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Alexander William Doniphan
Portrait of a Missouri Moderate
Roger D. Launius
University of Missouri Press, 1997

Alexander William Doniphan (1808-1887)--Missouri attorney, military figure, politician, and businessman--is one of the most significant figures in antebellum Missouri. From the 1830s to the 1880s, Doniphan was active in a variety of affairs in Missouri and held firm to several underlying principles, including loyalty, hard work, the sanctity of the republic, and commitment to Christian charity. However, the key to Doniphan's importance was his persistent moderation on the critical issues of his day.

Doniphan became a household name when he served as the commanding officer of the famed First Missouri Mounted Volunteers during the Mexican-American War. It was during this time that he won two battles, established an Anglo-American-based democracy in New Mexico, and paved the way for the annexation of the territory that became New Mexico and Arizona. He is also recognized by the Mormons for his assistance to their beleaguered church during Missouri's "Mormon War" and for his refusal to execute Joseph Smith when ordered to do so by his commanding officer.

Although Doniphan was a slaveholding unionist, he sought a middle ground to stave off war in the 1850s and early 1860s and served as a delegate to the Washington Peace Conference in 1861. When conflict escalated along the western border of Missouri in 1862, Doniphan moved to St. Louis, where he worked as a lawyer with the Missouri Claims Commission, seeking pensions for refugees.

Doniphan early adopted the Whig ideal of the "positive liberal state" and sought to use the power of government to remake society into something better. Once he saw the heavy-handed use of state power during Reconstruction, however, Doniphan reversed his views on the role of the government in society. For the rest of his life, he resisted government incursions into the lives of the people and sought to restore a healthy Union.

Alexander William Doniphan will be of interest to academic specialists and general readers alike, especially those interested in Mormon studies, Missouri history, military history, and Western history.

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Ancient Mesopotamia
Portrait of a Dead Civilization
A. Leo Oppenheim
University of Chicago Press, 1977
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review

Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.

Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun.

"To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week

"Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology

A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
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Ben Thompson
Portrait of a Gunfighter
Thomas C. Bicknell
University of North Texas Press, 2018

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Buarij
Portrait of a Lebanese Muslim Village
Anne H. Fuller
Harvard University Press

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Camus
Portrait of a Moralist
Stephen Eric Bronner
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Decades after his death, Albert Camus (1913–1960) is still regarded as one of the most influential and fascinating intellectuals of the twentieth century. This biography by Stephen Eric Bronner explores the connections between his literary work, his philosophical writings, and his politics.

Camus illuminates his impoverished childhood, his existential concerns, his activities in the antifascist resistance, and the controversies in which he was engaged. Beautifully written and incisively argued, this study offers new insights—and above all—highlights the contemporary relevance of an extraordinary man.

“A model of a kind of intelligent writing that should be in greater supply. Bronner manages judiciously to combine an appreciation for the strengths of Camus and nonrancorous criticism of his weaknesses. . . . As a personal and opinionated book, it invites the reader into an engaging and informative dialogue.”—American Political Science Review

 

“This concise, lively, and remarkably evenhanded treatment of the life and work of Albert Camus weaves together biography, philosophical analysis, and political commentary.”—Science & Society

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Carol and John Steinbeck
Portrait of a Marriage
Susan Shillinglaw
University of Nevada Press, 2013
Carol Henning Steinbeck, writer John Steinbeck’s first wife, was his creative anchor, the inspiration for his great work of the 1930s, culminating in The Grapes of Wrath. Meeting at Lake Tahoe in 1928, their attachment was immediate, their personalities meshing in creative synergy. Carol was unconventional, artistic, and compelling. In the formative years of Steinbeck’s career, living in San Francisco, Pacific Grove, Los Gatos, and Monterey, their Modernist circle included Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Lincoln Steffens. In many ways Carol’s story is all too familiar: a creative and intelligent woman subsumes her own life and work into that of her husband. Together, they brought forth one of the enduring novels of the 20th century. 
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Charles IV
Portrait of a Medieval Ruler
Václav Žurek
Karolinum Press, 2023
A critical examination of the life and legacy of Charles IV.

Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, has been called “one of the most learned and diplomatically skillful sovereigns” of the fourteenth century. Having moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire to Prague and founding the first university in Central Europe, Charles IV is a towering figure in Czech history and a crucial character in the story of medieval Europe.

Recent research, especially in art history, has tended to present Charles IV in a purely positive, unblemished light: viewing him and his imperial court as the engine behind a flourishing of culture in the region. This book views Charles IV through a more critical lens, examining the careful construction that went into the way he presented himself and the characteristic manifestations of Charles’ execution of royal power. The first part of the book offers a chronological description of Charles’ life within the broader context of the times and the House of Luxembourg. The second part provides a close look into Charles IV’s style of rule while focusing on phenomena that reveal his personal conception of power and how it was wielded.
 
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Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
Ekotto, Frieda
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Florence
A Portrait
Michael Levey
Harvard University Press, 1996
Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.
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Gaillard in Deaf America
A Portrait of the Deaf Community, 1917, Henri Gaillard
Henri Gaillard
Gallaudet University Press, 2002

In 1917, Henri Gaillard led a delegation of deaf French men to the United States for the centennial celebration of the American School for the Deaf (ASD). The oldest school for deaf students in America, ASD had been cofounded by renowned deaf French teacher Laurent Clerc, thus inspiring Gaillard’s invitation. Gaillard visited deaf people everywhere he went and recorded his impressions in a detailed journal. His essays present a sharply focused portrait of the many facets of Deaf America during a pivotal year in its history.

       Gaillard crossed the Atlantic only a few weeks after the United States entered World War I. In his writings, he reports the efforts of American deaf leaders to secure employment for deaf workers to support the war effort. He also witnesses spirited speeches at the National Association of the Deaf convention decrying the replacement of sign language by oral education. Gaillard also depicts the many local institutions established by deaf Americans, such as Philadelphia’s All Souls Church, founded in 1888 by the country’s first ordained deaf pastor, and the many deaf clubs established by the first wave of deaf college graduates in their communities. His journal stands as a unique chronicle of the American Deaf community during a remarkable era of transition.

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Ida Tarbell
Portrait of a Muckraker
Kathleen Brady
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
In this first definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, Kathleen Brady has written a readable and widely acclaimed book about one of America’s great journalists.

Ida Tarbell’s generation called her “a muckraker” (the term was Theodore Roosevelt’s, and he didn’t intend it as a compliment), but in our time she would have been known as “an investigative reporter,” with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her History of the Standard Oil Company was published, first in McClure’s Magazine and then as a book (1904), it shook the Rockefeller interests, caused national outrage, and led the Supreme Court to fragment the giant monopoly.

A journalist of extraordinary intelligence, accuracy, and courage, she was also the author of the influential and popular books on Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, and her hundreds of articles dealt with public figures such as Louis Pateur and Emile Zola, and contemporary issues such as tariff policy and labor.  During her long life, she knew Teddy  Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Henry James, Samuel McClure, Lincoln Stephens, Herbert Hoover, and many other prominent Americans. She achieved more than almost any woman of her generation, but she was an antisuffragist, believing that the traditional roles of wife and mother were more important than public life. She ultimately defended the business interests she had once attacked.

To this day, her opposition to women’s rights disturbs some feminists. Kathleen Brady writes of her: “[She did not have] the flinty stuff of which the cutting edge of any revolution is made. . . . Yet she was called to achievement in a day when women were called only to exist.  Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her tragedy ws that she was never to know it.”
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Insane Therapy
Portrait of a Psychotherapy Cult
Marybeth F. Ayella
Temple University Press, 1998
Sensational media coverage of groups like Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, and Synanon is tinged with the suggestion that only crazy, lonely, or gullible people join cults. Cults attract people on the fringe of society, people already on the edge. Contrary to this public perception, Marybeth Ayella reveals how anyone seeking personal change in an intense community setting is susceptible to the lure of group influence. The book begins with the candid story of how one keen skeptic was recruited by Moonies in the 1970s -- the author herself.

Ayella's personal experience fueled her interest in studying the cult phenomenon. This book focuses on her analysis of one community in southern California, The Center for Feeling Therapy, which opened in 1971 as an offshoot of Arthur Janov's Primal Scream approach. The group attracted mostly middle-class, college-educated clients interested in change through intense sessions led by licensed therapists. At the time of the Center's collapse in 1980, there were three hundred individuals living in the therapeutic community and another six hundred outpatients.

Through interviews with twenty-one former patients, the author develops a picture of the positive changes they sought, the pressures of group living, and the allegations of abuse against therapists. Many patients contended that they were beaten, made to strip before the group and to engage in forced sex, forced to have abortions and give up children, and coerced to donate money and to work in business affiliated with the Center.

The close of the Center brought  yet more trauma to the patients as they struggled to readjust to mainstream life. Ayella recounts the stories of these individuals, again and again returning to the question of how personal identity is formed and the power of social influences. This book is a key to understanding how "normal" people wind up in cults.
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Israelite Prophecy and the Deuteronomistic History
Portrait, Reality, and the Formation of a History
Mignon R. Jacobs
SBL Press, 2013
This collection of essays examines the relationship of prophecy to the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy–2 Kings), including the historical reality of prophecy that stands behind the text and the portrayal of prophecy within the literature itself. The contributors use a number of perspectives to explore the varieties of intermediation and the cultic setting of prophecy in the ancient Near East; the portrayal of prophecy in pentateuchal traditions, pre-Deuteronomistic sources, and other Near Eastern literature; the diverse perspectives reflected within the Deuteronomistic History; and the possible Persian period setting for the final form of the Deuteronomistic History. Together the collection represents the current state of an important, ongoing discussion. The contributors are Ehud Ben Zvi, Diana Edelman, Mignon R. Jacobs, Mark Leuchter, Martti Nissinen, Mark O’Brien, Raymond F. Person Jr., Thomas C. Römer, Marvin A. Sweeney, and Rannfrid Thelle.
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Japanese Marxist
A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946
Gail Lee Bernstein
Harvard University Press, 1976

It is the merit of Bernstein's portrait of Kawakami Hajime that he emerges as a recognizable human being, a truly modern figure reflecting in his own life a personal and hard-won balance between traditional Japanese values and the demands of modernization. The heir of a samurai family, an acknowledged authority on economics, a professor at one of Japan's leading universities, an early popularizer of Marxism in Japan, a Japanese Communist on his own unique terms, and, finally, the author of an autobiography that is a classic of modern Japanese literature, Kawakami Hajime is an important figure in the history of modern Japan.

At each stage of Kawakami's winding path to Marxism—from patriotic nationalist to academic Marxist to revolutionary Communist—his concern for the ethical and economic problems that emerged in the course of Japan's astonishingly rapid industrialization dominated his consciousness. Bernstein provides a portrait of Kawakami's complex personality as well as an elegantly shaped narrative of the context and content of Japanese left-wing politics in the 1920s, and she makes plain the kinds of cultural conflict that modernization, in its several varieties, bequeathed to Japanese intellectuals.

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Kurt Wolff
A Portrait in Essays and Letters
Kurt Wolff
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Kurt Wolff (1887-1963) was a singular presence in the literary world of the twentieth century, a cultural force shaping modern literature itself and pioneering significant changes in publishing. During an intense, active career that spanned two continents and five decades, Wolff launched seven publishing houses and nurtured an extraordinary array of writers, among them Franz Kafka, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Boris Pasternak, Günter Grass, Robert Musil, Paul Valéry, Julian Green, Lampedusa, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
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Life on the Rocks
A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat
Bruce L. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2014
The American mountain goat is one of the most elusive and least familiar species of hoofed mammals in North America. Confined to the remote and rugged mountains of the western United States and Canada, these extraordinary mountaineers are seldom seen or encountered, even by those who patiently study them. Life on the Rocks offers an intimate portrayal of this remarkable animal through the eyes and lens of field biologist and photographer Bruce Smith.

Color photographs and accounts of Smith's personal experiences living in Montana's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area accompany descriptions of the American mountain goat's natural history. Smith explores their treacherous habitat, which spans the perilous cliffs and crags of the Rocky, Cascade, and Coast mountain ranges. The physical and behavioral adaptations of these alpine athletes enable them to survive a host of dangers, including six-month-long winters, scarce food sources, thunderous avalanches, social strife, and predators like wolves, bears, lions, wolverines, and eagles. Smith also details the challenges these animals face as their territory is threatened by expanding motorized access, industrial activities, and a warming climate.

Life on the Rocks showcases the elegance and charm of this little-known creature, thriving in some of North America's harshest wilderness. Smith's volume will appeal to wildlife enthusiasts, wildland travelers, and conservationists interested in the future of the American mountain goat.

2014 National Outdoor Book Award winner: Nature & Environment and co-winner: Design and Artistic Merit

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Lion and Lamb
A Portrait of British Moral Duality
Mihir Bose
Haus Publishing, 2018
The great British dilemma is this: Britain is a country forever wrestling with two moral sides—whether to be viewed as a lion that roars and conquers, or a gentle lamb that gambols happily. In the days of the empire, one face meant the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Mother of Parliaments, and the country that harbored people forced to flee their homelands. But there also was an imperial face, where colonial subjects were made very aware that the British knew how to ensure obedience, even if that required the use of brutal force. Brexit has once again highlighted these dualities.

In Britain’s Eternal Dilemma, Mihir Bose shows how those who voted to leave the E.U. want Britain to roar like a lion. In contrast, the Remainers saw Brexit as a self-inflicted wound, believing the only option is to live symbiotically with the rest of Europe for a common future. Writing from the unique perspective of an immigrant, Bose personifies this ongoing debate: He has experienced racism in his near half century in Britain, but he has also been provided unimaginable opportunities to become a writer, opportunities he would never have had in his native India. This timely book demonstrates that Britain is still wresting with its two-sided identity while also showing that Brexit is still the number one priority on the European political agenda.
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Machiavelli
A Portrait
Christopher S. Celenza
Harvard University Press, 2015

“Machiavellian”—used to describe the ruthless cunning of the power-obsessed and the pitiless—is never meant as a compliment. But the man whose name became shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more engaging and nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher S. Celenza’s Machiavelli: A Portrait removes the varnish of centuries to reveal not only the hardnosed political philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.

Machiavelli’s hometown was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments. But Florence was also riven by extraordinary violence. War and public executions were commonplace—Machiavelli himself was imprisoned and brutally tortured at the behest of his own government. These experiences left a deep impression on this keen observer of power politics, whose two masterpieces—The Prince and The Discourses—draw everywhere on the hard-won wisdom gained from navigating a treacherous world. But like many of Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, he also immersed himself in the Latin language and wisdom of authors from the classical past. And for all of Machiavelli’s indifference to religion, vestiges of Christianity remained in his thought, especially the hope for a redeemer—a prince who would provide the stability so rare in Machiavelli’s worldly experience.

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The Mississippi Kite
Portrait of a Southern Hawk
By Eric Bolen and Dan Flores
University of Texas Press, 1993

Floating on air currents over rural countryside and open city spaces, the Mississippi Kite presents a familiar sight to many people across the southern United States, although this graceful hawk is not well known by name. This engaging natural history, illustrated with superb color photographs, provides all a bird watcher needs to become acquainted with the kite, its life cycle, and its fascinating history with humans.

Under various folk names, including Blue Darter, Grasshopper Hawk, and Mosquito Hawk, the Mississippi Kite ranges throughout the southern United States from the coasts of the Carolinas to the plains of the Southwest. The authors describe all aspects of the kite's life cycle, from breeding and nesting, raising young, and hunting and feeding to the kite's annual winter migration to South America. They also trace its intriguing relationship with humans, from its discovery by Europeans in the nineteenth century to the present day.

For bird lovers and ornithologists alike, The Mississippi Kite will be an essential introduction to a bird well worth knowing. A special section on conservation and a selection of references for further reading complement the text.

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Montgomery in the Good War
Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946
Wesley Phillips Newton
University of Alabama Press, 2000
Montgomery in the Good War is a richly textured account of a southern city and its people during World War II.
 
Using newspaper accounts, interviews, letters, journals, and his own memory of the time, Wesley Newton reconstructs wartime-era Montgomery, Alabama--a sleepy southern capital that was transformed irreversibly during World War II.
 
The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story.
 
Montgomery in the Good War is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace.
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Never in Anger
Portrait of an Eskimo Family
Jean L. Briggs
Harvard University Press, 1971

In the summer of 1963, anthropologist Jean Briggs journeyed to the Canadian Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) to begin a seventeen-month field study of the Utku, a small group of Inuit First Nations people who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Living with a family as their “adopted” daughter—sharing their iglu during the winter and pitching her tent next to theirs in the summer—Briggs observed the emotional patterns of the Utku in the context of their daily life.

In this perceptive and highly enjoyable volume the author presents a behavioral description of the Utku through a series of vignettes of individuals interacting with members of their family and with their neighbors. Finding herself at times the object of instruction, she describes the training of the child toward achievement of the proper adult personality and the handling of deviations from this desired behavior.

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Old Capitol
Portrait of an Iowa Landmark
Margaret N. Keyes
University of Iowa Press, 1988

Built between 1839 and 1842, the domed structure of Iowa City's Old Capitol served as the third territorial capitol and the first state capitol of Iowa. In 1857, when the state government was moved to Des Moines, Old Capitol became the first building of the new University of Iowa. It remains today the centerpiece of this handsome campus. The story of its history and restoration, told in this elegantly illustrated book, is an intriguing account of historical architectural detection.

Using primary sources, including manuscripts, vouchers, account books, newspaper stories, correspondence, and documents from the National Archives and Iowa repositories, Margaret Keyes portrays the major events of the total history of Old Capitol since its site was determined.

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Pella Dutch
Portrait of a Language in an Iowa Community, An Expanded Edition
Philip E. Webber
University of Iowa Press, 1988
Founded in 1847 by religious separatists, the town of Pella in central Iowa is the state’s oldest Dutch American colony, and its crafts, architecture, and celebrations reflect and perpetuate the Dutch heritage of its earlier residents. Through his intriguing blend of sociolinguistic research, regional history, and interviews with current speakers of Pella Dutch, Philip Webber examines the town’s rich cultural and linguistic traditions.
 
Drawing upon formal and informal interviews and conversations with more than 150 speakers of Pella Dutch, Webber uses the methods of language research to trace the vestiges of Dutch heritage left on the English spoken by local residents; to explain attitudes toward language and ethnicity that emerged in the twentieth century; and to document the vocabulary, linguistic forms, humor, and conversational patterns that characterize contemporary Pella Dutch. In addition, desiring to let his informants speak for themselves, he includes the playful jokes, proverbial observations, folk wisdom, children’s rhymes, riddles, and puzzles influenced by Pella Dutch.
 
Webber’s introduction to this expanded paperback edition provides new photographs, updated information about recent research and publications, examples of how Dutch continues to be spoken, and descriptions of the ways in which Pella continues to commemorate its linguistic and cultural heritage. Linguists, anthropologists, and historians—as well as all those who enjoy Pella’s Tulip Time festival, its summertime fair or kermis, the Dutch letters in its bakeries, and the early winter visit of Sinterklaas—will appreciate Webber’s informed and engaging study of this unique Iowa community.
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The Poetry of Asher Reich
Portrait of a Hebrew Poet
Yair Mazor
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    A rich union of image and word, this striking book introduces English-speaking audiences to a full range of poetry by Asher Reich, one of Israel’s most celebrated contemporary poets, paired with evocative drawings by renowned Israeli artist Michael Kovner. Yair Mazor, a leading scholar of Hebrew literature, provides readers with an introduction to Reich’s work and its prominent position within the panorama of modern literature in Hebrew.
    Asher Reich’s poetry has been characterized as vivid, vibrant, passionate, and expressionistic. Dominated by themes of stormy sensuality and frank sexuality, his dramatic imagery and metaphors interweave Mishnaic, Talmudic, and Biblical references in a colorful, complex poetic texture. The beautiful simplicity of Kovner’s drawings—depicting female figures and natural landscapes—resonates throughout the book. Tender, stark, and striking, the drawings illustrate life’s fragility and grace with a subtlety and dignity that complements Reich’s sensitive style.
    Presenting contemporary Hebrew poetry, modern Israeli art, and informed literary commentary in an engaging format, this book promises to delight a broad audience of readers.
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The Portrait and the Book
Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America
Megan Walsh
University of Iowa Press, 2017
In the nineteenth century, new image-making methods like steel engraving and lithography caused a surge in the publication of illustrated books in the United States. Yet even before the widespread use of these technologies, Americans had already established the illustrated book format as central to the nation’s literary culture. In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin’s and Phillis Wheatley’s frontispieces; political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale; and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson’s heroine Pamela, shaped readers’ conceptions of American literature.

Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country’s status as a former colony.

Through an examination of readers’ portrait-collecting habits, writers’ employment of ekphrasis, printers’ efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.
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A Portrait in Four Movements
The Chicago Symphony under Barenboim, Boulez, Haitink, and Muti
Andrew Patner
University of Chicago Press, 2019
“Playing in an orchestra in an intelligent way is the best school for democracy.”—Daniel Barenboim
 
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been led by a storied group of conductors. And from 1994 to 2015, through the best work of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Riccardo Muti, Andrew Patner was right there. As a classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT radio, Patner was able to trace the arc of the CSO’s changing repertories, all while cultivating a deep rapport with its four principal conductors.

This book assembles Patner’s reviews of the concerts given by the CSO during this time, as well as transcripts of his remarkable radio interviews with these colossal figures. These pages hold tidbits for the curious, such as Patner’s “driving survey” that playfully ranks the Maestri he knew on a scale of “total comfort” to “fright level five,” and the observation that Muti appears to be a southpaw on the baseball field. Moving easily between registers, they also open revealing windows onto the sometimes difficult pasts that brought these conductors to music in the first place, including Boulez’s and Haitink’s heartbreaking experiences of Nazi occupation in their native countries as children. Throughout, these reviews and interviews are threaded together with insights about the power of music and the techniques behind it—from the conductors’ varied approaches to research, preparing scores, and interacting with other musicians, to how the sound and personality of the orchestra evolved over time, to the ways that we can all learn to listen better and hear more in the music we love. Featuring a foreword by fellow critic Alex Ross on the ethos and humor that informed Patner’s writing, as well as an introduction and extensive historical commentary by musicologist Douglas W. Shadle, this book offers a rich portrait of the musical life of Chicago through the eyes and ears of one of its most beloved critics.
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Portrait In Photography
Graham Clarke
Reaktion Books, 1992
The photographic portrait is discussed in a wide context, from general subjects such as the family photograph album and American portrait photography to the work of individual artists like Sander and Stieglitz.
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Portrait of a Giving Community
Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora
Adil Najam
Harvard University Press, 2006

Portrait of a Giving Community is based on a nationwide survey of the giving habits of Pakistani-Americans. This study, the first of its kind, not only examines the history, demography, and institutional geography of Pakistani-Americans but also looks at how this immigrant community manages its multiple identities through charitable giving and volunteering. It provides a snapshot in time of a generous and giving community whose philanthropy has become increasingly “American” without being less “Pakistani.”

Who are the Pakistani-Americans? What is the extent of their diaspora giving to Pakistan? What can be done to increase and channel their philanthropy for more equitable development in Pakistan? How much do they give within the U.S. and to causes unrelated to Pakistan? How does this community manage the hyphen in “Pakistani-American”? These are some of the questions that motivate this book.

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Portrait of a Greek Imagination
An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis
Michael Herzfeld
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld first met Greek novelist Andreas Nenedakis in the drafty courtyard of a public library. This encounter led to an enduring intellectual relationship that prompted Herzfeld to reconsider both the contours of fiction and the nature of anthropology. Portrait of a Greek Imagination, part biography and part ethnography, is Herzfeld's contextualization of Nenedakis's life, as it was both lived and fictionalized.

Herzfeld explores how personal vision intersects with national cultures by examining the Greek author's novels and recollections as historical accounts. Bringing together the methods of the novelist and the anthropologist in their common concern with both social and lived experience, Herzfeld shows how different perspectives shape the historical record. Nenedakis has endured persecution, exile, imprisonment, and torture under Greece's military dictatorship, and his novels—excerpted here in English for the first time—offer an individual version of historical events. As one of his characters ask, "For was not his life, and are not the lives of all of us, a novel?"
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Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere
Georges Perec
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazzling effect in such works as A Void—a murder mystery that contains nary an “e”—and Life A User’s Manual, in which an apartment building, systematically canvassed, unfolds secrets and, ultimately offers a reflection on creation, destruction, and the devotion to art.
 
Before embarking on these experiments, however, Perec tried his hand at a relatively straightforward novel, Portrait of a Man. His first book, it was rejected by publishers when he submitted it in 1960, after which he filed it away. Decades after Perec’s death, David Bellos discovered the manuscript, and through his translation we have a chance to enjoy it in English for the first time. What fans will find here is a thriller that combines themes that would remain prominent in Perec’s later work, such as art forgery, authenticity, and murder, as well as craftsman Gaspard Winckler, who whose namesakes play major roles in Life A User’s Manual and W or The Memory of Childhood.
 
Engaging and entertaining on its own merits, and gaining additional interest when set in the context of Perec’s career, Portrait of a Man is sure to charm the many fans of this postmodern master.
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Portrait of a Marriage
Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
Nigel Nicolson
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of Sackville-West's marriage to Harold Nicolson is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, their son Nigel combines his mother's memoir with his own explanations and what he learned from their many letters. Even during her various love affairs with women, Vita maintained a loving marriage with Harold. Portrait of a Marriage presents an often misunderstood but always fascinating couple.

"Portrait of a Marriage is as close to a cry from the heart as anybody writing in English in our time has come, and it is a cry that, once heard, is not likely ever to be forgotten. . . . Unexpected and astonishing."—Brendan Gill, New Yorker

"The charm of this book lies in the elegance of its narration, the taste with which their son has managed to convey the real, enduring quality of his parents' love for each other."—Doris Grumbach, New Republic
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Portrait of a Port
Boston, 1852–1914
W. H. Bunting
Harvard University Press

Two hundred and thirty-four striking photographs of the port of Boston combine with interpretive commentary to recapture the flavor, buoyancy, and excitement of the city’s years as one of the two or three great American ports. After the Civil War Boston underwent a radical and successful transformation from a declining mercantile home port to an important and competitive modern seaport. At the same time the transition from sail to steam was taking place. Photographic studies of deep water sail and steam vessels, naval ships, fishing boats, catboats, tugs, schooners, and sloops, and of the picturesque wharves—all create a kaleidoscopic visual history of these years of change.

The volume offers, as well, some of the most distinguished early work in photography, including the widest selection ever published of photographs by pioneer marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins.

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Portrait of a Racist
Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers
Reed Massengill
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
Originally published in 1994, Portrait of a Racist is an astonishing biography of Byron De La Beckwith (1920–2001), who murdered Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June 1963. Written by Beckwith’s nephew by marriage, the book is based on dozens of exclusive personal interviews with Beckwith and people who knew him—as well as letters Beckwith wrote directly to the author. These unique sources provide as definitive a glimpse into the chilling psychological landscape of a man devoted to murderous intolerance as we will likely ever have. Although the slaying of Evers helped to galvanize the civil rights movement in the South, the killer evaded justice for three decades after the crime. Twice tried for murder in the 1960s—both times by all- male, all-White juries—Beckwith was finally convicted in a third trial in 1994.

Accompanied by new illustrations that have never been printed before, this new edition includes an afterword that recounts the author’s participation as a witness and his introduction of new evidence in the third trial. It also chronicles Beckwith’s last years of declining health behind bars, examines the rich scholarship on Evers and civil rights that has arisen since this book’s original appearance, and reflects on the catastrophic persistence of Beckwith’s ideology— Christian nationalism and white supremacy—in our own times.
 
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Portrait of a Russian Province
Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod
Catherine Evtuhov
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society.  The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nation’s population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society.
    A number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced “naturally” in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation; merely a derivative Enlightenment; and only a distorted capitalism. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions—and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history.
    This book undermines these preconceptions. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, Catherine Evtuhov demonstrates how nearly everything we thought we knew about the dynamics of Russian
society was wrong. Instead of peasants ground down by poverty and ignorance, we find skilled farmers, talented artisans and craftsmen, and enterprising tradespeople. Instead of an exclusively centrally administered state, we discover effective and participatory local government. Instead of pervasive ignorance, we are shown a lively cultural scene and an active middle class. Instead of a defining Russian exceptionalism, we find a world recognizable to any historian of nineteenth-century Europe.
    Drawing on a wide range of Russian social, environmental, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, and synthesizing it with deep archival research of the Nizhnii Novgorod province, Evtuhov overturns a simplistic view of the Russian past. Rooted in, but going well beyond, provincial affairs, her book challenges us with an entirely new perspective on Russia’s historical trajectory.
 

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Portrait of a Young Painter
Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation
Mary Kay Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2015
In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zúñiga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zúñiga's coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zúñiga's persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968.
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A Portrait of Isaac Newton
Frank E. Manuel
Harvard University Press

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident
The Life and Work of Aleksandar Petrovic
Vlastimir Sudar
Intellect Books, 2013
In the liberal West as in socialist Yugoslavia, the films of Aleksandar Petrovic dramatize how enforced dogmatism can corrode any political system. A case study of the oft-overlooked Yugoslav director’s colorful and eventful career, A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident explores how Petrovic developed specific political and social themes in his films. A response to the political vagaries of his time, these anti-dogmatic views were later to become a trademark of his work. Although interest in socialist Yugoslavia and its legacy has risen steadily since the 1990s, the history of Yugoslav cinema has been scarcely covered, and this book marks a fresh contribution to a burgeoning area of interest.
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Portrait of Us Burning
Poems
Sebastián H. Páramo
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A powerful debut collection exploring one family’s pursuit of the American Dream

Sebastián H. Páramo renders a semi-autobiographical collection, utilizing self-portraiture and memory to uncover how his Texan, working-class, Mexican American identity shapes his relationship to his stepbrother and to his family’s burning desire to become American.

Portrait of Us Burning begins with the humble picture of an immigrant American family. This picture starts to disintegrate—and, ultimately, burns—with the need to understand an inciting event that haunts the family throughout the second half of the collection. As the poems gather force and the picture dissolves further, Páramo asks us again and again: What does it mean to burn while becoming a part of a whole?
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Portrait of Your Niece
And Other Poems
Carol Hall
University of Minnesota Press, 1959
Portrait of Your Niece was first published in 1959.Carol Hall wrote her first poem, addressed to Santa Claus, when she was four years old. She has been writing ever since and has contributed poems to many magazines, but this is the first collection of her poetry to be published in book form. The volume contains fifty lyric and dramatic poems.Richard Eberhart comments: “Carol Hall’s poems are mature, tightly written and full of thought. She is not afraid to take a hard look at the truth. She can be light-hearted too. There is a sophisticated mind always present in the varying views and evaluations in this book.”Another interesting comment on this collection comes from Arnold Stein: “What especially attracts me is the voice I hear in the poems -- distinctive, wonderfully modulated, and remaining somehow itself even while expressing the intensities and surprises of the imagination with skill and force and courage.”Among the poems in this volume are some that have appeared previously in Botteghe Oscure (Italy), the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sewanee Review, New World Writing, Poetry, Western Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Folder, Perspective, Voices, Experiment, Interim, and Poetry Northwest.
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Rare Integrity
A Portrait of L. W. Payne, Jr.
Hansen Alexander
University of North Texas Press, 1986

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Robert M. Hutchins
Portrait of an Educator
Mary Ann Dzuback
University of Chicago Press, 1991
As president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951, Robert Maynard Hutchins came to be one of the most prominent and controversial figures in American higher education. To this day, his vision of what the university should be has given shape to twentieth-century debates over the content and function of education in the United States. In her critical biography, the first to focus on Hutchins' University of Chicago decades, Mary Ann Dzuback gives a full and fascinating account of this complex man—his development, his achievements and failures, and finally, his legacy.
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Seeing Baya
Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press
The first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth.  

On a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker named Baya escaped the drudgery of her labor by coloring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in November 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a one-woman show at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. She wasn’t yet sixteen years old. Alice Kaplan tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation of the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to reemerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage.
 
The toast of Paris for the 1947 season, Baya inspired colonialist fantasies about her “primitive genius” as well as genuine appreciation. She was featured in newspapers, radio, and a newsreel; her art was praised by Breton and Camus, Matisse and Braque. At the dawn of Algerian liberation, her appearance in Paris was used to stage the illusion of French-Algerian friendship, while horrific French massacres in Algeria were still fresh in memory. 

Kaplan uncovers the central figures in Baya’s life and the role they played in her artistic career. Among the most poignant was Marguerite Caminat-McEwen-Benhoura, who took Baya from her sister’s farm to Algiers to work as her maid and gave her paint and brushes. A complex and endearing character, Marguerite’s Pygmalion ambitions were decisive in determining Baya’s destiny. Kaplan also looks closely at Baya’s earliest paintings with an eye to their themes, their palette and design, and their enduring influence.

In vivid prose that brings Baya’s story into the present, Kaplan’s book, the fruit of scrupulous research in Algiers, Blida, Paris, and Provence, allows us to see in a whole new light the beloved artist who signed her paintings simply “Baya.”
 
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Sidney Rigdon
A Portrait of Religious Excess
Richard S. Van Wagoner
Signature Books, 2006

In the late 1820s a fiery young minister in western Ohio converted nearly 1,000 proselytes to the Reformed Baptist Movement. As these schismatics organized themselves into the new Disciples of Christ church, the Reverend Sidney Rigdon was already aligning himself with another, more radical movement, the Latter-day Saints, where he quickly became the LDS prophet’s principal advisor and spokesman. He served Joseph Smith loyally for the next fourteen years, even through a brief spat over the prophet’s romantic interest in his teenage daughter.

Next to Smith, Rigdon was the most influential early Mormon. He imported Reformed Baptist teachings into Latter-day Saint theology, wrote the canonized Lectures on Faith, championed communalism and isolationism, and delivered many of the most significant early sermons, including the famous Salt Sermon and the Ohio temple dedicatory address.

Following Smith’s death, Rigdon parted company with Brigham Young to lead his own group of some 500 secessionists Mormons in Pennsylvania. Rigdon’s following gradually dwindled, as the one-time orator took to wandering the streets, taunting indifferent passersby with God’s word. He was later recruited by another Mormon faction. Although he refused to meet with them, he agreed to be their prophet and send revelations by mail. Before long he had directed them to settle far-off Iowa and Manitoba, among other things. At his death, his followers numbered in the hundreds, and today they number about 10,000, mostly in Pennsylvania.

“Rigdon is a biographer’s dream,” writes Richard Van Wagoner. Intellectually gifted, manic-depressive, an eloquent orator and social innovator but a chronic indigent, Rigdon aspired to altruism but demanded advantage and deference. When he lost prominence, his early attainments were virtually written out of the historical record.

Correcting this void, Van Wagoner has woven the psychology of religious incontinence into the larger fabric of social history. In doing so, he reminds readers of the significance of this nearly-forgotten founding member of the LDS First Presidency. Nearly ten million members in over one hundred churches trace their heritage to Joseph Smith. Many are unaware of the importance of Rigdon’s contributions to their inherited theology.

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Southern Paiute
A Portrait
Logan Hebner
Utah State University Press, 2010

Now little recognized by their neighbors, Southern Paiutes once had homelands that included much of the vast Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert. From the Four Corners’ San Juan River to California’s lower Colorado, from Death Valley to Canyonlands, from Capitol Reef to the Grand Canyon, Paiutes lived in many small, widespread communities. They still do, but the communities are fewer, smaller, and mostly deprived of the lands and resources that sustained traditional lives.

To portray a people and the individuals who comprise it, William Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler relay Paiute voices and reveal Paiute faces, creating a space for them to tell their stories and stake claim to who they once were and now are.

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Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy
Baschenis, Bettera and the Painting of Cultural Identity
Ornat Lev-er
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy* centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.
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Taras Shevchenko
A Portrait in Four Sittings
George G. Grabowicz
Harvard University Press
Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), whose bicentennial coincided with the momentous events occurring in Ukraine in 2014, is almost universally acclaimed as the father of the modern Ukrainian nation and the icon of its cultural and political resurgence. Despite the volume and range of the scholarly attention devoted to him, however, much about his biography and creative output remains murky, largely as a result of the cult and myth that still envelop his legacy. This revisionist study reexamines the four basic frames that structure this legacy: Shevchenko’s biography, his career as a painter, the nature of his poetry, and its counterpoint in his considerable prose output. The questions addressed are fundamental: How did a former serf from the provinces become a presence at the imperial court in St. Petersburg? How could he reconcile a promising career in art and the world of patronage with his revolutionary poetry? How is a national poet made, and how does he function in the face of an official prohibition against writing and painting? And what does his Russian prose tell us about the Ukrainian voice of the national poet? The portrait that emerges shows a much more complex writer and artist than the icon intimates.
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Treasure Hill
Portrait Of A Silver Mining Camp
W. Turrentine Jackson
University of Nevada Press, 2000
In 1868, the discovery of an exceptionally rich silver ore on Treasure Hill in eastern Nevada led to an intense but short-lived boom. The White Pine Mining District was quickly organized, and in time a new Nevada county was created with that name. The boom lasted only two seasons, but dogged investors, mostly British, spent more than twenty years pursuing the dream of making White Pine a prosperous mining district before they withdrew and left behind only disappointment and ghost towns. W. Turrentine Jackson’s study of Treasure Hill, first published in 1963, has endured as a classic case study of a typical mining district in the western United States. Much more than events at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, the rush to White Pine, its brief season of glory and excitement followed by sudden decline, typifies the pattern of development in the majority of mining districts in the West. Far more than a tale of sudden wealth and lawlessness—although both were abundant—Treasure Hill encompasses the impact of growing international capitalism and labor movements on the mining West, the bitter politics surrounding the creation of towns and counties, and the human costs of boom and bust. Available again in a new paperback edition, with a foreword by mining historian Joseph V. Tingley,Treasure Hill offers readers a lively, thoroughly researched account of one of Nevada’s richest and briefest mining booms.
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Tuhami
Portrait of a Moroccan
Vincent Crapanzano
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Tuhami is an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker who believes himself married to a camel-footed she-demon. A master of magic and a superb story-teller, Tuhami lives in a dank, windowless hovel near the kiln where he works. Nightly he suffers visitations from the demons and saints who haunt his life, and he seeks, with crippling ambivalence, liberation from 'A'isha Qandisha, the she-demon.

In a sensitive and bold experiment in interpretive ethnography, Crapanzano presents Tuhami's bizarre account of himself and his world. In so doing, Crapanzano draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and symbolism to reflect upon the nature of reality and truth and to probe the limits of anthropology itself. Tuhami has become one of the most important and widely cited representatives of a new understanding of the whole discipline of anthropology.
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Up North in Michigan
A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons
Jerry Dennis
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Northern Michigan is a place, like all places, in change. Over the past half century, its landscape has been bulldozed, subdivided, and built upon. Climate change warms the water of the Great Lakes at an alarming rate—Lake Superior is now the fastest-warming large body of freshwater on the planet—creating increasingly frequent and severe storm events, altering aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, and contributing to further invasions by non-native plants and animals.

And yet the essence of this region, known to many as simply “Up North,” has proved remarkably perennial. Millions of acres of state and national forests and other public lands remain intact. Small towns peppered across the rural countryside have changed little over the decades, pushing back the machinery of progress with the help of dedicated land conservancies, conservation organizations, and other advocacy groups.

Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain.
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A View of Venice
Portrait of a Renaissance City
Kristin Love Huffman, editor
Duke University Press, 2024
Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, a woodcut first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird’s-eye portrait of Venice at its peak as an international hub of trade, art, and culture. An artistic and cartographic masterpiece of the Renaissance, the View depicts Venice as a vibrant, waterborne city interconnected by canals and bridges and filled with ornate buildings, elaborate gardens, and seafaring vessels. The contributors to A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City draw on a high-resolution digital scan of the over nine-foot-wide composite print to examine the complexities of this extraordinary woodcut and portrayal of early modern Venetian life. The essays show how the View constitutes an advanced material artifact of artistic, humanist, and scientific culture. They also outline the ways the print reveals information about the city’s economic and military power, religious and social infrastructures, and cosmopolitan residents. Featuring methodological advancements in the digital humanities, A View of Venice highlights the reality and myths of a topographically unique, mystical city and its place in the world.

Contributors. Karen-edis Barzman, Andrea Bellieni, Patricia Fortini Brown, Valeria Cafà, Stanley Chojnacki, Tracy E. Cooper, Giada Damen, Julia A. DeLancey, Piero Falchetta, Ludovica Galeazzo, Maartje van Gelder, Jonathan Glixon, Richard Goy, Anna Christine Swartwood House, Kristin Love Huffman, Holly Hurlburt, Claire Judde de Larivière, Blake de Maria, Martina Massaro, Cosimo Monteleone, Monique O’Connell, Mary Pardo, Giorgio Tagliaferro, Saundra Weddle, Bronwen Wilson, Rangsook Yoon
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Wisconsin Land and Life
A Portrait of the State
Robert C. Ostergren
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . .
    These are images of Wisconsin's land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offers an introduction to the state's natural environment, the historical processes of its human habitation, and the ways that nature and people interact to create distinct regional landscapes. To read it is to come away with a sweeping view of Wisconsin's geography and history: the glaciers that carved lakes and moraines; the soils and climate that fostered the prairies and great northern pine forests; the early Native Americans who began to shape the landscape and who established forest trails and river portages; the successive waves of Europeans who came to trade in furs, mine for lead and iron, cut the white pines, establish farms, work in the lumber and paper mills, and transform spent wheatfields into pasture for dairy cattle.
    Readers will learn, too, about the platting and naming of Wisconsin's towns, the establishment of county and township governments, the growth of urban neighborhoods and parishes, the role of rivers, railroads, and religion in shaping the state's growth, and the controversial reforestation of the cutover lands that eventually transformed hardscrabble farms and swamps into a sportsman's paradise.
    Abundantly illustrated with photos and maps, this book will richly reward anyone who wishes to learn more about the land and life of the place we know as Wisconsin.
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Wrestlin' Jacob
A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country
Erskine Clarke
University of Alabama Press, 2000
An important introduction to the efforts of whites to evangelize African Americans in the antebellum South
 
First published in 1979, Wrestlin’ Jacob offers important insights into the intersection of black and white religious history in the South. Erskine Clarke provides two arenas—one urban and one rural—that show what happened when white ministers tried to bring black slaves into the fold of Christianity. Clarke illustrates how the good intentions—and vain illusions—of the white preachers, coupled with the degradation and cultural strength of the slaves, played a significant role in the development of black churches in the South.
 
From 1833 to 1847, Reverend Charles Colcock Jones served as an itinerant minister to slaves on the rice and cotton plantations in Liberty County, Georgia. The aim of Jones, and of the largely Puritan-descended slave owners, was to harvest not only good Christians but also obedient and hard-working slaves. At the same time, similar efforts were under way in cosmopolitan Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston permitted blacks to worship only under the supervision of whites, and partially as a result, whites and blacks worshiped together in ways that would be unheard of later in the segregated South.
 
Clarke examines not only the white ministers’ motivation in their missionary work but also the slaves’ reasons for becoming a part of the church. He addresses the important issue of the continuity of African traditions with the religious life of slaves and provides a significant introduction to the larger issues of slavery and religion in the South.
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"Write Nothing about Politics"
A Portrait of Hans Bernd von Haeften
Barbara von Haeften
Michigan State University Press, 2018
 Barbara von Haeften’s memoir provides us with a moving account of the life of her husband Hans Bernd von Haeften, a lawyer, diplomat, and member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group in Nazi Germany. The Kreisau Circle participated in the assassination attempt of Hitler on July 20, 1944, carried out by Claus von Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften, Hans’s brother. The Circle had also developed extensive plans for a new government to be put into place after the removal of Hitler. Drawing on personal letters and clear memories, this biography describes the life and political activity of an extraordinary man who was executed in the struggle to save Germany from the disastrous consequences of Hitler’s regime, and it sheds light on Barbara von Haeften’s knowledge of and participation in the resistance movement.
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