such prominent individuals and organizations as Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Richard Sennett, Project for Public Spaces, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the development of urban placemaking, both in the abstract and on the ground. But that’s only half the story. Bringing the narrative to the present, Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol also detail placemaking interventions at more than 200 sites in more than 40 cities, combining archival research, interviews, participant observation, and Schalliol’s powerful documentary photography. Carriere and Schalliol find that while these formal and informal placemaking interventions can bridge local community development and regional economic plans, more often than not, they push the boundaries of mainstream placemaking. Rather than simply stressing sociability or market-driven economic development, these initiatives offer an alternative model of community-led progress with the potential to redistribute valuable resources while producing tangible and intangible benefits for their communities. The City Creative provides a kaleidoscopic overview of how these initiatives grow, and sometimes collapse, illustrating the centrality of placemaking in the evolution of the American city and how it can be reoriented to meet demands for a more equitable future.
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A City Divided
The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960
Sherry Lamb Schirmer
University of Missouri Press, 2002
A City Divided traces the development of white Kansas Citians’ perceptions of race and examines the ways in which those perceptions shaped both the physical landscape of the city and the manner in which Kansas City was policed and governed. Because of rapid changes in land use and difficulties in suppressing crime and vice in Kansas City, the control of urban spaces became an acute concern, particularly for the white middle class, before race became a problematic issue in Kansas City.

As the African American population grew in size and assertiveness, whites increasingly identified blacks with those factors that most deprived a given space of its middle-class character. Consequently, African Americans came to represent the antithesis of middle-class values, and the white middle class established its identity by excluding blacks from the urban spaces it occupied.

By 1930, racial discrimination rested firmly on gender and family values as well as class. Inequitable law enforcement in the ghetto increased criminal activity, both real and perceived, within the African American community. White Kansas Citians maintained this system of racial exclusion and denigration in part by “misdirection,” either by denying that exclusion existed or by claiming that segregation was necessary to prevent racial violence. Consequently, African American organizations sought to counter misdirection tactics. The most effective of these efforts followed World War II, when local black activists devised demonstration strategies that targeted misdirection specifically.

At the same time, a new perception emerged among white liberals about the role of race in shaping society. Whites in the local civil rights movement acted upon the belief that integration would produce a better society by transforming human character. Successful in laying the foundation for desegregating public accommodations in Kansas City, black and white activists nonetheless failed to dismantle the systems of spatial exclusion and inequitable law enforcement or to eradicate the racial ideologies that underlay those systems.

These racial perceptions continue to shape race relations in Kansas City and elsewhere. This study demystifies these perceptions by exploring their historical context. While there have been many studies of the emergence of ghettos in northern and border cities, and others of race, gender, segregation, and the origins of white ideologies, A City Divided is the first to address these topics in the context of a dynamic, urban society in the Midwest.
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