front cover of Adam and Eve in the Armenian Tradition, Fifth through Seventeenth Centuries
Adam and Eve in the Armenian Tradition, Fifth through Seventeenth Centuries
Michael E. Stone
SBL Press, 2013
The Adam and Eve stories are a foundational myth in the Jewish and Christian worlds, and the way they were recounted reveals a great deal about those doing the retelling. How did the Armenians retell these stories? What values do these retellings express about men and women, their life in the world, sin and redemption? Presented here are twelve hundred years of Armenian telling of the Genesis 1–3 stories in an unparalleled collection of all significant narratives of Adam and Eve in Armenian literature—prose and poetry, homilies and commentaries, calendary and mathematical texts—from its inception in the fifth century to the seventeenth century. This seminal resource contributes to the lively current discussion of how biblical and apocryphal traditions were retold, embroidered, and transformed into the lenses through which the Bible itself was read.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen
The Impact of Reform
Deborah Davis
Harvard University Press

By the late 1970s, state communism was everywhere in retreat. First in Eastern Europe, then in China and the Soviet Union, party leaders were compelled to devise fundamental departures from the economic procedures and structures they had confidently installed at the outset of their revolutionary victories. Perhaps no country departed more rapidly from communist economic structures than China.

Within five years of Mao Zedong’s death, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping had dismantled the people’s communes and created a range of markets that established the institutional foundations for a new form of socialism. But, unlike the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, the Chinese reformers refused to consider parallel changes in political institutions. The demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 made it clear that post-Mao economic policies had created unavoidable political consequences for the society and its leaders. In individual case studies, the twelve contributors to this volume document the uneven decollectivization and decentralization of China’s economy in the post-Mao years and the great diversity of the social and political consequences. They deal with the effects of the more materialistic and individualistic reward system on both public and private life in the countryside and in urban settings and the new expectations that economic changes engendered.

[more]

front cover of Daughters of Eve
Daughters of Eve
A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle
Lenard R. Berlanstein
Harvard University Press, 2001

Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them.

Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life.

Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Eve and the New Jerusalem
Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
Barbara Taylor
Harvard University Press, 1993

logo for Harvard University Press
Eve of the Festival
Making Myth in Odyssey 19
Olga Levaniouk
Harvard University Press, 2011
Eve of the Festival is a study of Homeric myth-making in the first and longest dialogue of Penelope and Odysseus (Odyssey 19). This study makes a case for seeing virtuoso myth-making as an essential part of this conversation, a register of communication important for the interaction between the two speakers. At the core of the book is a detailed examination of several myths in the dialogue in an attempt to understand what is being said and how. The dialogue as a whole is interpreted as an exchange of performances that have the eve of Apollo’s festival as their occasion and that amount to activating, and even enacting, the myth corresponding within the Odyssey to the ritual event of the festival.
[more]

front cover of Freeing Charles
Freeing Charles
The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War
Scott Christianson
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. This engaging narrative represents the first in-depth historical study of this crucial incident, one of the fiercest anti-slavery riots after Harpers Ferry. Christianson also presents a richly detailed look at slavery culture in antebellum Virginia and probes the deepest political and psychological aspects of this epic tale. His account underscores fundamental questions about racial inequality, the rule of law, civil disobedience, and violent resistance to slavery in the antebellum North and South.  As seen in New York Times and on C-Span’s Book TV.

[more]

front cover of From Eve to Evolution
From Eve to Evolution
Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America
Kimberly A. Hamlin
University of Chicago Press, 2014
From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American women’s responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin reveals how a number of nineteenth-century women, raised on the idea that Eve’s sin forever fixed women’s subordinate status, embraced Darwinian evolution—especially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man—as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis.
           
Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their enthusiasm for evolutionary science with their commitment to women’s rights, including Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt Gamble, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These Darwinian feminists believed evolutionary science proved that women were not inferior to men, that it was natural for mothers to work outside the home, and that women should control reproduction. The practical applications of this evolutionary feminism came to fruition, Hamlin shows, in the early thinking and writing of the American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. 
           
Much scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing what Darwin and other male evolutionists had to say about women, but very little has been written regarding what women themselves had to say about evolution. From Eve to Evolution adds much-needed female voices to the vast literature on Darwin in America.
[more]

front cover of The Galveston Era
The Galveston Era
The Texas Crescent on the Eve of Secession
By Earl Wesley Fornell
University of Texas Press, 1961

The "Queen City" of Texas they called her—or the "Octopus of the Gulf." Galveston from 1845 to 1860 was the center of culture in Texas—or the monster with an economic strangle hold on all Texas trade. It was a gracious city with wide paved streets, impressive buildings, and neat gardens; yet it was also a pestilence-ridden place where no sanitary code was ever enforced and where one in every two children died before reaching maturity. Its citizens, avid for culture and knowledge, attended concerts and plays in great numbers and exhibited an eager interest in science and history; yet they could not be brought to support the school system. Galveston was a city where no person in need was ever left uncared for, where the sick and needy—strangers or friends—were succoured; yet no free Negro was safe from legalized abduction and forced enslavement, and the city served as a center for the revived African slave trade.

Earl Fornell makes the charming, colorful, cosmopolitan, contradictory city of Galveston the focal point of his study of the Texas Gulf Coast on the eve of the Civil War. The years 1845-1860 were crucial for this area; during that period the economy became more and more dependent upon slave labor, and thus the stage was set for secession.

Dr. Fornell describes with clarity the interrelated events, the decisions, and the conflicts that went into the development of Galveston and the Texas Gulf Coast during these years. He portrays the people and their way of life. He introduces us to some of the notables who helped to shape the destiny of Texas: Sam Houston, the old general; Lorenzo Sherwood, the golden-tongued propounder of radical economic doctrines; Willard Richardson, Hamilton Stuart, Ferdinand Flake, and Edward Cushing, the newspapermen whose writing both reflected and guided the thought of their fellow citizens; Arthur Lynn, the British consul whose observing and compassionate nature brought him onto the stage of Galveston history with striking frequency and whose voluminous letters provide a rich source for historical details; and William Ballinger, a minor player on the stage but one whose conscience and interests mirrored those of many other thoughtful Galvestonians.

Always present, affecting and affected by virtually every aspect of life on the Coast, the slave-labor problem grew ever more acute as the expanding railroad system laid more and more of the land open for development. Dr. Fornell shows with keen insight how it eventually forced Texans into a position where conflict with the federal government was unavoidable and the decision to secede from the Union inevitable.

The late Earl W. Fornell, a native of Wisconsin, held B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from the New School for Social Research, the M.A. degree in political history from Columbia University, and the Ph.D. degree in political history from Rice University. He taught at Columbia, Amarillo College, Rice, and Lamar State College of Technology.

[more]

front cover of The Laughter of Adam and Eve
The Laughter of Adam and Eve
Jason Sommer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Near the beginning, just after the fall, was laughter—at least as Jason Sommer imagines it. In the title poem, Eve catches Adam’s hilarity over what passes for a tree outside of Eden, their laughter a heady combination of longing, defiance, and perhaps even relief, through which they find they now possess “a knowledge of evil that is good,” an understanding that will carry them through life after paradise. Through settings mythical, historical and biblical, through characters that range from Gunga Din to St. Kevin of Glendalough, the poems in this book often search out meaning in the tracing of origins: of a bird’s song, of laughter, of a word, of language itself.  Poems explore the source of the word brouhaha, the song of the “resignation bird,” and the dangerous way a poem of Anna Akhmatova enters the world, under the eyes and ears of Stalin’s secret police, escaping the house arrest its author must endure.
In The Laughter of Adam and Eve, Sommer speaks from a multitude of voices and perspectives, in short, formal lyrics as well as longer free-verse narratives. From the archetypal parents of us all, down through anonymous voices, throughout these pages, women and men speak to—and of—each other, in many roles and relations—as lover and beloved, as child and parent, as dreamer and dreamt of. The poems attempt to travel beyond the traditional binary in search of the common thread that binds us to one another. Perhaps chief among them is story: whether recasting myth so that Pygmalion and Narcissus become a single figure or using an Appalachian tale retold as a message, lover to lover, these poems narrate, while engaging deeply with those special properties that poetry can bring to story.
[more]

front cover of Letters from Clara
Letters from Clara
One Intrepid Woman's Travels on the Eve of War, 1936-1939
Janet Newman
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
A unique collection of letters from a member of the YWCA on her first world tour in the 1930s, Letters from Clara tells one woman’s story of adventure and danger on the eve of World War II. Despite limited financial means, Clara Pagel was richly resourceful and used the YWCA network to find work and places to live in the Far East, along the way meeting other women also working their way around the world. As Clara described in letters to her YWCA friends back home, her sojourn was filled with museums and world-famous landmarks, as well as typhoons, bombings, and earthquakes. These experiences are described in over one hundred pages of letters, annotated throughout by Janet Newman. Upon Clara’s return to the United States in 1939, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and earned an MBA at the age of forty-six. This is the story of a remarkable woman on an unexpected but fulfilling journey to learn about the world and herself.
[more]

front cover of The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek
The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek
A Critical Edition
Johannes Tromp
SBL Press, 2016

A Brill classic now in paperback from SBL Press

This critical edition of the Life of Adam and Eve in Greek is based on all available manuscripts. In the introduction the history of previous research is summarized, and the extant manuscripts are presented. Next comes a description of the grammatical characteristics of the manuscripts’ texts, followed by a detailed study of the genealogical relationships between them, resulting in a reconstruction of the writing’s history of transmission in Greek. On the basis of all this information, the Greek text of the Life of Adam and Eve in its earliest attainable stage, is established.

Features:

  • Illustrations of textual relationships and variants
  • Indices for subjects, passages, words in the text, variants, and additions and revisions
  • Full critical apparatus with relevant evidence from the manuscripts
[more]

front cover of On the Eve of Conquest
On the Eve of Conquest
The Chevalier de Raymond's Critique of New France in 1754
Joseph L. Peyser
Michigan State University Press, 1997

In 1754, Charles de Raymond, chevalier of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis and a captain in the Troupes de la Marine wrote a bold, candid, and revealing expose; on the French colonial posts and settlements of New France. On the Eve of the Conquest, more than an annotated translation, includes a discussion on the historical background of the start of the French and Indian War, as well as a concise biography of Raymond and Michel Le Courtois de Surlaville, the army colonel at the French court to whom the report was sent. The events surrounding Raymond's controversial year as commandant of the post (now Fort Wayne, Indiana) in 1749-50, his disputed recall by Governor General Jacques-Pierre de Taffanel de La Jonquier, and the subsequent friction between La Jonquiere's successor, Ange de Menneville Duqesne, and Raymond are presented in detail and illustrated by translations of their correspondence.  
 

[more]

front cover of The Ovary of Eve
The Ovary of Eve
Egg and Sperm and Preformation
Clara Pinto-Correia
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The Ovary of Eve is a rich and often hilarious account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century efforts to understand conception. In these early years of the Scientific Revolution, the most intelligent men and women of the day struggled to come to terms with the origins of new life, and one theory—preformation—sparked an intensely heated debate that continued for over a hundred years. Clara Pinto-Correia traces the history of this much maligned theory through the cultural capitals of Europe.

"The most wonderfully eye-opening, or imagination-opening book, as amusing as it is instructive."—Mary Warnock, London Observer

"[A] fascinating and often humorous study of a reproductive theory that flourished from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century."—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education

"More than just a good story, The Ovary of Eve is an object lesson about the history of science: Don't trust it. . . . Pinto-Correia says she wants to tell the story of history's losers. In doing so, she makes defeat sound more appealing than victory."—Emily Eakin, Nation.

"A sparkling history of preformation as it once affected every facet of European culture."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
[more]

front cover of Remembering Pinochet's Chile
Remembering Pinochet's Chile
On the Eve of London 1998
Steve J. Stern
Duke University Press, 2004
During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history.


“A thoughtful, nuanced study of how Chileans remember the traumatic 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and the nearly two decades of military government that followed. . . . In light of the recent revelations of American human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners, [Stern’s] insights into the legacies of torture and abuse in the Chilean prisons of the 1970s certainly have contemporary significance for any society that undergoes a national trauma.”—Publishers Weekly

“This outstanding work of scholarship sets a benchmark in the history of state terror, trauma, and memory in Latin America.”—Thomas Miller Klubock, American Historical Review

“This is a book of uncommon depth and introspection. . . . Steve J. Stern has not only advanced the memory of the horrors of the military dictatorship; he has assured the place of Pinochet’s legacy of atrocity in our collective conscience.”—Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

“Steve J. Stern’s book elegantly recounts the conflicted recent history of Chile. He has found a deft solution to the knotty problem of evenhandedness in representing points of view so divergent they defy even the most careful attempts to portray the facts of the Pinochet period. He weaves a tapestry of memory in which narratives of horror and rupture commingle with the sincere perceptions of Chileans who remember Pinochet’s rule as salvation. The facts are there, but more important is the understanding we gain by knowing how ordinary Chileans—Pinochet’s supporters and his victims—work through their unresolved past.”—John Dinges, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

[more]

front cover of The Road to September 1939
The Road to September 1939
Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II
Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit
Brandeis University Press, 2018
In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.
[more]

front cover of Walking with Eve in the Loved City
Walking with Eve in the Loved City
Poems
Roy Bentley
University of Arkansas Press, 2018

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Walking with Eve in the Loved City is an ambitious collection. Using a variety of male figures—Jeff Goldblum, Ringo Starr, the poet’s uncle Billy, to name a few—these poems skillfully interrogate masculinity and its cultural artifacts, searching for a way to reconcile reverence for the father figure with a crisis of faith about the world as run by men. And yet, despite the gravity of the subjects these poems engage, this is a hopeful, frequently funny book that encourages the reader to look deeply at the world, and then to laugh if she can.

Roy Bentley often accomplishes this work through a careful balancing of honesty and misdirection, as when in the poem “Can’t Help Falling in Love” the real drama of the narrative—the appearance of an affair between the speaker’s father and a drive-in restaurant carhop—operates as a backdrop for the eight-year-old speaker’s puerile attraction to the woman; or when the vampire Nosferatu (a frequent figure in the poems) materializes in a trailer park, his immortality becoming a lens through which to process the speaker’s righteous anger about wealth and poverty.

God too features prominently—as does doubt. Drawing from the vernacular of his childhood, Bentley accesses the simultaneous austerity and lyrical opulence of the King James Bible to invent stories in which the last note struck is often a call to pay kinder attention. More than anything, these poems serve as humanistic advocates, using the power of narrative—film, interview, imagination, memoir—to highlight how people matter.

Walking with Eve in the Loved City invites the reader to join in this watching and witnessing, to take part in renewing how we see.

[more]

front cover of Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 3
Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 3
Eve and the Church
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this volume, Georges Duby studies the relationship between the Church and women in twelfth-century Europe. By that time, the Church had begun to see the evolving roles and expectations of women as serious matters, resulting in a wide range of clerical writings addressing "the woman question."

Drawing on these writings, Duby describes how women were thought to embody particular sins, such as sorcery, disobedience, and licentiousness. He evaluates Eve's role in man's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and analyzes the reasoning behind the view that women are unstable, curious, frivolous creatures. He also notes that these charges are leveled against women, even as praise is heaped upon them for the conventional virtues they exhibit in their roles as wives and mothers.

As the final installment in Duby's three-volume study of French noblewomen of the twelfth century, Eve and the Church is the last work of this superb historian. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval history and women's history as well as to anyone interested in current debates about women and religion.

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

[more]

front cover of World's Fairs on the Eve of War
World's Fairs on the Eve of War
Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942
Robert H. Kargon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Since the first world’s fair in London in 1851, at the dawn of the era of industrialization, international expositions served as ideal platforms for rival nations to showcase their advancements in design, architecture, science and technology, industry, and politics. Before the outbreak of World War II, countries competing for leadership on the world stage waged a different kind of war—with cultural achievements and propaganda—appealing to their own national strengths and versions of modernity in the struggle for power. World’s Fairs on the Eve of War examines five fairs and expositions from across the globe—including three that were staged (Paris, 1937; Dusseldorf, 1937; and New York, 1939–40), and two that were in development before the war began but never executed (Tokyo, 1940; and Rome, 1942). This coauthored work considers representations of science and technology at world’s fairs as influential cultural forces and at a critical moment in history, when tensions and ideological divisions between political regimes would soon lead to war.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Wretched Rebels
Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution
Lucien Bianco
Harvard University Press, 2009

This book, a condensed translation of the prize- winning Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, focuses on “spontaneous” rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. Yet it raises issues inspired by the perennial concerns of revolutionary leaders, such as peasant “class consciousness” and China’s modernization.

The author shows that the predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against agents of the state. Foremost among them, resistance to taxation had little to do with class struggle. By contrast, protest by poor agricultural laborers and heavily indebted households was extremely rare. Other forms of social protest were reactions less to social exploitation than to oppression by local powerholders. Peasant resistance to the late Qing “new policy” reforms did indeed impede China’s modernization. Decades later, peasant efforts to evade conscription, while motivated by abuses and inequities, weakened the anti-Japanese resistance.

The concluding chapter stresses persistent features of rural protest. It suggests that twentieth-century Chinese peasants were less different from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French peasants than might be imagined and points to continuities between pre- and post-1949 rural protest.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter