front cover of Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings
Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings
Michel De Certeau
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

front cover of The Disciplinary Frame
The Disciplinary Frame
Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning
John Tagg
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Photography can seem to capture reality and the eye like no other medium, commanding belief and wielding the power of proof. In some cases, a photograph itself is attributed the force of the real. How can a piece of chemically discolored paper have such potency? How does the meaning of a photograph become fixed? In The Disciplinary Frame, John Tagg claims that, to answer these questions, we must look at the ways in which all that frames photography—the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate it— determines what counts as truth.

The meaning and power of photographs, Tagg asserts, are discursive effects of the regimens that produce them as official record, documentary image, historical evidence, or art. Teasing out the historical processes involved, he examines a series of revealing case studies from nineteenth-century European and American photographs to Depression-era works by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White to the conceptualist photography of John Baldessari.

Central to this transformative work are questions of cultural strategy, the growth of the state, and broad issues of power and representation: how the discipline of the frame holds both photographic image and viewer in place, without erasing the possibility for evading, and even resisting, capture. Photographs, Tagg ultimately finds, are at once too big and too small for the frames in which they are enclosed—always saying more than is wanted and less than is desired.
[more]

front cover of Operation Whisper
Operation Whisper
The Capture of Soviet Spies Morris and Lona Cohen
Barnes Carr
University Press of New England, 2016
Meet Morris and Lona Cohen, an ordinary-seeming couple living on a teacher’s salary in a nondescript building on the East Side of New York City. On a hot afternoon in the autumn of 1950, a trusted colleague knocked at their door, held up a finger for silence, then began scribbling a note: Go now. Leave the lights on, walk out, don’t look back. Born and raised in the Bronx and recruited to play football at Mississippi State, Morris Cohen fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and with the U.S. Army in World War II. He and his wife, Lona, were as American as football and fried chicken, but for one detail: they’d spent their entire adult lives stealing American military secrets for the Soviet Union. And not just any military secrets, but a complete working plan of the first atomic bomb, smuggled direct from Los Alamos to their Soviet handler in New York. Their associates Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who accomplished far less, had just been arrested, and the prosecutor wanted the death penalty. Did the Cohens wish to face the same fate? Federal agents were in the neighborhood, knocking on doors, getting close. So get out. Take nothing. Tell no one. In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the full, true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI’s nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies—an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends, and very good at their work. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.
[more]

front cover of To Risk It All
To Risk It All
General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country
Michael McConnell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne was the largest over-land expedition during the Seven Years’ War in America. While most histories of the time period include the Forbes Campaign as an aside, McConnell documents how and why Forbes and his army succeeded, and what his success meant to the subsequent history of the mid-Atlantic colonies, native inhabitants of the Ohio Country, and the empire he represented.

A close look at the Forbes Campaign and its personnel reveals much about both British relations with native peoples and the nature of Britain’s American empire during a time of stress. Unlike other campaigns, this one was composed largely of colonial—not professional British—troops. In addition, individual colonies negotiated their role in the campaign and frequently placed their own local interests ahead of those of the empire as a whole. The campaign thus suggests the limits of imperial power and how Britain’s hold over its American frontiers was, at best, tenuous and helped lead to an eventual break-down of empire in the 1760s and 1770s.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter