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Asian Video Cultures
In the Penumbra of the Global
Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
The contributors to this volume theorize Asian video cultures in the context of social movements, market economies, and local popular cultures to complicate notions of the Asian experience of global media. Whether discussing video platforms in Japan and Indonesia, K-pop reception videos, amateur music videos circulated via microSD cards in India, or the censorship of Bollywood films in Nigeria, the essays trace the myriad ways Asian video reshapes media politics and aesthetic practices. While many influential commentators overlook, denounce, and trivialize Asian video, the contributors here show how it belongs to the shifting core of contemporary global media, thereby moving conversations about Asian media beyond static East-West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms. In so doing, they write Asia's vibrant media practices into the mainstream of global media and cultural theories while challenging and complicating hegemonic ideas about the global as well as digital media.

Contributors. Conerly Casey, Jenny Chio, Michelle Cho, Kay Dickinson, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Feng-Mei Heberer, Tzu-hui Celina Hung, Rahul Mukherjee, Joshua Neves, Bhaskar Sarkar, Nishant Shah, Abhigyan Singh, SV Srinivas, Marc Steinberg, Chia-chi Wu, Patricia Zimmerman
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Asianisms
Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration
Edited by Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski
National University of Singapore Press, 2015
At the core of this book is a seemingly simple question: What is Asia? In search of common historical roots, traditions and visions of political-cultural integration, first Japanese, then Chinese, Korean and Indian intellectuals, politicians and writers understood Asianisms as an umbrella for all conceptions, imaginations and processes which emphasized commonalities or common interests among different Asian regions and nations.


This book investigates the multifarious discursive and material constructions of Asia within the region and in the West. It reconstructs regional constellations, intersections and relations in their national, transnational and global contexts. Moving far beyond the more well-known Japanese Pan-Asianism of the first half of the twentieth century, the chapters investigate visions of Asia that have sought to provide common meanings and political projects in efforts to trace, and construct, Asia as a united and common space of interaction. By tracing the imagination of civil society actors throughout Asia, the volume leaves behind state-centered approaches to regional integration and uncovers the richness and depth of complex identities within a large and culturally heterogeneous space.
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Asians in Britain
400 Years of History
Rozina Visram
Pluto Press, 2002

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Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production
Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
The Pacific, long a source of fantasies for EuroAmerican consumption and a testing ground for the development of EuroAmerican production, is often misrepresented by the West as one-dimensional, culturally monolithic. Although the Asia/Pacific region occupies a prominent place in geopolitical thinking, little is available to readers outside the region concerning the resistant communities and cultures of Pacific and Asian peoples. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production fills that gap by documenting the efforts of diverse indigenous cultures to claim and reimagine Asia/Pacific as a space for their own cultural production.
From New Zealand to Japan, Taiwan to Hawaii, this innovative volume presents essays, poems, and memoirs by prominent Asia/Pacific writers that resist appropriation by transnational capitalism through the articulation of autonomous local identities and counter-histories of place and community. In addition, cultural critics spanning several locations and disciplines deconstruct representations—particularly those on film and in novels—that perpetuate Asia/Pacific as a realm of EuroAmerican fantasy.
This collection, a much expanded edition of boundary 2, offers a new perception of the Asia/Pacific region by presenting the Pacific not as a paradise or vast emptiness, but as a place where living, struggling peoples have constructed contemporary identities out of a long history of hegemony and resistance. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production will prove stimulating to readers with an interest in the Asia/Pacific region, and to scholars in the fields of Asian, American, Pacific, postcolonial, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Joseph P. Balaz, Chris Bongie, William A. Callahan, Thomas Carmichael, Leo Ching, Chiu Yen Liang (Fred), Chungmoo Choi, Christopher L. Connery, Arif Dirlik, John Fielder, Miriam Fuchs, Epeli Hau`ofa, Lawson Fusao Inada, M. Consuelo León W., Katharyne Mitchell, Masao Miyoshi, Steve Olive, Theophil Saret Reuney, Peter Schwenger, Subramani, Terese Svoboda, Jeffrey Tobin, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Whittier Treat, Tsushima Yuko, Albert Wendt, Rob Wilson

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Asinou across Time
Studies in the Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus
Annemarie Weyl Carr
Harvard University Press, 2012
The church of Asinou is among the most famous in Cyprus. Built around 1100, the edifice, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is decorated with accretions of images, from the famous fresco cycle executed shortly after initial construction to those made in the early seventeenth century. During this period the church served the adjacent monastery of the Mother of God ton Phorbion ("of the vetches"), and was subject to Byzantine, Lusignan (1191-1474), Venetian (1474-1570), and Ottoman rule. This monograph is the first on one of Cyprus's major diachronically painted churches. Written by an international team of renowned scholars, the book sets the accumulating phases of Asinou's art and architecture in the context of the changing fortunes of the valley, of Cyprus, and of the eastern Mediterranean. Chapters include the first continuous history of the church and its immediate setting; a thorough analysis of its architecture; editions, translations, and commentary on the poetic inscriptions; art-historical studies of the post-1105/6 images in the narthex and nave; a detailed comparative analysis of the physical and chemical properties of the frescoes; and a diachronic table of paleographical forms.
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Aspects
Fred Sandback's Sculpture
Edward A. Vazquez
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.
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Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran
From Gaumāta to Wahnām
M. Rahim Shayegan
Harvard University Press, 2012

Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran focuses on the content of one of the most important inscriptions of the Ancient Near East: the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century BCE), which in essence reports on a suspicious fratricide and subsequent coup d’état. Moreover, the study shows how the inscription’s narrative would decisively influence the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions well into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.

Intriguingly, our assessment of the impact of the Bisotun narrative on later literary traditions—in particular, the inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli (3rd–4th centuries CE)—necessarily relies on the reception of the oral rendition of the Bisotun story captured by Greek historians. As Rahim Shayegan argues, this oral tradition had an immeasurable impact upon the historiographical writings and epic compositions of later Iranian empires. It would have otherwise remained unknown to modern scholars, had it not been partially preserved and recorded by Hellanicus of Lesbos, Herodotus, Ctesias, and other Greek authors. The elucidation of Bisotun’s thematic composition therefore not only allows us to solve an ancient murder but also to reevaluate pre-Thucydidean Greek historiography as one of the most important repositories of Iranian epic themes.

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Aspects of Islamic Civilization
As Depicted in the Original Texts
A. J. Arberry
University of Michigan Press, 1967

Islamic literature is rich, varied, and abundant, as befits the literature of a civilization which once controlled an empire as great as that of the Romans. In Aspects of Islamic Civilization, A. J. Arberry has chosen and translated passages from the most highly regarded works of Islamic literature in order to illustrate the development of Islamic civilization from its origins in the sixth century to the present.

This anthology is made up of selections from Arabic and Persian writers who have given world renown to Islamic literature—such as Hafiz, Sa'di, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Farid, Avicenna, Ibn Hazm—and from such works as the Koran, the Masnavi, and the Moorish Anthology. It is an invaluable collection of sources for anyone interested in the Moslem world and a fascinating volume to browse in.

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Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax
WHERE CLAUSES BEGIN
Mary Blockley
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax, Mary Blockley uses modern linguistics to tackle the thorny problem of how to interpret a written language that relied neither on punctuation nor on capitalization to mark clause boundaries and subordination.
 
Distinguished by a remarkable combination of erudition and lucidity,  Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax provides new insight into the rules that govern syntactic relationships and indicates how these rules differ for prose and verse. Blockley considers the functions of four of the most common and most syntactically important words in Old English, as well as such features of clauses as verb-initial order, negative contraction, and unexpressed but understood subjects. Picking up where Bruce Mitchell's classic Old English Syntax left off, Blockley shows how such common words and structures mark the relationships between phrases and clauses.
Blockley also considers how the poetic tradition compensated for the loss in written texts of the syntactic functions served by intonation and inflection. Arguing that verse relied instead on a prescriptively regulated, unambiguous syntax, she suggests principles that promise more complex and subtle interpretations of familiar texts such as Beowulf as well as a wealth of other Old English writings.
 
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Aspects of the Renaissance
Edited by Archibald R. Lewis
University of Texas Press, 1967

The Renaissance has long posed a problem to scholars. It has been generalized as an emergence of intellect and will in all fields of human endeavor, but because it is diversely manifested in varying attitudes and forms at various times in the Western world, this vast era of Western European history has resisted definitive boundaries.

To help clarify the problems inherent in the study of the Renaissance and its relationship to the preceding and subsequent historical periods, an international conference was held in Austin, Texas, in April, 1964, jointly sponsored by the South Central Renaissance Conference and The University of Texas. The ten papers here presented reveal how during the symposium leading scholars representing several academic disciplines shared their approaches and insights into the politics, economics, science, literature, art, music, philosophy, and religion of this complex era.

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Aspects of Urbanization in China
Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou
Edited by Gregory Bracken
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
China’s rise as a global power is one of the major economic and political developments of the past fifty years. One seemingly inevitable outcome of industrialization is urbanization, and this definitive study surveys the key aspects of China’s massive wave of urbanization with an emphasis on the changes to the quality of life of urban dewellers. With contributions from authors in a variety of fields, Aspects of Urbanization in China creates a resonant and rich portrait of China’s global ambitions, as well as their culture, architecture, and economy. While the volume deals with disparate aspects of urbanization, the articles included are unified by a deep concern for Chinese citizens.  
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Aspen
The History of a Silver Mining Town, 1879 - 1893
Malcolm J. Rohrbough
University Press of Colorado, 2000

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Aspiring to Greatness
West Virginia University Since World War II
RONALD L. LEWIS
West Virginia University Press, 2013
 Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II chronicles the emergence of WVU as a major land-grant institution. As a continuation of the work of Doherty and Summers in West Virginia University: Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalized State, this book focuses on the modern historical developments that elevated WVU from a small regional institution to one of national prominence.
 
West Virginia University’s growth mirrors the developmental eras that have shaped American higher education since World War II. The University’s history as an innovative, pioneering force within higher education is explored through its major postwar stages of expansion, diversification, and commercialization.
 
Institutions of higher education nationwide experienced a dramatic increase in enrollments between 1945 and 1975 as millions of returning World War II and Korean War veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. Their children, the “baby boom” generation, continued to supply the growth in college enrollment and the corresponding increase in institutional complexity until the mid-1970s. During this period WVU followed the national trend by growing from a few thousand students to nearly fifteen thousand.
 
From 1975 to the early 1990s, expansion gave way to diversification. The traditional student population stopped growing by 1975, and  “boomers” were replaced by students from nontraditional backgrounds. An unprecedented gender, racial, and ethnic diversification took place on college campuses, a trend encouraged by federal civil rights legislation. To a lesser degree WVU was no exception, although its location in a rural state with a small minority population forced the University to work harder to attract minorities than institutions in proximity to urban areas.
 
The commercialization of higher education became a full-fledged movement by the 1990s. Major changes, such as globalization, demographic shifts, a weak economy, and the triumph of the “market society,” all accelerated the penetration of business values and practices into university life.  Like other public universities, WVU was called upon to generate more of its own revenues. The University’s strategic responses to these pressures reconstructed the state’s leading land grant into the large complex institution of today.
 
As the only modern history of West Virginia University, this text reaches into the archives of the President’s Office and makes exhaustive use of press accounts and interviews with key individuals to produce a detailed resource for alumni, friends, and supporters of WVU, as well as administrators and specialists in higher education. 
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Assassin of Youth
A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs
Alexandra Chasin
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its establishment in 1930 until his retirement in 1962, Harry J. Anslinger is the United States’ little known first drug czar. Anslinger was a profligate propagandist with a flair for demonizing racial and immigrant groups and perhaps best known for his zealous pursuit of harsh drug penalties and his particular animus for marijuana users. But what made Anslinger who he was, and what cultural trends did he amplify and institutionalize? Having just passed the hundredth anniversary of the Harrison Act—which consolidated prohibitionist drug policy and led to the carceral state we have today—and even as public doubts about the drug war continue to grow, now is the perfect time to evaluate Anslinger’s social, cultural, and political legacy.

In Assassin of Youth, Alexandra Chasin gives us a lyrical, digressive, funny, and ultimately riveting quasi-biography of Anslinger. Her treatment of the man, his times, and the world that arose around and through him is part cultural history, part kaleidoscopic meditation. Each of the short chapters is anchored in a historical document—the court decision in Webb v. US (1925), a 1935 map of East Harlem, FBN training materials from the 1950s, a personal letter from the Treasury Department in 1985—each of which opens onto Anslinger and his context. From the Pharmacopeia of 1820 to death of Sandra Bland in 2015, from the Pennsylvania Railroad to the last passenger pigeon, and with forays into gangster lives, CIA operatives, and popular detective stories, Chasin covers impressive ground. Assassin of Youth is as riotous and loose a history of drug laws as can be imagined—and yet it culminates in an arresting and precise revision of the emergence of drug prohibition.

Today, even as marijuana is slowly being legalized, we still have not fully reckoned with the racist and xenophobic foundations of our cultural appetite for the severe punishment of drug offenders. In Assassin of Youth, Chasin shows us the deep, twisted roots of both our love and our hatred for drug prohibition.
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Assassination of a Michigan King
The Life of James Jesse Strang
Roger Van Noord
University of Michigan Press, 1997

A skeptical follower of James Jesse Strang once wrote: "No man can serve two masters. You cannot serve a temporal king and a republican government at the same time. The thing is preposterous." And yet, under Strang, such a system survived in Michigan for six years. This book traces the life and assassination of King Strang, the extraordinary Mormon leader who, in the 1850s, created a literal kingdom on Beaver Island, in Lake Michigan.

As a young man, Strang was a dreamer of grandiose dreams---dreams of power, of royalty, and of fame. For him, the dreams came true. But in his pursuit of those dreams, Strang walked a tightrope to avoid ever-impending doom. Strang's kingdom flourished despite perennial conflicts with non-Mormons, including a gun battle with mainlanders, and despite a major prosecution by the federal government. His kingdom was designed to be totally independent of the state and nation. And yet, he was a shrewd political tactician who took advantage of Michigan law to be twice elected to the state legislature and become what one Detroit newspaper called the most powerful politician in the state.

Here is Strang the man of contrasts and contradictions, the strident opponent of polygamy and the husband of five wives, the astute editor and the incendiary propagandist, the prophet and the scoundrel, the man who through the sheer force of his personality made his followers a group to be feared in his region.

Vast amount of fresh information, including contemporary journals, documents, and letters never before used by biographers help draw a portrait of one of the most complex and resourceful leaders in American history.

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The Assassination of Gaitán
Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia
Herbert Braun
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

Drawn in part from personal interviews with participants and witnesses, Herbert Braun’s analysis of the riot’s roots, its patterns and consequences, provides a dramatic account of this historic turning point and an illuminating look at the making of modern Colombia.

Braun’s narrative begins in the year 1930 in Bogotá, Colombia, when a generation of Liberals and Conservatives came to power convinced they could kept he peace by being distant, dispassionate, and rational. One of these politicians, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was different. Seeking to bring about a society of merit, mass participation, and individualism, he exposed the private interests of the reigning politicians and engendered a passionate relationship with his followers. His assassination called forth urban crowds that sought to destroy every visible evidence of public authority of a society they felt no longer had the moral right to exist.

This is a book about behavior in public: how the actors—the political elite, Gaitán, and the crowds—explained and conducted themselves in public, what they said and felt, and what they sought to preserve or destroy, is the evidence on which Braun draws to explain the conflicts contained in Colombian history. The author demonstrates that the political culture that was emerging through these tensions offered the hope of a peaceful transition to a more open, participatory, and democratic society.

“Most Colombians regard Jorge Eliécer Gaitán as a pivotal figure in their nation’s history, whose assassination on April 9, 1948 irrevocably changed the course of events in the twentieth century. . . . As biography, social history, and political analysis, Braun’s book is a tour de force.”—Jane M. Rausch, Hispanic American Historical Review

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The Assassination of Paris
Louis Chevalier
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Published to controversial acclaim in 1977, The Assassination of Paris describes the transformation of the Paris of Raymond Queneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson; of quartiers of carpenters and Communists and country folk from the Auvergne; of dance halls and corner cafes. Much of Louis Chevalier's Paris faced the wrecking ball in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, as Georges Pompidou, Andre Malraux and their cadres of young technocratic elites sought to proclaim the glory of the new France by reinventing the capital in brutal visions of glass and steel. Chevalier sought to tell the world what was at stake, and who the villains were.

He describes an almost continual parade of garish and grandiose plans: some, like the destruction of the glorious marketplace of les Halles for him the heart of the city, were realized; others, like the superhighway along the left bank of the Seine, were bitterly and successfully resisted.

Almost twenty years later, we find it difficult to remember the city as it was. And while Paris looks to many much the way it always has, behind the carefully sandblasted stone and restored shop fronts is a city radically transformed—emptied of centuries of popular life; of entire neighborhoods and the communities they housed engineered out to desolate suburban slums. The battle over the soul and spirit of the city continues.

This book is not entirely about the loss of physical places. Or a romance about a world that never really was. It is a cautionary tale filled with lessons for all who struggle to protect the human scale, the diversity, and the welcoming public life that are the threatened gifts of all great cities.
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The Assassination of Theo van Gogh
From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma
Ron Eyerman
Duke University Press, 2008
In November 2004, the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed on a busy street in Amsterdam. A twenty-six-year-old Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent shot van Gogh, slit his throat, and pinned a five-page indictment of Western society to his body. The murder set off a series of reactions, including arson against Muslim schools and mosques. In The Assassination of Theo van Gogh, Ron Eyerman explores the multiple meanings of the murder and the different reactions it elicited: among the Amsterdam-based artistic and intellectual subculture, the wider Dutch public, the local and international Muslim communities, the radical Islamic movement, and the broader international community. After meticulously analyzing the actions and reputations of van Gogh and others in his milieu, the motives of the murderer, and the details of the assassination itself, Eyerman considers the various narrative frames the mass media used to characterize the killing.

Eyerman utilizes theories of social drama and cultural trauma to evaluate the reactions to and effects of the murder. A social drama is triggered by a public transgression of taken-for-granted norms; one that threatens the collective identity of a society may develop into a cultural trauma. Eyerman contends that the assassination of Theo van Gogh quickly became a cultural trauma because it resonated powerfully with the postwar psyche of the Netherlands. As part of his analysis of the murder and reactions to it, he discusses significant aspects of twentieth-century Dutch history, including the country’s treatment of Jews during the German occupation, the loss of its colonies in the wake of World War II, its recruitment of immigrant workers, and the failure of Dutch troops to protect Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.

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Assassins against the Old Order
Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siecle Europe
Nunzio Pernicone, Fraser Ottanelli
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The image of the anarchist assassin haunted the corridors of power and the popular imagination in the late nineteenth century. Fear spawned a gross but persistent stereotype: a swarthy "Italian" armed with a bloody knife or revolver and bred to violence by a combination of radical politics, madness, innate criminality, and poor genes. That Italian anarchists targeted--and even killed--high-profile figures added to their exaggerated, demonic image.

Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli dig into the transnational experiences and the historical, social, cultural, and political conditions behind the phenomenon of anarchist violence in Italy. Looking at political assassinations in the 1890s, they illuminate the public effort to equate anarchy's goals with violent overthrow. Throughout, Pernicone and Ottanelli combine a cutting-edge synthesis of the intellectual origins, milieu, and nature of Italian anarchist violence with vivid portraits of its major players and their still-misunderstood movement.

A bold challenge to conventional thinking, Assassins against the Old Order demolishes a century of myths surrounding anarchist violence and its practitioners.

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Assassins’ Deeds
A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2020
Assassins have been killing the powerful and famous for at least three thousand years. Personal ambition, revenge, and anger have encouraged many to violent deeds, like the Turkish sultan who had nineteen of his brothers strangled or the bodyguards who murdered a dozen Roman emperors. More recently have come new motives like religious and political fanaticism, revolution and liberation, with governments also getting in on the act, while many victims seem to have been surprisingly careless: Abraham Lincoln was killed after letting his bodyguard go for a drink. So, do assassinations work? Drawing on anecdote, historical evidence, and statistical analysis, Assassins’ Deeds delves into some of history’s most notorious acts, unveiling an intriguing cast of characters, ingenious methods of killing, and many unintended consequences.
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Assault on Paradise
Tatiana Lobo
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Assault on Paradise vividly depicts the Conquistadores and the Church invading Central America, impoverishing one world to enrich another. In a fast-paced, bawdy, swashbuckling adventure in Central America of the early 1700s, Costa Rican novelist Tatiana Lobo lays bare the dark legacy of the Conquistadores and the Church. Through the central picaresque story of Pedro Albaran, Lobo dramatizes the intrigues of politicians and the Inquisition and the bloody battles between the native people and the invaders, while simultaneously presenting a reverent poetic recreation of indigenous cosmogony and mystical values which the natives seek to use to drive out the invaders.
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The Assault on Progress
Technology and Time in American Literature
J. Adam Johns
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize for Best Manuscript in American Literature

A belief in progress is a fundamental ethos in American history and culture. The Assault on Progress probes American literary works that challenge the prevailing notion of technology as a manifestation of progress. J. Adam Johns argues that the idea of technology-as-destiny has long been explored—and undercut—in American literary works and that literature remains a crucial site for ongoing debates in this area.
 
Johns studies the phenomenon by which each generation comes to regard itself as the hinge upon which history turns. He explores several works by historians of technology, focusing in detail on the works of literary critic Lewis Mumford, whose examinations of Herman Melville’s novels provide an early example of critical interest in the abandonment of progress as a value.
 
He goes on to study the works of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, focusing on the convergence of technology and race—machines and slavery, and highlights the ways that these writers have portrayed humans as reduced to machines, evidence that technological “progress” is not always progressive, or liberating to humanity.
 
The conclusion argues for a shift in our understanding of the relationship between technology and time. According to Johns, writers like Melville, Faulkner, and Ellison help us to think of technology separate from notions of progress, and therefore help us to escape from a perilous ideological bind that forever situates humankind at the end of history.
 
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Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times
Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War
Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham
Northwestern University Press, 2019

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism.

Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities
explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. 

The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.

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Assembling Shinto
Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan
Anna Andreeva
Harvard University Press, 2017

During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of religious ideas and practices. These stages illuminate the medieval pedigree of Ryōbu Shintō (kami ritual worship based loosely on esoteric Buddhism’s Two Mandalas), a major precursor to modern Shinto.

In analyzing the key mechanisms for “assembling” medieval forms of kami worship, Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century master narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why groups of religious practitioners affiliated with different cultic sites and religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism’s teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations.

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Assembling the Dinosaur
Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle
Lukas Rieppel
Harvard University Press, 2019

A lively account of how dinosaurs became a symbol of American power and prosperity and gripped the popular imagination during the Gilded Age, when their fossil remains were collected and displayed in museums financed by North America’s wealthiest business tycoons.

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.

Assembling the Dinosaur follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North America’s Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, using them to project American exceptionalism back into prehistory. Learning from the show-stopping techniques of P. T. Barnum, museums exhibited dinosaurs to attract, entertain, and educate the public. By assembling the skeletons of dinosaurs into eye-catching displays, wealthy industrialists sought to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science, showing that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, museums adopted corporate management practices to control the movement of dinosaur bones, restricting their circulation to influence their meaning and value in popular culture.

Tracing the entwined relationship of dinosaurs, capitalism, and culture during the Gilded Age, Lukas Rieppel reveals the outsized role these giant reptiles played during one of the most consequential periods in American history.

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Assembly Codes
The Logistics of Media
Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film production and the construction of internet infrastructure to the environmental impact of the creation, distribution, and sale of vinyl records. They also reveal how logistical technologies have generated new aesthetic and performative practices. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, Assembly Codes demonstrates that media and logistics are co-constitutive and that one cannot be understood apart from the other.

Contributors
Ebony Coletu, Kay Dickinson, Stefano Harney, Matthew Hockenberry, Tung-Hui Hu, Shannon Mattern, Fred Moten, Michael Palm, Ned Rossiter, Nicole Starosielski, Liam Cole Young, Susan Zieger
 
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The Assembly Line
Robert Linhart
University of Massachusetts Press, 1981
Firsthand accounts of the numbing experience of industrial work by Robert Linhart, one of the militant leftist intellectuals of 1968 France. Translated by Margaret Crosland.
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Assessing War
The Challenge of Measuring Success and Failure
Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein, and Jason J. Lepore, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Today's protracted asymmetrical conflicts confuse efforts to measure progress, often inviting politics and wishful thinking to replace objective evaluation.

In Assessing War, military historians, social scientists, and military officers explore how observers have analyzed the trajectory of war in American conflicts from the Seven Years’ War through the war in Afghanistan. Drawing on decades of acquired expertise, the contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory and practice and, through alternative dimensions of assessment such as justice and proportionality, the war of ideas and economics. This group of distinguished authors grapples with both conventional and irregular wars and emerging aspects of conflict—such as cyberwar and nation building—that add to the complexities of the modern threat environment. The volume ends with recommendations for practitioners on best approaches while offering sobering conclusions about the challenges of assessing war without politicization or self-delusion.

Covering conflicts from the eighteenth century to today, Assessing War blends focused advice and a uniquely broad set of case studies to ponder vital questions about warfare's past—and its future. The book includes a foreword by Gen. George W. Casey Jr. (USA, Ret.), former chief of staff of the US Army and former commander, Multi-National Force–Iraq.

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Assisting Development in a Changing World
The Harvard Institute for International Development, 1980-1995
Dwight H. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 1997

For over forty years the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) has worked with countries in the developing world on the complex issues of economic and social reform. This volume describes the experience of the Institute in the challenging development assistance world of the 1980s and early 1990s, when HIID's largest projects involved work with countries attempting to move away from high levels of government intervention to more market-friendly systems. These efforts involved work in formerly centrally planned command economies (e.g., Russia, Vietnam, etc.) as well as in the mixed plan/market economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The book also describes HIID's efforts in education and health reform as well as in the rapidly expanding area of environmental economics and policy.

Assisting Development in a Changing World is an unvarnished account written by the HIID practitioners who participated in these programs and edited by its former director and executive directors.

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Associate Degree Nursing Education
An Historical Annotated Bibliography, 1942–1988
Patricia T. Haase
Duke University Press, 1990
This volume offers a comprehensive listing, from the development of the Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) program in 1948 to the present, of all literature related to the ADN program. Any item related to the degree programs and their contributions, the AD nurses, their relation to nurses trained in other programs, and their role in the health care system is included. Published and unpublished items as well as dissertations, research reports and monographs, state and federal government documents, materials issued by state and national nursing groups, journal articles, and books are listed.
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Association and Enlightenment
Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830
Mark C. Wallace
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.
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The Association
British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769-1793
Eugene Charlton Black
Harvard University Press

The generations of Britons living through the reign of George III saw basic changes in economic and social structure: industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, demographic revolution. Romanticism displaced classicism. The religious and spiritual life of the nation changed dramatically. The rise of the mass constituency, the extension of political consensus, proved the salient new political fact. Traditional institutions and relationships were not impervious to change, but extraparliarmentary political organizations forced the pace. They reflected the interests of the community far more closely than the traditional, fragmented political factions. National extraparliamentary political organizations attempted, in parliamentary constituencies, to secure the election of members pledged to a specific program. Potential supporters were organized, after a fashion, in parliament. This is the nucleus of modern party organization, platform, and propaganda.

Mr. Black examines a number of these associations—their motives, their leaders, their opponents, their means of expression and operation, their accomplishments and failures. Names such as Wilkes, Wyvill, Gordon, Jebb, and Reeves are found in cooperation with and opposition to Rockingham, Pitt, Fox, and North. Organizations such as the Associated Counties; the Protestant Association; the Society for the Commemoration of the Glorious Revolution; and the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers are represented in this narrative of eighteenth-century political history.

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The Assyrians
Lost Civilizations
Paul Collins
Reaktion Books, 2024
An accessible guide to the history of the Assyrian empire from the perspective of its powerful elites.
 
At the height of its power near 660 BC, the Assyrian empire, centered in northern Iraq, wielded dominance from Egypt to Iran. This vast region was ruled by a series of kings who demonstrated their power with magnificent palaces adorned by sculptures depicting rituals, battles, and hunts. Established by military might, the empire thrived under the guidance of scholars who interpreted divine will and administrators who relocated tens of thousands of people to serve the state. This book relates the history of Assyria through the lens of its royal family and the officials who commissioned its buildings, art, and literature—each a critical part of the foundation for the later Babylonian and Persian empires.
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Astray
A History of Wandering
Eluned Summers-Bremner
Reaktion Books, 2023
A meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human—it is everything.
 
This book explores how, far from being an act limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning—a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today’s refugees, and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging and at notions of alienation and hope.
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The Astrological History of Masha'allah
E. S. Kennedy, E.S. Kennedy, and David Pingree
Harvard University Press, 1971

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Astronomer, Cartographer and Naturalist of the New World
The Life and Scholarly Achievements of Georg Marggrafe (1610-1643) in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Volume 1: Life, Work and Legacy
Huib Zuidervaart
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This volume, Volume 1, presents Marggrafe’s stunning biography. Volume 2 consists of a text edition of his astronomical legacy, prepared for the printing press in the 1650s, but only now finalized and published. Georg Marggrafe (1610-1643) is today hailed as the principal author of an influential account of the natural history of Northern Brazil and as compiler of the first accurate map of the area, which is considered as one of the most elegant products of seventeenth-century Dutch cartography. But initial he had the ambition to become known in astronomy. With the support Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, then governor-general of colonial Dutch Brazil, he built in Recife the first European-style astronomical observatory on the South-American continent, where he systematically charted the southern stars. He intended to supplement the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, who charted the Northern sky half a century before. But Marggrafe’s untimely death (and the negligence of a Leiden professor) prevented the publication of his valuable observations. As a result, Marggrafe did not achieve fame in astronomy, but instead became famous for his equally remarkable other achievements.
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Astronomer, Cartographer and Naturalist of the New World
The Life and Scholarly Achievements of Georg Marggrafe (1610-1643) in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Volume 2: Transcription and English Translation of His Astronomical Observations
Oscar Matsuura
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This volume, Volume 2, is a supplementary text and consists of a text edition of his astronomical legacy, prepared for the printing press in the 1650s, but only now finalized and published. Volume 1 presents Marggrafe’s stunning biography. Georg Marggrafe (1610-1643) is today hailed as the principal author of an influential account of the natural history of Northern Brazil and as compiler of the first accurate map of the area, which is considered as one of the most elegant products of seventeenth-century Dutch cartography. But initial he had the ambition to become known in astronomy. With the support Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, then governor-general of colonial Dutch Brazil, he built in Recife the first European-style astronomical observatory on the South-American continent, where he systematically charted the southern stars. He intended to supplement the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, who charted the Northern sky half a century before. But Marggrafe’s untimely death (and the negligence of a Leiden professor) prevented the publication of his valuable observations. As a result, Marggrafe did not achieve fame in astronomy, but instead became famous for his equally remarkable other achievements.
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Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests
Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period
Gabrielle Vail
Harvard University Press, 2010
Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests examines evidence for cultural interchange among the intellectual powerbrokers in Postclassic Mesoamerica, specifically those centered in the northern Maya lowlands and the central Mexican highlands. Contributors to the volume’s thirteen chapters bring an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding the interactions that led to shared content in hieroglyphic codices and mural art. The authors address similarities in artifacts, architectural styles, and building alignments—often produced in regions separated by hundreds of miles—based on their analyses of iconographic, archaeological, linguistic, and epigraphic material. The volume includes a wealth of new data and interpretive frameworks in this comprehensive discussion of a critical time period in the Mesoamerican past.
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Astronomica
Manilius
Harvard University Press, 1977

Poetry of the sky and stars.

Marcus Manilius, who lived in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, is the author of the earliest treatise on astrology we possess. His Astronomica, a Latin didactic poem in five books, begins with an account of celestial phenomena, and then proceeds to treat of the signs of the zodiac and the twelve temples; there follow instructions for calculating the horoscoping degree, and details of chronocrators, decans, injurious degrees, zodiacal geography, paranatellonta, and other technical matters. Besides exhibiting great virtuosity in rendering mathematical tables and diagrams in verse form, the poet writes with some passion about his Stoic beliefs and shows much wit and humor in his character sketches of persons born under particular stars. Perhaps taking a lead from Virgil in his Georgics, Manilius abandons the proportions of his last book to narrate the story of Perseus and Andromeda at considerable length.

In spite of its undoubted elegance, the Astronomica is a difficult work, and this edition provides in addition to the first English prose translation a full guide to the poem, with copious explanatory notes and illustrative figures.

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Astronomy in India, 1784-1876
Joydeep Sen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Indian scientific achievements in the early twentieth century are well known, with a number of heralded individuals making globally recognized strides in the field of astrophysics. Covering the period from the foundation of the Asiatick Society in 1784 to the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, Sen explores the relationship between Indian astronomers and the colonial British. He shows that from the mid-nineteenth century, Indians were not passive receivers of European knowledge, but active participants in modern scientific observational astronomy.
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Astros and Asterisks
Houston's Sign-Stealing Scandal Explained
Edited by Jonathan Silverman
University of Texas Press, 2023

An in-depth and multiperspectival look at the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and its roots in the culture of baseball fandom.

In 2017 the Houston Astros won their first World Series title, a particularly uplifting victory for the city following Hurricane Harvey. But two years later, the feel-good energy was gone after The Athletic revealed that the Astros had stolen signs from opposing catchers during their championship season, perhaps even during the playoffs and World Series. Their methods were at once high-tech and crude: staff took video of opponents’ pitching signals and transmitted the footage in real time to the Astros’ dugout, where players banged on trash cans to signal to their teammates at bat which pitches were coming their way. Wry observers labeled them the Asterisks, pointing to the title that no longer seemed so earned.

Astros and Asterisks examines the scandal from historical, journalistic, legal, ethical, and cultural perspectives. Authors delve into the Astros’ winning-above-all attitude, cultivated by a former McKinsey consultant; the significance of hiring a pitcher recently suspended for domestic abuse; the career-ending effects of the Astros’ transgression on opposing players; and the ethically fraught choices necessary to participate in sign-stealing. Ultimately, it links the Astros’ choices to the sporting world’s obsession with analytics. What emerges is a sobering tale about the impact of new technology on a game whose romanticized image feels increasingly incongruous with its reality in the era of big data and video.

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Asylum on the Hill
History of a Healing Landscape
Katherine Ziff
Ohio University Press, 2012

Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley responded to a national movement to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician.

Katherine Ziff’s compelling presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed. Incorporating rare photos, letters, maps, and records, Asylum on the Hill is a fascinating glimpse into psychiatric history.

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Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse
The Writings and Reform Work of Dorothea Dix in Illinois
David L. Lightner
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

This illustrated collection of annotated newspaper articles and memorials by Dorothea Dix provides a forum for the great mid-nineteenth-century humanitarian and reformer to speak for herself.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802­–87) was perhaps the most famous and admired woman in America for much of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1840s, she launched a personal crusade to persuade the various states to provide humane care and effective treatment for the mentally ill by funding specialized hospitals for that purpose. The appalling conditions endured by most mentally ill inmates in prisons, jails, and poorhouses led her to take an active interest also in prison reform and in efforts to ameliorate poverty.

In 1846–­47 Dix brought her crusade to Illinois. She presented two lengthy memorials to the legislature, the first describing conditions at the state penitentiary at Alton and the second discussing the sufferings of the insane and urging the establishment of a state hospital for their care. She also wrote a series of newspaper articles detailing conditions in the jails and poorhouses of many Illinois communities.

These long-forgotten documents, which appear in unabridged form in this book, contain a wealth of information on the living conditions of some of the most unfortunate inhabitants of Illinois. In his preface, David L. Lightner describes some of the vivid images that emerge from Dorothea Dix's descriptions of social conditions in Illinois a century and a half ago: "A helpless maniac confined throughout the bitter cold of winter to a dark and filthy pit. Prison inmates chained in hallways and cellars because no more men can be squeezed into the dank and airless cells. Aged paupers auctioned off by county officers to whoever will maintain them at the lowest cost."

Lightner provides an introduction to every document, placing each memorial and newspaper article in its proper social and historical context. He also furnishes detailed notes, making these documents readily accessible to readers a century and a half later. In his final chapter, Lightner assesses both the immediate and the continuing impact of Dix's work.

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At Full Speed
Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World
Esther Yau
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
An original and incisive account of one of the world's most exciting cinemas. Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers-these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions. At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe to convey the transnational, multilayered character that Hong Kong films acquire and impart as they circulate worldwide. These writers scrutinize the films they find captivating: from the lesser known works of Law Man and Yuen Woo Ping to such film festival notables as Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, and from the commercial action, romance, and comedy genres of Jackie Chan, Peter Chan, Steven Chiau, Tsui Hark, John Woo, and Derek Yee to the attempted departures of Evans Chan, Ann Hui, and Clara Law. In this cinema the contributors identify an aesthetics of action, gender-flexible melodramatic excesses, objects of nostalgia, and globally projected local history and identities, as well as an active critical film community. Their work, the most incisive account ever given of one of the world's largest film industries, brings the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema into clear close-up focus even as it enlarges on the relationships between art and the market, cultural theory and the movies. Contributors: Jinsoo An, David Bordwell, Rey Chow, Steve Fore, Elaine Yee-Lin Ho, Law Kar (Lau Yiu-kuen), Kwai-cheung Lo, Linda Lai Chiu-han, Gina Marchetti, Hector Rodriquez, Bhaskar Sarkar, Marc Siegel, and Stephen Teo. Esther C. M. Yau is associate professor of film and new media at Occidental College.
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At Grandma's House
The World War II Homefront in Havana, Illinois
H. Byron Earhart with Illustrations by John Michael Downs
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence Winner, 2021

When H. Byron Earhart’s father enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942, young Byron and his family moved into his grandparents' old-fashioned home with a coal-fired range and potbelly stove, and his mother took charge of the family business, a frozen food locker. Grandma was the undisputed head of the family. While his father served on the battleship USS Missouri, his grandparents and mother held the family and the business together. At Grandma’s House is a tribute to everyday Americans who provided the social glue for a country at war as they balanced fear and anxiety for loved ones with the challenges and pleasures of daily life. The experiences of the Earhart family and this Midwestern community, supplemented by contemporary documents, family photos, and professional illustrations, recount with vivid local color the drama that played out on the national and international stage.
 
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At Home
Historic Houses of Central and Western Massachusetts
Beth Luey
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
With its rich history of prominent families, Massachusetts is home to some of the most historic residences in the country. In the central and western half of the Commonwealth, these include Edith Wharton's The Mount, the Salisbury Mansion in Worcester, Herman Melville's Arrowhead in Pittsfield, and the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens in Amherst.

In At Home: Historic Houses of Central and Western Massachusetts, Beth Luey examines the lives and homes of acclaimed poets and writers, slaves who won their freedom, Civil War ­enlistees, socialites, and leading merchants. Drawing on architectural and genealogical texts, wills, correspondence, and diaries, Luey situates the stories of these notable homes and the people who inhabited them in the context of broader economic, social, and political transformations. Filled with vivid details and fresh perspectives, each chapter is sure to inspire first-time visitors and seasoned travelers alike. All the homes are open to the public.
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At Home
Historic Houses of Eastern Massachusetts
Beth Luey
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
With its abundant history of prominent families, Massachusetts boasts some of the most historically rich residences in the country. In the eastern half of the Commonwealth, these include Presidents John and John Quincy Adams's home in Quincy, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House in Concord, the Charles Bulfinch—designed Harrison Gray Otis House in Boston, and Edward Gorey's Elephant House in Yarmouth Port.

In At Home: Historic Houses of Eastern Massachusetts, Beth Luey uses architectural and genealogical texts, wills, correspondences, and diaries to craft delightful narratives of these notable abodes and the people who variously built, acquired, or renovated them. Filled with vivid details and fresh perspectives that will surprise even the most knowledgeable aficionados, each chapter is short enough to serve as an introduction for a visit to its house. All the homes are open to the public.
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At Home in the Studio
The Professionalization of Women Artists in America
Laura R. Prieto
Harvard University Press, 2001

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.

Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women's earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women's history.

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At Home in the World
Cosmopolitanism Now
Timothy Brennan
Harvard University Press, 1997

From every quarter we hear of a new global culture, postcolonial, hybrid, announcing the death of nationalism, the arrival of cosmopolitanism. But under the drumbeat attending this trend, Timothy Brennan detects another, altogether different sound. Polemical, passionate, certain to provoke, his book exposes the drama being played out under the guise of globalism. A bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism, it also takes note of the many countervailing forces acting against globalism in its facile, homogenizing sense.

The developments Brennan traces occur in many places--editorial pages, policy journals, corporate training manuals, and, primarily, in the arts. His subject takes him from George Orwell to Julia Kristeva, from Subcommandante Marcos to Julio Cortázar, from Ernst Bloch to contemporary apologists for transnational capitalism and "liberation management," from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize, with little of critical theory or cultural studies left untouched in between. Brennan gives extended treatment to two exemplary figures: the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, whose work suggests an alternative approach to cultural studies; and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, whose appreciation of Cuban popular music cuts through the usual distinctions between mass and elite culture.

A critical call to arms, At Home in the World summons intellectuals and scholars to reinvigorate critical cultural studies. In stripping the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism, Brennan revitalizes the idea.

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At Home with the Sapa Inca
Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero
By Stella Nair
University of Texas Press, 2015

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca’s reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero’s extraordinary built environment.

What emerges are the subtle, often sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture in order to impose their authority, identity, and agenda. The remains of grand buildings, as well as a series of deft architectural gestures in the landscape, reveal the unique places that were created within the royal estate and how one space deeply informed the other. These dynamic settings created private places for an aging ruler to spend time with a preferred wife and son, while also providing impressive spaces for imperial theatrics that reiterated the power of Topa Inca, the choice of his preferred heir, and the ruler’s close relationship with sacred forces.

This careful study of architectural details also exposes several false paradigms that have profoundly misguided how we understand Inca architecture, including the belief that it ended with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes. Instead, Nair reveals how, amidst the entanglement and violence of the European encounter, an indigenous town emerged that was rooted in Inca ways of understanding space, place, and architecture and that paid homage to a landscape that defined home for Topa Inca.

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At Lincoln's Side
John Hay's Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings
Edited by Michael Burlingame
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

John Hay believed that “real history is told in private letters,” and the more than 220 surviving letters and telegrams from his Civil War days prove that to be true, showing Abraham Lincoln in action: “The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene & busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides & there is no cavil.”

Along with Hay’s personal correspondence, Burlingame includes his surviving official letters. Though lacking the “literary brilliance of [Hay’s] personal letters,” Burlingame explains, “they help flesh out the historical record.” Burlingame also includes some of the letters Hay composed for Lincoln’s signature, including the celebrated letter of condolence to the Widow Bixby.

More than an inside glimpse of the Civil War White House, Hay’s surviving correspondence provides a window on the world of nineteenth-century Washington, D.C.

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At Peace with All Their Neighbors
Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860
William W. Warner
Georgetown University Press, 1994

In 1790, two events marked important points in the development of two young American institutions—Congress decided that the new nation's seat of government would be on the banks of the Potomac, and John Carroll of Maryland was consecrated as America's first Catholic bishop. This coincidence of events signalled the unexpectedly important role that Maryland's Catholics, many of them by then fifth- and sixth-generation Americans, were to play in the growth and early government of the national capital. In this book, William W. Warner explores how Maryland's Catholics drew upon their long-standing traditions—advocacy of separation of church and state, a sense of civic duty, and a determination "to live at peace with all their neighbors," in Bishop Carroll's phrase—to take a leading role in the early government, financing, and building of the new capital.

Beginning with brief histories of the area's first Catholic churches and the establishment of Georgetown College, At Peace with All Their Neighbors explains the many reasons behind the Protestant majority's acceptance of Catholicism in the national capital in an age often marked by religious intolerance. Shortly after the capital moved from Philadelphia in 1800, Catholics held the principal positions in the city government and were also major landowners, property investors, and bankers. In the decade before the 1844 riots over religious education erupted in Philadelphia, the municipal government of Georgetown gave public funds for a Catholic school and Congress granted land in Washington for a Catholic orphanage.

The book closes with a remarkable account of how the Washington community, Protestants and Catholics alike, withstood the concentrated efforts of the virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic American nativists and the Know-Nothing Party in the last two decades before the Civil War.

This chronicle of Washington's Catholic community and its major contributions to the growth of the nations's capital will be of value for everyone interested in the history of Washington, D.C., Catholic history, and the history of religious toleration in America.

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At Play in the Tavern
Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages
Andrew Cowell
University of Michigan Press, 1999
At Play in the Tavern is a lively study of the tavern, inn, and brothel in the literature of medieval France. Cowell's original treatment of the medieval tavern as a counterpoint to orthodox institutions considers such delicious transgressions as drinking, gambling, prostitution, theft, usury, and "foile" (a peculiar combination of madness and sinfulness). This innovative study of both market-place values and literary culture unveils a raucous culture opposed to the dominant models of society coming out of the Augustinian tradition. Cowell contrasts the literary domains of the carnal and the orthodox and innovatively assigns physical space to each. The literature of the tavern is shown to represent the possibility of escape from ecclesiastical models of economic and literary exchange that insisted on equality, utility, and charity by offering a vision of exuberant excess. Cowell concludes that drama, poetry, and other secular texts, when considered as a whole, are ultimately complicit in a revolution favoring an ethic of profit.
Drawing on recent work in medieval literature, history, popular culture, gender studies, and sign theory, Andrew Cowell employs a wide range of traditional and, until now, little known sources to show the unity and importance of a countercultural literary mode.
Andrew Cowell is Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Colorado at Boulder.
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At Pyramid Lake
Bernard Mergen
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Pyramid Lake is one of the largest lakes in the Great Basin, the terminus of the Truckee River flowing from Lake Tahoe into northern Nevada. This desert oasis, with a surface area of nearly two hundred square miles, is a unique geological feature and was home to the Paiute for thousands of years before the arrival of explorer John C. Frémont in 1844.

For the Paiute, it was a spiritual center that provided life-sustaining resources, such as the cui-ui, a fish unique to the lake and now endangered. For the ranchers and farmers who settled on tribal lands, the waters that flowed into it were necessary to raise cattle and crops. Mergen tells how these competing interests have interacted with the lake and with each other, from the Paiute War of 1860 to the present. The lake’s very existence was threatened by dams and water diversion; it was saved by tribal claims, favorable court decisions, improved water laws, and the rise of environmentalism.

At Pyramid Lake is about more than Indians and water wars, however. It is the story of railroads on the reservation and the role of federal, state, and private groups interested in sportfishing. It is about scientists, artists, and tourists who were captivated by the lake’s beauty. Finally, it is also a story of the lake as a place of spiritual renewal and celebration. Mergen grew up near its shores in the 1940s and returned frequently through the years. In this cultural history, he combines his personal remembrances with other source material, including novels, poetry, newspaper and magazine journalism, unpublished manuscripts, and private conversations, to paint a fascinating portrait of one of Nevada’s natural wonders.
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At The Beach
Jean-Didier Urbain
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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At the Border of Empires
The Tohono O'odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880-1934
Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman
University of Arizona Press, 2013
The story of the Tohono O’odham peoples offers an important account of assimilation. Bifurcated by a border demarcating Mexico and the United States that was imposed on them after the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the Tohono O’odham lived at the edge of two empires. Although they were often invisible to the majority cultures of the region, they attracted the attention of reformers and government officials in the United States, who were determined to “assimilate” native peoples into “American society.” By focusing on gender norms and ideals in the assimilation of the Tohono O’odham, At the Border of Empires provides a lens for looking at both Native American history and broader societal ideas about femininity, masculinity, and empire around the turn of the twentieth century.

Beginning in the 1880s, the US government implemented programs to eliminate “vice” among the Tohono O’odham and to encourage the morals of the majority culture as the basis of a process of “Americanization.” During the next fifty years, tribal norms interacted with—sometimes conflicting with and sometimes reinforcing—those of the larger society in ways that significantly shaped both government policy and tribal experience. This book examines the mediation between cultures, the officials who sometimes developed policies based on personal beliefs and gender biases, and the native people whose lives were impacted as a result. These issues are brought into useful relief by comparing the experiences of the Tohono O’odham on two sides of a border that was, from a native perspective, totally arbitrary.
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At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom
The Fight for Social and Educational Justice
Robert L. Green
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Robert L. Green, a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., served as education director for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference during a crucial period in Civil Rights history, and—as a consultant for many of the nation’s largest school districts—he continues to fight for social justice and educational equity today.
This memoir relates previously untold stories about major Civil Rights campaigns that helped put an end to voting rights violations and Jim Crow education; explains how Green has helped urban school districts improve academic achievement levels; and explains why this history should inform our choices as we attempt to reform and improve American education. Green’s quest began when he helped the Kennedy Administration resolve a catastrophic education-related impasse and has continued through his service as one of the participants at an Obama administration summit on a current academic crisis.
It is commonly said that education is the new Civil Rights battlefield. Green’s memoir, At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom: The Fight for Social and Educational Justice, helps us understand that educational equity has always been a central objective of the Civil Rights movement.

 
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At the Dawn of Belt and Road
China in the Developing World
Andrew Scobell
RAND Corporation, 2018
China has always viewed itself as a vulnerable underdeveloped country. In the 1990s, it began negotiating economic agreements and creating China-centric institutions, culminating in the 2000s in numerous institutions and ultimately the Belt and Road Initiative. The authors analyze China’s political and diplomatic, economic, and military engagement with the Developing World and discuss specific countries that are most important to China.
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At the Edge of Sight
Photography and the Unseen
Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2013
The advent of photography revolutionized perception, making visible what was once impossible to see with the human eye. In At the Edge of Sight, Shawn Michelle Smith engages these dynamics of seeing and not seeing, focusing attention as much on absence as presence, on the invisible as the visible. Exploring the limits of photography and vision, she asks: What fails to register photographically, and what remains beyond the frame? What is hidden by design, and what is obscured by cultural blindness? Smith studies manifestations of photography's brush with the unseen in her own photographic work and across the wide-ranging images of early American photographers, including F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Augustus Washington. She concludes by showing how concerns raised in the nineteenth century remain pertinent today in the photographs of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, Smith explores the capacity of photography to reveal what remains beyond the edge of sight.
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At the Edge of the Abyss
A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944
David Koker; Edited by Robert Jan van Pelt; Translated from the Dutch by Michiel Horn and John Irons
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Finalist for 2012 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category

David Koker's diary is one of the most notable accounts of life in a German concentration camp written by a Jew during the years of the Holocaust. First brought to attention when the Dutch historian Jacob Presser-Koker's history teacher in high school-quoted from Koker's diary in his monumental history, published in English as The Destruction of the Dutch Jews (1968), the diary itself became a part of the Dutch literary canon when it was published in 1977 as Dagboek geschreven in Vught (Diary Written in Vught). It has remained in print ever since, and is notable for its literary qualities, weaving poetry and powerful observations of the emotional life of a camp prisoner, including reflections after an in-person visit by Heinrich Himmler. Surprisingly, the book has never before been translated into English.

During his time in the Vught concentration camp, the 21-year-old David recorded on an almost daily basis his observations, thoughts, and feelings. He mercilessly probed the abyss that opened around him and, at times, within himself. David's diary covers almost a year, both charting his daily life in Vught as it developed over time and tracing his spiritual evolution as a writer. Until early February 1944, David was able to smuggle some 73,000 words from the camp to his best friend Karel van het Reve, a non-Jew. 

With an informative introduction, annotation, and list of dramatis personae by Robert Jan van Pelt, At the Edge of the Abyss offers an immediate and wholly original look into the life of a concentration camp prisoner.
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At the Glacier’s Edge
A Natural History of Long Island from the Narrows to Montauk Point
Betsy McCully
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Vast salt marshes, ancient grasslands, lush forests, pristine beaches and dunes, and copious inland waters, all surrounded by a teeming sea. These are probably not the first things you imagine when you think of Long Island, but just beyond its highways and housing developments lies a stunning landscape full of diverse plant and animal life. 
 
Combining science writing, environmental history, and first-hand accounts from a longtime resident, At the Glacier’s Edge offers a unique narrative natural history of Long Island. Betsy McCully tells the story of how the island was formed at the end of the last ice age, how its habitats evolved, and how humans in the last few hundred years have radically altered and degraded its landscape. Yet as she personally recounts the habitat losses and species declines she has witnessed over the past few decades, she describes the vital efforts that environmental activists are making to restore and reclaim this land—from replanting salt marshes, to preserving remaining grasslands and forests, to cleaning up the waters. At the Glacier’s Edge provides an in-depth look at the flora, fauna and geology that make Long Island so special.
 
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At the Hearth of the Crossed Races
A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859
Melinda Marie Jetté
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.  

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.
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At the Limits of Cure
Bharat Jayram Venkat
Duke University Press, 2021
Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.
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At the Margins
Minority Groups in Premodern Italy
Stephen J. Milner
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Slaves, foundlings, prostitutes, nuns, homosexuals, exiles, the elderly, and mountain communities - such groups stood at the margins of society in premodern Italy. But where precisely the margins were was not so easily determined. Examining these minorities as the buffer zones between more readily recognizable centers, At the Margins explores identity as a process rather than a fixed entity, stressing the multiplicity of groups to which individuals belonged. By tracing the shifting relations of social margins to centers in Italy between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - and showing how these shifts in turn relate to social order and identity formation - the authors challenge entrenched ideas about the nature of the Renaissance and its role in shaping modernity. Behind much cultural theory lies a critique of the centrality of modernity and its foundations in the discourse of Renaissance humanism. And yet, as this volume reveals, the insights of contemporary cultural theory serve to expose the flaws in this picture of cultural hegemony and, in decentering the Renaissance, return it to the heart of cultural debate.
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At the Point of a Cutlass
The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton
Gregory N. Flemming
University Press of New England, 2015
A handful of sea stories define the American maritime narrative. Stories of whaling, fishing, exploration, naval adventure, and piracy have always captured our imaginations, and the most colorful of these are the tales of piracy. Called America’s real-life Robinson Crusoe, the true story of Philip Ashton—a nineteen-year-old fisherman captured by pirates, impressed as a crewman, subjected to torture and hardship, who eventually escaped and lived as a castaway and scavenger on a deserted island in the Caribbean—was at one time as well known as the tales of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Defoe. Based on a rare copy of Ashton’s 1725 account, Gregory N. Flemming’s vivid portrait recounts this maritime world during the golden age of piracy. Fishing vessels and merchantmen plied the coastal waters and crisscrossed the Atlantic and Caribbean. It was a hard, dangerous life, made more so by both the depredations and temptations of piracy. Chased by the British Royal Navy, blown out of the water or summarily hung when caught, pirate captains such as Edward Low kidnapped, cajoled, beat, and bribed men like Ashton into the rich—but also vile, brutal, and often short—life of the pirate. In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick, At the Point of a Cutlass expands on a lost classic narrative of America and the sea, and brings to life a forgotten world of ships and men on both sides of maritime law.
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At the President's Side
The Vice Presidency in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Timothy Walch
University of Missouri Press, 1997

The nation's first vice president, John Adams, called his job "the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." And many of the forty-four men who succeeded him in the office have said much worse. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the job has a fancy title, but few responsibilities. Other than presiding over the Senate, the vice president of the United States has no constitutional duties. In fact, it is not even clear that the founders of the republic ever intended that the vice president would succeed to the presidency upon the death of an incumbent.

Yet, despite the relative obscurity of the position, few politicians turn down the opportunity to serve as vice president of the United States. Being elected vice president is often a stepping-stone to the presidency. Since World War II, five vice presidents—Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George Bush—have gone on to become president. While it may not be glamorous, the vice presidency is an important training ground for national leadership.

The essays in this book trace the evolution of the vice presidency in the twentieth century from Theodore Roosevelt to Dan Quayle. The first five chapters tell the stories of a colorful collection of the men chosen because of their native states or their political acumen, but not their leadership abilities. The next four chapters form a mosaic of tragedy. Richard Nixon rose from the vice presidency to the presidency only to be forced from office. Lyndon Johnson's tenure ended unhappily because of the prolonged fighting in Vietnam. Hubert Humphrey was humiliated as vice president by a man who should have known better. And Spiro Agnew was rousted from the office by petty greed.

The following four chapters tell the story of a new vice presidency. Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, George Bush, and Dan Quayle redefined the job that not many people wanted but that few could refuse. In a particularly valuable essay, Quayle reflects on the checkered past of his predecessors, gives credit to Walter Mondale for rehabilitating the vice presidency, and tells of his working relationship with George Bushþoffering a unique glimpse of an office that is quickly becoming the second most powerful in the nation.

Addressing the future of the office, Richard E. Neustadt provides a detailed analysis of the nucleus of vice presidential powerþproximity to the president. To whit, we have Neustadt's maxim: "The power and influence of a vice president is inversely proportional to the political distance between that vice president and his president. The greater the distance the less the power."

At the President's Side includes anecdotal and informative essays by presidential scholars John Milton Cooper Jr., Robert H. Ferrell, Elliot A. Rosen, Richard S. Kirkendall, Richard Norton Smith, Robert Dallek, Joel K. Goldstein, John Robert Greene, and Steven M. Gillon. Also included are incisive commentaries by such Washington insiders as Hugh Sidey, R. W. Apple Jr., James Cannon, and Chase Untermeyer. This book will inform and entertain general readers and also challenge scholars interested in the presidency and the vice presidency.

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At the Price of the Republic
Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938
James Ramon Felak
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994

Slovak nationalist sentiment has been a constant presence in the history of Czechoslovakia, coming to head in the torrent of nationalism that resulted in the dissolution of the Republic on January 1, 1993.  James Felak examines a parallel episode in the 1930s with Slovak nationalists achieved autonomy for Slovakia-but “at the price” of the loss of East Central Europe's only parliamentary democracy and the strengthening of Nazi power.
   
The tensions between Czechs and Slovaks date back to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Slovaks, who differed sharply in political tradition, social and economic development, and culture, and resented being governed by a centralized administration run from the Czech capital of Prague, formed the Slovak People's Party, led by Roman Catholic priest Ankrej Hlinka. Drawing heavily on Czech and Slovak archives, Felak provides a balanced history of the party, offering unprecedented insight into intraparty factionalism and behind-the-scenes maneuvering surrounding SSP's policy decisions.

 

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At the Table of Power
Food and Cuisine in the African American Struggle for Freedom, Justice, and Equality
Diane Spivey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these pages, Spivey tells a powerful story beckoning and daring the reader to witness this culinary, cultural, and political journey taken hand in hand with the fight of Africans in America during the foundation years, from colonial slavery through the Reconstruction era. These narratives, together with the recipes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expose the politics of the day and offer insight on the politics of today. African American culinary artists, Spivey concludes, have more than earned a rightful place at the table of culinary contribution and power.

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At the Vanguard of Vinyl
A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz
Darren Mueller
Duke University Press, 2024
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.
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At War
The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond
Kieran, David
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. 

At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.  
 
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At Work in the Atomic City
A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Russell B. Olwell
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
Founded during World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a vital link in the U.S. military’s atomic bomb assembly line—the site where scientists worked at a breakneck pace to turn tons of uranium into a few grams of the artificial element plutonium. To construct and operate the plants needed for this effort, thousands of workers, both skilled and unskilled, converged on the “city behind a fence” tucked between two ridges of sparsely populated farmland in the Tennessee hills.

At Work in the Atomic City explores the world of those workers and their efforts to form unions, create a community, and gain political rights over their city. It follows them from their arrival at Oak Ridge, to the places where they lived, and to their experiences in a dangerous and secretive workplace. Lured by promises of housing, plentiful work, and schooling for their children, they were often exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity, harmful chemicals, and other hazards. Although scientists and doctors intended to protect workers, the pressure to produce materials for the bomb often overrode safety considerations. After the war, as the military sought to reduce services and jobs in Oak Ridge, workers organized unions at two plants to demand higher wages and job security. However, the new Taft-Hartley Act limited defense workers’ ability to strike and thus curbed union influence.

The book examines the ongoing debates over workers’ rights at Oak Ridge—notably the controversy surrounding the new federal program intended to compensate workers and their families for injuries sustained on the job. Because of faulty record keeping at the facilities and confusion over exposure levels, many have been denied payment to this day.

Drawing on extensive research into oral history collections, transcripts of government proceedings, and other primary sources, At Work in the Atomic City is the first detailed account of the workers who built and labored in the facilities that helped ensure the success of the Manhattan Project—a story known, heretofore, only in broad outline.

Russell Olwell, an assistant professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, has published articles in ISIS, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and Technology and Culture.
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Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination
Stefan Ihrig
Harvard University Press, 2014

Early in his career, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Benito Mussolini, his senior colleague in fascism—this fact is widely known. But an equally important role model for Hitler and the Nazis has been almost entirely neglected: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Stefan Ihrig’s compelling presentation of this untold story promises to rewrite our understanding of the roots of Nazi ideology and strategy.

Hitler was deeply interested in Turkish affairs after 1919. He not only admired but also sought to imitate Atatürk’s radical construction of a new nation from the ashes of defeat in World War I. Hitler and the Nazis watched closely as Atatürk defied the Western powers to seize government, and they modeled the Munich Putsch to a large degree on Atatürk’s rebellion in Ankara. Hitler later remarked that in the political aftermath of the Great War, Atatürk was his master, he and Mussolini his students.

This was no fading fascination. As the Nazis struggled through the 1920s, Atatürk remained Hitler’s “star in the darkness,” his inspiration for remaking Germany along nationalist, secular, totalitarian, and ethnically exclusive lines. Nor did it escape Hitler’s notice how ruthlessly Turkish governments had dealt with Armenian and Greek minorities, whom influential Nazis directly compared with German Jews. The New Turkey, or at least those aspects of it that the Nazis chose to see, became a model for Hitler’s plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland.

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Atavistic Tendencies
The Culture of Science in American Modernity
Dana Seitler
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Athanasius and Constantius
Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire
Timothy D. Barnes
Harvard University Press, 1993

As the high-ranking Bishop of Alexandria from 328 to 373, Athanasius came into conflict with no fewer than four Roman emperors—Constantine himself, his son Constantius, Julian the Apostate, and the “Arian” Valens. In this new reconstruction of Athanasius’s career, Timothy D. Barnes analyzes the nature and extent of the Bishop’s power, especially as it intersected with the policies of these emperors.

Repeatedly condemned and deposed by church councils, the Bishop persistently resurfaced as a player to contend with in ecclesiastic and imperial politics. Barnes’s work reveals that Athanasius’s writings, though a significant source for this period, are riddled with deliberate misinterpretations, which historians through the ages have uncritically accepted.

Untangling longstanding misconceptions, Barnes reveals the Bishop’s true role in the struggles within Christianity, and in the relations between the Roman emperor and the Church at a critical juncture.

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The Atheist's Bible
The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed
Georges Minois
University of Chicago Press, 2012

A comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors, a controversial nonexistent medieval book.
 

Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous book—De tribus impostoribus, or the Treatise of the Three Impostors—in which Frederick denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as impostors. Of course, Frederick denied the charge, and over the following centuries the story played out across Europe, with libertines, freethinkers, and other “strong minds” seeking a copy of the scandalous text. The fascination persisted until finally, in the eighteenth century, someone brought the purported work into actual existence—in not one but two versions, Latin and French.
 
Although historians have debated the origins and influences of this nonexistent book, there has not been a comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors. In The Atheist’s Bible, the eminent historian Georges Minois tracks the course of the book from its origins in 1239 to its most salient episodes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introducing readers to the colorful individuals obsessed with possessing the legendary work—and the equally obsessive passion of those who wanted to punish people who sought it. Minois’s compelling account sheds much-needed light on the power of atheism, the threat of blasphemy, and the persistence of free thought during a time when the outspoken risked being burned at the stake.          
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Athene Palace
Hitler's "New Order" Comes to Rumania
R. G. Waldeck
University of Chicago Press, 2013
On the day that Paris fell to the Nazis, R. G. Waldeck was checking into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. A cosmopolitan center during the war, the hotel was populated by Italian and German oilmen hoping to secure new business opportunities in Romania, international spies cloaked in fake identities, and Nazi officers whom Waldeck discovered to be intelligent but utterly bloodless. A German Jew and a reporter for Newsweek, Waldeck became a close observer of the Nazi invasion. As King Carol first tried to placate the Nazis, then abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Waldeck was dressing for dinners with diplomats and cozying up to Nazi officers to get insight and information. From her unique vantage, she watched as Romania, a country with a pro-totalitarian elite and a deep strain of anti-Semitism, suffered civil unrest, a German invasion, and an earthquake, before turning against the Nazis.
 
A striking combination of social intimacy and disinterest political analysis, Athene Palace evokes the elegance and excitement of the dynamic international community in Bucharest before the world had comes to grips with the horrors of war and genocide. Waldeck’s account strikingly presents the finely wrought surface of dinner parties, polite discourse, and charisma, while recognizing the undercurrents of violence and greed that ran through the denizens of Athene Palace.
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The Athenian Adonia in Context
The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice
Laurialan Reitzammer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Ancient sources and modern scholars have often represented the Athenian festival of Adonis as a marginal and faintly ridiculous private women's ritual. Seeds were planted each year in pots and, once sprouted, carried to the rooftops, where women lamented the death of Aphrodite's youthful consort Adonis. Laurialan Reitzammer resourcefully examines a wide array of surviving evidence about the Adonia, arguing for its symbolic importance in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian culture as an occasion for gendered commentary on mainstream Athenian practices.

Reitzammer reveals correlations of the Adonia to Athenian wedding rituals and civic funeral oration and provides illuminating evidence that the festival was a significant cultural template for such diverse works as Aristophanes' drama Lysistrata and Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Her fresh approach offers a timely contribution to studies of the ways gender and sexuality intersect with religion and ritual in ancient Greece.
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The Athenian Empire Restored
Epigraphic and Historical Studies
Harold B. Mattingly
University of Michigan Press, 1996
One of the most important periods of Greek history lies between the Persian king Xerxes' defeat at Greek hands in 479 B.C.E. and the destruction of the power of Athens in 404 B.C.E. A major problem in this era is how and when Athens managed to transform the free alliance against Persia into an empire of Athenian subjects: The Athenian Empire Restored presents a sustained challenge to the dating and interpretation of this process. 

This volume collects Harold B. Mattingly's most important essays on the question, and offers them in updated form together with a new introduction and notes, and a concordance of inscriptions. A preface by Mortimer Chambers helps place the volume amid the decades- long controversy about events in and around Athens, and describes the scientific technique that has proven Mattingly's argument.
Drawing on meticulous study of ancient coins, civic or religious inscriptions, and political decrees, Mattingly contends that the historical record has been badly muddled by over-reliance on "letter forms," or the "handwriting" on inscriptions made by stone-cutters, as a criterion for dating fifth-century inscriptions from the district of Attica. 

In the process of establishing a sounder methodology for investigating this crucial period of Greek--and Western--history, Mattingly in these groundbreaking essays turns a beacon of light on many aspects of Greek and Athenian society and history.
The Athenian Empire Restored will be eagerly received by historians, students and scholars of Greek culture and literature, and archaeologists in many fields.
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Athenian Tragedy in Performance
A Guide to Contemporary Studies and Historical Debates
Melinda Powers
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Foregrounding critical questions about the tension between the study of drama as literature versus the study of performance, Melinda Powers investigates the methodological problems that arise in some of the latest research on ancient Greek theatre. She examines key issues and debates about the fifth-century theatrical space, audience, chorus, performance style, costuming, properties, gesture, and mask, but instead of presenting a new argument on these topics, Powers aims to understand her subject better by exploring the shared historical problems that all scholars confront as they interpret and explain Athenian tragedy.

A case study of Euripides’s Bacchae, which provides more information about performance than any other extant tragedy, demonstrates possible methods for reconstructing the play’s historical performance and also the inevitable challenges inherent in that task, from the limited sources and the difficulty of interpreting visual material, to the risks of conflating actor with character and extrapolating backward from contemporary theatrical experience.

As an inquiry into the study of theatre and performance, an introduction to historical writing, a reference for further reading, and a clarification of several general misconceptions about Athenian tragedy and its performance, this historiographical analysis will be useful to specialists, practitioners, and students alike.
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Athens
James H. S. McGregor
Harvard University Press, 2014

Revered as the birthplace of Western thought and democracy, Athens is much more than an open-air museum filled with crumbling monuments to ancient glory. Athens takes readers on a journey from the classical city-state to today’s contemporary capital, revealing a world-famous metropolis that has been resurrected and redefined time and again.

Although the Acropolis remains the city’s anchor, Athens’ vibrant culture extends far beyond the Greek city’s antique boundaries. James H. S. McGregor points out how the cityscape preserves signs of the many actors who have crossed its historical stage. Alexander the Great incorporated Athens into his empire, as did the Romans. Byzantine Christians repurposed Greek temples, the Parthenon included, into churches. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the city’s language changed from French to Spanish to Italian, as Crusaders and adventurers from different parts of Western Europe took turns sacking and administering the city. An Islamic Athens took root following the Ottoman conquest of 1456 and remained in place for nearly four hundred years, until Greek patriots finally won independence in a blood-drenched revolution.

Since then, Athenians have endured many hardships, from Nazi occupation and military coups to famine and economic crisis. Yet, as McGregor shows, the history of Athens is closer to a heroic epic than a Greek tragedy. Richly supplemented with maps and illustrations, Athens paints a portrait of one of the world’s great cities, designed for travelers as well as armchair students of urban history.

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Athens 415
The City in Crisis
Clara Shaw Hardy, with translations by Robert B. Hardy
University of Michigan Press, 2020

On a summer night in 415 BCE, unknown persons systematically mutilated most of the domestic “herms”—guardian statues of the god Hermes—in Athens. The reaction was immediate and extreme:  the Athenians feared a terrifying conspiracy was underway against the city and its large fleet—and possibly against democracy itself.   The city established a board of investigators, which led to informants, accusations, and flight by many of the accused.  Ultimately, dozens were exiled or executed, their property confiscated.

This dramatic period offers the opportunity to observe the city in crisis. Sequential events allow us to see the workings of the major institutions of the city (assembly, council, law courts, and theater, as well as public and private religion). Remarkably, the primary sources for these tumultuous months name conspirators and informants from a very wide range of status-groups: citizens, women, slaves, and free residents. Thus the incident provides a particularly effective entry-point into a full multifaceted view of the way Athens worked in the late fifth century.

Designed for classroom use, Athens 415 is no potted history, but rather a source-based presentation of ancient urban life ideal for the study of a people and their institutions and beliefs.  Original texts—all translated by poet Robert B. Hardy—are presented along with thoughtful discussion and analyses by Clara Shaw Hardy in an engaging narrative that draws students into Athens’ crisis.

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Athens, Etruria, and the Many Lives of Greek Figured Pottery
Sheramy D. Bundrick
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
A lucrative trade in Athenian pottery flourished from the early sixth until the late fifth century B.C.E., finding an eager market in Etruria. Most studies of these painted vases focus on the artistry and worldview of the Greeks who made them, but Sheramy D. Bundrick shifts attention to their Etruscan customers, ancient trade networks, and archaeological contexts.

Thousands of Greek painted vases have emerged from excavations of tombs, sanctuaries, and settlements throughout Etruria, from southern coastal centers to northern communities in the Po Valley. Using documented archaeological assemblages, especially from tombs in southern Etruria, Bundrick challenges the widely held assumption that Etruscans were hellenized through Greek imports. She marshals evidence to show that Etruscan consumers purposefully selected figured pottery that harmonized with their own local needs and customs, so much so that the vases are better described as etruscanized. Athenian ceramic workers, she contends, learned from traders which shapes and imagery sold best to the Etruscans and employed a variety of strategies to maximize artistry, output, and profit.
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Athens from Alexander to Antony
Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 1997

The conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the Greek world into a complex of monarchies and vying powers, a vast sphere in which the Greek city-states struggled to survive. This is the compelling story of one city that despite long periods of subjugation persisted as a vital social entity throughout the Hellenistic age.

Christian Habicht narrates the history of Athens from its subjugation by the Macedonians in 338 B.C. to the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., when Octavian's defeat of Mark Antony paved the way for Roman dominion over the Hellenistic world. For nearly three centuries Athens strove unsuccessfully for sovereignty; its foreign policies were shaped by the dictates first of the Macedonian monarchy and later of the Roman republic. Yet the city never relinquished control of internal affairs, and citizen participation in its government remained strong. Habicht lucidly chronicles the democracy's setbacks and recoveries over these years as it formed and suffered the consequences of various alliances. He sketches its continuing role as a leader in intellectual life and the arts, as Menander and other Athenian playwrights saw their work produced throughout the Greek world; and the city's famous schools of philosophy, now including those of Zeno and Epicurus, remained a stellar attraction for students from around the Mediterranean. Habicht has long been in the forefront of research on Hellenistic Athens; in this authoritative yet eminently readable history he distills that research for all readers interested in the ancient Mediterranean world.

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The Athens of America
Boston, 1825-1845
Thomas H. O'Connor
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
Many people are generally familiar with the fact that Boston was once known as "the Athens of America." Very few, however, are clear about exactly why, except for their recollections of the famous writers and poets who gave the city a reputation for literature and learning.

In this book, historian Thomas H. O'Connor sets the matter straight by showing that Boston's eminence during the first half of the nineteenth century was the result of a much broader community effort. After the nation emerged from its successful struggle for independence, most Bostonians visualized their city not only as the Cradle of Liberty, but also as the new world's Cradle of Civilization.

According to O'Connor, a leadership elite, composed of men of prominent family background, Unitarian beliefs, liberal education, and managerial experience in a variety of enterprises, used their personal talents and substantial financial resources to promote the cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian interests of Boston to the point where it would be the envy of the nation. Not only did writers, scholars, and philosophers see themselves as part of this process, but so did physicians and lawyers, ministers and teachers, merchants and businessmen, mechanics and artisans, all involved in creating a well-ordered city whose citizens would be committed to the ideals of social progress and personal perfectibility.

To accomplish their noble vision, leading members of the Boston community joined in programs designed to cleanse the old town of what they felt were generations of accumulated social stains and human failures, and then to create new programs and more efficient institutions that would raise the cultural and intellectual standards of all its citizens. Like ancient Athens, Boston would be a city of great statesmen, wealthy patrons, inspiring artists, and profound thinkers, headed by members of the "happy and respectable classes" who would assume responsibility for the safety, welfare, and education of the "less prosperous portions of the community."

Designed for the general reader and the historical enthusiast, The Athens of America is an interpretive synthesis that explores the numerous secondary sources that have concentrated on individual subjects and personalities, and draws their various conclusions into a single comprehensive narrative.
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Athens of the New South
College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville
Mary Ellen Pethel
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

In 2013, the New York Times identified Nashville as America’s “it” city—a leading hub of music, culture, technology, food, and business. But long before, the Tennessee capital was known as the “Athens of the South,” as a reflection of the city’s reputation for and investment in its institutions of higher education, which especially blossomed after the end of the Civil War and through the New South Era from 1865 to 1930.

This wide-ranging book chronicles the founding and growth of Nashville’s institutions of higher education and their impressive impact on the city, region, and nation at large. Local colleges and universities also heavily influenced Nashville’s brand of modernity as evidenced by the construction of a Parthenon replica, the centerpiece of the 1897 Centennial Exposition. By the turn of the twentieth century, Vanderbilt University had become one of the country’s premier private schools, while nearby Peabody College was a leading teacher-training institution. Nashville also became known as a center for the education of African Americans. Fisk University joined the ranks of the nation’s most prestigious black liberal-arts universities, while Meharry Medical College emerged as one of the country’s few training centers for African American medical professionals. Following the agricultural-industrial model, Tennessee A&I became the state’s first black public college. Meanwhile, various other schools— Ward-Belmont, a junior college for women; David Lipscomb College, the instructional arm of the Church of Christ; and Roger Williams University, which trained black men and women as teachers and preachers—made important contributions to the higher educational landscape. In sum, Nashville was distinguished not only by the quantity of its schools but by their quality.

Linking these institutions to the progressive and educational reforms of the era, Mary Ellen Pethel also explores their impact in shaping Nashville’s expansion, on changing gender roles, and on leisure activity in the city, which included the rise and popularity of collegiate sports. In her conclusion, she shows that Nashville’s present-day reputation as a dynamic place to live, learn, and work is due in no small part to the role that higher education continues to play in the city’s growth and development.

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Athens of the New South
College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville
Mary Ellen Pethel
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

In 2013, the New York Times identified Nashville as America’s “it” city—a leading hub of music, culture, technology, food, and business. But long before, the Tennessee capital was known as the “Athens of the South,” as a reflection of the city’s reputation for and investment in its institutions of higher education, which especially blossomed after the end of the Civil War and through the New South Era from 1865 to 1930.

This wide-ranging book chronicles the founding and growth of Nashville’s institutions of higher education and their impressive impact on the city, region, and nation at large. Local colleges and universities also heavily influenced Nashville’s brand of modernity as evidenced by the construction of a Parthenon replica, the centerpiece of the 1897 Centennial Exposition. By the turn of the twentieth century, Vanderbilt University had become one of the country’s premier private schools, while nearby Peabody College was a leading teacher-training institution. Nashville also became known as a center for the education of African Americans. Fisk University joined the ranks of the nation’s most prestigious black liberal-arts universities, while Meharry Medical College emerged as one of the country’s few training centers for African American medical professionals. Following the agricultural-industrial model, Tennessee A&I became the state’s first black public college. Meanwhile, various other schools— Ward-Belmont, a junior college for women; David Lipscomb College, the instructional arm of the Church of Christ; and Roger Williams University, which trained black men and women as teachers and preachers—made important contributions to the higher educational landscape. In sum, Nashville was distinguished not only by the quantity of its schools but by their quality.

Linking these institutions to the progressive and educational reforms of the era, Mary Ellen Pethel also explores their impact in shaping Nashville’s expansion, on changing gender roles, and on leisure activity in the city, which included the rise and popularity of collegiate sports. In her conclusion, she shows that Nashville’s present-day reputation as a dynamic place to live, learn, and work is due in no small part to the role that higher education continues to play in the city’s growth and development.

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Athens, Ohio
The Village Years
Robert L. Daniel
Ohio University Press, 1997

Two hundred years ago, Rufus Putnam, leader of the Ohio Company, sent eleven men west into the Ohio Country to found what is now the City of Athens. As one of the oldest communities in Ohio, Athens has a heritage rich in history and lore. Now, as Athens looks ahead to its third century, historian and raconteur Robert L. Daniel provides a timely assessment of the community’s past.

Drawing on reminiscences by Athens residents over the past two centuries, and on newspaper accounts, institutional archives, census records, and a host of historic photographs and drawings, Daniel illustrates how the Athens community grew, how it changed over the years, and what it was like to have lived in Athens in the past, from the times before white settlement to 1920. He identifies the problems the community faced and how it went about resolving them—its efforts to provide local government, the changing ways its people earned a living, the ways they worshipped, their efforts to establish Ohio University, how they coped during times of war, and what they did to amuse themselves.

In a lively style peppered with firsthand accounts by the people who made Athens, Daniel narrates his tale with wry humor and a sharp eye for detail. Always focusing on the people who lived there, he brings Athens to life during its village years.

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Athens, Ohio
The Village Years
Robert L. Daniel
Ohio University Press, 1997

Two hundred years ago, Rufus Putnam, leader of the Ohio Company, sent eleven men west into the Ohio Country to found what is now the City of Athens. As one of the oldest communities in Ohio, Athens has a heritage rich in history and lore. Now, as Athens looks ahead to its third century, historian and raconteur Robert L. Daniel provides a timely assessment of the community’s past.

Drawing on reminiscences by Athens residents over the past two centuries, and on newspaper accounts, institutional archives, census records, and a host of historic photographs and drawings, Daniel illustrates how the Athens community grew, how it changed over the years, and what it was like to have lived in Athens in the past, from the times before white settlement to 1920. He identifies the problems the community faced and how it went about resolving them—its efforts to provide local government, the changing ways its people earned a living, the ways they worshipped, their efforts to establish Ohio University, how they coped during times of war, and what they did to amuse themselves.

In a lively style peppered with firsthand accounts by the people who made Athens, Daniel narrates his tale with wry humor and a sharp eye for detail. Always focusing on the people who lived there, he brings Athens to life during its village years.

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An Athletic Director’s Story and the Future of College Sports in America
Robert E. Mulcahy
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Robert Mulcahy’s chronicle of his decade leading Rutgers University athletics is an intriguing story about fulfilling a vision.  The goal was to expand pride in intercollegiate athletics.  Redirecting a program with clearer direction and strategic purpose brought encouraging results.  Advocating for finer coaching and improved facilities, he and Rutgers achieved national honors in Division I sports.  Unprecedented alumni interest and support for athletics swelled across the Rutgers community.
His words and actions were prominent during a nationally-reported incident involving student athletes.  When the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team players were slandered by racist remarks from a popular radio talk show host, Mulcahy met it head on.  With the coach and players, he set an inspiring example for defending character and values.
Though Mr. Mulcahy left Rutgers in 2009, his memoir reflects continued devotion to intercollegiate athletics and student athletes.  His insights for addressing several leading issues confronting Division I sports today offer guidelines for present and future athletic directors to follow.
 
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The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War
Stephen Davis
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

Confederate newspapers were beset by troubles: paper shortages, high ink prices, printers striking for higher pay, faulty telegraphic news service, and subscription prices insufficient to support their operations. But they also had the potential to be politically powerful, and their reporting of information—accurate or biased—shaped perceptions of the Civil War and its trajectory.

The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War investigates how Atlanta’s most important newspaper reported the Civil War in its news articles, editorial columns, and related items in its issues from April 1861 to April 1865. The authors show how The Intelligencer narrated the war’s important events based on the news it received, at what points the paper (and the Confederate press, generally) got the facts right or wrong based on the authors’ original research on the literature, and how the paper’s editorial columns reflected on those events from an unabashedly pro-Confederate point of view.

While their book focuses on The Intelligencer, Stephen Davis and Bill Hendrick also contribute to the scholarship on Confederate newspapers, emphasizing the papers’ role as voices of Confederate patriotism, Southern nationalism, and contributors to wartime public morale. Their well-documented, detailed study adds to our understanding of the relationship between public opinion and misleading propaganda

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Atlanta Life Insurance
Guardian of Black Economic Dignity
Alexa Benson Henderson
University of Alabama Press, 1990
An important and richly detailed and researched history of Black entrepreneurship in the American South, Atlanta Life Insurance Company traces the inspiring success story of Black Americans to build and sustain a thriving business and an institution important to the Black population of Georgia and surrounding states. 

Efforts to develop an economic base within the Black community began even before the Civil War. These efforts gained new meaning in the post-Reconstruction period as Blacks strove to adapt to radically changing economic circumstances and the emergence of the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, shortly after the turn of the century, Alonzo Franklin Herndon, a former slave, joined a long line of Black entrepreneurs by creating Atlanta Life Insurance Company. More than three-quarters of a century later, it remains an important enterprise that is the nation’s largest Black-controlled shareholder insurance company. The firm is today a significant example of the efforts of Black Americans to achieve economic independence and dignity in America.
 
Henderson's fascinating book reveals the historic roots of Atlanta Life, its economic growth and development as a Black-owned institution, and its social and economic involvement with the challenges and progress of Black America. 
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The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race
Bernard Headley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

At least twenty-nine black children and young adults were murdered by an Atlanta serial killer between the summer of 1979 and the spring of 1981. Drawing national media attention, the “Atlanta tragedy,” as it became known, was immediately labeled a hate crime. However, when a young black man was arrested and convicted for the killings, public attention quickly shifted. Noted criminologist Bernard Headley was in Atlanta as the tragedy unfolded and provides here a thoughtful exploration of the social and political implications of the case both locally and nationally. Focusing on a singular historical event, Headley exposes broader tensions of race and class in contemporary America.

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Atlantic Celts
Ancient People Of Modern Invention
Simon James
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

The Celtic peoples hold a fundamental place in the British national conscious-ness. In this book Simon James surveys ancient and modern ideas of the Celts and challenges them in the light of revolutionary new thinking on the Iron Age peoples of Britain. Examining how ethnic and national identities are constructed, he presents an alternative history of the British Isles, proposing that the idea of insular Celtic identity is really a product of the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century. He considers whether the “Celticness” of the British Isles is a romantic, even politically dangerous, falsification of history, with implications for the debate on self-government for the Celtic regions of the United Kingdom.

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Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions
Jane G. Landers
Harvard University Press, 2011

Sailing the tide of a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Big Prince Whitten, the black Seminole Abraham, and General Georges Biassou were “Atlantic creoles,” Africans who found their way to freedom by actively engaging in the most important political events of their day. These men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds, who were fluent in multiple languages and familiar with African, American, and European cultures, migrated across the new world’s imperial boundaries in search of freedom and a safe haven. Yet, until now, their extraordinary lives and exploits have been hidden from posterity.

Through prodigious archival research, Jane Landers radically alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors. Whereas Africans in the Atlantic world are traditionally seen as destined for the slave market and plantation labor, Landers reconstructs the lives of unique individuals who managed to move purposefully through French, Spanish, and English colonies, and through Indian territory, in the unstable century between 1750 and 1850. Mobile and adaptive, they shifted allegiances and identities depending on which political leader or program offered the greatest possibility for freedom. Whether fighting for the King of Kongo, England, France, or Spain, or for the Muskogee and Seminole chiefs, their thirst for freedom helped to shape the course of the Atlantic revolutions and to enrich the history of revolutionary lives in all times.

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Atlantic Crossings
Social Politics in a Progressive Age
Daniel T. Rodgers
Harvard University Press, 2000

"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.

On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.

The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.

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Atlantic History
Concept and Contours
Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press, 2005

Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study.

He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries. The vast contribution of the African people to all regions of the West, the westward migration of Europeans, pan-Atlantic commerce and its role in developing economies, racial and ethnic relations, the spread of Enlightenment ideas--all are Atlantic phenomena.

In examining both the historiographical and historical dimensions of this developing subject, Bailyn illuminates the dynamics of history as a discipline.

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The Atlantic Slave Trade
A Census
Philip D. Curtin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1972

Curtin combines modern research and statistical methods with his broad knowledge of the field to present the first book-length quantitative analysis of the Atlantic slave trade.  Its basic evidence suggests revision of currently held opinions concerning the place of the slave trade in the economies of the Old World nations and their American colonies.

“Curtin’s work will not only be the starting point for all future research on the slave trade and comparative slavery, but will become an indispensable reference for anyone interested in Afro-American studies.”—Journal of American History

“Curtin has produced a stimulating monograph, the product of immaculate scholarship, against which all past and future studies will have to be judged.”—Journal of American Studies

“Professor Curtin’s new book is up to his customary standard of performance: within the limits he set for himself, The Atlantic Slave Trade could hardly be a better or more important book.”—American Historical Review

 

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The Atlantic Slave Trade
Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe
Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman
Duke University Press, 1992
Debates over the economic, social, and political meaning of slavery and the slave trade have persisted for over two hundred years. The Atlantic Slave Trade brings clarity and critical insight to the subject. In fourteen essays, leading scholars consider the nature and impact of the transatlantic slave trade and assess its meaning for the people transported and for those who owned them.
Among the questions these essays address are: the social cost to Africa of this forced migration; the role of slavery in the economic development of Europe and the United States; the short-term and long-term effects of the slave trade on black mortality, health, and life in the New World; and the racial and cultural consequences of the abolition of slavery. Some of these essays originally appeared in recent issues of Social Science History; the editors have added new material, along with an introduction placing each essay in the context of current debates.
Based on extensive archival research and detailed historical examination, this collection constitutes an important contribution to the study of an issue of enduring significance. It is sure to become a standard reference on the Atlantic slave trade for years to come.

Contributors. Ralph A. Austen, Ronald Bailey, William Darity, Jr., Seymour Drescher, Stanley L. Engerman, David Barry Gaspar, Clarence Grim, Brian Higgins, Jan S. Hogendorn, Joseph E. Inikori, Kenneth Kiple, Martin A. Klein, Paul E. Lovejoy, Patrick Manning, Joseph C. Miller, Johannes Postma, Woodruff Smith, Thomas Wilson

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Atlantis Lost
The American Experience with De Gaulle, 1958-1969
Sebastian Reyn
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

During the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle’s greatest quarrel was with the Americans. The American attitude towards this forceful European leader was, however, an equally defining part of the dispute. In this riveting study of transatlantic international relations, Sebastian Reyn traces American responses to de Gaulle’s foreign policy from 1958 to 1969, concluding that how Americans judged de Gaulle depended largely on whether their politics leaned to the left or the right.

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The Atlas of Boston History
Edited by Nancy S. Seasholes
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Few American cities possess a history as long, rich, and fascinating as Boston’s. A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural capital. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city’s terrain has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with beautifully rendered maps.
 
Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city.

Contributors
Robert J. Allison, Robert Charles Anderson, John Avault, Joseph Bagley, Charles Bahne, Laurie Baise, J. L. Bell, Rebekah Bryer, Aubrey Butts, Benjamin L. Carp, Amy D. Finstein, Gerald Gamm, Richard Garver, Katherine Grandjean, Michelle Granshaw, James Green, Dean Grodzins, Karl Haglund, Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Arthur Krim, Stephanie Kruel, Kerima M. Lewis, Noam Maggor, Dane A. Morrison, James C. O’Connell, Mark Peterson, Marshall Pontrelli, Gayle Sawtelle, Nancy S. Seasholes, Reed Ueda, Lawrence J. Vale, Jim Vrabel, Sam Bass Warner, Jay Wickersham, and Susan Wilson
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