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OBERIU
An Anthology of Russian Absurdism
Eugene Ostashevsky
Northwestern University Press, 2006
OBERIU is an anthology of short works by three leading Russian absurdists: Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Between 1927 and 1930, the three made up the core of an avant-garde literary group called OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art). It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished—and then only in samizdat and émigré publications.

Some called it the last of the Russian avant-garde, and others called it the first (and last) instance of Absurdism in Russia. Though difficulty to pigeon-hole, OBERIU and the pleasures of its poetry and prose are, with this volume, at long last fully open to English-speaking readers. Skillfully translated to preserve the weird charm of the originals, these poems and prose pieces display all the hilarity and tragedy, the illogical action and puppetlike violence and eroticism, and the hallucinatory intensity that brought down the wrath of the Soviet censors. Today they offer an uncanny reflection of the distorted reality they reject.
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The Object of Performance
The American Avant-Garde since 1970
Henry M. Sayre
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Sayre defines for the first time the apparently diffuse avant-garde art of the past two decades in terms of its distinctly postmodern concerns. The range of arts discussed here encompasses contemporary dance, photography, oral poetics, performance art, and earthworks.

"Sayre has written one of the most intelligent, sensible, and readable accounts of the tenents of Postmodern artmaking published to date."—Jeff Abell, New Art Examiner

"No one can read The Object of Performance without gaining a far better idea than before of what has happened to art, and, in some measure, why. . . . I find this book consistently illuminating."—Arthur C. Danto
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The Objectivist Nexus
Essays in Cultural Poetics
Peter Quartermain
University of Alabama Press, 1999

"Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retained their outsider status. Despite such status, however, the formal, intellectual, ideological, and ethical concerns of the Objectivist nexus have increasingly influenced poetry and poetics in the United States.

Thus, argue editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, the time has come for an anthology that unites essential works on Objectivist practices and presents Objectivist writing as an enlargement of the possibilities of poetry rather than as a determinable and definable literary movement. The authors' collective aim is to bring attention to this group of poets and to exemplify and specify cultural readings for poetic texts--readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history, and readings concerned with the production, dissemination, and reception of poetic texts.

The contributors consider Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky within both their historical milieu and our own. The essays insist on poetry as a mode of thought; analyze and evaluate Objectivist politics; focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by certain Objectivist affiliations with Judaism; and explore the dissemination of poetic texts and the vagaries of Objectivist reception. Running throughout the book are two related threads: Objectivist writing as generally a practice aware of its own historical and social contingency and Objectivist writing as a site of complexity, contestation, interrogation, and disagreement.

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Objects in Air
Artworks and Their Outside around 1900
Margareta Ingrid Christian
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.

Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
 
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The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole
Postmodernist Long Poems
Brian McHale
University of Alabama Press, 2003
A smart, eclectic analysis of nine long poems written by postmodernist poets
 
Addressing subjects as wide-ranging as angelology, the court masque, pop art, caricature, the cult of the ruin, hip-hop, Spense’'s Irish policy, and the aesthetics of silence, Brian McHale pulls varied threads together to identify a repertoire of postmodernist elements characteristic of the long poems he examines.

As critic Jed Rasula explains, “McHale is wonderfully resourceful in changing the subject from chapter to chapter to fit the poems discussed, and while his approach adheres to the conventions of textual exegesis, the chapters really shine as orchestrations of issues. For instance, James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover works unexpectedly well in raising the subject of found poetry and procedural composition; Melvin Tolso’'s Harlem Gallery and Edward Dorn's Gunslinger are effectively paired to demonstrate the period flavor of pastiche; Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets explode the modernist fixation with depth; John Ashbery’s work is given a nuanced reading as proto-theory; Letter to an Imaginary Friend by Thomas McGrath provides a lucid backdrop to raise the question of political efficacy in approaching language poet Bruce Andrews; and Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts is explored for its intertextual tapestry.”

McHale shows how elements from these long poems overlap, interfere, pull in different directions, jar against, and even contradict each other; and he demonstrates how they also echo, amplify, and reinforce each other. They do not slot smoothly together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but they do form (what else?) a difficult whole.
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Obliged to Help
Adolphine Fletcher Terry and the Progressive South
Stephanie Bayless
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2011
Author Stephanie Bayless examines why this Southern aristocratic matron, the daughter of a Confederate soldier, tirelessly devoted herself to improving the lives of others and, in so doing, became a model for activism across the South. It is the first work of its kind to consider Terry's lifelong commitment to social causes and is written for both traditional scholars and all those interested in history, civil rights, and the ability of women to create change within the gender limits of the time. Adolphine Fletcher Terry died in Little Rock, Arkansas, in July of 1976, at the age of ninety-three. Her life was a monument to progress in the South, particularly in her native state of Arkansas, a place she once described as "holy ground."
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Oblivion and Stone
A Selection of Bolivian Poetry and Fiction
Sandra Reyes
University of Arkansas Press, 1998

In a literature where recognition is hard earned, this anthology demonstrates what distinguishes contemporary Bolivian fiction and poetry from the rest of Latin American writing and shows clearly how Bolivian writers relate to that tradition.

Bolivia is a landlocked nation of mountains and high, arid plains, a place native writer Jesús Urzagasti calls the “Land of Silence.” This crucible of indigenous and European influences has contributed to the creation of a writing style that is always down-to-earth, often grittily realistic.

From this fundamental base, Bolivian writers express provincial customs and values, decry political oppression, and sound universal themes of isolation, even resignation; but, more often, they show the will to move forward as a people. This rich thematic mix encourages what critic Edgar Lora has called the “dynamic and vigorous social dis course” and the resulting “subversive, militant, and revolutionary” qualities of Bolivian literature.

Editor Sandra Reyes has gathered a panoramic sampling of twenty two poets and eighteen fiction writers. Focusing predominantly on living, practicing writers, this anthology defines the current literary voice of Bolivia and gives us a distillation of the contemporary Bolivian consciousness.

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Obreros Unidos
The Roots and Legacy of the Farmworkers Movement
Jesus Salas
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
In an expansive narrative, noted labor leader Jesus Salas shares an insider’s look at the farm workers movement, from its roots in southern political uprisings to its lasting legacy of activism. During his childhood, Salas and his family joined the migrant workers who traveled from their hometown in Texas to work on farms in Wisconsin, Illinois, and other states. In riveting detail, he describes the brutal working conditions and overcrowded labor camps experienced by the Mexican American workers who fueled the Midwest’s agriculture industry.
Taking inspiration from César Chávez, as a young man Salas and others led a historic march from Wautoma to Madison to demand that lawmakers address rampant violations of Wisconsin’s minimum wage laws and housing codes. These young labor leaders founded Obreros Unidos—Workers United—to continue the fight for fairness and respect, as well as to provide much-needed services to migrant families. This memoir of a movement details how their work went beyond the fields to have lasting impacts on representation in community organizations and access to education, empowering later generations to demand better.
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Observing America
The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950
Robert Frankel
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville and Frances Trollope, visitors to America have written some of the most penetrating and, occasionally, scathing commentaries on U.S. politics and culture. Observing America focuses on four of the most insightful British commentators on America between 1890 and 1950. The colorful journalist W. T. Stead championed Anglo-American unity while plunging into reform efforts in Chicago. The versatile writer H. G. Wells fiercely criticized capitalist America but found reason for hope in the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. G. K. Chesterton, one of England’s great men of letters, urged Americans to preserve the vestiges of Jeffersonian democracy that he still discerned in the small towns of the heartland. And the influential political theorist and activist Harold Laski assailed the business ethos that he believed dominated the nation, especially after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. 
    
Robert Frankel examines the New World experiences of these commentators and the books they wrote about America. He also probes similar writings by other prominent observers from the British Isles, including Beatrice Webb, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. The result is a book that offers keen insights into America’s national identity in a time of vast political and cultural change.
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The Occasions of Poetry
Essays in Criticism and Autobiography
Thom Gunn
University of Michigan Press, 1999
"For me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience.
The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.
Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.
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Occupying Our Space
The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875–1942
Cristina Devereaux Ramírez; Foreword by Jacqueline Jones Royster
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award Winner

Occupying Our Space sheds new light on the contributions of Mexican women journalists and writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, marked as the zenith of Mexican journalism. Journalists played a significant role in transforming Mexican social and political life before and after the Revolution (1910–1920), and women were a part of this movement as publishers, writers, public speakers, and political activists. However, their contributions to the broad historical changes associated with the Revolution, as well as the pre- and post-revolutionary eras, are often excluded or overlooked.
 
This book fills a gap in feminine rhetorical history by providing an in-depth look at several important journalists who claimed rhetorical puestos, or public speaking spaces. The book closely examines the writings of Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1842–1896), Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875­–1942), the political group Las mujeres de Zitácuaro (1900), Hermila Galindo (1896–1954), and others. Grounded in the overarching theoretical lens of mestiza rhetoric, Occupying Our Space considers the ways in which Mexican women journalists negotiated shifting feminine identities and the emerging national politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With full-length Spanish primary documents along with their translations, this scholarship reframes the conversation about the rhetorical and intellectual role women played in the ever-changing political and identity culture in Mexico.
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Occupying the Stage
The Theater of May '68
Kate Bredeson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959–71 forms a standalone paradigm called "The Theater of May '68." 

The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond.

At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.
 
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Octavio Paz
A Meditation
Ilan Stavans
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Octavio Paz: Nobel Prize winner, author of The Labyrinth of Solitude and Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Faith, precursor and pathfinder, a guiding light of the Mexican intelligentsia in the twentieth century. In this small, memorable meditation on Octavio Paz as a thinker and man of action, Ilan Stavans—described by the Washington Post as "one of our foremost cultural critics" and by the New York Times as "the czar of Latino culture in the United States"—ponders Paz's intellectual courage against the ideological tapestry of his epoch and shows us what lessons can be learned from him. He does so by exploring such timeless issues as the crossroads where literature and politics meet, the place of criticism in society, and Mexico’s difficult quest to come to terms with its own history. Stavans reflects on Paz's personal struggle with Marxism and surrealism, his reflections on pachucos, his analysis of love and eroticism, his study of the life and legacy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and his influence as a magazine editor. But this extraordinary rumination is not only a thought-provoking appraisal of Paz; it is also a feast for the myriad admirers of Stavans, himself a spirited, mordant essayist who is not afraid of controversy. This explains why Richard Rodriguez has portrayed Stavans as "the rarest of North American writers—he sees the Americas whole," and then added, "Not since Octavio Paz has Mexico given us an intellectual so able to violate borders with learning and grace." Octavio Paz: A Meditation is a fitting addition to Stavans’s own oeuvre that will stimulate discerning readers.
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Odyssey of a Wandering Mind
The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author
Jennifer Horne
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own
 
Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years.

Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.
 
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Of G-Men and Eggheads
The FBI and the New York Intellectuals
John Rodden
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red.

John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends.

In a rich and stimulating epilogue, Rodden shows how his Cold War research possesses thought-provoking implications for us today, in our post-9/11 era of debates about data collection, privacy invasion, personal dignity, and the use and abuse of government and corporate power.

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Of Greater Dignity than Riches
Austerity and Housing Design in India
Farhan Karim
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. 

As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.
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Of Morsels and Marvels
Maryse Condé
Seagull Books, 2019
For many, cooking is simply the mechanical act of reproducing standard recipes. To Maryse Condé, however, cooking implies creativity and personal invention, on par with the complexity of writing a story. A cook, she explains, uses spices and flavors the same way an author chooses the music and meaning of words.
 
In Of Morsels and Marvels, Condé takes us on a literary journey around places she has travelled to in India, Indonesia, and South Africa. She highlights the tastes and culinary traditions that are fascinating examples of a living museum. Such places, Condé explains, provide important insights into lesser-known aspects of contemporary life. One anecdote illustrates what becomes of the standard Antillean dishes of fish stew and goat curry by two Antilleans who own a restaurant in Sydney, Australia. Cuisine changes not only according to the individual cook but also adapts to foreign skies under which it is created. The author also recounts personal memories of her lifelong relationship with cooking, such as when Adélia, her family’s servant, wrongly blames little Maryse for mixing raisins with fish and using her imagination in the kitchen.
 
Blending travel with gastronomy, this enchanting volume from the winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize will delight all who marvel at the wonders of the kitchen or seek to taste the world.
 
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Of Space and Mind
Cognitive Mappings of Contemporary Chicano/a Fiction
By Patrick L. Hamilton
University of Texas Press, 2011

Chicano/a fiction is often understood as a literature of resistance to the dominant U.S. Anglo culture and society. But reducing this rich literary production to a single, binary opposition distorts it in fundamental ways. It conflates literature with life, potentially substituting a literature of protest for social activism that could provoke real changes in society. And it overlooks the complex range of responses to Anglo society that actually animates Chicano/a fiction.

In this paradigm-shifting book, Patrick L. Hamilton analyzes works by Rudolfo Anaya, Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Alfredo Véa, and Helena María Viramontes to expand our understandings of the cultural interactions within the United States that are communicated by Chicano/a fiction. He argues that the narrative ethics of "resistance" within the Chicano/a canon is actually complemented by ethics of "persistence" and "transformation" that imagine cultural differences within the United States as participatory and irreducible to simple oppositions. To demonstrate these alternative ethics, Hamilton adapts the methodology of cognitive mapping; that is, he treats the chosen fictional texts as mental maps that are constructed around and communicative of the narrative's ethics. As he reads these cognitive maps, which envision Chicano/a culture as being part of U.S. society rather than as "resistant" and separate, Hamilton asserts that the authors' conception of cultural difference speaks more usefully to current sociopolitical debates, such as those about gay marriage and immigration reform, than does the traditional "resistant" paradigm.

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Of the Land
The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall
Will Stovall
Georgetown University Press, 2022

The emergence of a master artist alongside his first major collection, created during a golden age of art in the nation’s capital

Renowned for his innovative work with silkscreen printing, Lou Stovall’s works are part of numerous collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Phillips Collection. Washington Post art critic Paul Richard once wrote, “As a printer of his own art, and of the art of many others, as a framer and installer and shepherd of collections, Stovall has inserted more art into Washington than almost anyone in town.”

Of the Land: The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall presents a series of prints and accompanying poems that showcase the artist’s work during the 1970s, when he was developing his unique silkscreen technique and exploring both natural and abstract elements. An introduction by the book’s editor and artist’s son, Will Stovall, along with an autobiography from the artist anchor the Of the Land series in its time and place—a period of jazz, protest, and prolific art production in Washington, DC, that birthed the Washington Color School. Stovall’s contributions, as well as his collaborations with well-known artists like Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Elizabeth Catlett, and Robert Mangold, have cemented him as one of the most significant American artists of our age.

Part of a tradition of African American artists and thinkers who met at Howard University, Lou Stovall created the Workshop in 1968, a small, active silkscreen studio printing posters for arts and DC-focused events. His deep influence on the silkscreen medium, the art community, and DC will be part of his lasting legacy.

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Of War and Men
World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families
Ralph LaRossa
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Fathers in the fifties tend to be portrayed as wise and genial pipe-smokers or distant, emotionless patriarchs. This common but limited stereotype obscures the remarkable diversity of their experiences and those of their children. To uncover the real story of fatherhood during this transformative era, Ralph LaRossa takes the long view—from the attack on Pearl Harbor up to the election of John F. Kennedy—revealing the myriad ways that World War II and its aftermath shaped men.

Offering compelling accounts of people both ordinary and extraordinary, Of War and Men digs deep into the terrain of fatherhood. LaRossa explores the nature and aftereffects of combat, the culture of fear during the Cold War, the ways that fear altered the lives of racial and sexual minorities, and how the civil rights movement affected families both black and white. Overturning some calcified myths, LaRossa also analyzes the impact of suburbanization on fathers and their kids, discovering that living in the suburbs often strengthened their bond. And finally, looking beyond the idealized dad enshrined in TV sitcoms, Of War and Men explores the brutal side of family life in the postwar years. LaRossa’s richly researched book dismantles stereotypes while offering up a fascinating and incisive chronicle of fatherhood in all its complexity.

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Of What One Cannot Speak
Doris Salcedo's Political Art
Mieke Bal
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal.

In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations.

An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

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Off Limits
Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963
Marter, Joan
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Off Limits is the first examination of the Rutgers group, artists who came together on the Rutgers University, New Brunswick campus during the 1950s and revolutionized art practices and pedagogy. Based on interviews with artists, critics, and dealers from the period, the book connects the initiation of major trends such as Happenings, Pop Art, and Fluxus to the faculty, students, art curriculum, and events at the university. It is the first book to look not only at the work of individual artists, but to consider how interactions between these artists influenced their groundbreaking work.

Rutgers was clearly the place to be for experimental artists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Allan Kaprow’s first Happening was presented at Rutgers. Roy Lichtenstein’s first Pop paintings, George Segal’s earliest figurative tableaux, Lucas Samaras’s radical exploration of media, and proto-Fluxus events by Robert Watts and George Brecht all took place on and around the campus. The innovative group rejected Abstract Expressionism for art based on the immediate experience of urban and industrial life, creating startling new artforms which remain startling and provocative.

 Led by the theoretical writings and art practice of Kaprow, the group created a New Art—art beyond the limits of the conventional and predictable, even beyond accepted notions of progressive trends. Lichtenstein recalls in an interview, “Kaprow showed us that art didn’t have to look like art.” Along with Lichtenstein, Kaprow, Segal, and Watts taught at Rutgers and challenged one another to take art “Off Limits” — beyond the limits of the conventional, the predictable — even beyond the progressive, as defined by Abstract Expressionist gesturalism. Their art incorporated the gritty environs, the technological, the everyday, making art radical, outrageous, disturbing, and humorous.

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Off-Screen Cinema
Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
Kaira M. Cabañas
University of Chicago Press, 2015
One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists.

Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.
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The O’Hara Concern
A Biography of John O’Hara
Matthew J. Bruccoli
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
The definitive biography of short story writer John O’Hara.
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The Ohio State University in the Sixties
The Unraveling of the Old Order
William J. Shkurti
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
At 5:30 p.m. on May 6, 1970, an embattled Ohio State University President Novice G. Fawcett took the unprecedented step of closing down the university. Despite the presence of more than 1,500 armed highway patrol officers, Ohio National Guardsmen, deputy sheriffs, and Columbus city police, university and state officials feared they could not maintain order in the face of growing student protests. Students, faculty, and staff were ordered to leave; administrative offices, classrooms, and laboratories were closed. The campus was sealed off. Never in the first one hundred years of the university’s existence had such a drastic step been necessary.
 
Just a year earlier the campus seemed immune to such disruptions. President Nixon considered it safe enough to plan an address at commencement. Yet a year later the campus erupted into a spasm of violent protest exceeding even that of traditional hot spots like Berkeley and Wisconsin. How could conditions have changed so dramatically in just a few short months?
 
Using contemporary news stories, long overlooked archival materials, and first-person interviews, The Ohio State University in the Sixties explores how these tensions built up over years, why they converged when they did and how they forever changed the university.
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Oil and Mexican Foreign Policy
George Grayson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
The discovery of enormous oil reserves in the early 1970s revolutionized Mexico's economy and political behavior, bringing soaring revenues and industrial development. The oil glut of 1981 and wild fluctuations in world prices, pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy. George W. Grayson describes how the roller-coaster economic ride, shrill nationalism, political assertiveness, and arrogant posturing of the 1970s have given way to greater professionalism, fiscal responsibility, and a cooperative attitude towards the United States in recent times.
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Oil and Nation
A History of Bolivia's Petroleum Sector
Stephen C. Cote
West Virginia University Press, 2016
Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious twentieth-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales, who renationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and has used revenues from the sector to reduce poverty and increase infrastructure development in South America’s poorest country.

The book advances chronologically from Bolivia’s earliest petroleum pioneers in the nineteenth century until the present, inserting oil into historical debates about Bolivian ethnic, racial, and environmental issues, and within development strategies by different administrations. While Bolivia is best known for its tin mining, Oil and Nation makes the case that nationalist reformers viewed hydrocarbons and the state oil company as a way to modernize the country away from the tin monoculture and its powerful backers and toward an oil-powered future.
 
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Oil Cities
The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930
Henry Alexander Wiencek
University of Texas Press, 2024

How international oil companies navigated the local, segregated landscape of north Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In 1904, prospectors discovered oil in the rural parishes of North Louisiana just outside Shreveport. As rural cotton fields gave way to dense, industrial centers of energy extraction, migrants from across the US—and the world—rushed to take a share of the boom. The resulting boomtowns, most notoriously Oil City, quickly gained a reputation for violence, drinking, and rough living. Meanwhile, North Louisiana’s large Black population endured virulent white supremacy in the oil fields and the courtrooms to earn a piece of the boom, including one Black woman who stood to become the wealthiest oil heiress in America.

In Oil Cities, Henry Wiencek uncovers what life was like amidst the tent cities, saloons, and oil derricks of North Louisiana’s oil boomtowns, tracing the local experiences of migrants, farmers, sex workers, and politicians as they navigated dizzying changes to their communities. This first historical monograph on the region’s dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana’s unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.

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Old Age, New Science
Gerontologists and Their Biosocial Visions, 1900-1960
Hyung Wook Park
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Between 1870 and 1940, life expectancy in the United States skyrocketed while the percentage of senior citizens age sixty-five and older more than doubled—a phenomenon owed largely to innovations in medicine and public health. At the same time, the Great Depression was a major tipping point for age discrimination and poverty in the West: seniors were living longer and retiring earlier, but without adequate means to support themselves and their families. The economic disaster of the 1930s alerted scientists, who were actively researching the processes of aging, to the profound social implications of their work—and by the end of the 1950s, the field of gerontology emerged.
Old Age, New Science explores how a group of American and British life scientists contributed to gerontology’s development as a multidisciplinary field. It examines the foundational “biosocial visions” they shared, a byproduct of both their research and the social problems they encountered. Hyung Wook Park shows how these visions shaped popular discourses on aging, directly influenced the institutionalization of gerontology, and also reflected the class, gender, and race biases of their founders.
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Old Farm Country Cookbook
Recipes, Menus, and Memories
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
When Jerry Apps was growing up on a Wisconsin farm in the 1930s and 1940s, times were tough. Yet most folks living on farms had plenty to eat. Preparing food from scratch was just the way things were done, and people knew what was in their food and where it came from. Delicious meals were at the center of every family and social affair, whether it be a threshing-day dinner with all the neighbors, the end-of-school-year picnic, or just a hearty supper after chores were done. As Jerry writes, "For me food will always be associated with times of good eating, storytelling, laughter, and good-hearted fun."

Inspired by the dishes made by his mother, Eleanor, and featuring recipes found in her well-worn recipe box, Jerry and his daughter, Susan, take us on a culinary tour of life on the farm during the Depression and World War II. Seasoned with personal stories, menus, and family photos, Old Farm Country Cookbook recalls a time when electricity had not yet found its way to the farm, when making sauerkraut was a family endeavor, and when homemade ice cream tasted better than anything you could buy at the store.
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The Old Formalism
Character and Contemporary American Poetry
Jonathan Holden
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
Our appreciation of American poetry is as influenced by the personas presented in the poems as by public perception of the poets themselves. Emily Dickinson peeking from behind a doorway with large dark eyes is an indelible image superimposed over her spare, enigmatic poems. The grand gestures of Walt Whitman's voice have much to do with our reading of "Song of Myself." And we cannot hear "Mending Wall" or "Mowing" without thinking of the image of the rustic, sly farmer-poet that Robert Frost so carefully cultivated. The moral authority of the poet reveals itself through the poems as well, and it is crucial to the meaning of the poem, Holden argues, if art is to elevate life. Part 1 of The Old Formalism,"The Practice," is a close study of some of the conventions and developments in contemporary American poetry, with such topics as "sex and poetry" "rhetoricity," and "sensibility." Holden shows lucidly how character—or lack of it—is revealed in poetry. In "Personae," the second part, he gives a studied reading of a group of several admired poets, such as Richard Hugo, Mary Kinzie, Ted Kooser, and William Stafford. Holden uses biographical references and personal contacts with the poets to strengthen the notion of character revealed in poetry. This book takes a decided stand in the ongoing debate of the past two decades about the relationship of American poetry to American culture. In an age when image dominates word, and the business of poetry is nearly as celebrity-laden as Hollywood, Holden takes us past the media glitz, backstage where the poems are waiting to be read. Quite simply, in a clear, incisive manner, he teaches us how to read well again.
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The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde
Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940
Edited by Sue Ann Prince
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 brings together the history and the critical reaction to the new developments in art and design, places them in the context of conservative yet innovative Chicago at the turn of the century, and explores the tensions between tradition and innovation. The individual essays present the best in specialized current research, yet one can clearly understand the impact of modernism on the broader intellectual and cultural life of the city. I eagerly await as cohesive and thorough an analysis of the subject for New York."—David Sokol, University of Chicago

"This is fresh and fascinating research about the ups and downs of modernism in Chicago, a city where art students reportedly once hung Matisse in effigy. Regional studies like this one broaden our understanding of how the art world has worked outside of New York and gives depth to a story we know too narrowly. Applause all the way around."—Wanda M. Corn, Stanford University
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Old Paint
A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980
English, Peter C.
Rutgers University Press, 2001

In the early twentieth century lead had many domestic uses: in solder for cans, as a gasoline additive to prevent “knocking” in engines, in water pipes, and, most prominently, in interior paint prized for its durability and ability to hold color. Far from being the toxic hazard we recognize today, lead was a valuable commodity. However, by the end of the century, lead had largely disappeared from our environment as physicians discovered the threat it posed to children’s health and mental development.

Old Paint documents the history of lead-paint poisoning in the United States and the evolving responses of public health officials and the lead-paint industry to this hazard up to 1980, by which time lead had been banned from gasoline and paint. Peter C. English traces lead poisoning from a rare, but acute problem confined to a small group of children to the discovery by the end of the 1940s of the dangers of the crumbling lead-painted interiors of inner-city dwellings. He draws on a wide range of primary materials not only to illuminate our understanding of how this health hazard changed over time, but also to explore how diseases are constructed and evolve.

 

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OLD SOUTH, NEW SOUTH, OR DOWN SOUTH?
FLORIDA AND THE MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Edited by Irvin D. S. Winsboro
West Virginia University Press, 2009

How does a state, tarnished with a racist, violent history, emerge from the modern civil rights movement with a reputation for tolerance and progression? Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement exposes the image, illusion, and reality behind Florida’s hidden story of racial discrimination and violence. By exploring multiple perspectives on racially motivated events, such as black agency, political stonewalling, and racist assaults, this collection of nine essays reconceptualizes the civil rights legacy of the Sunshine State. Its dissection of local, isolated acts of rebellion reveals a strategic, political concealment of the once dominant, often overlooked, old south attitude towards race in Florida.

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Old Wives' Tales
Susan M. Dodd
University of Iowa Press, 1984

In these ten varied and keenly rendered tales, Susan Dodd explores the levels of the human heart by leading us through a gallery of feelings, insights, characters, and emotions. Whether writing about a 100-year-old woman in South America, a teenage suicide in Winnetka, a divorced couple meeting by chance, or a pair of lovers listening to the family on the other side of their apartment wall, Dodd places us in a world full of subdued conflict where bonds between loved ones and strangers are tested, broken, and sometimes renewed. Her themes range beyond the regional or contemporary, embracing those moments of loneliness and self-knowledge that confront us all. As the characters meet and separate, wonder and react, we travel with them, exploring the forms of our existence, and the substance of our hearts.

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Oliver Heaviside
Maverick Mastermind of Electricity
Basil Mahon
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp.
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The Omega Workshops
Judith Collins
University of Chicago Press, 1984

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Omnicompetent Modernists
Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere
Matthew Hofer
University of Alabama Press, 2022
An innovative exploration of early twentieth-century avant-garde poetry’s relationship to the public sphere
 
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,” as the poet William Carlos Williams memorably declared. In Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere, Matthew Hofer examines, through a multilayered literary critique of interwar modernist poetry, what it might mean to get the news, and more, from a poet.

Using pragmatist ideas about the public sphere as a tool, Hofer reveals how Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy sought to use literature to both express and enable thought. In Hughes, Pound, and Loy, Hofer attends to poets whose work vigorously imagined possible new relationships between language, thinking, and public society. Each poet had different goals and used different methods, but all found both inspiration and encouragement in popular political theory. Hughes advocated for a more just vision of color and class in the United States. Pound sought to condemn those whom he associated with public harm, linguistically, socially, economically, and politically. Loy championed the “psycho-democratic” representation of women, in both public and private life.

Although Hughes, Pound, and Loy are rarely considered together, what unites these three writers is how each reconceived the public realm, and revolutionized aesthetic form to articulate those visions. Hofer combines sharp intellectual historiography with rigorous literary criticism and the result is a study that reinvigorates both the poems and poets under consideration and speaks to the immense power of language in manipulating public opinion—with pertinent implications for the politics of the present.
 
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On Art
Ilya Kabakov
University of Chicago Press, 2018
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.
            Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists.
            This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.
 
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On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias
By Luis Camnitzer
University of Texas Press, 2009

Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an integral part of Camnitzer's artistic project, a way of developing an idiosyncratic art history in which to work out his own place in the picture.

This volume gathers Camnitzer's most thought-provoking essays—"texts written to make something happen," in the words of volume editor Rachel Weiss. They elaborate themes that appear persistently throughout Camnitzer's work: art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. The theme of "translation" informs the texts in the first part of the book, with Camnitzer asking such questions as "What is Latin America, and who asks the question? Who is the artist, there and here?" The texts in the second section are more historically than geographically oriented, exploring little-known moments, works, and events that compose the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers.

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On Broadway
Art and Commerce on the Great White Way
Steven Adler
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

At a critical, transitional moment in the history of Broadway—and, by extension, of American theatre itself—former Broadway stage manager Steven Adlerenlists insider perspectives from sixty-six practitioners and artists to chronicle the recent past and glimpse the near future of the Great White Way. From marquee names to behind-the-scenes power brokers, Adler has assembled a distinctly knowledgeable cast of theatre’s elite, including Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Des McAnuff, Frank Rich, Robin Wagner, Rocco Landesman, Robert Longbottom, Todd Haimes, Bernard Gersten, and Alan Eisenberg.

On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way spotlights the differing vantage points of performers, artists, writers, managers, producers, critics, lawyers, theatre owners, union leaders, city planners, and other influential players. Each details his or her firsthand account of the creative and economic forces that have wrought extraordinary changes in the way Broadway theatre is conceived, produced, marketed, and executed. Once the paramount site of American theatre, Broadway today is becoming a tourist-driven, family-friendly, middle-class entertainment oasis in Midtown, an enterprise inextricably bound to the larger mosaic of national and international professional theatre.

Accounting for this transformation and presaging Broadway’s identity for the twenty-first century, Adler and his interviewees assess the impact of the advent of corporate producers, the ascendance of not-for-profit theatres on Broadway, and the growing interdependence between regional and Broadway productions. Also critiqued are the important roles of the radical urban redevelopment staged in Times Square and the changing demographics and appetites of contemporary theatre audiences in New York and around the globe.

Actors and administrators, performers and producers, theatre students and theatregoers will all benefit from the perceptive insights in this authoritative account of theatre making for the new millennium.

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On Civilization, Power, and Knowledge
Selected Writings
Norbert Elias
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Nobert Elias (1897-1990) is among the great sociologists of the twentieth century. Born in Germany, Elias earned a doctorate in philosophy and then turned to sociology, working with Max Weber's younger brother, Alfred Weber, and with Karl Mannheim. He later fled the Nazi regime in 1935 and spent most of his life in Britain. He is best known for his book, The Civilizing Process, wherein he traces the subtle changes in manners among the European upper classes since the Middle Ages, and shows how those seemingly innocuous changes in etiquette reflected profound transformations of power relations in society. He later applied these insights to a wide range of subjects, from art and culture to the control of violence, the sociology of sports, the development of knowledge and the sciences, and the methodology of sociology.

This volume is a carefully chosen collection of Elias's most important writings and includes many of his most brilliant ideas. The development of Elias's thinking during the course of his long career is traced along with a discussion of how his work relates to other major sociologists and how the various selections are interconnected. The result is a consistent and stimulating look at one of sociology's founding thinkers.
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On Cultural Freedom
An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
University of Chicago Press, 1983
In this timely study, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb explores the nature and prospects of cultural freedom by examining the conditions that favor or threaten its development in the political East and West.

Goldfarb—who examines conditions in the Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective European allies—focuses most closely upon Poland and the United States. He investigates a wide range of concrete cases, including the Polish opposition movement and Solidarity, the migration of artists, the American television and magazine industries, American philanthropy, and communist cultural conveyor belts.

From these cases, Goldfarb derives a definitive set of sociological conditions for cultural freedom: critical creativity which resists systematic constraints, continuity of cultural tradition, and a relatively autonomous public realm for the reception of culture. Cultural freedom, Goldfarb shows, is not a static state but a process of achievement. Its parameters and content are determined by social practice in cultural institutions and by their relations with other components and the totality of social structure.

So defined, cultural freedom is transformed from an ideological concept into one with real critical and analytical power. Through it we can appreciate the invisible nature of constraint in the West and the unapparent but acting supports of cultural freedom existing in socialist countries. Most importantly, Goldfarb's conclusions provide a framework for understanding more clearly than before the circumstance of cultural freedom in both East and West so that citizens may utilize their full creative abilities as they address the problems of the present day.
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On Dark and Bloody Ground
An Oral History of the West Virginia Mine Wars
Anne T. Lawrence
West Virginia University Press, 2021
An oral history of the West Virginia Mine Wars published to coincide with the centennial of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

In 1972 Anne Lawrence came to West Virginia at the invitation of the Miners for Democracy movement to conduct interviews with participants in, and observers of, the Battle of Blair Mountain and other Appalachian mine wars of the 1920s and ’30s. The set of oral histories she collected—the only document of its kind—circulated for many years as an informal typescript volume, acquiring an almost legendary status among those intrigued by the subject. Key selections from it appear here for the first time as a published book, supplemented with introductory material, maps, and photographs. The volume’s vivid, conversational mode invites readers into miners’ lived experiences and helps us understand why they took up arms to fight anti-union forces in some of the nation’s largest labor uprisings.

Published to coincide with the celebration of the Blair Mountain centennial in 2021, On Dark and Bloody Ground includes a preface by public historian Catherine Venable Moore and an afterword by Cecil E. Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America.
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On European Ground
Alan Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 2001
A profound visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe, Alan Cohen's On European Ground considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember about these places and what we can still observe in them today. By walking these sites and photographing the very ground in which their history has dissolved, Cohen opens a space for reflection on their complex gravity and legacy.

Cohen's images achieve a solemn beauty even as they engage history at its most topical. Pictures of trenches and bunkers at the battlefields of Somme and Verdun explore the tension between the violence of the past and the inscrutability of its remnants. Photographs from the grounds of Dachau and Auschwitz solicit a provocative dialogue between the ordinariness of these sites today and their haunting memory. They teach us, as the New Art Examiner notes, "that the living perceptual connection to the Holocaust is vanishing." Images of the Berlin Wall show only the footprint of the barricade that once separated two hostile ideologies. They record the physical erosion and looming disappearance of the Wall while capturing its reappearance as a memorialized abstraction.

Accompanying the photographs in On European Ground are essays by Sander Gilman and Jonathan Bordo, as well as an interview with Cohen by critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times. The essays present both an introduction to and aesthetic analysis of Cohen's work, while the interview discusses the intractable problems of history and memory that his photographs so uniquely capture.
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On Gender, Labor, and Inequality
Ruth Milkman
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define.

Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.

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On Hashish
Walter BenjaminTranslated by Howard Eiland and Others
Harvard University Press, 2006

Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.

Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called "profane illumination." At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin's work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls "image space" comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.

This English-language edition of On Hashish features a section of supplementary materials--drawn from Benjamin's essays, letters, and sketches--relating to hashish use, as well as a reminiscence by his friend Jean Selz, which concerns a night of opium-smoking in Ibiza. A preface by Howard Eiland discusses the leading motifs of Benjamin's reflections on intoxication.

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On Internal War
American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents
William E. Odom
Duke University Press, 1992
William E. Odom combines expertise in political science and military affairs to challenge both conventional and unconventional wisdom about insurgencies and political development. The author concludes that in all three components of U.S. strategy for counterinsurgency—political, economic, and military—faulty notions of causation inform policy. U.S. advice to embattled governments fails to recognize the inherent clash of development goals; direct fiscal aid hurts more often than it helps recipient governments; and the focus of U.S. military assistance on fighting insurgents plays to their strengths and fails to exploit their weaknesses.
On Internal War reviews the contrasting theory and practice in Soviet and American approaches to their competition in the Third World and relates them to indigenous causes of internal wars. Odom also integrates the military dimensions of insurgencies with external influences and internal politics. Drawing on political development theory, he underscores the sources of instability in Third World states that make insurgencies more likely and offers ways to assess the prospects for democracy in specific cases.
The centerpiece of the study is a practical application of the author’s analysis to three case studies—El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Philippines—and a regional assessment of the Middle East. Odom provides no panaceas but suggests that more promising strategies can be devised.
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On Louise Gluck
Change What You See
Joanne Feit Diehl, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
On Louise Glück features essays by leading critics, poets, and scholars that explore the work of recent U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück.

Glück, author of nine books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris, is noted for her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae. Though compared to world-famous verse by Sappho and Dickinson, Glück's poetry has remained curiously undigested among readers of contemporary poetry for some time. On Louise Glück gathers for the first time a diverse array of essays by the leading critics of this preeminent poet. Featuring a probing, extended interview with Glück, On Louise Glück traces the critical reception of her work and offers new insights into her imaginative, mysterious poetry.

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On Modern Poetry
Guido Mazzoni
Harvard University Press, 2022

An incisive, unified account of modern poetry in the Western tradition, arguing that the emergence of the lyric as a dominant verse style is emblematic of the age of the individual.

Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, poetry in the West was transformed. The now-common idea that poetry mostly corresponds with the lyric in the modern sense—a genre in which a first-person speaker talks self-referentially—was foreign to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetics. Yet in a relatively short time, age-old habits gave way. Poets acquired unprecedented freedom to write obscurely about private experiences, break rules of meter and syntax, use new vocabulary, and entangle first-person speakers with their own real-life identities. Poetry thus became the most subjective genre of modern literature.

On Modern Poetry reconstructs this metamorphosis, combining theoretical reflections with literary history and close readings of poets from Giacomo Leopardi to Louise Glück. Guido Mazzoni shows that the evolution of modern poetry involved significant changes in the way poetry was perceived, encouraged the construction of first-person poetic personas, and dramatically altered verse style. He interprets these developments as symptoms of profound historical and cultural shifts in the modern period: the crisis of tradition, the rise of individualism, the privileging of self-expression and its paradoxes. Mazzoni also reflects on the place of poetry in mass culture today, when its role has been largely assumed by popular music.

The result is a rich history of literary modernity and a bold new account of poetry’s transformations across centuries and national traditions.

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On Mount Vision
Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry
Norman Finkelstein
University of Iowa Press, 2010

Plumbing what the poet Michael Palmer calls “the dimension of the Spirit, with that troublesome, rebarbative capital letter,” Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision asks how and why the sacred has remained a basic concern of contemporary experimental poets in our secular age. By charting the wandering, together and apart, of poetry and belief, Finkelstein illustrates the rich tapestry formed by the warp and woof of poetry, and the play of Gnosticism, antinomianism, spiritualism, and shamanism, which have commonly been regarded as heretical and sometimes been outright suppressed.

 This beautifully written work begins with an overview of the spiritual problematics found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American poetry. Traveling slightly outside of the realm of the contemporary, Finkelstein’s discussions of Emerson, Whitman, and Eliot yield to close readings of the works of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Armand Schwerner. In restoring verse to its place alongside scripture, Finkelstein reminds us why the sacred remains crucial to our understanding of postmodern American poetry.

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On Niebuhr
A Theological Study
Langdon Gilkey
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Langdon Gilkey's insightful, engaging book offers a detailed—and not uncritical—examination of one of the most influential American theologians of the twentieth century.
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On or About December 1910
Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World
Peter Stansky
Harvard University Press, 1996

On or about December 1910 human character changed, Virginia Woolf remarked, and well she might have. The company she kept, the Bloomsbury circle, took shape before the coming of World War I, and would have a lasting impact on English society and culture after the war. This book captures the dazzling world of Bloomsbury at the end of an era, and on the eve of modernism.

Peter Stansky depicts the vanguard of a rising generation seizing its moment. He shows us Woolf in that fateful year, in the midst of an emotional breakdown, reaching a turning point with her first novel, The Voyage Out, and E. M. Forster, already a success, offering Howards End and acknowledging his passion for another man. Here are Roger Fry, prominent art critic and connoisseur, remaking tradition with the epochal exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant beginning their most interesting phase as artists; Lytton Strachey signing the contract for his first book; and John Maynard Keynes entering a significant new stage in his illustrious career.

Amid the glittering opulence and dismal poverty, the swirl of Suffragists, anarchists, agitators, and organizers, Stansky—drawing upon his historical and literary skills—brings the intimate world of the Bloomsbury group to life. Their lives, relationships, writings, and ideas entwine, casting one member after another in sharp relief. Even their Dreadnought Hoax, a trick played on the sacred institution of the navy, reveals their boldness and esprit. The picture Stansky presents, with all its drama and detail, encompasses the conflicts and sureties of a changing world of politics, aesthetics, and character.

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On Press
The Liberal Values That Shaped the News
Matthew Pressman
Harvard University Press, 2018

“The ultimate story behind all the stories… In an age when the press is alternately villain or hero, Pressman serves as a kind of medicine man of journalism, telling us how we got from there to here.”—Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American press embraced a new way of reporting and selling the news. The causes were many: the proliferation of television, pressure to rectify the news media’s dismal treatment of minorities and women, accusations of bias from left and right, and the migration of affluent subscribers to suburbs. As Matthew Pressman’s timely history reveals, during these tumultuous decades the core values that held the profession together broke apart, and the distinctive characteristics of contemporary American journalism emerged.

Simply reporting the facts was no longer enough. In a country facing assassinations, a failing war in Vietnam, and presidential impeachment, reporters recognized a pressing need to interpret and analyze events for their readers. Objectivity and impartiality, the cornerstones of journalistic principle, were not jettisoned, but they were reimagined. Journalists’ adoption of an adversarial relationship with government and big business, along with sympathy for the dispossessed, gave their reporting a distinctly liberal drift. Yet at the same time, “soft news”—lifestyle, arts, entertainment—moved to the forefront of editors’ concerns, as profits took precedence over politics.

Today, the American press stands once again at a precipice. Accusations of political bias are more rampant than ever, and there are increasing calls from activists, customers, advertisers, and reporters themselves to rethink the values that drive the industry. As On Press suggests, today’s controversies—the latest iteration of debates that began a half-century ago—will likely take the press in unforeseen directions and challenge its survival.

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On the Animation of the Inorganic
Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life
Spyros Papapetros
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today.

Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

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On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements
Selected Writings of Ella Shohat
Ella Shohat
Pluto Press, 2017
Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat’s work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time.
 
As a renowned academic, orator, and activist, Shohat’s work unpacks complexly fraught issues: anomalies of the national and colonial in Zionist discourse; narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; links and distinctions between the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew; and efforts to imagine a possible united and peaceful future. Shohat’s trans-disciplinary perspective illuminates the contemporary cultural politics in and around the Middle East. A transdisciplinary work engaging history, literature, sociology, film, media, and cultural studies, Selected Writings offers a vivid sense of Shohat’s unique intellectual journey and field-defining career. 
 
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On the Battlefield of Merit
Harvard Law School, the First Century
Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball
Harvard University Press, 2015

Harvard Law School is the oldest and, arguably, the most influential law school in the nation. U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and foreign heads of state, along with senators, congressional representatives, social critics, civil rights activists, university presidents, state and federal judges, military generals, novelists, spies, Olympians, film and TV producers, CEOs, and one First Lady have graduated from the school since its founding in 1817.

During its first century, Harvard Law School pioneered revolutionary educational ideas, including professional legal education within a university, Socratic questioning and case analysis, and the admission and training of students based on academic merit. But the school struggled to navigate its way through the many political, social, economic, and legal crises of the century, and it earned both scars and plaudits as a result. On the Battlefield of Merit offers a candid, critical, definitive account of a unique legal institution during its first century of influence.

Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball examine the school’s ties with institutional slavery, its buffeting between Federalists and Republicans, its deep involvement in the Civil War, its reluctance to admit minorities and women, its anti-Catholicism, and its financial missteps at the turn of the twentieth century. On the Battlefield of Merit brings the story of Harvard Law School up to 1909—a time when hard-earned accomplishment led to self-satisfaction and vulnerabilities that would ultimately challenge its position as the leading law school in the nation. A second volume will continue this history through the twentieth century.

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On the Corner
African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis
Daniel Matlin
Harvard University Press, 2013

In July 1964, after a decade of intense media focus on civil rights protest in the Jim Crow South, a riot in Harlem abruptly shifted attention to the urban crisis embroiling America's northern cities. On the Corner revisits the volatile moment when African American intellectuals were thrust into the spotlight as indigenous interpreters of black urban life to white America, and examines how three figures--Kenneth B. Clark, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden--wrestled with the opportunities and dilemmas their heightened public statures entailed. Daniel Matlin locates in the 1960s a new dynamic that has continued to shape African American intellectual practice to the present day, as black urban communities became the chief objects of black intellectuals' perceived social obligations.

Black scholars and artists offered sharply contrasting representations of black urban life and vied to establish their authority as indigenous interpreters. As a psychologist, Clark placed his faith in the ability of the social sciences to diagnose the damage caused by racism and poverty. Baraka sought to channel black fury and violence into essays, poems, and plays. Meanwhile, Bearden wished his collages to contest portrayals of black urban life as dominated by misery, anger, and dysfunction.

In time, each of these figures concluded that their role as interpreters for white America placed dangerous constraints on black intellectual practice. The condition of entry into the public sphere for African American intellectuals in the post-civil rights era has been confinement to what Clark called "the topic that is reserved for blacks."

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On the Edge of the Holocaust
The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture
Edna Aizenberg
Brandeis University Press, 2015
In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing—Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa—Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information that reached them regarding the Holocaust, including the sympathy and collaboration of their own governments with the Nazis. Aizenberg emphasizes how—through fiction, journalism, and activism—these five culture-makers opposed and fought fascism. At the same time, her readings of individual texts confront shopworn clichés about Latin American writing and literature, suggesting deeper and richer dimensions to many canonical works. This interdisciplinary book fills critical gaps in both Holocaust and Latin American studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and students in both fields.
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On the Left in America
Memoirs of the Scandinavian-American Labor Movement
Henry Bengston. Translated by Kermit B. Westerberg. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Brook
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Previously available only in an out-of-print Swedish edition published in 1955, Henry Bengston's firsthand account deals with what historian Dag Blanck calls the "other Swedish America."

Swedish immigrants in general were conservative, but Bengston and others—most notably Joe Hill—joined the working-class labor movement on the left, primarily as Debsian socialists, although their ranks included other socialists, communists, and anarchists. Involved in the radical labor movement on many fronts, Bengston was the editor of Svenska Socialisten from 1912 until he dropped out of the Scandinavian Socialist Federation in 1920. Even after 1920, however, his sympathies remained with the movement he had once strongly espoused.

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On the Margins of Empire
Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan
Jeffrey Paul Bayliss
Harvard University Press, 2013

Two of the largest minority groups in modern Japan—Koreans, who emigrated to the metropole as colonial subjects, and a social minority known as the Burakumin, who descended from former outcastes—share a history of discrimination and marginalization that spans the decades of the nation’s modern transformation, from the relatively liberal decade of the 1920s, through the militarism and nationalism of the 1930s, to the empire’s demise in 1945.

Through an analysis of the stereotypes of Koreans and Burakumin that were constructed in tandem with Japan’s modernization and imperial expansion, Jeffrey Bayliss explores the historical processes that cast both groups as the antithesis of the emerging image of the proper Japanese citizen/subject. This study provides new insights into the majority prejudices, social and political movements, and state policies that influenced not only their perceived positions as “others” on the margins of the Japanese empire, but also the minorities’ views of themselves, their place in the nation, and the often strained relations between the two groups.

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On the Modernist Long Poem
Margaret Dickie
University of Iowa Press, 1986

Beyond Lionel Trilling's classic definition of Modernism as anticultural and subversive, Margaret Dickie posits American Modernist poetry as both conservative and affirmative—conservative because it was dominated by the composition of the long poem, affirmative because these poems aimed to restore public themes to poetry, to instruct and improve, to "affirm the gold thread in the pattern," as Ezra Pound claimed.

Each poet discussed in this new study—T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound—began his career as an experimenter in brief lyrics and then, paradoxically, developed an ambition to write a long public poem. The poems they wrote—The Waste Land, The Bridge, Paterson, and The Cantos—differed in length, in program, and in composition, but all were alike in their idealization of form, their commitment to the long poem, and the troubled and difficult process of their composition. Read together, they offer a new understanding of the Modernist sense of form shared by these quite different writers.

Tracing the development of each poem from the poet's initial announced plans through the lengthy writing and reconsideration of purpose, Dickie offers a new history not only of each poem but of the American Modernists and the ways they adapted the avant-garde tendencies of European Modernism to their own native needs.

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On the Picket Line
Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression
Mary Triece
University of Illinois Press, 2006

On the Picket Line uncovers the voices of working-class women, particularly those active in the Communist Party, U.S.A., in order to examine how these individuals confronted the tensions between their roles as workers, wives, mothers, and consumers. Combining critical analysis, Marxist and feminist theory, and labor history, Mary E. Triece analyzes the protest tactics employed by working class women to challenge dominant ideologies surrounding domesticity. 

She details the rhetorical strategies used by women to argue for their rights as workers in the paid labor force and as caregivers in the home. Their overtly coercive tactics included numerous sit-ins, strikes, and boycotts that won tangible gains for working poor and unemployed women. The book also gives voice to influential figures in the 1930s labor movement (many of whom were members of the Communist Party, U.S.A.), such as Ella Reeve Bloor, Margaret Cowl, Anna Damon, Ann Burlak, and Grace Hutchins. Triece ultimately argues that these confrontational protest tactics of the 1930s remain relevant in today’s fights for more humane workplaces and better living conditions. 

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On the Waves of Empire
U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872-1924
William D. Riddell
University of Illinois Press, 2023
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the United States’ acquisition of an overseas empire compelled the nation to reconsider the boundary between domestic and foreign--and between nation and empire. William D. Riddell looks at the experiences of merchant sailors and labor organizations to illuminate how domestic class conflict influenced America’s emerging imperial system. Maritime workers crossed ever-shifting boundaries that forced them to reckon with the collision of different labor systems and markets. Formed into labor organizations like the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific and the International Seaman’s Union of America, they contested the U.S.’s relationship to its empire while capitalists in the shipping industry sought to impose their own ideas.

Sophisticated and innovative, On the Waves of Empire reveals how maritime labor and shipping capital stitched together, tore apart, and re-stitched the seams of empire.

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On the Wings of Modernism
The United States Air Force Academy
Robert Allen Nauman
University of Illinois Press, 2003

The United States Air Force Academy stands as one of the most extensive architectural projects of the cold war era. Key to a full understanding of American modernism, the project was also a volatile battleground involving competing ideas about aesthetics and politics. Arguing that the academy's production was squarely grounded in bureaucratic and political processes, Robert Allen Nauman demonstrates that selection of both the site and the design firm was the result of political maneuverings involving U.S. military leadership.

In the academy’s iconic design, myths and metaphors of flight and the American West were interwoven with those of modernism, both to justify the plan and to free it from any lingering socialist or European associations. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s first public exhibition of plans and models for the project was designed by the former Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer, and it incorporated photographs of the Colorado Springs site by Ansel Adams and William Garnett. Using previously unexplored resources of the U.S. Air Force Academy, SOM, and the Air Force Academy Construction Agency, Nauman uncovered materials such as negatives of Adams’s original photographs of the sites. He also conducted extensive interviews with SOM’s project director for the academy, Walter Netsch, in tracing the complete history of the academy's construction, from its earliest conception to eventual completion.
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On War and Writing
Samuel Hynes
University of Chicago Press, 2018
     “In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives, our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with ourselves.”
 
Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers.
            On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes’s essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself—the battlefield uproar of actual combat—is unimaginable for those who weren’t there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren’t, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can’t possibly know.
           The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes’s experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, E. E. Cummings, and Cecil Day-Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years—men like Samuel Hynes.
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Once a Cigar Maker
Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919
Patricia A. Cooper
University of Illinois Press, 1987
Patricia A. Cooper charts the course of competition, conflict, and camaraderie among American cigar makers during the two decades that preceded mechanization of their work. In the process, she reconstructs the work culture, traditions, and daily lives of the male cigar makers who were members of the Cigar Makers' International Union of America (CMIU) and of the nonunion women who made cigars under a division of labor called the "team system." But Cooper not only examines the work lives of these men and women, she also analyzes their relationship to each other and to their employers during these critical years of the industry's transition from handcraft to mass production.
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The Once and Future Muse
The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat
Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Honorable Mention, 2021 SSAWW Book Award

The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections.

The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre—her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments—this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.
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The Once and Future Silver Queen of the Rockies
Georgetown, Colorado, and the Fight for Survival into the Twentieth Century
Christine Bradley
University Press of Colorado, 2018

There are many studies of local communities during their heydays, but the life of a community in decline is rarely studied. The Once and Future Silver Queen of the Rockies delves into the life of Georgetown, Colorado, after the turn of the twentieth century as mining in Clear Creek County steadily declined and ultimately collapsed.

One of the earliest mining communities in the state, Georgetown began to struggle for survival as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The price of silver dropped precipitously while other mining camps were still opening around the region. The new, bright future once envisioned for the “Silver Queen of the Rockies” began to fade. Yet the community managed to survive and re-create itself in the new world of the twentieth century. Tourism, skiing, and historic preservation replaced mineral extraction as the basis of the regional economy. Today, Georgetown maintains the aesthetic feel of a nineteenth-century mining town and stands as an example of community-supported historic preservation.

This richly illustrated sequel to The Rise of the Silver Queen tells the compelling story of Georgetown’s survival, and ultimate flourishing, after the loss of its principal industry. It is an interesting and engaging addition to the history of Colorado and the West.

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Once Upon a Time in Texas
A Liberal in the Lone Star State
By David Richards
University of Texas Press, 2002

Once upon a time in Texas...there were liberal activists of various stripes who sought to make the state more tolerant and more tolerable. David Richards was one of them. In this fast-paced, often humorous memoir, he remembers the players, the strategy sessions, the legal and political battles, and the wins and losses that brought significant gains in civil rights, voter rights, labor law, and civil liberties to the people of Texas from the 1950s to the 1990s.

In his work as a lawyer, Richards was involved in cases covering voters' rights, school finance reform, and a myriad of civil liberties and free speech cases. In telling these stories, he vividly evokes the "glory days" of Austin liberalism, when a who's who of Texas activists plotted strategy at watering holes such as Scholz Garden and the Armadillo World Headquarters. Likewise, he offers vivid portraits of liberal politicians from Ralph Yarborough to Ann Richards (his former wife), progressive journalists such as Molly Ivins and the Texas Observer staff, and the hippies, hellraisers, and musicians who all challenged Texas's conservative status quo.

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One Day a Year
2001–2011
Christa Wolf
Seagull Books, 2017
During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year—a collection of Wolf’s notes from the last decade of her life.

The book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times. With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.
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One Discipline, Four Ways
British, German, French, and American Anthropology
Fredrik Barth, Robert Parkin, Andre Gingrich, and Sydel Silverman
University of Chicago Press, 2005
One Discipline, Four Ways offers the first book-length introduction to the history of each of the four major traditions in anthropology—British, German, French, and American. The result of lectures given by distinguished anthropologists Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman to mark the foundation of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, this volume not only traces the development of each tradition but considers their impact on one another and assesses their future potentials.

Moving from E. B. Taylor all the way through the development of modern fieldwork, Barth reveals the repressive tendencies that prevented Britain from developing a variety of anthropological practices until the late 1960s. Gingrich, meanwhile, articulates the development of German anthropology, paying particular attention to the Nazi period, of which surprisingly little analysis has been offered until now. Parkin then assesses the French tradition and, in particular, its separation of theory and ethnographic practice. Finally, Silverman traces the formative influence of Franz Boas, the expansion of the discipline after World War II, and the "fault lines" and promises of contemporary anthropology in the United States.
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One Kind of Everything
Poem and Person in Contemporary America
Dan Chiasson
University of Chicago Press, 2007

One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.

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One Must Also Be Hungarian
Adam Biro
University of Chicago Press, 2006

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as “this people has already suffered for its past and its future,” Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darker and more tragic turn during the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is the one acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian, an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years. 

A Hungarian refugee and celebrated novelist working in Paris, Biro recognizes the enormous sacrifices that his ancestors made to pave the way for his successes and the envious position he occupies as a writer in postwar Europe. Inspired, therefore, to share the story of his family members with his grandson, Biro draws some moving pictures of them here: witty and whimsical vignettes that convey not only their courageous sides, but also their inner fears, angers, jealousies, and weaknesses—traits that lend an indelible humanity to their portraiture. Spanning the turn of the nineteenth century, two destructive world wars, the dramatic rise of communism, and its equally astonishing fall, the stories here convey a particularly Jewish sense of humor and irony throughout—one that made possible their survival amid such enormous adversity possible. 

Already published to much acclaim in France, One Must Also Be Hungarian is a wry and compulsively readable book that rescues from oblivion the stories of a long-suffering but likewise remarkable and deservedly proud people.

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One Nation Divisible
What America Was and What It Is Becoming
Michael B. Katz
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
American society today is hardly recognizable from what it was a century ago. Integrated schools, an information economy, and independently successful women are just a few of the remarkable changes that have occurred over just a few generations. Still, the country today is influenced by many of the same factors that revolutionized life in the late nineteenth century—immigration, globalization, technology, and shifting social norms—and is plagued by many of the same problems—economic, social, and racial inequality. One Nation Divisible, a sweeping history of twentieth-century American life by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, weaves together information from the latest census with a century's worth of data to show how trends in American life have changed while inequality and diversity have endured. One Nation Divisible examines all aspects of work, family, and social life to paint a broad picture of the American experience over the long arc of the twentieth century. Katz and Stern track the transformations of the U.S. workforce, from the farm to the factory to the office tower. Technological advances at the beginning and end of the twentieth century altered the demand for work, causing large population movements between regions. These labor market shifts fed both the explosive growth of cities at the dawn of the industrial age and the sprawling suburbanization of today. One Nation Divisible also discusses how the norms of growing up and growing old have shifted. Whereas the typical life course once involved early marriage and living with large, extended families, Americans today commonly take years before marrying or settling on a career path, and often live in non-traditional households. Katz and Stern examine the growing influence of government on trends in American life, showing how new laws have contributed to more diverse neighborhoods and schools, and increased opportunities for minorities, women, and the elderly. One Nation Divisible also explores the abiding economic paradox in American life: while many individuals are able to climb the financial ladder, inequality of income and wealth remains pervasive throughout society. The last hundred years have been marked by incredible transformations in American society. Great advances in civil rights have been tempered significantly by rising economic inequality. One Nation Divisible provides a compelling new analysis of the issues that continue to divide this country and the powerful role of government in both mitigating and exacerbating them. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount
Popular Music on Early Television
Murray Forman
Duke University Press, 2012
Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television—its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years.
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The One Voice of James Dickey
His Letters and Life, 1942-1969
Edited & Commentary by Gordon Van Ness
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In The One Voice of James Dickey, Gordon Van Ness skillfully documents James Dickey’s growth from a callow teen interested primarily in sports to a mature poet who possessed literary genius and who deliberately advanced himself and his career. The letters from 1942 through 1969 depict Dickey gradually establishing a self-identity, deciding to write, struggling to determine a subject matter and style, working determinedly to gain initial recognition, and eventually seeking out the literary establishment to promote himself and his views on poetry. The letters also portray a complex personality with broad interests, acute intelligence, and heightened imagination as well as a deep need to re-create his past and assume various roles in the present.
From Dickey’s extensive correspondence, Van Ness has selected not only those letters that best reveal the chronological development of Dickey’s career and his conscious efforts to chart its course, but also those that portray his other interests and depict the various features of his personality. The letters are grouped by decade, with each period placed in perspective by a critical introduction. The introductory sections offer a psychological understanding of Dickey’s personality by identifying the needs and fears that affected his actions. They also explain the American literary and cultural scene that Dickey confronted as he matured. Together, the letters and commentary yield a sense of Dickey’s complex personality—both the man as a writer and the writer as a man—while arguing that he remained “one voice.”
Because how a writer writes—the appearance of a writer’s words on a page—makes a statement, the letters are reproduced here without alterations. There are no silent deletions or revisions; the original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Dickey’s letters gathered in The One Voice of James Dickey portray a poet’s consciousness, chronicling its growth and revealing its breadth. They do not contain the whole truth, but they are what we have.
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The One Voice of James Dickey
His Letters and Life, 1970-1997
Edited & Commentary by Gordon Van Ness
University of Missouri Press, 2005
This book completes and complements the first volume of the letters and life of James Dickey. Picking up where the previous volume left off, The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1970–1997 chronicles Dickey’s career from the unparalleled success of his novel Deliverance in 1970 through his poetic experimentation in such books as The Eye Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy and Puella until his death in 1997. A prolific correspondent, Dickey tried to write at least three letters a day, and these letters provide a unique way for Gordon Van Ness to portray the vast and varied panorama of Dickey’s life.
            The letters are grouped by decade largely because Dickey’s life was so very different in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The chapter titles and their progression, as in the first volume, reflect Dickey’s sense that his life and career were a kind of warfare and that he was on a mission. A final section, “Debriefings,” offers a concise overview of Dickey’s full career. In earlier chapters, letters to people as varied as Saul Bellow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Robert Penn Warren indicate Dickey’s belief that this correspondence was a valuable networking tool, likely to open up new opportunities, while other letters, such as ones to Dickey’s oldest son, Christopher, expose the tender aspects of the author’s character.
            No other critical study so well projects the development of Dickey’s career while simultaneously exhibiting the diversity of his interests and the often-conflicting sides of his personality. In the strictest sense, this volume is not a life-in-letters, but it does provide a general sense of Dickey’s comings, goings, and doings. Van Ness’s selection of letters suggests an acute understanding of Dickey, and his editorial commentary examines and reveals Dickey’s brilliance.
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One Writer’s Beginnings
Eudora Welty
Harvard University Press, 1984

Now available as an audio CD, in Eudora Welty's own voice, or as a book.

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

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O'Neill's Shakespeare
Normand Berlin
University of Michigan Press, 1993

In O'Neill's Shakespeare , Normand Berlin explores the relationship of William Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill through detailed, often surprising, intertextual readings of the two great playwrights' work. "Of course, it would have been impossible for O'Neill not to have been influenced by Shakespeare," acknowledges Berlin. But this is an influence of an unusual and extraordinary sort, "a family romance" that transcends their obvious differences—a romance that "takes in all O'Neill's life and art."

In the first book-length study of this crucial literary and dramatic relationship, Berlin probes far beyond the usual listing of allusions and references. This is the exploration of an "essential, basic, even natural" connection, in which Shakespeare is shown to have fundamentally shaped O'Neill's creative imagination. Following O'Neill's career chronologically, Berlin divides his study into two parts. The "first career" (culminating in Mourning Becomes Electra) is explored through recurring themes that evoke Shakespeare: the sea, black and white, and the family. O'Neill's "second career" (from Ah! Wilderness until the last plays) is examined through Shakespearean genre classifications: comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Though always grounded in close textual readings, Berlin's analysis spirals outward to encompass O'Neill's artistic and psychological development and touches on the questions of tradition, transcendence, and human nature inevitably raised when such literary connections across history are drawn.

O'Neill's Shakespeare is more than a reminder that Shakespeare continues to haunt Western culture; it is a careful and fascinating analysis of a particular legacy in American drama. The book has insights to offer to specialists in Shakespeare and O'Neill, and to any reader interested in the transmission of ideas through Western culture. Berlin's study of the unconscious and conscious uses of Shakespeare by O'Neill provide a valuable new understanding of O'Neill's artistry. It is also an eloquent, thoughtful account that blends the transcendence of Shakespeare's influence with the particular ways in which every era must refashion Shakespeare so that "the past becomes the present."

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One-Way Street
Walter Benjamin
Harvard University Press, 2016

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature—by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project.

Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.”

Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.

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The Only Efficient Instrument
American Women Writers & The Periodical
Aleta Feinsod Cane
University of Iowa Press, 2001

Many farsighted women writers in nineteenth-century America made thoughtful and sustained use of newspapers and magazines to effect social and political change. “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916 examines these pioneering efforts and demonstrates that American women had a vital presence in the political and intellectual communities of their day.

Women writers and editors of diverse social backgrounds and ethnicities realized very early that the periodical was a powerful tool for education and social reform—it was the only efficient instrument to make themselves and their ideas better known. This collection of critical essays explores American women's engagement with the periodical press and shows their threefold use of the periodical: for social and political advocacy; for the critique of gender roles and social expectations; and for refashioning the periodical as a more inclusive genre that both articulated and obscured such distinctions as class, race, and gender.

Including essays on familiar figures such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Only Efficient Instrument” also focuses on writings from lesser-known authors, including Native American Zitkala-Sä, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, African American Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the Lowell factory workers. Covering nearly eighty years of publishing history, from the press censure of the outspoken Angelina Grimké in 1837 to the last issue of Gilman's Forerunner in 1916, this fascinating collection breaks new ground in the study of the women's rights movement in America.

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Only the Road / Solo el Camino
Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry
Margaret Randall, editor and translator
Duke University Press, 2016
Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry. 
 
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Onomastic Reforms
Family Names and State Building in Iran
H. E. Chehabi
Harvard University Press, 2020

In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry’s naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens’ life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men’s ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of the state-building efforts that followed the weakening of the central government induced by the First World War.

In Onomastic Reforms, H. E. Chehabi explains the traditional naming practices of Iranians before the reform, describes the public debates surrounding their obsolescence, traces the legislative measures and decrees that constituted the reform, and explores the ways Iranians chose or invented surnames for themselves.

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The Open Invitation
Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect
Freya Schiwy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
The Open Invitation explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and activist video. Schiwy analyzes activist videos from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca,  the Zapatista’s Other Campaign, as well as collaborative and community video from the Yucatán. Schiwy argues that transnational activist videos and community videos in indigenous languages reveal collaborations and that their political impact cannot be grasped through the concept of the public sphere. Instead, she places these videos in dialogue with recent efforts to understand the political with communality, a mode of governance articulated in indigenous struggles for autonomy, and with cinematic politics of affect.
 
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The Open Mind
Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature
Jamie Cohen-Cole
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The Open Mind chronicles the development and promulgation of a scientific vision of the rational, creative, and autonomous self, demonstrating how this self became a defining feature of Cold War culture. Jamie Cohen-Cole illustrates how from 1945 to 1965 policy makers and social critics used the idea of an open-minded human nature to advance centrist politics. They reshaped intellectual culture and instigated nationwide educational reform that promoted more open, and indeed more human, minds. The new field of cognitive science was central to this project, as it used popular support for open-mindedness to overthrow the then-dominant behaviorist view that the mind either could not be studied scientifically or did not exist. Cognitive science also underwrote the political implications of the open mind by treating it as the essential feature of human nature.     
           
While the open mind unified America in the first two decades after World War II, between 1965 and 1975 battles over the open mind fractured American culture as the ties between political centrism and the scientific account of human nature began to unravel. During the late 1960s, feminists and the New Left repurposed Cold War era psychological tools to redefine open-mindedness as a characteristic of left-wing politics. As a result, once-liberal intellectuals became neoconservative, and in the early 1970s, struggles against open-mindedness gave energy and purpose to the right wing.
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The Open-Ended City
David Dillon on Texas Architecture
By Kathryn E. Holliday; foreword by Robert Decherd
University of Texas Press, 2019

Texas Historical Commission Award of Excellence in Media Achievement, Texas Historical Commission

In 1980, David Dillon launched his career as an architectural critic with a provocative article that asked “Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?” Over the next quarter century, he offered readers of the Dallas Morning News a vision of how good architecture and planning could improve quality of life, combatting the negative effects of urban sprawl, civic fragmentation, and rapacious real estate development typical in Texas cities. The Open-Ended City gathers more than sixty key articles that helped establish Dillon’s national reputation as a witty and acerbic critic, showing readers why architecture matters and how it can enrich their lives.

Kathryn E. Holliday discusses how Dillon connected culture, commerce, history, and public life in ways that few columnists and reporters ever get the opportunity to do. The articles she includes touch on major themes that animated Dillon’s writing: downtown redevelopment, suburban sprawl, arts and culture, historic preservation, and the necessity of aesthetic quality in architecture as a baseline for thriving communities. While the specifics of these articles will resonate with those who care about Dallas, Fort Worth, and other Texas cities, they are also deeply relevant to all architects, urbanists, and citizens who engage in the public life and planning of cities. As a collection, The Open-Ended City persuasively demonstrates how a discerning critic helped to shape a landmark city by shaping the conversation about its architecture.

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Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China
Hsiao-t’i Li
Harvard University Press, 2019

Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.

Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time.

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Opium’s Long Shadow
From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control
Steffen Rimner
Harvard University Press, 2018

The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I.

Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage.

The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.

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Oppenheimer
The Tragic Intellect
Charles Thorpe
University of Chicago Press, 2007
At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making—and unmaking—of Oppenheimer’s wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture.
 
A stylish intellectual biography, Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer’s persona that coincided with changing attitudes toward science in society.
 
“This is an outstandingly well-researched book, a pleasure to read and distinguished by the high quality of its observations and judgments. It will be of special interest to scholars of modern history, but non-specialist readers will enjoy the clarity that Thorpe brings to common misunderstandings about his subject.”—Graham Farmelo, Times Higher Education Supplement
 
“A fascinating new perspective. . . . Thorpe’s book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind.”—Catherine Westfall, Nature
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An Opportunity Lost
The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate
Virgil W. Dean
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal” domestic policy agenda promised to continue Roosevelt’s New Deal and, with some modification for postwar realities, to guide America into a new age of peace and prosperity. Agricultural policy was a cornerstone of this program, as it attempted to transform the farm program from the parity price foundation crafted by FDR to one based on income support through direct payment to farmers.
Virgil W. Dean takes a new look at the much-heralded “Brannan Plan” to examine in detail the farm policy dilemma and Truman’s quest for a long-range agricultural program that would confront the problems of an industry in the midst of a technological revolution—one in which regional and commodity-based differences only served to complicate any solution. He assesses Truman’s relationships with the farming community and with politicians of both parties and analyzes the complex problems facing those concerned about the welfare of the American farm, focusing on their search for a workable peacetime program—especially as it related to price supports—and their failure to come to terms with the issues.
Dean describes how supporters of the Brannan Plan recognized its promise of social and economic equity while opponents feared excessive government spending, creeping socialism, and the regimentation of agriculture. He also tells how agriculture secretary Charles Brannan interjected partisan politics to an unprecedented degree in policy making—and how Truman used agricultural policy against the Republicans in the 1948 election by creating an issue with little basis in fact.
As Dean shows, the failure of Truman’s efforts meant that the nation lost an opportunity to effect a much-needed change in agricultural policy, yet the issues raised remained at the heart of the farm policy debate for decades to come—with “direct income” morphing into “deficiency payments” to satisfy farmers not wanting to appear to be on welfare. An Opportunity Lost makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Truman administration’s political activities at a time when the agricultural community had a strong voice in the formulation of domestic policy, and it casts new light on the overall fate of the Fair Deal.
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Opposing Poetries
Part One: Issues and Institutions
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.
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Opposing Poetries
Part Two: Readings
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

In Volume Two, Lazer presents a series of sustained readings of important experimental texts. Included are the poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry. Lazer places these poets in the context of contemporary literary theory, and inspects both the successes and failures of said theory to interpret these works.
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Opposing Power
Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies
Elvin Ong
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Opposing Power argues that perceptions of regime vulnerability and mutual dependency by opposition elites shape the building of opposition alliances. When electoral autocracies are consistently dominant, opposition parties eschew fully fledged alliances. At best, they allocate only one candidate to contest against the incumbent in each subnational electoral district to avoid splitting the opposition vote. However, when multiple regime-debilitating events strike within a short period of time, thus pushing an incumbent to the precipice of power, opposition elites expect victory, accepting costly compromises to build alliances and seize power. Opposing Power shows how oppositions build these alliances through case study comparisons in East and Southeast Asia—between the Philippines and South Korea in the late 1980s, and between Malaysia and Singapore from 1965 to 2020.
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Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West
Edited by Jessie L. Embry
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Nurses, show girls, housewives, farm workers, casino managers, and government inspectors—together these hard-working members of society contributed to the development of towns across the West. The essays in this volume show how oral history increases understanding of work and community in the twentieth century American West.

In many cases occupations brought people together in myriad ways. The Latino workers who picked lemons together in Southern California report that it was baseball and Cinco de Mayo Queen contests that united them. Mormons in Fort Collins, Colorado, say that building a church together bonded them together. In separate essays, African Americans and women describe how they fostered a sense of community in Las Vegas. Native Americans detail the “Indian economy” in Northern California.

As these essays demonstrate, the history of the American West is the story of small towns and big cities, places both isolated and heavily populated. It includes groups whose history has often been neglected. Sometimes, western history has mirrored the history of the nation; at other times, it has diverged in unique ways. Oral history adds a dimension that has often been missing in writing a comprehensive history of the West. Here an array of oral historians—including folklorists, librarians, and public historians—record what they have learned from people who have, in their own ways, made history.
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Orchestrating Public Opinion
How Music Persuades in Television Political Ads for US Presidential Campaigns, 1952-2016
Paul Christiansen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.
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The Ordeal of the Jungle
Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922
David Bates
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt.
 
By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organization’s membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFL’s innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the union’s hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed.
 
The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago.
 
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Ordinary Language Criticism
Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein
Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which language and literature truly live, the essays in this volume articulate a productive, new critical approach: ordinary language criticism. With roots in the ordinary language philosophy derived especially from Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, and in the ideas of American pragmatic philosophy propounded and extended by Stanley Cavell, this approach seeks to return criticism to its grounds in the natural language we all speak; to expose the terms of our engagement with narratives, arguments, and concepts-what Wittgenstein and Cavell call the "criteria" of our writing and reading.

Resisting master formulations and overarching theories, Ordinary Language Criticism does not so much dismiss the excitement of the last two decades of literary theorizing as it reminds us of the excitement of the shared common enterprises to which theory may still contribute. In this, the volume and the model it offers have wide implications for the academy, in which a widespread ersatz-sophistication has shorted the circuit between literary works and the real lives of those reading and teaching them.

With a definitive introduction by editors Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, and elaborations and practical examples by major figures such as Cavell himself, Martha Nussbaum, Marjorie Perloff, Anthony Cascardi, and Charles Altieri, among others, this volume clearly shows and explains how ordinary language criticism differs from current trends and what it exactly it can accomplish in theory and practice. These essays prove that by attending more faithfully to what we actually do when we read, we can make reading more productive--can reveal how extraordinary and rich, how really sophisticated, the ordinary actually is.
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Organizing for Equality
The Evolution of Women's and Racial-Ethnic Organizations in America, 1955-1985
Minkoff, Debra C
Rutgers University Press, 1995

Women and racial-ethnic minorities have had long histories of mobilizing for equality in U.S. society, but recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number and visibility of voluntary and activist organizations committed to challenging gender and racial-ethnic discrimination. What conditions have encouraged this growth? Going beyond more familiar accounts of social movement development, Debra Minkoff uses multivariate techniques to demonstrate that there is an ecology of organizational evolution that has shaped the formation and survival of national women's, African-American, Asian American, and Latino social and political organizations. Changes in the environment for action during the 1960s promoted the creation of a niche for women's and minority organizational activity, and this sector continued to expand even as the climate for social action became increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on recent advances in both social movement and organizational theory and research, Minkoff offers an organizational analysis of the evolution of the women's and racial-ethnic social change sector since the mid-1950s. She provides an original synthesis of social movement and organizational theory, and unique analysis of the development of these women's and minority organizations from the civil rights era to the present.

 

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Organizing for Foreign Policy Crises
Presidents, Advisers, and the Management of Decision Making
Patrick J. Haney
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Presidents often assemble ad hoc groups of advisers to help them make decisions during foreign policy crises. These advisers may include the holders of the traditional foreign policy positions--secretaries of state and defense--as well as others from within and without the executive branch. It has never been clear what role these groups play in the development of policy. In this landmark study, Patrick Haney examines how these crisis decision groups were structured and how they performed the tasks of providing information, advice, and analysis to the president. From this, Haney investigates the links between a president's crisis management structure and the decision-making process that took place during a foreign policy crisis.
Haney employs case studies to examine the different ways presidents from Truman through Bush used crisis decision-making groups to help manage foreign policy crises. He looks at the role of these groups in handling the Berlin blockade in 1948, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Tet offensive in 1968, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Panama invasion in 1989, among other crises. He extends our understanding of the organization, management and behavior of the decision-making groups presidents assemble during foreign policy crises. This book will appeal to scholars of the American presidency and American foreign policy.
Patrick Haney is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio.
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