BiblioVault - Books about Millennium

Approaching the Millennium

Essays on Angels in America

Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Tony Kushner's complex and demanding play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes has been the most talked about, analyzed, and celebrated play of the decade. The critic Harold Bloom has included Kushner's play in his "Western canon" alongside Shakespeare and the Bible, and drama scholar John M. Clum has termed it "a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American drama, and of American literary culture." While we might be somewhat wary of the instant canonization that such critical assessments confer, clearly Kushner's play is an important work, honored by the Pulitzer Prize, thought worthy of recognition on "purely aesthetic" grounds at the same time that it has been embraced--and occasionally rejected--for its politics.

Kushner's play explicitly positions itself in the current American conflict over identity politics, yet also situates that debate in a broader historical context: the American history of McCarthyism, of immigration and the "melting pot," of westward expansion, and of racist exploitation. Furthermore, the play enters into the politically volatile struggles of the AIDS crisis, struggles themselves interconnected with the politics of sexuality, gender, race, and class.

The original essays in Approaching the Millennium explore the complexities of the play and situate it in its particular, conflicted historical moment. The contributors help us understand and appreciate the play as a literary work, as theatrical text, as popular cultural phenomenon, and as political reflection and intervention. Specific topics include how the play thematizes gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity; the postmodern incarnation of the Brechtian epic; AIDS and the landscape of American politics. The range of different international productions of Angels in America provides a rich basis for discussion of its production history, including the linguistic and cultural shifts required in its "translation" from one stage to the next.

The last section of Approaching the Millennium includes interviews with Tony Kushner and other key creators and players involved in the original productions of Angels. The interviews explore issues raised earlier in the volume and dialogues between the creative artists who have shaped the play and the critics and "theatricians" engaged in responding to it.

Contributors to this volume are Arnold Aronson, Art Borreca, Gregory W. Bredbeck, Michael Cadden, Nicholas de Jongh, Allen J. Frantzen, Stanton B. Garner, Deborah R. Geis, Martin Harries, Steven F. Kruger, James Miller, Framji Minwalla, Donald Pease, Janelle Reinelt, David Román, David Savran, Ron Scapp, and Alisa Solomon.

Deborah Geis is Associate Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York. Steven F. Kruger is Professor and Chair of the Department of English, Queens College, City University of New York.

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Buckminster Fuller

Anthology for the Millennium

Edited by Thomas T. K. Zung

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Praise for the previous edition:

“In order to acquaint a new generation with Fuller, his former architectural partner, Zung, gathers selections [from Fuller’s writings] on topics ranging from education and environment to engineering and the Lord’s Prayer. Admirers of Fuller—such as actress Valerie Harper, author Arthur C. Clarke, and entrepreneur Steve Forbes—introduce each selection. Zung’s anthology traces the development of Fuller’s intellectual life and provides an excellent introduction for a new generation to the life and work of this brilliant thinker.”—Publishers Weekly

“Stimulating and provocative. . . . Like a Francis Bacon charting the course for future generations to pursue, Fuller anticipates the need for the ‘comprehensive designer,’ who would be a ‘synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.’ Such a [person], he says, would be an initiator of design, able to anticipate all of man’s needs and provide new and advanced standards of living for a steadily increasing percentage of the world’s population.”—Chicago Tribune

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The Christian Right in American Politics

Marching to the Millennium

John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, Editors

Georgetown University Press, 2003

From the first rumblings of the Moral Majority over twenty years ago, the Christian Right has been marshalling its forces and maneuvering its troops in an effort to re-shape the landscape of American politics. It has fascinated social scientists and journalists as the first right-wing social movement in postwar America to achieve significant political and popular support, and it has repeatedly defied those who would step up to write its obituary. In 2000, while many touted the demise of the Christian Coalition, the broader undercurrents of the movement were instrumental in helping George W. Bush win the GOP nomination and the White House. Bush repaid that swell of support by choosing Senator John Ashcroft, once the movement's favored presidential candidate, as attorney general.

The Christian Right in American Politics, under the direction of three of the nation's leading scholars in the field of religion and politics, recognizing the movement as a force still to be reckoned with, undertakes the important task of making an historical analysis of the Christian Right in state politics during its heyday, 1980 to the millennium. Its twelve chapters, written by outstanding scholars, review the impact and influence of the Christian Right in those states where it has had its most significant presence: South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Maine, and Oregon and Washington.

Since 1980, scholars have learned a good deal about the social characteristics, religious doctrine, and political beliefs of activists in and supporters of the Christian Right in these states, and each contribution is based on rigorous, dispassionate scholarship. The writers explore the gains and losses of the movement as it attempts to re-shape political landscapes. More precisely, they provide in-depth descriptions of the resources, organizations, and the group ecologies in which the Christian Right operates-the distinct elements that drove the movement forward.

As the editors state, "the Christian Right has been engaged in a long and torturous 'march toward the millennium,' from outsider status into the thick of American politics." Those formative years, 1980-2000, are essential for any understanding of this uniquely American social movement. This rigorous analysis over many states and many elections provides the clearest picture yet of the goals, tactics, and hopes of the Christian Right in America.

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The Emperor's New Clothes

Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

Graves Jr., Joseph L.

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of biological thought about human genetic diversity. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses.

Graves argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. He champions the scientific method and explains how we may properly ask scientific questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to observed human behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits.

According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand the empirical evidence behind this truth that separate human races do not exist. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be deleted.

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Ethnobiology at the Millennium

Past Promise and Future Prospects

Edited by Richard I. Ford

University of Michigan Press, 2001

A collection of papers from the Ethnobiology 2000 millennium conference in Ann Arbor. Contributions by Richard Ford, Elizabeth Wing, Steven Weber, Paul Minnis, Karen Adams, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown, Catherine Fowler, Nancy Turner, and Eugene Anderson.

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Feminisms at a Millennium

Edited by Judith A. Howard and Carolyn Allen

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Last year the editors of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society invited feminists worldwide to comment on the millennial transition. Representing a disciplinary and generational range of writers, the resulting collection is at turns inspiring, troubling, provocative, despairing, celebratory. Some of the essays give voice to anxieties, others are more hopeful; some reflect back, others look forward. Many of these fifty-plus short essays speak to themes of gender, nationality, global independence, transnational corporate domination, racial and ethnic identities, and complex intersections among these systems. Readers will find eye-opening writing that is thoughtful, committed, and passionate about feminist futures.

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Hard Road to Freedom

The Story of African America, The Civil War to the Millennium

Horton, Lois E

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Hard Road to Freedom tells the story of African America from its African roots to the political and social upheavals at the end of the twentieth century. It interweaves the experiences of individual black Americans with an analysis of the nation's pursuit of its fundamental principles, of freedom, and civil rights. The book begins with African cultures and the African people who withstood the horrors of the slave trade and slavery to help shape a new multiracial society in North America. The American Revolution brought freedom to some, but most remained in the grip of slavery. African Americans and their allies continually raised the cry for freedom, building determined black communities and dedicated antislavery organizations that contributed to the abolition of slavery. The precarious freedom after the Civil War brought new opportunities, but also new dangers and the limitations of Jim Crow. The wars and the depression in the early twentieth century found black Americans forging new alliances, creating a cultural renaissance, and fighting for democracy and freedom abroad. At home, they struggled against the denials of freedom and citizenship that still barred their full participation and that tarnished America's standing in the eyes of the international community. Throughout the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s and the political and cultural backlash that followed, African Americans continued to raise their voices in often eloquent and always insistent appeals that the nation live up to the promise of its principles. This book tells of America's unsteady advance along the road to freedom, the triumphs and hope, as well as the failures and despair, from the vantage point of the African Americans who resolutely played a critical role in that story.

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Latin American Literature at the Millennium

Local Lives, Global Spaces

Cecily Raynor

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.

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Literary Luxuries

American Writing at the End of the Millennium

Joe David Bellamy

University of Missouri Press, 1995

From the Iowa Writers Workshop to the halls of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts, from the world of literary magazines and writers' conferences to the bizarre realm of the late-twentieth-century American English department, Literary Luxuries takes the reader on a guided tour of American literary life in our time--and the forces threatening its existence.

Joe David Bellamy has been a significant figure on the literary scene during the last three decades; as a "literary Everyman," he offers in Literary Luxuries a distinctive and valuable perspective on the culture wars, on education and the imagination, on particular writers and major literary and aesthetic movements, on the role of government in fostering cultural development, and on the day-to-day strife of the writer's life in the United States.

As director of the literature program of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bellamy had the unenviable task of trying to persuade Congress and ordinary citizens that American literature is worthy of support, and in Literary Luxuries he continues that debate and helps us to understand its implications: "Literature is our national treasury of language and style and our best reckoning about human life, as it is lived in this time and place."

Part memoir, part critique, part impassioned defense of American literary culture and the values it espouses and struggles to uphold, Literary Luxuries offers unforgettable commentary on the literary life in the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century as described from the perspective of one of its key participants.

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Michigan at the Millennium

A Benchmark and Analysis of Its Fiscal and Economic Structure

Charles L. Ballard

Michigan State University Press, 2003

Michigan at the Millennium provides objective background and analysis on a wide variety of key economic and fiscal issues. The chapters are written by economists and policy analysts at leading universities and other institutions in Michigan. Written in clear, non-technical language, the articles are aimed at an audience that includes members of the legislative and executive branches of state government, members of the judicial system, local government officials, policy analysts, and informed citizens.
This volume follows in the tradition of the landmark 1982 study, Michigan’s Fiscal and Economic Structure, edited by Harvey E. Brazer. The first section of the volume focuses on broad aspects of the economy, people, and land of Michigan, including chapters on demographics, the labor force, land use, the manufacturing sector, high-technology industries, and health care. Section two focuses on public expenditures and public services, and includes chapters on economic-development efforts, K–12 education, the transportation system, the welfare system, policies for low-wage workers and displaced workers, and pensions. The third section is concerned with taxes and other government revenues. It includes chapters on the Headlee Amendment, income taxes, sales and use taxes, property taxes, the Single Business Tax, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and other sources of revenue.

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The Olympics at the Millennium

Power, Politics, and the Games

Edited by Kay Schaffer

Rutgers University Press, 2000

The Olympics thrill the world with spectacle and drama. They also carry a cultural and social significance that goes beyond the stadium, athletes, and fans. The Games are arenas in which individual and team athletic achievement intersect with the politics of national identity in a global context.

The Olympics at the Millennium offers groundbreaking essays that explore the cultural politics of the Games. The contributors investigate such topics as the emergence of women athletes as cultural commodities, the orchestrated spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies, and the alternative sport culture offered via the Gay Games. Unforgettable events and decisions are discussed: Native American athlete Jim Thorpe winning—and losing—his two gold medals in 1912. Why America was one of the few countries to actually send Jewish athletes to the “Nazi Olympics.” The disqualification of champion Ewa Klobukowska from competing as a woman, due to chromosomal testing in 1967.

With the 2000 Sydney Games imminent, several essays address concerns with which every host country must contend, such as the threat of terrorism. Highlighting the difficult issues of racism and nationalism, another article explores the efforts of this country’s aboriginal people to define a role for themselves in the 2000 Games, as they struggle with ongoing discrimination. And with the world watching, Sydney faces profound pressure to implement a successful Olympics, as a matter of national pride.

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Questioning the Millennium

A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, Revised Edition

Stephen Jay Gould

Harvard University Press, 2011

Gould addresses three questions about the millennium with his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy: What is the concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted over time? How did the projection of Christ’s 1,000-year reign become a secular measure? And when exactly does the millennium begin—January 1, 2000, or January 2, 2001?

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Southern Women at the Millennium

A Historical Perspective

Edited by Melissa Walker, Jeanette R. Dunn, & Joe P. Dunn, & Intro by Joe P. Dunn

University of Missouri Press, 2003

This collection of essays by eight scholars of southern women’s history traces the evolution of southern women’s lives during the twentieth century. Throughout this era, southern life, and in particular the opportunities for southern women, changed dramatically as southern women have taken leadership roles in business, government, education, and social programs.

The essayists employ a variety of approaches, ranging from case studies to historical overviews, but they all carefully place the developments in southern women’s lives in a national context. Most important, each author seeks to understand the nature of change in these women’s lives over the last century and to forecast the course of their lives in the future.

The first effort to synthesize research on southern women during this period, this collection will be useful to both scholars and students of southern history. Students will be provided with an introduction to women’s involvement in many areas of southern society, while scholars will appreciate the essays as a guide to new directions for research.

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Utopias and the Millennium

Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann

Reaktion Books, 1993

Utopia has always had a close, though ambivalent, relationship with millennialism. This relationship was probably at its most intense in England at the time of the Civil War; even when utopia aspired to secularism – as at the time of the French Revolution, or in nineteenth-century socialism – it continued to turn to millennial forms to recharge its energies.

The essays in this book explore aspects of this relationship; some consider their role in the debate concerning human perfectibility, while others examine the rise of secularism. Further contributions reflect upon the apparent failure of the modern Communist utopia, note the recent reappearance of apocalyptic themes in fiction and social theory, or draw on the contributions of feminism and ecology. As our century ends, it seems that utopia and the millennium are once more locked in an uneasy embrace.

With essays by Louis Marin, J. C. Davis, Louis James, Gregory Claeys, Krishan Kumar, Vita Fortunati, David Ayers, Jan Relf and John O'Neill.

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