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Jacques Lacan
The French Context
Marini, Marcelle
Rutgers University Press, 1993
Although many books have been published on Jacques Lacan that attem0pt to explain his work and to provide insights into the relationship between his work and his life, most of them depend largely on the small number of texts that were published in his lifetime. Unlike Freud, however, Lacan expressed his ideas not through voluminous writings and carefully considered case studies, but through his lectures. He was a volatile figure on the French psychoanalytic scene; his feuds and friendships and ever-changing professional alliances go a long way toward explaining his views. JACQUERS LACAN, published to great acclaim in France in 1986, has now been translated into English. It is the first look at Lacan and his work from within the French context. Marcelle Marini, a knowledgeable insider, presents Lacan in two parts. The first part focuses on the actual situation of psychoanalysis in France, attempting to efine the impact of Lacan on it and its effect on him, his life, and work since 1926. Marini describes scandals and battles, as well as material on Lacan's original concepts and major theories. In the second half of the book Marini provides a full chronological, biographical, and bibliographical dossier - year by year - of the progress of Lacan's work. Lacan's lectures are given proper attention, extending our view far beyond the written texts. JACQUES LACAN is indispensable reading for anyone who truly wants to understand the man and his work.

 
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James Joyce and the Irish Revolution
The Easter Rising as Modern Event
Luke Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A provocative history of Ulysses and the Easter Rising as harbingers of decolonization.
 
When revolutionaries seized Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, they looked back to unrequited pasts to point the way toward radical futures—transforming the Celtic Twilight into the electric light of modern Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Luke Gibbons, the short-lived rebellion converted the Irish renaissance into the beginning of a global decolonial movement. James Joyce and the Irish Revolution maps connections between modernists and radicals, tracing not only Joyce’s projection of Ireland onto the world stage, but also how revolutionary leaders like Ernie O’Malley turned to Ulysses to make sense of their shattered worlds. Coinciding with the centenary of both Ulysses and Irish independence, this book challenges received narratives about the rebellion and the novel that left Ireland changed, changed utterly.
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Jan Compagnie in the Straits of Malacca, 1641–1795
Mis Sea#96
Dianne Lewis
Ohio University Press, 1995

In 1500 Malay Malacca was the queen city of the Malay Archipelago, one of the great trade centers of the world. Its rulers, said to be descendents of the ancient line of Srivijaya, dominated the lands east and west of the straits. The Portuguese, unable to compete in the marketplace, captured the town. They were followed a hundred years later by the Dutch who, lured in their turn by Malacca as symbol of the wealth and luxury of the east, were to rule this port city for more than a hundred and fifty years.

It proved to be, in many ways, an empty conquest. Portuguese and Dutch governments imposed restrictions on Malacca’s trade, driving it to the newer ports in the north and south. Moreover, by the time the Dutch finally secured the town, they had established their own port at Batavia, in Java. Dutch Malacca was, by 1701, “a place of little trade.” Why then did the Dutch maintain their occupation of the port? Lewis draws on the extensive correspondence of the Dutch East India Company to examine the role the Dutch played as Malacca’s rulers in the eighteenth-century Malay world, arguing that their presence, though generally too weak to secure their own interests, disrupted the traditional political and economic organization of the Malay polities, contributing significantly to the disarray that beset the Malay world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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Jan Waclaw Machajski
A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism
Marshall S. Shatz
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
Jan Waclaw Machajski's (1866-1926) political doctrine, known as Makhaevism, was a synthesis of several revolutionary theories in Western and Eastern Europe: Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism. His criticism of the intelligentsia and theory of a “new class” were influential to Communism and helped to create a hostility that culminated in Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s.
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Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures
Claudia L. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Jane Austen completed only six novels, but enduring passion for the author and her works has driven fans to read these books repeatedly, in book clubs or solo, while also inspiring countless film adaptations, sequels, and even spoofs involving zombies and sea monsters. Austen’s lasting appeal to both popular and elite audiences has lifted her to legendary status. In Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, Claudia L. Johnson shows how Jane Austen became “Jane Austen,” a figure intensely—sometimes even wildly—venerated, and often for markedly different reasons.

Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created. She then passes through the four critical phases of Austen’s reception—the Victorian era, the First and Second World Wars, and the establishment of the Austen House and Museum in 1949—and ponders what the adoration of Austen has meant to readers over the past two centuries. For her fans, the very concept of “Jane Austen” encapsulates powerful ideas and feelings about history, class, manners, intimacy, language, and the everyday. By respecting the intelligence of past commentary about Austen, Johnson shows, we are able to revisit her work and unearth fresh insights and new critical possibilities.
 
An insightful look at how and why readers have cherished one of our most beloved authors, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures will be a valuable addition to the library of any fan of the divine Jane.
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Jane Austen's Names
Riddles, Persons, Places
Margaret Doody
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In Jane Austen’s works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a “big cheese”—the moon’s reflection on the water’s surface. It worked.

In Jane Austen’s Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places—real and imaginary—in Austen’s fiction. Austen’s creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen’s names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen’s technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism—in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency.

Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen’s Names will revolutionize how we read Austen’s fiction.
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Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism
Music, "Race," and Intellectuals in France, 1918-1945
Jeremy F. Lane
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Jeremy F. Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is a bold challenge to the existing homogenous picture of the reception of American jazz in world-war era France. Lane’s book closely examines the reception of jazz among French-speaking intellectuals between 1918 and 1945 and is the first study to consider the relationships, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic, between early white French jazz critics and those French-speaking intellectuals of color whose first encounters with the music in those years played a catalytic role in their emerging black or Creole consciousness. Jazz’s first arrival in France in 1918 coincided with a series of profound shocks to received notions of French national identity and cultural and moral superiority. These shocks, characteristic of the era of machine-age imperialism, had been provoked by the first total mechanized war, the accelerated introduction of Taylorist and Fordist production techniques into European factories, and the more frequent encounters with primitive “Others” in the imperial metropolis engendered by interwar imperialism. Through close readings of the work of early white French jazz critics, alongside the essays and poems of intellectuals of color such as the Nardal sisters, Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and René Ménil, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism highlights the ways in which the French reception of jazz was bound up with a series of urgent contemporary debates about primitivism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, black and Creole consciousness, and the effects of American machine-age technologies on the minds and bodies of French citizens.

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Jazz Exiles
Bill Moody
University of Nevada Press, 2000
The Jazz Exiles chronicles the expatriate movement of American jazz musicians during the post-World War II era. While the term "exiles" normally conjures up images of ousted Third World leaders or deposed kings, it is as much a part of the jazz vocabulary as improvization or Birdland. Like the American writers of the 1920s who went to Europe and became Gertrude Stein's "lost generation", jazz musicians from the United States also made the Atlantic crossing at a steadily increasing rate until many of the major names in jazz lived or worked almost exclusively abroad. Throughout "The Jazz Exiles", the musicians speak for themselves in describing their motivation for joining the exodus to Europe which is now regarded as the third largest migration in jazz history. The exiles include many of the biggest names in jazz - Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Phil Woods, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Benny Carter, and Bud Powell, among others. This work also assesses the impact of foreign residence on the careers of these musicians and on the history of jazz. Moody, a jazz musician himself, charts the movement of American musicians to Europe from a historical perspective and examines the exile experience from a number of sociological and economic viewpoints, all of which are factors in understanding jazz history. With stories narrated through personal interviews in the musicians' own words, "The Jazz Exiles" aims to shed new light on America's attitude toward its own original art form and examines the dilemma of the American artist both at home and abroad. Jazz aficionados, rhythm and blues fans - in fact, anyone who appreciates American music - should read the stories of these jazz exiles. "
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The Jazz Republic
Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany
Jonathan O. Wipplinger
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany’s exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. Jonathan O. Wipplinger explores the history of jazz in Germany as well as the roles that music, race (especially Blackness), and America played in German culture and follows the debate over jazz through the fourteen years of Germany’s first democracy. He explores visiting jazz musicians including the African American Sam Wooding and the white American Paul Whiteman and how their performances were received by German critics and artists. The Jazz Republic also engages with the meaning of jazz in debates over changing gender norms and jazz’s status between paradigms of high and low culture.  By looking at German translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry, as well as Theodor W. Adorno’s controversial rejection of jazz in light of racial persecution, Wipplinger examines how jazz came to be part of German cultural production more broadly in both the US and Germany, in the early 1930s.
 
Using a wide array of sources from newspapers, modernist and popular journals, as well as items from the music press, this work intervenes in the debate over the German encounter with jazz by arguing that the music was no mere “symbol” of Weimar’s modernism and modernity. Rather than reflecting intra-German and/or European debates, it suggests that jazz and its practitioners, African American, white American, Afro-European, German and otherwise, shaped Weimar culture in a central way. 

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Jealousy of Trade
International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective
Istvan Hont
Harvard University Press, 2005
This collection explores eighteenth-century theories of international market competition that continue to be relevant for the twenty-first century. “Jealousy of trade” refers to a particular conjunction between politics and the economy that emerged when success in international trade became a matter of the military and political survival of nations. Today, it would be called “economic nationalism,” and in this book Istvan Hont connects the commercial politics of nationalism and globalization in the eighteenth century to theories of commercial society and Enlightenment ideas of the economic limits of politics.The book begins with an analysis of how the notion of “commerce” was added to Hobbes’s “state of nature” by Samuel Pufendorf. Hont then considers British neo-Machiavellian political economy after the Glorious Revolution. From there he moves to a novel interpretation of the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly of David Hume and Adam Smith, concluding with a conceptual history of nation-state and nationalism in the French Revolution.Jealousy of Trade combines political theory with intellectual history, illuminating the past but also considering the challenges of today.
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Jean Paul Marat
Tribune of the French Revolution
Clifford D. Conner
Pluto Press, 2012

Jean-Paul Marat’s role in the French Revolution has long been a matter of controversy among historians. Often he has been portrayed as a violent, sociopathic demagogue. This biography challenges that interpretation and argues that without Marat’s contributions as an agitator, tactician, and strategist, the pivotal social transformation that the Revolution accomplished might well not have occurred.

Clifford D. Conner argues that what was unique about Marat - which set him apart from all other major figures of the Revolution, including Danton and Robespierre - was his total identification with the struggle of the propertyless classes for social equality.

This is an essential book for anyone interested in the history of the revolutionary period and the personalities that led it.

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Jean-Luc Godard
The Permanent Revolutionary
Bert Rebhandl, translated by Edward Maltby
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In this biography, now translated into English for the first time, Bert Rebhandl provides a balanced evaluation of the work of one of the most original and influential film directors of all time: Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022). In this sympathetic yet critical overview, he argues that Godard's work captured the revolutionary spirit of Paris in the late 1960s as no other filmmaker has dared, and in fact reinvented the medium.

Rebhandl skillfully weaves together biographical details; information about the cultural, intellectual, and cinematic milieu over the decades; and descriptions of Godard’s most significant films to support his assertion that the director was a permanent revolutionary—always seeking new ways to create, understand, and comment on film within a larger context. He views Godard as an artist consistently true to himself while never ceasing to change and evolve, often in unexpected, radical, and controversial ways. 

Rebhandl is known as a journalist with deep insights and lucid prose. Despite the wealth of material to analyze, he neither gets lost in the details nor offers a superficial gloss, even while directly tackling such topics as the long-standing charges of antisemitism against Godard and his oeuvre. This volume will be welcome to both casual fans and dedicated devotees. 
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Jerusalem of Lithuania
A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History
Jerold C. Frakes
The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Yerusholayim d’lite: di yidishe kultur in der lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania: A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History) by Jerold C. Frakes contains cultural, literary, and historical readings in Yiddish that vividly chronicle the central role Vilnius (Lithuania) played in Jewish culture throughout the past five centuries. It includes many examples of Yiddish literature, historiography, sociology, and linguistics written by and about Litvaks and includes work by prominent Yiddish poets, novelists, raconteurs, journalists, and scholars. In addition, Frakes has supplemented the primary texts with many short essays that contextualize Yiddish cultural figures, movements, and historical events.

 
Designed especially for intermediate and advanced readers of Yiddish (from the second-year of instruction), each text is individually glossed, including not only English definitions, but also basic grammatical information that will enable intermediate readers to progress to an advanced reading ability.
 
Because of its unique content, Yerusholayim d’lite will be of interest not only to university students of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, but it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and Yiddish reading groups and clubs worldwide, as well as for all general readers interested in Yiddish-language culture.
 
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The Jesuit and the Incas
The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J.
Sabine Hyland
University of Michigan Press, 2004
In the spirit of justice Blas Valera broke all the rules-and paid with his life. Hundreds of years later, his ghost has returned to haunt the official story. But is it the truth, and will it set the record straight?

This is the tale of Father Blas Valera, the child of a native Incan woman and Spanish father, caught between the ancient world of the Incas and the conquistadors of Spain. Valera, a Jesuit in sixteenth-century Peru, believed in what to his superiors was pure heresy: that the Incan culture, religion, and language were equal to their Christian counterparts.

As punishment for his beliefs he was imprisoned, beaten, and, finally, exiled to Spain, where he died at the hands of English pirates in 1597.

Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten, until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private Neapolitan collection. The documents claimed, among other things, that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he had returned to Peru; and, intriguingly, while there had taught his followers that the Incas used a secret phonetic quipu-a record-keeping device of the Inca empire-to record history.

Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to bitter disputes over how they should be assessed. Are they forgeries, authentic documents, or something in between? If genuine, they will radically reform our view of Inca culture and Valera. The author insightfully examines the evidence, showing how fact and fiction intertwine, and brings the dimly understood history of this author-priest to light.
Sabine Hyland is Co-director of a multidisciplinary project studying the Chanka people of Peru. She holds a doctoral degree in anthropology from Yale, and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Norbert College.
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The Jesuits and Italian Universities, 1548-1773
Paul F. Grendler
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
The Society of Jesus arrived in Italy in 1540 brimming with enthusiasm to found new universities. These would be better than Italian universities, which the Jesuits believed were full of professors teaching philosophical atheism to debauched students. The Jesuits also wanted to become professors in existing Italian universities. They would teach Christian philosophy, true theology, sound logic, eloquent humanities, and practical mathematics. They would exert a positive moral influence on students.

The Jesuits were rejected. Italy already had fourteen universities famous for their research and teaching. They were ruled by princes and cities who refused to share their universities with a religious order led by Spaniards. Between 1548 and 1773 the Jesuits made sixteen attempts, from Turin in the north to Messina in Sicily, to found new universities or to become professors in existing universities. They had some successes, as they helped found four new universities and became professors of mathematics in three more universities. But they suff­ered nine total failures. The battles between universities, civil governments, and the Jesuits were memorable. Lay professors accused the Jesuits of teaching philosophy badly. The Jesuits charged that Italian professors delivered few lectures and skipped most of Aristotle. Behind the denunciations were profound diff­erences about what universities should be.

Italian universities were dominated by law and the Jesuits emphasized the humanities and theology. Nevertheless, the Society of Jesus had an impact. They added cases of conscience to the training of clergymen. They made four years of study the norm for a degree in theology. They off­ered a student-centered alternative to Italian universities that focused on research and ignored student misbehavior.

Paul Grendler tells a new story based on years of research in a dozen archives. Anyone interested in the volatile mix of universities, religion, and politics will find this book fascinating and instructive, as will anyone who contemplates what it means to be a Catholic university.
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Jewel of the Soul
Honorius Augustodunensis
Harvard University Press, 2023

The first complete translation into a modern language of a major authority on the medieval Christian liturgy.

Honorius Augustodunensis’s Jewel of the Soul (the Gemma animae) gleams as one of the most attractive liturgical commentaries from the twelfth century. A lively and effective teacher, Honorius strives to unveil the meaning behind the sacred texts, objects, music, and ritual of the Roman Mass and Divine Office for young initiates. Building on the allegorical approach pioneered in the Carolingian era by Amalar of Metz, he shows readers how their souls are beautified by the liturgy as gold is by a jewel. His flowing and comprehensive commentary gained widespread influence in Western Christendom and was an important source for later liturgical treatises. For the modern scholar this work remains key to understanding the medieval allegorical approach to worship and provides valuable documentation about how these offices were celebrated in the twelfth century. These volumes offer the first complete translation into a modern language of this foundational Latin text on Christian liturgy.

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Jewel of the Soul
Honorius Augustodunensis
Harvard University Press, 2023

The first complete translation into a modern language of a major authority on the medieval Christian liturgy.

Honorius Augustodunensis’s Jewel of the Soul (the Gemma animae) gleams as one of the most attractive liturgical commentaries from the twelfth century. A lively and effective teacher, Honorius strives to unveil the meaning behind the sacred texts, objects, music, and ritual of the Roman Mass and Divine Office for young initiates. Building on the allegorical approach pioneered in the Carolingian era by Amalar of Metz, he shows readers how their souls are beautified by the liturgy as gold is by a jewel. His flowing and comprehensive commentary gained widespread influence in Western Christendom and was an important source for later liturgical treatises. For the modern scholar this work remains key to understanding the medieval allegorical approach to worship and provides valuable documentation about how these offices were celebrated in the twelfth century. These volumes offer the first complete translation into a modern language of this foundational Latin text on Christian liturgy.

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The Jewish Enemy
Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust
Jeffrey Herf
Harvard University Press, 2008

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds.

According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

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Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present
History, Representation, and Memory
Edited by Joanna Beata Michlic
Brandeis University Press, 2017
This book offers an extensive introduction and 13 diverse essays on how World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath affected Jewish families and Jewish communities, with an especially close look at the roles played by women, youth, and children. Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe, themes explored include: how Jewish parents handled the Nazi threat; rescue and resistance within the Jewish family unit; the transformation of gender roles under duress; youth’s wartime and early postwar experiences; postwar reconstruction of the Jewish family; rehabilitation of Jewish children and youth; and the role of Zionism in shaping the present and future of young survivors. Relying on newly available archival material and novel research in the areas of families, youth, rescue, resistance, gender, and memory, this volume will be an indispensable guide to current work on the familial and social history of the Holocaust.
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Jewish Lives under Communism
New Perspectives
Katerina Capková
Rutgers University Press, 2022
This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism  by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.
 
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Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia
ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Brandeis University Press, 2001
ChaeRan Freeze explores the impact of various forces on marriage and divorce among Jews in 19th-century Russia. Challenging romantic views of the Jewish family in the shtetl, she shows that divorce rates among Russian Jews in the first half of the century were astronomical compared to the non-Jewish population. Even more surprising is her conclusion that these divorce rates tended to drop later in the century, in contrast to the rising pattern among populations undergoing modernization. Freeze also studies the growing involvement of the Tsarist state. This occurred partly at the behest of Jewish women contesting patriarchy and parental power and partly because the government felt that Jewish families were in complete anarchy and in need of order and regulation. Extensive research in newly-declassified collections from twelve archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania enables Freeze to reconstruct Jewish patterns of marriage and divorce and to analyze the often conflicting interests of Jewish husbands and wives, rabbinic authorities, and the Russian state. Balancing archival resources with memoirs and printed sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, she offers a tantalizing glimpse of the desires and travails of Jewish spouses, showing how individual life histories reflect the impact of modernization on Jewish matchmaking, gender relations, the "emancipation" of Jewish women, and the incursion of the Tsarist state into the lives of ordinary Jews.
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A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany
Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League
Lily E. Hirsch
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Offers a clear introduction to a fascinating, yet little known, phenomenon in Nazi Germany, whose very existence will be a surprise to the general public and to historians. Easily blending general history with musicology, the book provides provocative yet compelling analysis of complex issues."
---Michael Meyer, author of The Politics of Music in the Third Reich

"Hirsch poses complex questions about Jewish identity and Jewish music, and she situates these against a political background vexed by the impossibility of truly viable responses to such questions. Her thorough archival research is complemented by her extensive use of interviews, which gives voice to those swept up in the Holocaust. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is a book filled with the stories of real lives, a collective biography in modern music history that must no longer remain in silence."
---Philip V. Bohlman, author of Jewish Music and Modernity

"An engaging and downright gripping history. The project is original, the research is outstanding, and the presentation lucid."
---Karen Painter, author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945

The Jewish Culture League was created in Berlin in June 1933, the only organization in Nazi Germany in which Jews were not only allowed but encouraged to participate in music, both as performers and as audience members. Lily E. Hirsch's A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is the first book to seriously investigate and parse the complicated questions the existence of this unique organization raised, such as why the Nazis would promote Jewish music when, in the rest of Germany, it was banned. The government's insistence that the League perform only Jewish music also presented the organization's leaders and membership with perplexing conundrums: what exactly is Jewish music? Who qualifies as a Jewish composer? And, if it is true that the Nazis conceived of the League as a propaganda tool, did Jewish participation in its activities amount to collaboration?

Lily E. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University.

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Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848
Sven-Erik Rose
Brandeis University Press, 2014
In this book Rose illuminates the extraordinary creativity of Jewish intellectuals as they reevaluated Judaism with the tools of a German philosophical tradition fast emerging as central to modern intellectual life. While previous work emphasizes the “subversive” dimensions of German-Jewish thought or the “inner antisemitism” of the German philosophical tradition, Rose shows convincingly the tremendous resources German philosophy offered contemporary Jews for thinking about the place of Jews in the wider polity. Offering a fundamental reevaluation of seminal figures and key texts, Rose emphasizes the productive encounter between Jewish intellectuals and German philosophy. He brings to light both the complexity and the ambivalence of reflecting on Jewish identity and politics from within a German tradition that invested tremendous faith in the political efficacy of philosophical thought itself.
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Jewish Poetry and Cultural Coexistence in Late Medieval Spain
Gregory B. Kaplan
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
<div>This book offers a groundbreaking perspective on Judeo-Christian coexistence in medieval Spain, in particular on the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), one of the most important pilgrimage routes in Europe. The author uncovers new evidence of Judeo-Christian cooperation in Castilian monasteries on the Camino. It reveals that a collaborative climate endured in these monasteries as demonstrated by the transmission of <I>cuaderna vía</I> poetry from Christians to Jews.</div>
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Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Between History and Faith
Nils Roemer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    German Jews were fully assimilated and secularized in the nineteenth century—or so it is commonly assumed. In Jewish Scholarship and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Nils Roemer challenges this assumption, finding that religious sentiments, concepts, and rhetoric found expression through a newly emerging theological historicism at the center of modern German Jewish culture.
    Modern German Jewish identity developed during the struggle for emancipation, debates about religious and cultural renewal, and battles against anti-Semitism. A key component of this identity was historical memory, which Jewish scholars had begun to infuse with theological perspectives beginning in the 1850s. After German reunification in the early 1870s, Jewish intellectuals reevaluated their enthusiastic embrace of liberalism and secularism. Without abandoning the ideal of tolerance, they asserted a right to cultural religious difference for themselves--an ideal they held to even more tightly in the face of growing anti-Semitism. This newly re-theologized Jewish history, Roemer argues, helped German Jews fend off anti-Semitic attacks by strengthening their own sense of their culture and tradition.

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Jewish Theatre Making in Mantua, 1520–1650
Erith Jaffe-Berg
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
This book studies how the Jewish community of Mantua established, normalized, and maintained interrelations with the Christian community for over 130 years, from 1520 to 1650, by means of theatre performance for the Gonzaga Dukes. Performance is shown to have been a mutually beneficial "currency" that both the Dukes and Jews could use to calibrate their relations with one another. Seen in this light, the author demonstrates that performance was not the consequence of cultural exchange between Jews and Christians, but was one of the means by which the complicated nature of cultural communication and exchange took place. Jewish Theatre Making in Mantua details the performances created by the Jewish community of Mantua and argues that these theatrical events were a crucial component in the ability of Jews to live peacefully within Mantua, which became one of the few refuges left to Jews in the Italian peninsula and Catholic Europe.
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Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile
Maya Soifer Irish
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile examines the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the reconquest and the hundred years that followed the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). The study's focus on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, allows for a detailed investigation of the Jews' changing relations with the area's main power players - the monarchy, the church, and the towns. In a departure from previous assessments, Soifer Irish shows that the institutional and legal norms of toleration for the Jewish minority were forged not along the military frontier with Islam, but in the north of Castile. She argues that the Jews' relationship with the Castilian monarchy was by far the most significant factor that influenced their situation in the kingdom, but also demonstrates that this relationship was inherently problematic. Although during the early centuries of Christian expansion the Jewish communities benefited from a strong royal power, after about 1250 helping maintain it proved to be costly to the Jewish communities in economic and human terms. Soifer Irish demonstrates that while some Castilian clergymen were vehemently anti-Jewish, the Castilian Church as a whole never developed a coordinated strategy on the Jews, or even showed much interest in the issue. The opposite is true about the townsmen, whose relations with their Jewish neighbors vacillated between cooperation and conflict. In the late thirteenth century, the Crown's heavy-handed tactics in enforcing the collection of outstanding debts to Jewish moneylenders led to the breakdown in the negotiations between the Jewish and Christian communities, creating a fertile ground for the formation of an anti-Jewish discourse in Castilian towns. Soifer Irish also examines the Jews' attitudes toward the various powers in the Christian society and shows that they were active players in the kingdom's politics. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile breaks new ground in helping us understand more fully the tensions, and commonalities, between groups of different faiths in the late medieval period.
[more]

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Jews and Diaspora Nationalism
Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States
Edited by Simon Rabinovitch
Brandeis University Press, 2012
The question of how to preserve, construct or transform Jewish peoplehood consumed Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite a rich array of writing from Jewish nationalists, liberals, and socialists about the vitality of Jewish existence in the diaspora, the key works have never been collected in a single volume, and few reliable English translations exist. This anthology brings together a variety of thinkers who offered competing visions of peoplehood within the established and developing Jewish diaspora centers of Europe and America. Writing in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and English, these Jewish intellectuals sought to recast Jewish existence, whether within multiethnic empires, liberal democracies, or socialist forms of government, in national terms. Volume editor Simon Rabinovitch provides an introductory essay, as well as short introductions and annotations to each document that contextualize and make accessible this wealth of primary sources for scholars and students.
[more]

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Jews and Other Germans
Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925
Till van Rahden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Jews and Other Germans is the first social and cultural history to probe the parameters of Jewish integration in the half century between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. Questioning received wisdom about German-Jewish assimilation and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, van Rahden’s prize-winning book restores some of the complexity and openness of relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews before World War I.
            Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.
            Yet van Rahden not only illuminates Breslau’s multicultural fabric; he also tells the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious conflict and coexistence. Recounting the experiences of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics within a single narrative, he offers a critical intervention into scholarship on liberalism and civil society in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
[more]

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Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona
Elka Klein
University of Michigan Press, 2006

Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona traces the development of the Jewish community of Barcelona from 1050 to 1300. Elka Klein challenges the common perception that medieval Jews lived in relative isolation from the surrounding society, argues for the existence of significant cultural common ground between Jews and Christians, and proposes a new model for understanding Jewish communal autonomy and the relationship between Jews and their rulers.

Klein traces the development of the Jewish community of Barcelona in two contexts: the parallel development of the city of Barcelona and the changing relationship of the king to urban communities, Jewish and Christian. Until the later twelfth century, the Jewish community, like the Christian city of Barcelona, was left mostly to its own devices by the counts of Barcelona, who had neither the interest nor the power to interfere in internal affairs. Klein draws on both Hebrew and Latin sources to offer a picture of a communal elite whose power, mostly informal, derived from their influence within the community. This system changed in the later twelfth century as a result of the expansion of comitial-royal administration. Four Jewish families used their positions as bailiffs, accountants, and secretaries to consolidate power within their community. The rule of this courtier elite was short lived; two episodes of communal conflict in the early thirteenth century and increased royal activism led to the institution of a new regime of elected officials in 1241. The book concludes with an examination of the new elite and the implications of increased royal interference in internal affairs.

A central argument of Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona is that it is necessary to distinguish between autonomy by default, resulting from the indifference of the ruler, who leaves a community to govern itself; and autonomy by design, guaranteed by selective royal interference. Against the view that royal interference undercut Jewish autonomy, Klein argues that autonomy by default left the community with insufficient power to enforce its decisions; because Catalan kings generally interfered in support of existing structures, autonomy by design in fact strengthened the community.

This book contributes to ongoing debates about the relationship between the cultures of the three religions in the Iberian peninsula. It joins a body of recent scholarship arguing that medieval European Jews and Christians shared considerable cultural common ground.
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Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam
Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities
Jacob Lassner
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly discovered medieval sources that describe life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.
[more]

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The Jews in Mussolini's Italy
From Equality to Persecution
Michele Sarfatti; Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
      Often overshadowed by the persecution of Jews in Germany, the treatment of Jews in fascist Italy comes into sharp focus in this volume by Italian historian Michele Sarfatti. Using thorough and careful statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial, Sarfatti begins with a history of Italian Jews in the decades before fascism—when Jews were fully integrated into Italian national life—and provides a deft and comprehensive history from fascism’s rise in 1922 to its defeat in 1945. 
 
 
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
    
[more]

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Jews in Nazi Berlin
From Kristallnacht to Liberation
Edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With Jews in Nazi Berlin, those individual lives—and the constant struggle they required—come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a people.

Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime’s power. The book’s essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement—and, importantly, to humanize—the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increasing brutality of the regime.

A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, Jews in Nazi Berlin renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.

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front cover of The Jews in Polish Culture
The Jews in Polish Culture
Aleksander Hertz
Northwestern University Press, 1988
Jews in Polish Culture was and in large measure remains an essentially pioneering work. Despite the passage of many years, the book's thrust has retained its initial, original freshness. 
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front cover of The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars
The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars
Edited by Yisrael Gutman
Brandeis University Press, 1991
Jews have long seen the interwar years as a “golden age” for Polish Jewry and hold it in special reverence because of the community’s heroic struggle against the encroaching darkness of antisemitism. During the years 1918 to 1939, Polish Jews constituted the largest Jewish community in noncommunist Europe and were the leading cultural and political force in the Jewish Diaspora. In this volume distinguished American, West European, Israeli, and Polish scholars combine forces to explore the politics, antisemitism, economic and social life, religious patterns, and cultural creativity of a period whose relevance is heightened because of current changes under way in Eastern Europe.
[more]

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Jews, Turks, and Other Strangers
Roots of Prejudice in Modern Germany
Jerome S. Legge, Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

Scholarly, objective, insightful, and analytical, Jews, Turks, and Other Strangers studies the causes of prejudice against Jews, foreign workers, refugees, and emigrant Germans in contemporary Germany. Using survey material and quantitative analyses, Legge convincingly challenges the notion that German xenophobia is rooted in economic causes. Instead, he sees a more complex foundation for German prejudice, particularly in a reunified Germany where perceptions of the "other" sometimes vary widely between east and west, a product of a traditional racism rooted in the German past. By clarifying the foundations of xenophobia in a new German state, Legge offers a clear and disturbing picture of a conflicted country and a prejudice that not only affects Jews but also fuels a larger, anti-foreign sentiment.

[more]

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Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil
Correspondence 1880-1905
Edited by Leslie Bethell and Murilo De Carvalho
University of London Press, 2009

front cover of Johann Wier
Johann Wier
Debating the Devil and Witches in Early Modern Europe
Michaela Valente
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Freud chose to put Wier’s work among the ten books to be read. According to Wier, Satan seduced witches, thus they did not deserve to be executed, but they must be cured for their melancholy. When the witch hunt was rising, Wier was the first to use some of the arguments adopted in the emerging debate on religious tolerance in defence of witches. This is the first overall study of Wier which offers an innovative view of his thought by highlighting Wier’s sources and his attempts to involve theologians, physicians, and philosophers in his fight against cruel witch hunts. Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches situates and explains his claim as a result of a moral and religious path as well as the outcome of his medical experience. The book aims to provide an insightful examination of Wier’s works to read his pleas emphasizing the duty of every good Christian to not abandon anyone who strays from the flock of Christ. For these reasons, Wier was overwhelmed by bitter confutations, such as those of Jean Bodin, but he was also celebrated for his outstanding and prolific heritage for debating religious tolerance.
[more]

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John Dee
The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance
William H. Sherman
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
This book challenges the conventional image of John Dee (1527–1609) as an isolated, eccentric philosopher. Instead, William H. Sherman presents Dee in a fresh context, revealing that he was a well-connected adviser to the academic, courtly, and commercial circles of his day.
[more]

front cover of John Dygon's Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gaffurium
John Dygon's Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gaffurium
New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations, and Indices by Theodor Dumitrescu
University of Illinois Press, 2006

A rare example of musical scholarship from the Tudor period, in translation and fully annotated

John Dygon was the prior of St. Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury when Henry VIII boldly dissolved the English Catholic Church during the 1530s and reorganized it under royal control. Only a single copy of Dygon’s manuscript on music theory has survived, held by Trinity College, Cambridge.  This volume will be the first publication of these two treatises, providing both a scholarly transcription and English translation.

Dygon’s treatise provides a rare and important example of musical scholarship from the early Tudor period, demonstrating the status of music education at the time, the affiliations of English scholarship with music study in Europe, and the music that was actually performed in England. The treatises address questions of musical notation, especially regarding rhythmic proportions, as well as practical issues about performance. Theodor Dumitrescu’s introduction situates Dygon’s treatises within the larger history of European music, paying close attention to its borrowings from and adaptations of prior treatises. 

[more]

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John Evelyn
A Life of Domesticity
John Dixon Hunt
Reaktion Books, 2018
The great English writer and gardener John Evelyn (1620–1706) kept a diary all his life. Today, this diary is considered an invaluable source of information on more than fifty years of social, cultural, religious, and political life in seventeenth-century England. Evelyn’s work is often overshadowed by the literary contributions of his contemporary and friend, Samuel Pepys. This new biography changes that.

John Dixon Hunt takes a fresh look at the life and work of one of England’s greatest diarists, focusing particularly on Evelyn’s “domesticity.” The book explores Evelyn’s life at home, and perhaps even more importantly, his domestication of foreign ideas and practices in England. During the English Civil Wars, Evelyn traveled extensively throughout Europe, taking in ideas on the management of estate design while abroad to apply them in England. Evelyn’s greatest accomplishment was the import of European garden art to the UK, a feat Hunt puts into context alongside a range of Evelyn’s social and ethical thinking. Illustrated with visual material from Evelyn’s time and from his own pen, the book is an ideal introduction to a hugely important figure in the shaping of early modern Britain.
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John Evelyn’s “Elysium Britannicum” and European Gardening
Therese O'Malley
Harvard University Press, 1998

John Evelyn (1620–1706), an English virtuoso and writer, was a pivotal figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life in England. He left an immensely rich literary heritage, which is of great significance for scholars interested in garden history and the histories of intellectual life and architecture.

Evelyn is perhaps best known for Sylva, a compilation of thoughts on practical estate management, gardening, and philosophy, and the first book published by the Royal Society in London. As one of the group of learned men who founded the Royal Society in 1660 to promote scientific research, discussion, and publications, John Evelyn was at the center of many of the vital intellectual currents of the time. “Elysium Britannicum,” Evelyn’s unpublished manuscript of almost a thousand pages of densely packed drafts, rewrites, and projects, was perhaps something of an enigma to his contemporaries, who nevertheless urged its publication. It remains for scholars today a treasure-trove of fascinating insights on Evelyn and his milieu.

The contributors to this volume approach Evelyn and his work from diverse disciplines, including architectural and intellectual history and the histories of science, agriculture, gardens, and literature. They present a rich picture of the “Elysium Britannicum” as one of the central documents of late European humanism.

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John Fuller and the Sycamore Press
A Bibliographic History
Ryan Roberts
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010

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John Gower
Poems on Contemporary Events
David R. Carlson
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

front cover of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image
Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage
Andrés Mario Zervigón
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.
 
Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century.
A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.
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John Leland
De uiris illustribus / On Famous Men
John Leland
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010

front cover of John Miles Foley's World of Oralities
John Miles Foley's World of Oralities
Text, Tradition, and Contemporary Oral Theory
Mark C. Amodio
Arc Humanities Press, 2020
This collection brings together newly commissioned and cutting-edge essays on oral text and tradition ranging from the ancient and medieval world to the present day by a leading group of European and North American oral theorists. Using a range of materials including the Bible, Greek epic, Beowulf, Old Norse and Old English riddles, and medieval music, the contributors collectively work to refine, challenge, and further advance contemporary Oral Theory, an interdisciplinary school of thought heavily influenced by John Miles Foley, whose work provides the jumping-off point for this volume. The book includes a useful introduction to the history of oral theory and Foley’s ground-breaking and influential work.
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John Steinbeck Goes to War
The Moon is Down as Propaganda
Donald V. Coers
University of Alabama Press, 2005

In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down­—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country.  Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people.

The Moon is Down created an immediate sensation among American literary critics; fierce debate erupted over Steinbeck’s uncommonly sympathetic portrayal of the enemy and the novel’s power as a vehicle for propaganda.  Fifty years later, Coers continues the debate, relying heavily on unpublished letters and personal interviews with the lawyers, book dealers, actors, publishers, and housewives associated with the resistance movements in Western Europe.  Clandestine translations of The Moon Is Down quickly appeared and were widely circulated under the noses of the Gestapo.   Coers documents the fate of Steinbeck’s novel in the hands of World War II resistance fighters and deepens our appreciation of Steinbeck’s unique ability to express the feelings of oppressed peoples.

[more]

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John Venn
A Life in Logic
Lukas M. Verburgt
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The first comprehensive history of John Venn’s life and work.

John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group. 

This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.
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Joining the Conversation
Dialogues by Renaissance Women
Janet Levarie Smarr
University of Michigan Press, 2005

Avoiding the male-authored model of competing orations, French and Italian women of the Renaissance framed their dialogues as informal conversations, as letters with friends that in turn became epistles to a wider audience, and even sometimes as dramas. No other study to date has provided thorough, comparative view of these works across French, Italian, and Latin. Smarr's comprehensive treatment relates these writings to classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms of dialogue, and to other genres including drama, lyric exchange, and humanist invective -- as well as to the real conversations in women's lives -- in order to show how women adapted existing models to their own needs and purposes.

Janet Levarie Smarr is Professor of Theatre and Italian Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

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Joseph Banks
A Life
Patrick O'Brian
University of Chicago Press, 1997
One of our greatest writers about the sea has written an engrossing story of one of history's most legendary maritime explorers. Patrick O'Brian's biography of naturalist, explorer and co-founder of Australia, Joseph Banks, is narrative history at its finest. Published to rave reviews, it reveals Banks to be a man of enduring importance, and establishes itself as a classic of exploration.

"It is in his description of that arduous three-year voyage [on the ship Endeavor] that Mr. O'Brian is at his most brilliant. . . . He makes us understand what life within this wooden world was like, with its 94 male souls, two dogs, a cat and a goat."—Linda Colley, New York Times

"An absorbing, finely written overview, meant for the general reader, of a major figure in the history of natural science."—Frank Stewart, Los Angeles Times

"[This book is] the definitive biography of an extraordinary subject."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

"His skill at narrative and his extensive knowledge of the maritime history . . . give him a definite leg up in telling this . . . story."—Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle
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Joseph of Arimathea
Glyn S. Lewis
Westholme Publishing, 2017
Exploring the legend of the man who brought Christianity to the British Isles 

“This author testifieth Joseph of Arimathea to be the first preacher of the word of God within our realms. Long after that, when Austin came from Rome, this our realm had bishops and priests there-in, as is well known to the learned of our realm.”—Elizabeth I, in a 1559 letter to Roman Catholic bishops on the precedence of the Church of England

The name Joseph of Arimathea is generally well known, either from the accounts in each of the New Testament Gospels that tell of his providing a tomb for the burial of Jesus; from his depictions in medieval and Renaissance art; from his associations with the Holy Grail that later found greater expression in medieval Arthurian stories; and even from the story that has endured in western Britain that as a trader in tin, copper, and lead, he had traveled often to the region—and with him came the Christian religion. These stories are strongly rooted, despite the lack of impeccable source material—so much so that Elizabeth I used Joseph of Arimathea as proof that the Church of England predated the Catholic church in her country. In Joseph of Arimathea Glyn S. Lewis brings these fragments together in order to provide as fully as is possible what we can infer about this first-century apostle.
   The author first discusses Arimathea, a town that has yet to be positively identified. He then reviews the accounts of Joseph’s entombment of Jesus that appear in each of the four Gospels. From these earliest references, the author next consults the literary and oral tradition evidence of Joseph’s passage by ship to the south of France among a group of fugitives escaping persecution for being Christians, and his early visits to Britain as a trader in precious ores. These voyages are said to have brought him to the area around Glastonbury, which became a flourishing monastery in the Middle Ages. Whether or not Joseph of Arimathea visited Britain, his story remains an enthralling and fascinating mystery. 
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Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham
Dances in Literature and Cinema
Hannah Durkin
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. Both also produced fascinating memoirs that provided vital insights into their artistic philosophies and choices. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining—within significant confines—new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin pays particular attention to the ways dancing bodies function as ever-changing signifiers and de-stabilizing transmitters of cultural identity. In addition, she offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history.
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front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 1 (March 2020)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 1 (March 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020
This is volume 92 issue 1 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
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front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 2 (June 2020)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 2 (June 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020
This is volume 92 issue 2 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 3 (September 2020)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 3 (September 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020
This is volume 92 issue 3 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 4 (December 2020)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 92 number 4 (December 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020
This is volume 92 issue 4 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 1 (March 2021)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 1 (March 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 93 issue 1 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 2 (June 2021)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 2 (June 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 93 issue 2 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 3 (September 2021)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 3 (September 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 93 issue 3 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 4 (December 2021)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 93 number 4 (December 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 93 issue 4 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
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front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 1 (March 2022)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 1 (March 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 94 issue 1 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 2 (June 2022)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 2 (June 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 94 issue 2 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 3 (September 2022)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 3 (September 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 94 issue 3 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 4 (December 2022)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 94 number 4 (December 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 94 issue 4 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 1 (March 2023)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 1 (March 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 95 issue 1 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 2 (June 2023)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 2 (June 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 95 issue 2 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 3 (September 2023)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 3 (September 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 95 issue 3 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 4 (December 2023)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 95 number 4 (December 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 95 issue 4 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Modern History, volume 96 number 1 (March 2024)
The Journal of Modern History, volume 96 number 1 (March 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 96 issue 1 of The Journal of Modern History. The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal's broad geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
[more]

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The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist
Volumes 1 & 2
Samuel Curwen
Harvard University Press, 1972

"He was a man of fair learning, and more than average accomplishment; not at all intolerant of opinions at issue with his own; in religion a Dissenter of the class still prevalent in New England: in his tastes scholarly and refined, not ill read in general literature, prone to social enjoyments, a reasonably good critic of what he saw, altogether an excellent example of the class of men out of whom the fathers and founders of that great republic sprang..."
-Charles Dickens, in summing up the character of Samuel Curwen

This unabridged two-volume edition of Samuel Curwen's journal supersedes the only version previously available to historians: a fragmentary and inaccurate mid-nineteenth-century work published by George Atkinson Ward, which nevertheless was celebrated by Charles Dickens.

Andrew Oliver, combining painstaking documentation with an abundance of illustrations, provides a colorful, complete work which ranks as a valuable source of English social history from 1775 to 1784. It was during these years that Curwen, a Salem merchant, after fleeing from the harassment incurred by his loyalist activities, migrated to England and kept this journal. A man small in size, physically timid, mentally brave, and remarkably injudicious, Curwen felt that he was "unhappily though unjustly ranked" as a tory. Thus his observations and thoughts are useful in understanding the attitudes and experiences of the loyalist exiles.

Set primarily in England and sparked throughout with engaging reports on personalities, places, and even the weather, the journal traces Curwen's nine years of exile. It also briefly details his departure from Salem, his short and alarming sojourn in Philadelphia where he found the political climate no less unfavorable, and his subsequent sea voyage to England.

The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist is the first in a series of Loyalist Papers, a long-term program to be undertaken independently by a number of publishers in Britain, Canada, and the United States. The program will locate, gather, and make available documents that place in perspective those Americans who, at the time of the Revolution, remained loyal to the Crown.

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Journal of the American Revolution 2020
Annual Volume
Don N. Hagist
Westholme Publishing, 2020
The Year’s Best Articles from the Leading On-Line Source of New Research on the American Revolution and Founding Eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2020, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. The thirty-six articles in the 2020 edition include: 
Bernard E. Griffiths: Trumpeter Barney of the Queen’s Rangers, Chelsea Pensioner—and Freed Slave by Todd W. Braisted
The Declaration of Independence: Did John Hancock Really Say that about his Signature?—and Other Signing Stories by J. L. Bell
Les Habitants: Collaboration and Pro-American Violence in Canada, 1774–1776 by Sebastian van Bastelaer
Misadventures in the Countryside: Escape from a British Prison Ship by Katie Turner Getty
The Revolutionary Memories of New York Loyalists: Thomas Jones and William Smith, Jr. by Cho-Chien Feng
The East India Company and Parliament’s “Fateful Decision” of 1767 by Steven Neill
Massachusetts Privateers During the Siege of Boston by Alexander Cain
The Constitution Counted Free Women and Children—And It Mattered by Andrew M. Schocket, with Kinzey M. McLaren-Czerr and Colin J. Spicer
How Magna Carta Influenced the American Revolution by Jason Yonce
Putting a Price on Loyalty: Mary Loring’s List of Losses by John Knight
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front cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2022
Journal of the American Revolution 2022
Annual Volume
Don N. Hagist
Westholme Publishing, 2022

The year’s best articles from the leading on-line source of new research on the Revolution and Founding eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2022, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. This year's articles are:
Massachusettensis and Novanglus: The Last Great Debate Prior to the War by James M. Smith
Wampum Belts to Canada: Stockbridge Indian Ambassadors’ Dangerous 1775 Peace Mission by Mark R. Anderson
Ethan Allen’s “Motley Parcel of Soldiery” at Montreal by Mark R. Anderson
The Devil at the Helm: A Quote That Went Astray by Don N. Hagist
Thomas Knowlton’s Revolution by David Price
Major Robert Rogers and the American Revolution by Scott M. Smith
La Petite Guerre and Indian Irregular Manner of War: Siblings, But Not Twins by Brian Gerring
George Washington and the First Mandatory Immunization by Richard J. Werther
French Adventurers, Patriots, and Pretentious Imposters in the Fight for American Independence by Arthur S. Lefkowitz
The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective by Jordan Baker
The Numerical Strength of George Washington’s Army During the 1777 Philadelphia Campaign by Gary Ecelbarger and Michael C. Harris
A Reconsideration of Continental Army Numerical Strength at Valley Forge by Gary Ecelbarger and Michael C. Harris
American Indians at Valley Forge by Joseph Lee Boyle
The Discovery of a Letter from a Soldier of the First Rhode Island Regiment by Christian McBurney
“The Predicament We Are In”: How Paperwork Saved the Continental Army by Mike Matheny
Sir Henry Clinton’s Generalship by John Ferling
The Varick Transcripts and the Preservation of the War by Justin McHenry
“A Mere Youth”: James Monroe’s Revolutionary War by John A. Ruddima
Haitian Soldiers at the Siege of Savannah by Robert S. Davis
George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring: Separating Fact from Fiction by Bill Bleyer
Texas, Cattle, Cowboys, Ranchers, Indian Raids, and the American Revolution by George Kotlik
The Odyssey of Loyalist Colonel Samuel Bryan by Douglas R. Dorney, Jr.
“She Had Gone to the Army . . . to Her Husband”: Judith Lines’s Unremarked Life by John U. Rees
The Yorktown Tragedy: George Washington’s Slave Roundup by Gregory J. W. Urwin
Such as are Absolutely Free: Benjamin Thompson’s Black Troopers by Todd W. Braisted
The King of Sweden: Friendly Foe of the United States by Richard Werther
Shifting Indian Policy of the Articles of Confederation by John DeLee
Justice, Mercy, and Treason: John Marshall’s and Mercy Otis Warren’s Treatments of Benedict Arnold by Ray Mirante
A Chance Amiss: George Washington and the Fiasco of Spain’s Gift Diplomacy by Elisa Vargas
The Constitutional Convention Debates the Electoral College by Jason Yonce
Respected Citizen of Washington City: The Mystery of  Will Costin, Freed Mount Vernon Slave by David O. Stewart
The Impeachment of Senator William Blount  by Andrew A. Zellers-Frederick
Instinctive Temporary Unity: Examining Public Opinion During the Whiskey Rebellion by Jonathan Curran
“Good and Sufficient Testimony”: The Development of the Revolutionary War Pension Plan by Michael Barbieri

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Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns
Madre María Rosa
Iter Press, 2009

Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns contains all the elements of a riveting adventure story. Through the eyes of the Mother Abbess, María Rosa, the reader is taken along on this journey through wars, pirates, disease, travel on the high seas, and treacherous mountain passes in the Andes. Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years—an odyssey not all of them would complete. Yet, this unique historical document is so much more than a typical travel narrative. It illuminates the eighteenth-century way of life of religious women on both sides of the Atlantic basin. María Rosa’s lively prose attests to the literary connection among women religious writers of Spain and Latin America. This annotated edition and first-ever English translation of the manuscript will be of interest to scholars, students and anyone who wants to learn more about women’s history.

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Journeys from Scandinavia
Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000
Elisabeth Oxfeldt
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
For all of the scholarship done on postcolonial literatures, little has been applied to Scandinavian writing. Yet, beginning with the onset of tourism beyond Scandinavia in the 1840s, a compelling body of prose works documents Scandinavian attitudes toward foreign countries and further shows how these Scandinavian travelers sought to portray themselves to uncharted cultures.
 
Focusing on Danish and Norwegian travelogues, Elisabeth Oxfeldt traces the evolution of Scandinavian travel writing over two centuries using pivotal texts from each era, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Oxfeldt situates each one in its historical and geopolitical context, and her close readings delineate how each travelogue reflects Scandinavia’s ongoing confrontation between Self and the non-European cultural Other.
 
A long-overdue examination of travel literature produced by some of Denmark and Norway’s greatest writers, Journeys from Scandinavia unpacks the unstable constructions of Scandinavian cultural and national identity and, in doing so, complicates the common assumption of a homogeneous, hegemonic Scandinavia.
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front cover of Joyce's Ghosts
Joyce's Ghosts
Ireland, Modernism, and Memory
Luke Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For decades, James Joyce’s modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe’s urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure.

In Joyce’s Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce’s Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce’s stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce’s language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the “shout in the street,” that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis.

Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce’s achievement and its foundations.
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front cover of Judaism Musical and Unmusical
Judaism Musical and Unmusical
Michael P. Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity. Judaism Musical and Unmusical traces the formulation of this secular Jewishness from its Enlightenment roots through the twentieth century to explore the infinite variations of modern Jewish experience in Central Europe and beyond.

Engaging the work of such figures as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, Arnaldo Momigliano, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Libeskind, Michael Steinberg shows how modern Jews advanced cosmopolitanism and multiplicity by helping to loosen—whether by choice or by necessity—the ties that bind any culture to accounts of its origins. In the process, Steinberg composes a mosaic of texts and events, often distant from one another in time and place, that speak to his theme of musicality. As both a literal value and a metaphorical one, musicality opens the possibility of a fusion of aesthetics and analysis—a coupling analogous to European modernity’s twin concerns of art and politics.
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Judging the French Reformation
Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements
William Monter
Harvard University Press, 1999

This original look at the French Reformation pits immovable object--the French appellate courts or parlements--against irresistible force--the most dynamic forms of the Protestant Reformation. Without the slightest hesitation, the high courts of Renaissance France opposed these religious innovators. By 1540, the French monarchy had largely removed the prosecution of heresy from ecclesiastical courts and handed it to the parlements. Heresy trials and executions escalated dramatically. But within twenty years, the irresistible force had overcome the immovable object: the prosecution of Protestant heresy, by then unworkable, was abandoned by French appellate courts.

Until now no one has investigated systematically the judicial history of the French Reformation. William Monter has examined the myriad encounters between Protestants and judges in French parlements, extracting information from abundant but unindexed registers of official criminal decisions both in Paris and in provincial capitals, and identifying more than 425 prisoners condemned to death for heresy by French courts between 1523 and 1560. He notes the ways in which Protestants resisted the French judicial system even before the religious wars, and sets their story within the context of heresy prosecutions elsewhere in Reformation Europe, and within the long-term history of French criminal justice.

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front cover of The Judgment of the Nations
The Judgment of the Nations
Christopher Dawson
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1942, in the midst of the horrors of World War II.
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front cover of Just Assassins
Just Assassins
The Culture of Terrorism in Russia
Edited and with an introduction by Anthony Anemone
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Just Assassins is an engrossing collection of fourteen original essays that illuminate terrorism as it has occurred in Russian culture past and present. The broad range of writers and scholars have contributed work that examines Russian literature, film, and theater; historical narrative; and even amateur memoir, songs, and poetry posted on the Internet. Along with editor Anthony Anemone’s introduction, these essays chart the evolution of modern political terrorism in Russia, from the Decembrist uprising to the horrific school siege in Beslan in 2004.

As terrorism and the fear of terrorism continues to animate, shape, and deform public policy and international relations across the globe, Just Assassins brings into focus how Russia’s cultural engagement with its legacy of terrorism offers instructive lessons and insights for anyone concerned about political terror.

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front cover of Just Wonder
Just Wonder
Shifting Perspectives in Tradition
Pauline Greenhill
Utah State University Press, 2024
Inspired by folklore, television, fairy tales, social media, novels, and films, Just Wonder addresses crucial themes in social and ecological justice efforts. Moving into the mid-twenty-first century, wonder—as a potentially critical sociocultural, ecological, and individual stance—will play a significant role in reconceptualizing the present to imagine a different and better world.
 
These essays examine fairy tales and other traditional forms of the fantastic and the real to offer alternative expressions of justice relevant to gender, sex, sexuality, environment, Indigeneity, class, ability, race, decolonizing, and human and nonhuman relations. By analyzing fairy tales and wonder texts from various media through an intersectional feminist lens, Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme consider how wonder genres and forms blend with diverse conceptions of seeking and enacting justice. International collaborators—both established and emerging scholars who self-identify with different subjectivities, locations, and generations and come from an impressive range of inter/disciplines—engage with contemporary and historical texts from various languages and cultural contexts, including interventions, counterparts, and comparisons to the fairy tale. Just Wonder offers a critical look at how creative wondering can expand the ability to resist modes of oppression while fostering equity, as well as encourage curiosity and imagination.
 
In a world that can be overwhelming and precarious, this book presents scholarly, artistic, personal, and collective-action interventions to identify and respond to injustice while centering wonder and, thus, imagination, questioning, and hope. Just Wonder will appeal to fairy-tale scholars; folklorists; students and scholars of film, media studies, and cultural studies; as well as a general audience.
 
 
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Justice Imperiled
The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany
Douglas G. Morris
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"This book reads like a legal thriller; it will leave you thinking about the nature of justice and inspired by the human spirit."
-Sister Helen Prejean

Justice Imperiled is the story of the brilliant lawyer Max Hirschberg, one of Germany's most courageous defenders of justice in the face of Hitler's rise to power.

Hirschberg lived an extraordinary life at a defining moment in German and European history. By the time he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, he had argued a series of cases in Munich's courtrooms that shed light on the history of political justice in pre-Nazi Germany and, by extension, the miscarriage of justice in all Western democracies.

Hirschberg was a rare figure: he fought for cases that reflected the new democracy rather than the old monarchy, that valued equality rather than hierarchy, and that showed respect for workers as well as aristocrats.

Throughout the Weimar period Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis-twice facing Hitler himself. As he litigated politically charged disputes, he also began fighting to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants and to study what mistaken verdicts teach us about the criminal justice system as a whole.

In a unique blend of biography and courtroom drama, Justice Imperiled captures the excitement of Hirschberg's actual cases and presents legal battles that still rage, in different circumstances, to this day.
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front cover of Justifying Genocide
Justifying Genocide
Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler
Stefan Ihrig
Harvard University Press, 2016

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.”

As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey.

Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

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