A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
During the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama was the central battleground in the struggle for human rights in the American South. As one of the most segregated cities in the United States, the city of Birmingham became infamous for its suppression of civil rights and for official and vigilante violence against its African American citizens, most notoriously the use of explosives in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the bombing of the home of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
In October of 1979, Birmingham elected its first Black mayor, Richard Arrington Jr. He was born in the rural town of Livingston, Alabama. His family moved to Birmingham when he was a child. A man of quiet demeanor, he was nevertheless destined to bring to fruition many of the fundamental changes that the Civil Rights Movement had demanded. This is his story. Not a conventional political or Civil Rights history, Back to Birmingham is the story of a man who demonstrated faith in his region and people. The work illuminates Arrington's sense of place, a quality that enables a person to claim sentimentally a portion of the natural and human environment. Franklin passionately underscores the importance of the attachment of Southern Blacks to their land and place.
Back to Birmingham will appeal to both the general reader and the serious student of American society. The book endeavors to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly history. It is guided by the assumption that Americans of whatever description can find satisfaction in comprehending social change and that they are buoyed by the individual triumph of those who beat the odds.
A new account of the life and policies of the first German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, this concise historical-biography reflects, for the first time in English, the historical shift in emphasis from the traditional political-economic approach to the more complex social-economic one of post—World War II scholarship.
Since the middle of the 1950s, much new material on Bismarck and nineteenth-century Germany and new interpretations of existing material have been published in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Professor George O. Kent’s brilliant synthesis, drawing on this mass of material, examines changes in emphasis in post—World War II scholarship. The book, particularly in the historiographical notes and bibliographical essay, provides the serious student with an invaluable guide to the intricacies of recent Bismarckian scholarship. For the general reader, the main text presents a picture of the man, the issues, and the age in the light of modern scholarship.
The major shift in historical emphasis described in this new account is the importance scholars give to the period 1877–79, the years of change from free trade to protectionism, rather than to 1870–71 the founding of the Reich. Bismarck’s political machinations, particularly his willingness to explore the possibilities of a coup d’état, are more fully discussed here than in any other book.
Not a Jew marginally, but centrally
In this book, LaCocque presents the case that Jesus was totally and unquestionably a Jew. He lived as a Jew, thought as a Jew, debated as a Jew, acted as a Jew and died as a Jew. He had no intention of creating a new religion; rather, he was a reformer of the Judaism of his day. True, his critique went far beyond an intellectual subversion. In fact, Jesus progressively thought of himself as the “Son of Man” inaugurating the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Features:
- Focused attention given to the historical Jesus and not Christianity or Christology
- Addresses restricted sources, namely, the Synoptic Gospels
- Close examination of Jesus’s way of thinking, teaching, and behaving
Economic historian, democratic socialist, educator, and British labor party activist, R. H. Tawney touched many worlds. His life, too, spanned great distance and change. When he was born in Calcutta in 1880, Gladstone, Tennyson, and Queen Victoria were flourishing and the British Empire was approaching its height. By the time of his death in 1962, the Empire had shrunk to a few tourist islands, and socialism, once so shocking, was now commonplace.
Ross Terrill, in this absorbing first study of Tawney’s thought, view his subject within three related contexts. The first is Tawney, the man. Terrill makes skillful use of unpublished material—the early diary, speech and lecture notes, letters, interviews with friends and associates—to tell the story of Tawney’s life in relation to his times. Second is social democracy. Tawney was one of its most influential philosophers and prophets, and this book argues for the continuing validity of his socialism as a path between capitalism and communism. Third is British politics. From Edwardian liberal “consensus” to mid-century collectivist “consensus,” Tawney’s long career, often at odds with prevailing orthodoxies, offers a window on British political culture.
Four key ideas are found in Tawney’s political thought: equality and the dispersion of power—the “shape of socialism”; function and citizenship—the “life of socialism.” These ideas, and indeed the life of the man himself, Terrill believes, are summed up in socialism as fellowship. “As long as men are men,” Tawney said, “a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.”
This book is a blend of biography, history, and the study of political ideas. It provides a striking portrait of a remarkable man and a panorama of changing ideas and situations in the society where he tried to realize his socialist vision. It offers many glimpses of Tawney’s associates, among them Beveridge, the Webbs, Laski, A. P. Wadsworth, Temple, Margaret Cole, and Leonard Woolf; and surprising snippets, like the fact that Tawney used the phrase “private affluence and public squalor” in 1919.
In this captivating and complex portrait of an American sports legend, Russell Sullivan confirms Rocky Marciano's place as a symbol and cultural icon of his era. As much as he embodied the wholesome, rags-to-riches patriotism of a true American hero, he also reflected the racial and ethnic tensions festering behind the country's benevolent facade.
Spirited, fast-paced, and rich in detail, Rocky Marciano is the first book to place the boxer in the context of his times. Capturing his athletic accomplishments against the colorful backdrop of the 1950s fight scene, Sullivan examines how Marciano's career reflected the glamour and scandal of boxing as well as tenor of his times.
In 1885, at the age of seventy-two and “in the evening of life,” Thomas Mellon published his autobiography in a limited edition exclusively for his family. He was a distinguished and highly successful Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker, and his descendants would play major roles in American business, art, and philanthropy. Two of his sons, Andrew William and Richard Beatty, were to join Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller as the four wealthiest men in the United States.
Thomas Mellon was an anomaly among the great American capitalists of his time. Highly literate and intelligent, astute and deadly honest about his own life and financial success, and an excellent narrative writer with a chilly but genuine sense of humor, he wrote a perspective and self-revealing book that remains to this day a major autobiography and an important source for American social and business history.
That it has found very few readers in the 114 year since its publication is due to the author himself. Warning his descendants in the preface that the book should never “be for sale in the bookstore, nor any new edition published,” because it contains “nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted,” Thomas in effect buried a masterpiece.
Nor in later years has it ever been generally available. An abridged version was prepared solely for the Mellon family in 1968, and the book also appeared years ago in an obscure fascimile. Until the University of Pittsburgh Press edition, Thomas Mellon and His Times has been virtually unobtainable.
Born in Ulster with a Scotch-Irish heritage, Thomas Mellon immigrated to the United States in 1818 at the age of five. He was raised by his parents on a small, hilly farm at Poverty Point, about twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. When he was nine, he walked to Pittsburgh and, awe-struck, viewed the mansion and steam mill of the Negley family, “impressed . . . with an idea of wealth and magnificence I had before no conception of.”
Yet the true turning point of his life was a decision he made at the age of seventeen. For years his father, Andrew, had insisted that Thomas become a farmer. One summer day in 1831, leaving his son cutting timber, Andrew rode to the county seat to close on the purchase of an adjoining farm which he intended for Thomas. “Nearly crazed” by the impending collapse of all hope of “acquiring knowledge and wealth,” Thomas threw down his axe and ran ten miles to stop the purchase. From this spontaneous decision flowed his later success as a judge, banker, and capitolist who caught the exhilarating tide of the American economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For this new edition of the book, Paul Mellon, Thomas Mellon’s grandson, has written a preface, and David McCullough, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Harry S. Truman, has contributed a foreword. The introduction, notes, and afterword by Mary L, Briscoe, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of American Autobiography, 1945-1980, provide the historical and social context for the autobiography. The book is illustrated with three maps and approximately twenty-five photographs, many of them rarely seen, from a variety of sources that includes Paul Mellon and other members of the Mellon family.
Sergei Konenkov was one of this century's most distinguished Russian artists. A celebrated sculptor, he was a leading figure of the young Soviet art establishment in the early 1920s. After spending over twenty years in the United States, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1945 to become a respected member of the Soviet art world. The mentor to an entire generation of Soviet sculptors, he was renowned for his personal charisma and artistic versatility. This collection of essays, interviews, and personal reminiscences is the first appraisal of his work and life published outside of Russia.
The contributors view Konenkov’s work within a variety of cultural, artistic, and philosophical contexts. With particular attention to his awareness of both indigenous Russian traditions and European innovations, they trace the many stages of his artistic development as he explored and experimented with techniques borrowed from Realism, Symbolism, salon portraiture, African wood carving, Socialist Realism, and Surrealism. The many different historical sources that inspired Konenkov’s artistic expression, from Orthodox Christianity and the folklore of the Russian peasantry to the Egyptian pyramids and pre-classical antiquity are also discussed. The contributors also explore the relationship of Konenkov's life and ideology to art, and the effects of expatriation on creativity.
Illustrated with dozens of photographs of Konenkov’s art, this study of one of the most enigmatic and fascinating artists of the modern period will accompany an exhibition at The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.
Best known for his book, Small Town in Mass Society (co-authored with Joseph Bensman, 1958), Vidich taught for more than forty years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He published eighteen books, co-edited a book series with Robert Jackall, and was the founding editor of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
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