A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1249 start with R start with R
Risk is a part of life. How we handle uncertainty and deal with potential threats influence decision making throughout our lives. In The Risk Society Revisited, Eugene A. Rosa, Ortwin Renn, and Aaron M. McCright offer the first book to present an integrated theory of risk and governance.
The authors examine our sociological understanding of risk and how we reconcile modern human conditions with our handling of risk in our quest for improved quality of life. They build a new framework for understanding risk—one that provides an innovative connection between social theory and the governance of technological and environmental risks and the sociopolitical challenges they pose for a sustainable future.
Showing how our consciousness affects risk in the decisions we make—as individuals and as members of a democratic society—The Risk Society Revisited makes an important contribution to the literature of risk research.
Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader documents the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when SNCC and CORE workers and volunteers arrived in the Deep South to register voters and teach non-violence, and more than 60,000 black Mississippians risked everything to overturn a system that had brutally exploited them.
In the 44 original documents in this anthology, you’ll read their letters, eavesdrop on their meetings, shudder at their suffering, and admire their courage. You’ll witness the final hours of three workers murdered on the project’s first day, hear testimony by black residents who bravely stood up to police torture and Klan firebombs, and watch the liberal establishment betray them.
These vivid primary sources, collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society, provide both first-hand accounts of this astounding grassroots struggle as well as a broader understanding of the Civil Rights movement.
The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The manuscripts were collected in the mid-1960s, at a time when few other institutions were interested in saving the stories of common people in McComb or Ruleville, Mississippi. Most have never been published before.
In February 1990 assailants murdered Kenya’s distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko. The horror of the attack, the images of his mutilated and burned corpse, the evidence of a notorious cover-up, and the revelations of the pressures, conflicts, and fears he faced in his last weeks have engaged Kenya’s publics for years. The Risks of Knowledge minutely examines the multiple and unfinished investigations into the crime.
Among the probes was an extensive 1990 inquiry organized by a New Scotland Yard team invited to Kenya by the government, as well as an open public commission of inquiry appointed by President Daniel arap Moi. The commission ran for seventeen months in 1990-91 before the president shut it down. International and Kenyan unrest over Ouko’s brutal death brought increasing attention to corruption and violence associated with the Moi government, leading in late 1991 to multiparty politics and in December 2002 to the elections that ended the Moi era.
This powerfully argued book raises important issues about the production of knowledge and the politics of memory that will interest a large interdisciplinary audience.
Risky Lessons brings readers inside three North Carolina middle schools to show how students and teachers support and subvert the official curriculum through their questions, choices, viewpoints, and reactions. Most important, the book highlights how sex education's formal and informal lessons reflect and reinforce gender, race, and class inequalities.
Ultimately critical of both conservative and liberal approaches, Fields argues for curricula that promote social and sexual justice. Sex education's aim need not be limited to reducing the risk of adolescent pregnancies, disease, and sexual activity. Rather, its lessons should help young people to recognize and contend with sexual desires, power, and inequalities.
They have, however, suffered greatly from unpredictable crop prices and erratic state agricultural policies. Michael Chibnik here examines the household economies, cultural ecology, grassroots political organizations of ribere¤os living in three floodplain villages near Iquitos, Peru. He describes the villagers' remarkable history, their participation in misconceived development programs, and their longstanding conflicts with regional elites. Chibnik discusses the political ecology of the region in the context of arguments about appropriate development policies in tropical lowlands. Although ribere¤os practice intensive agriculture with low environmental impact, they have not been able to improve their economic circumstances in recent years. Chibnik's study is a significant and timely contribution to current debates about the possibility of sustainable, equitable development in Amazonia.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winner David I. Kertzer
Arnold van Gennep’s masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of transitions: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, old age, and, finally, death. Van Gennep’s great insight was discerning a common structure in each of these seemingly different transitions, involving rituals of separation, liminality, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he set out the terms that would both define twentieth-century ritual theory and become a part of our everyday lexicon.
This new edition of his work demonstrates how we can still make use of its enduring critical tools to understand our own social, religious, and political worlds, and even our personal and professional lives. In his new introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and anthropologist David I. Kertzer sheds new light on van Gennep, on the battles he fought, and on the huge impact the book has had since publication of the first English edition.
As part of the ritual economy, a large quantity of jade and marble artifacts were deposited as offerings in the ritual architecture of the El Cajón region’s central community of Salitrón Viejo. Over 2,800 of these high-value items were recovered from their original ritual contexts, making Salitrón Viejo one of the largest in situ collections of these materials ever recovered in the New World. These materials are well dated and tremendously varied and provide a cross-section of all jade-carving lapidary traditions in use across eastern Mesoamerica between AD 250 and 350.
With a complementary website providing extensive additional description, visualization, and analysis (https://journals.psu.edu/opa/issue/view/3127), Ritual and Economy in a Pre-Columbian Chiefdom is a new and original contribution that employs an “economy of ritual approach” to the study of chiefdom societies in the Americas. It is a foundational reference point for any scholar working in Mesoamerica and Central America, especially those engaged in Maya research, as well as archaeologists working with societies at this scale of complexity in Latin America and around the world.
The Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca were two of the most sacred locations in the Inca empire. A pan-Andean belief held that they marked the origin place of the Sun and the Moon, and pilgrims from across the Inca realm made ritual journeys to the sacred shrines there. In this book, Brian Bauer and Charles Stanish explore the extent to which this use of the islands as a pilgrimage center during Inca times was founded on and developed from earlier religious traditions of the Lake Titicaca region.
Drawing on a systematic archaeological survey and test excavations in the islands, as well as data from historical texts and ethnography, the authors document a succession of complex polities in the islands from 2000 BC to the time of European contact in the 1530s AD. They uncover significant evidence of pre-Inca ritual use of the islands, which raises the compelling possibility that the religious significance of the islands is of great antiquity. The authors also use these data to address broader anthropological questions on the role of pilgrimage centers in the development of pre-modern states.
The ancient Mesoamerican city of Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico, is renowned for its extensive collection of elaborate stone stelae and altars, which were carved during the Late Preclassic period (300 BC-AD 250). Many of these monuments depict kings garbed in the costume and persona of a bird, a well-known avian deity who had great significance for the Maya and other cultures in adjacent regions. This Izapan style of carving and kingly representation appears at numerous sites across the Pacific slope and piedmont of Mexico and Guatemala, making it possible to trace political and economic corridors of communication during the Late Preclassic period.
In this book, Julia Guernsey offers a masterful art historical analysis of the Izapan style monuments and their integral role in developing and communicating the institution of divine kingship. She looks specifically at how rulers expressed political authority by erecting monuments that recorded their performance of rituals in which they communicated with the supernatural realm in the persona of the avian deity. She also considers how rulers used the monuments to structure their built environment and create spaces for ritual and politically charged performances. Setting her discussion in a broader context, Guernsey also considers how the Izapan style monuments helped to motivate and structure some of the dramatic, pan-regional developments of the Late Preclassic period, including the forging of a codified language of divine kingship. This pioneering investigation, which links monumental art to the matrices of political, economic, and supernatural exchange, offers an important new understanding of a region, time period, and group of monuments that played a key role in the history of Mesoamerica and continue to intrigue scholars within the field of Mesoamerican studies.
In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley.
Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsiders—conquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insider’s perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this people’s great ability to adapt.
This book examines ritual practices and public festivals in the Otavalo and Cotacachi areas of northern Andean Ecuador's Imbabura province. Otavaleños are a unique group in that they maintain their traditional identity but also cultivate a cosmopolitanism through frequent international travel. Ritual Encountersexplores the moral, mythic, and modern crossroads at which Otavaleños stand, and how, at this junction, they come to define themselves as millennial people.
Michelle Wibbelsman shows that Otavaleños are deeply engaged in transnational mobility and in the cultural transformations that have resulted from Otavalan participation in global markets, international consumer trends, and technological developments. Rituals have persisted among this ethnic community as important processes for symbolically capturing and critically assessing cultural changes in the face of modern influences. As religious expression, political commentary, transcendental communication, moral judgment, and transformative experience, Otavalan rituals constitute enduring practices that affirm ethnic identities, challenge dominant narratives, and take issue with power inequalities behind hegemony. Ritual Encounters thus offers an appreciation of the modern and mythic community as a single and emergent condition.
Zinacantan, Chamula, and Chenalhó are neighboring Mayan communities situated in highland Chiapas, Mexico, near the city of San Cristóbal Las Casas. The inhabitants of the three communities speak dialects of the Tzotzil language. Five religious fiestas, celebrated by these communities in honor of their saints, provide the data for Victoria Bricker's comparative study of ritual humor.
In Chenalhó and Chamula performances of ritual humor are concentrated in the five-day period of a single fiesta, while in Zanacantan similar performances are distributed over threee fiestas. In these fiesta settings, performers in distinctive costumes make obscene and sacreligious remarks in the context of religious ritual. These performances are defined as ritual humor because they occur only in ritual settings.
Bricker's study constitutes a controlled cross-cultural comparison of ceremonial or ritual humor in its social and cultural setting. Much new information is provided in verbatim texts, recorded during actual fiesta performances. The study reveals that, although the three communities share a common pool of ritual symbols, they elaborate them differently in ritual humor. The study analyzes the symbolic expression of values, social organization, and interethnic relations.
As part of Great Depression relief projects started in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored massive archaeological projects across Oklahoma. The WPA crews excavated eight mound sites and dozens of nonmound residential sites in the Arkansas River Valley that date between AD 1000 and 1450. These sites are considered the westernmost representations of Mississippian culture in the Southeast.
The results of these excavations were documented in field journals and photographs prepared by the field supervisors and submitted in a series of quarterly reports to WPA headquarters. These reports contain a wealth of unpublished information summarizing excavations at the mound sites and residential sites, including mound profiles, burial descriptions, house maps, artifact tables, and artifact sketches. Of the excavated mound sites, results from only one, Spiro, have been extensively studied and synthesized in academic literature. The seven additional WPA-excavated mound sites—Norman, Hughes, Brackett, Eufaula, Skidgel, Reed, and Lillie Creek—are known to archaeologists outside of Oklahoma only as unlabeled points on maps of mound sites in the Southeast.
The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma curates and contextualizes the results of the WPA excavations, showing how they inform archaeological understanding of Mississippian occupation in the Arkansas Valley. Regnier, Hammerstedt, and Savage also relate the history and experiences of practicing archaeology in the 1930s, incorporating colorful excerpts from field journals of the young, inexperienced archaeologists. Finally, the authors update current knowledge of mound and nonmound sites in the region, providing an excellent example of historical archaeology.
Material remains of religious practices may reveal striking local continuity, but they also highlight points of change, as distinct moments of manufacture and use transformed both sites and objects. Yet not every religious practice leaves a trace: the embodied use of imperial statuary, the rationale for the design of particular sacred books or the ephemeral “magical” implements designed by local religious experts leave few traces, if any, and are therefore less amenable to material investigation. What does remain, however, challenges any neat association between representation and reality or literary claim and practical application.
This volume represents a significant contribution to the material approach of studying the ancient Mediterranean’s diverse religious practices. In addition to volume editors Claudia Moser and Jennifer Knust, contributors include Henri Duday, Gunnel Ekroth, David Frankfurter, Richard Gordon, Valérie Huet, William Van Andringa, and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi. Topics covered include funerary remains, sacrificial practices, “magic,” Roman altars, imperial reliefs and statuary, and the role of sacred books.
Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003.
Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues.
Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses.
For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.
Propitiating the supernatural forces that could grant bountiful crops or wipe out whole villages through natural disasters was a sacred duty in ancient Peruvian societies, as in many premodern cultures. Ritual sacrifices were considered necessary for this propitiation and for maintaining a proper reciprocal relationship between humans and the supernatural world.
The essays in this book examine the archaeological evidence for ancient Peruvian sacrificial offerings of human beings, animals, and objects, as well as the cultural contexts in which the offerings occurred, from around 2500 B.C. until Inca times just before the Spanish Conquest. Major contributions come from the recent archaeological fieldwork of Steve Bourget, Anita Cook, and Alana Cordy-Collins, as well as from John Verano's laboratory work on skeletal material from recent excavations. Mary Frame, who is a weaver as well as a scholar, offers rich new interpretations of Paracas burial garments, and Donald Proulx presents a fresh view of the nature of Nasca warfare. Elizabeth Benson's essay provides a summary of sacrificial practices.
In Ritual Soundings, Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals represent.
Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory.
Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.
Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as:
* How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new?
* What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes?
* How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity?
* Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western?
* What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"? How does that role
cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society?
* What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise?
Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.
Megged analyzes these women’s life stories recorded during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as wills and bequests, petitions, parish records, and private letters that describe—in their own words—how they exercised agency in male-dominated and religious spaces. Translations of select documents and accompanying analysis illustrate the conditions in which women dissolved their marriages, remained in long-lasting extramarital cohabitations, and formed female-led households and “sisterhoods” of their own. Megged provides evidence that single women in colonial Mexico played a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than has been previously thought, creating spaces for themselves in which they could initiate and maintain autonomy and values distinct from those of elite society.
The institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico had wide-ranging repercussions and effects on general societal values. Rituals and Sisterhoods details the particular relevance of these changes to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and views of honor and shame in colonial society. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of colonial Latin American history, the history of Early Modern Spain and Europe, and gender and women’s studies.
Against the backdrop of South Africa's turbulent history, Muller shows how Shembe's ideas of female ritual purity developed as a response to a regime and culture that pushed all things associated with women, cultural expression, and Africanness to the margins.
Carol Muller breaks new ground in the study of this changing region and along the way includes fascinating details of her own poignant journey, as a young, white South African woman, to the "other" side of a divided society.
"In the remoteness of their mountain retreat, the herders of Chillihuani, Peru, recognize that respect for others is the central and most significant element of all thought and action," observes Inge Bolin. "Without respect, no society, no civilization, can flourish for long. Without respect, humanity is doomed and so is the earth, sustainer of all life."
In this beautifully written ethnography, Bolin describes the rituals of respect that maintain harmonious relations among people, the natural world, and the realm of the gods in an isolated Andean community of llama and alpaca herders that reaches up to 16,500 feet. Bolin was the first foreigner to visit Chillihuani, and she was permitted to participate in private family rituals, as well as public ceremonies. In turn, she allows the villagers to explain the meaning of their rituals in their own words.
From these first-hand experiences, Bolin offers an intimate portrait of an annual ritual cycle that dates back to Inca and pre-Inca times, including the ancient Pukllay; weddings; the Fiesta de Santiago, with its horse races on the top of the world; and Peru's Independence Day, when the Rituals of Respect for elders and young people alike are carried out within male and female hierarchies reminiscent of Inca times.
Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.
Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.
Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen
India’s sacred Ganga River is arguably one of the most iconic sites for worship, with a continuity of rituals for the living and the dead that span over two millennia. Along the river, from high in the Himalaya to the vast plains below, people gather daily to worship the Ganga through prayer and song. But large government-sponsored dams threaten to upend these practices.
In River Dialogues, Georgina Drew offers a detailed ethnographic engagement with the social movements contesting hydroelectric development on the Ganga. The book examines the complexity of the cultural politics that, on the one hand, succeeded in influencing an unprecedented reversal of government plans for three contested hydroelectric projects, and how, on the other hand, this decision sparked ripples of discontent after being paired with the declaration of a conservation zone where the projects were situated.
The book follows the work of women who were initially involved in efforts to stop the disputed projects. After looking to their discourses and actions, Drew argues for the use of a political ecology analysis that incorporates the everyday practice and everyday religious connections that animated the cultural politics of development. Drew offers a nuanced understanding of the struggles that communities enact to assert their ways of knowing and caring for resources that serves as an example for others critically engaging with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship.
Winner, William P. Clements Prize, Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America, 2004
Not quite the United States and not quite Mexico, La Junta de los Rios straddles the border between Texas and Chihuahua, occupying the basin formed by the conjunction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the Chihuahuan Desert, ranking in age and dignity with the Anasazi pueblos of New Mexico.
In the first comprehensive history of the region, Jefferson Morgenthaler traces the history of La Junta de los Rios from the formation of the Mexico-Texas border in the mid-19th century to the 1997 ambush shooting of teenage goatherd Esquiel Hernandez by U.S. Marines performing drug interdiction in El Polvo, Texas. "Though it is scores of miles from a major highway, I found natives, soldiers, rebels, bandidos, heroes, scoundrels, drug lords, scalp hunters, medal winners, and mystics," writes Morgenthaler. "I found love, tragedy, struggle, and stories that have never been told." In telling the turbulent history of this remote valley oasis, he examines the consequences of a national border running through a community older than the invisible line that divides it.
The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat. The river brings her family back, as she records the stories of her fellow “river rats”: steamboat veterans, deckhands, captains, and cooks.
The River Home takes the reader into a world few ever glimpse, that of America’s riverboats. In the fast-paced narrative, with incisive characterizations and dialogue, the author introduces us to this vivid milieu and a gallery of fascinating people. We meet her father, a “wild river man from the Kentucky hills,” her mother, “a proper girl from a Cincinnati Dutch clan,” and her brother, a fourth-generation river man, as well as the artists and academics she meets in her adult life.
Weil’s voice is clear and wry, as well as poetic, bringing out both the sadness and joys of a family torn by mismatched backgrounds. Her themes speak to all: the confusion brought by family conflict, the strength of family love no matter how troubled the relationships, the mortality we all face, the importance of where we come from and where we go.
Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize
Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award
“Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.”
—Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement
“[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.”
—The Nation
“An important, arguably seminal, book…Always trenchant and learned.”
—Wall Street Journal
A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism.
When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.
Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.
But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.
“Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.”
—A. O. Scott, New York Times
“River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’”
—Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books
Diverse influences transformed the borderlands as Spain, Mexico, and the United States competed for control of the region. Indian slaves joined Spanish society; Mexicans allied with Indians to defend river communities; Anglo Americans and Mexicans intermarried and collaborated; and women sued to confront spousal abuse and to secure divorces. Drawn into multiple conflicts along the border, Mexican nationals and Mexican Texans (tejanos) took advantage of their transnational social relations and ambiguous citizenship to escape criminal prosecution, secure political refuge, and obtain economic opportunities. To confront the racialization of their cultural practices and their increasing criminalization, tejanos claimed citizenship rights within the United States and, in the process, created a new identity.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.
Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”
A hundred forty years ago, the Western Shoshone occupied a vast area of present-day Nevada—from Idaho in the north to Death Valley in the south. Today, the Newe hold a fraction of their former territory, still practicing native lifeways while accepting many aspect of American culture. Their story deserves telling.
The Road on Which We Came is the first comprehensive history of the Great Basin Shoshone. Written by historian Steven Crum, an enrolled tribal member, this book presents the Shoshone as an active force in their own history, effectively adapting to harsh physical environment, defending their territory in the nineteenth century, and working to modify or reject assimilationists policy in the present.
Noting that Native American history did not end with Wounded Knee, Crum gives substantial attention to twentieth-century events up to 1990 and emphasizes that in every period tribal actions can be characterized by a plurality of voices and opinions.
McNall rejects the traditional view that blames the failure of the Alliance on a turn to mass-based electoral politics, but rather sees the move into national politics by the Farmer's Alliance as part of a rational strategy to better wage their fight for economic justice. The Kansas populists failed, he argues, because of their inability to embrace a broad, working-class base, to provide an effective alternative vision, and ultimately to create a distinct class organization. Debates about how classes come into being, or how democracy is to be realized, cannot be settled in the abstract. McNall's recreation of this heroic struggle is a model in the analysis of class formation. At the same time, The Road to Rebellion is dynamic social history, which holds vital lessons for structuring and realizing alternative political agendas today.
The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times.
Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments," Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements.
The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal," both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.
First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate attention from the public, politicians, and scholars alike. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 were sold. In April of 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this condensation to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best-seller, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States, not including the British edition or the nearly twenty translations into such languages as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese, and not to mention the many underground editions produced in Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain.
After thirty-two printings in the United States, The Road to Serfdom has established itself alongside the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Milton Friedman, commemorates the enduring influence of The Road to Serfdom on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" in the 1980s and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.
F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century.
On the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom:
"One of the most important books of our generation. . . . It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen."—Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944
"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."—George Orwell, Collected Essays
The Reader is organized around four central concerns. It seeks to place modernity in theoretical and historical perspective, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary, from Aristotle and Rousseau through Durkheim and Weber to Habermas and Mary Douglas. It takes the United States to be in some respects the type-case of modernity and in others the most atypical of modern societies, analyzing its common faith in individual freedom and democratic self-government, and its persistent paradoxes of inequality, exclusion, and empire. The Reader is also concerned to test the axiomatic modern assumption that rational cognition and moral evaluation, fact and value, are absolutely divided, arguing instead that they overlap and interact much more than conventional wisdom in the university today usually admits. Finally, it criticizes modernity’s affirmation that faith and knowledge stand even more utterly at odds, arguing instead that their overlap and interaction, obvious in every premodern society, animate the modern world as well.
Through such critical and constructive inquiry this Reader probes many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements, at mortal risk. Through the practical self-understanding such inquiry spurs, Bellah shows how we may share responsibility for the world we have made and seek to heal it.
This collection of essays by leading critics and poets charts Robert Hayden’s growing reputation as a major writer of some of the twentieth century’s most important poems on African-American themes, including the famed “Middle Passage” and “Frederick Douglass.” The essays illuminate the themes and techniques that established Hayden as a modernist writer with affinities to T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, and W. B. Yeats, as well as to traditions of African-American writings that include such figures as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry is the first and only book to collect significant essays on this distinguished poet. Covering sixty years of commentary, book reviews, essays, and Hayden’s own published materials, this volume is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the poet’s vision of experience, artistry, and influence. The book includes forty different works that examine the life and poetry of Hayden, the first African-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called Poet Laureate) and to receive the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.
Merging literary analysis with cultural criticism and biographical study, Patricia R. Schroeder explores Johnson's ongoing role as a cultural icon. Schroeder's detailed analysis engages key images and myths about the blues musician (such as the Faustian crossroads exchange of his soul for guitar virtuosity). Navigating the many competing interpretations that swirl around him, Schroeder reveals the cultural purposes served by the stories and the storytellers. The result is a fascinating examination of the relationships among Johnson's life, its subsequent portrayals, and the forces that drove the representations.
Offering penetrating insights into both Johnson and the society that perpetuates him, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is essential reading for blues fans and cultural critics interested in a foundational musical figure.
Roberto Michels' First Lectures in Political Sociology was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A number of papers on key ideas in the social sciences are made available to Americans for the first time in this book. Representative of Western European culture, Roberto Michels, author of the famous Political Parties and many other works, asks and gives answers to a number of questions basic to the further study of political behavior, socialeconomic institutions, and public law.
There parade before the reader of this volume the really great European contributors to social science of the last century: Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Gabriel Tarde, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Georges Sorel, and many other critics and scholars. At every step the sociologist, the economist, the psychologist, and the political scientist — for Michels was all of these—intermingle and reinforce each other.
German born, Roberto Michels studied at Paris, Munich, Leipzig, Halle, and Turin, and taught successively in some of Europe's greatest universities. In 1927 he lectured in America at the University of Chicago and elsewhere.
Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan.
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture.
Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre.
Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U.
Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University.
Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.
Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor
The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.
Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.
Rock art, petroglyphs, and pictographs have been made by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Images have been found on bedrock, cliff faces, ridge tops, and boulders and in rock shelters. Some rock surfaces are covered with abstract and geometric designs such as concentric circles, zigzag lines, grids, and cross-hatched and ladder-like patterns. Others depict humans, footprints and handprints, mammals, serpents, and mythic creatures. All were meticulously pecked, incised or painted. This ancient art form connects us to Native Americans’ past, traditions, world views, and sacred places.
Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape: From Atlantic Canada to Chesapeake Bay is the culmination of the research of preeminent rock art scholar Edward J. Lenik. Here, he profiles more than 64 examples of rock art in varied locations from Nova Scotia to Maryland. Chapters are organized geographically and lead the reader through coastal sites, rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, and upland sites.
Lenik discusses the rock art examples in the context of the indigenous landscape, noting the significance of the place of discovery. Coverage includes a meticulous description of the design or motif and suggestions of time frame, artist-makers, and interpretations. Where possible, indigenous views on the artifacts enrich the narrative. Other invaluable elements are a discussion of how to identify indigenous rock art; a glossary of rock art terms and features and archaeological culture periods; an up-to-date bibliography; and an appendix of a number of reported but unconfirmed petroglyph sites in the regions.
Over many centuries, the prehistoric Fremont and Anasazi peoples of present-day Utah left an artistic record in which distinctive styles are readily identifiable. From the Uinta Mountains through the central canyonlands to the Virgin River, Utah’s abundant prehistoric rock art offers glimpses of a lost world.
The Rock Art of Utah is a rich sample of the many varieties of rock art found in the state. Through nearly two hundred high-quality photographs and drawings from the Donald Scott Collection, all made during the 1920s and 1930s, rock art expert Polly Schaafsma provides a fascinating, comprehensive tour of this unique legacy.
From the Uinta Mountains through the central canyonlands to the Virgin River, Utah’s abundant prehistoric rock art offers glimpses of a lost world. Over many centuries, the Fremont and Anasazi peoples left an artistic record in which distinctive styles are readily identifiable.
Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge documents, for the first time, fifty years of oral history from this famous climbing community. Through extensive interviews, Maples reconstructs the growth of rock climbing in the region—including a twice-failed dam project, mysterious first routes, unauthorized sport-route growth on public lands, and a controversial archaeological dig. The book details five decades of collaborations to secure ongoing access to some of the world’s most beautiful and technically demanding routes and the challenges along the way.
More than a recounting of the past, however, Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge uses the region’s extraordinary history to argue that climbing has the potential to be a valuable source of sustainable economic activity in rural areas throughout Appalachia today and in the years to come. The book concludes by offering policy recommendations and lessons learned about building beneficial partnerships among climbers, local communities, and public land managers to encourage community development and ecotourism alongside preservation.
In the mid-1960s, Peter T. Furst began a lifelong encounter with their intellectual culture, facilitated by a growing relationship of mutual trust with Ramón Medina, an aspiring Huichol shaman, storyteller, and artist, and his wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos. Ramón, who became a full-fledged shaman with his fifth peyote pilgrimage, also had a Huichol name: 'Uru Temay, Young Arrow Person.' Over the years Furst published a number of articles on various facets of Huichol life, many of them centered on what he learned and observed during his growing relationship with Ramón and his people.
Bound together by personal reminiscences and background explanations, Furst here brings many of those articles together and updates them. It includes transcriptions of myths that function as charters for 'being Huichols,' descriptions of deities, rituals, beliefs, as well as discussion of the place of hallucinogens in Huichol culture. Furst skillfully weaves current reflections with memories and older material in a manner that makes for a highly readable, contemporary presentation.
Paper is temporarily out of stock, Cloth (0-87972-368-8) is available at the paper price until further notice.
Bridging the disciplines of musicology and cultural studies, the collection has two primary goals: to seek out a language for talking about music culture and to look at the relationship of music to culture in general. The editors’ introduction provides a backward glance at recent rock criticism and also looks to the future of the rapidly expanding discipline of popular music studies. Taking seriously the implications of critical theory for the study of non-literary aesthetic endeavors, the volume also addresses such issues as the affective power of popular music and the psychic construction of fandom.
Rock Over the Edge will appeal to scholars and students in popular music studies and American Studies as well as general readers interested in popular music.
Contributors. Ian Balfour, Roger Beebe, Michael Coyle, Robert Fink, Denise Fulbrook, Tony Grajeda, Lawrence Grossberg, Trent Hill, Josh Kun, Jason Middleton, Lisa Ann Parks, Ben Saunders, John J. Sheinbaum, Gayle Wald, Warren Zanes
Showcases the wealth of new research on sacred imagery found in twelve states and four Canadian provinces
In archaeology, rock-art—any long-lasting marking made on a natural surface—is similar to material culture (pottery and tools) because it provides a record of human activity and ideology at that site. Petroglyphs, pictographs, and dendroglyphs (tree carvings) have been discovered and recorded throughout the eastern woodlands of North America on boulders, bluffs, and trees, in caves and in rock shelters. These cultural remnants scattered on the landscape can tell us much about the belief systems of the inhabitants that left them behind.
The Rock-Art of Eastern North America brings together 20 papers from recent research at sites in eastern North America, where humidity and the actions of weather, including acid rain, can be very damaging over time. Contributors to this volume range from professional archaeologists and art historians to avocational archaeologists, including a surgeon, a lawyer, two photographers, and an aerospace engineer. They present information, drawings, and photographs of sites ranging from the Seven Sacred Stones in Iowa to the Bald Friar Petroglyphs of Maryland and from the Lincoln Rise Site in Tennessee to the Nisula Site in Quebec.
Discussions of the significance of artist gender, the relationship of rock-art to mortuary caves, and the suggestive link to the peopling of the continent are particularly notable contributions. Discussions include the history, ethnography, recording methods, dating, and analysis of the subject sites and integrate these with the known archaeological data.
Histories of American rock music and the 1960s counterculture typically focus on the same few places: Woodstock, Monterey, Altamont. Yet there was also a very active college circuit that brought edgy acts like the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground to different metropolitan regions and smaller towns all over the country. These campus concerts were often programmed, promoted, and reviewed by students themselves, and their diverse tastes challenged narrow definitions of rock music.
Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s. Analyzing campus archives and college newspapers, historian James Carter traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities in the 1960s. Furthermore, he finds that these progressive students refused to segregate genres like folk, R&B, hard rock, and pop. Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower gives readers a front-row seat to a dynamic time for the music industry, countercultural politics, and youth culture.
Every nation in the Americas—from indigenous Peru to revolutionary Cuba—has been touched by the cultural and musical impact of rock. Rockin’ Las Américas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, the Andes, and the Southern Cone as well as among Latinos in the United States.
The contributors include experts in music, history, literature, culture, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing <I>rockeros</I> and <I>rockeras</I>. The multidisciplinary, transnational, and comparative perspectives they bring to the topic serve to address a broad range of fundamental questions about rock in Latin and Latino America, including: Why did rock become such a controversial cultural force in the region? In what ways has rock served as a medium for expressing national identities? How are unique questions of race, class, and gender inscribed in Latin American rock? What makes Latin American rock Latin American? <I>Rockin’ Las Américas</I> is an essential book for anyone who hopes to understand the complexities of Latin American culture today.
Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives?
In Rockin’ Out of the Box, Mimi Schippers, employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. The author focuses on this sizable section of rock music both because it is widely inclusive of men and women and because it explicitly adopted feminism as its point of departure from mainstream music. Schippers uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain her observations that gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process, she demonstrates, operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles.
Schippers, who spent more than two years frequenting alternative hard rock clubs and concerts in Chicago, conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, this book also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people.
Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These women tell powerful stories that highlight and detail women's many roles as workers, trade unionists, and family members. They all faced difficulties in their personal lives, overcame challenges in their unions, and individually and collectively helped improve women's everyday working lives.
Maida Springer-Kemp came from New York City's Harlem, Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to represent the AFL-CIO in Africa. In Chicago, Alice Peurala fought for her job in the steel mill and her place in the steel workers' union. Jessie De La Cruz organized farm workers in California. Esther Peterson, organizer, educator, and lobbyist, became an advisor to four U.S. presidents. In chapters based on oral history interviews, these women and others provide new perspectives and practical advice for today's working women. They share an idealistic and practical commitment to the labor movement. As Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers and a founding member of the National Organization of Women said, "You have to take a look at how to rock the boat. You don't want to spill yourself out if you can avoid it, but sometimes you have to rock the boat." From these women we, too, learn how to rock the boat.
The opposing forces of conservation and development have shaped and will continue to shape the natural environment and scenic beauty of the American West. Perhaps nowhere are their opposite effects more visible than in the neighboring states of Colorado and Utah, so alike in their spectacular mountain environments, yet so different in their approaches to land conservation. This study explores why Colorado has over twenty-five land trusts, while Utah has only one.
John Wright traces the success of voluntary land conservation in Colorado to the state’s history as a region of secular commerce. As environmental consciousness has grown in Colorado, people there have embraced the businesslike approach of land trusts as simply a new, more responsible way of conducting the real estate business.
In Utah, by contrast, Wright finds that Mormon millennialism and the belief that growth equals success have created a public climate opposed to the formation of land trusts. As Wright puts it, "environmentalism seems to thrive in the Centennial state within the spiritual vacuum which is filled by Mormonism in Utah." These findings remind conservationists of the power of underlying cultural values that affect their efforts to preserve private lands.
Rodeo is an enduring relic of America’s popular culture, drawing capacity audiences to all its venues, from small western cowtowns to Madison Square Garden. The rodeo cowboy, that figure of rugged independence and solitary courage, continues to evoke the spirit of a vanished frontier and the hardy pioneers who conquered it. In this study historian Michael Allen examines the image of the rodeo cowboy and the role this image has played in popular culture over the past century. He sees rodeo as a significant American folk festival and the rodeo cowboy as the avatar of a nearly extinct authentic figure, the “real cowboy,” who embodies the skills and values of traditional western rural culture. Allen’s analysis explores the evolution of the myth of the rodeo man and its subsequent institutionalization and acculturation into the media of popular culture. He also examines the impact on this myth of significant changes in the rodeo milieu—the commercialization of the event and the professionalization of rodeo performers; the arrival on the rodeo scene of performers from outside the white, male, western, rural origins of the traditional cowboy performers. He discovers that America’s—and indeed the world’s—fascination with the rodeo cowboy reflects feelings far deeper than a taste for exciting entertainment. Allen’s discussion of the archetypal figure of the rodeo cowboy will change forever our perception of rodeo, but it will also help us understand how the ancient tension between frontier and civilization continues to play a role in our national imagination.
Richard Bailey's narrative, calm and impartial yet spiked with wit and suspense, captures perfectly the slightly haunted and overwrought air of Victorian rural America, calling on newspaper accounts, interviews, and eyewitness reports of the day. Inevitably, the quiet accumulation of details builds to a story that transcends its individual events to touch on the universal themes of any age.
Rogue Scholar is about the evil of one man who lived a life of deception and crime. Yet in a larger sense it is also the portrait of a condemned soul in its final hours, an examination of the death penalty, and a reminder that media sensationalism is nothing new.
A revealing portrait of law-breaking and law enforcement on the Florida frontier
The pervasive influence of the frontier is fundamental to an understanding of antebellum Florida. James M. Denham traces the growth and social development of this sparsely settled region through its experience with crime and punishment. He examines such issues as Florida's criminal code, its judicial and law enforcement officers, the accommodation of criminals in jails and courts, outlaw gangs, patterns of punishment, and the attitude of the public toward lawbreakers.
Using court records, government documents, newspapers, and personal papers, Denham explores how crime affected ordinary Floridians—whites and blacks, perpetrators, victims, and enforcers. He contends that although the frontier determined the enforcement and administration of the law, the ethic of honor dominated human relationships.
Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.
early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries
by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites
in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of
paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake,
Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.
Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of
myth in the structure of societies past and present—how we create,
use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions
about ourselves and our world.
Many of the sections in Mythologies, originally published as a
two-volume cloth set, will soon be available in four paperback volumes
(two are announced here; two more are scheduled for 1993). These
volumes will reproduce the articles, introductory essays, and
illustrations as they appeared in the full Mythologies set.
---Classical Review
---Classical World
The essays treat works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats.
In a complementary fashion the essays consider domestic art in relation to questions of decorum, status, wealth, social privilege, and obligation. Patrons emerge as actively interested in the character of their surroundings; artists appear as responsive to the desire of their patrons. The evidence in private art of homosexual conduct in high society is also set forth.
Originality of subject matter, sophisticated appreciation of stylistic and compositional nuance, and philosophical perceptions of the relationship of humanity and nature are among the themes that the essays explore. Together they demonstrate that Roman domestic art must be viewed on its own terms.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquities at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
The work gathered in Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption displays the breadth and depth of scholarship in the field made possible by these fundamental changes. The first five essays approach individual objects and artistic tropes, as well as their cultural contexts and functions, from fresh and dynamic angles. The latter essays focus on case studies in Pompeii, demonstrating how close visual analysis firmly rooted in local and temporal contexts not only strengthens understanding of ancient interactions with monuments but also sparks a reconsideration of long-held assumptions reinforced by earlier scholarship.
These rigorous essays reflect and honor the groundbreaking scholarship of Elaine K. Gazda. In addition to volume editors Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, contributors include Bettina Bergmann, Elise Friedland, Barbara Kellum, Diana Y. Ng, Jessica Powers, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, Lea M. Stirling, Molly Swetnam-Burland, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, and Jennifer Trimble.
Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.
It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.
George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.
This expanded edition of Donahue’s work includes significant new material on current trends in food studies, including the archaeology and bioarchaeology of ancient food and drink; an additional collection of inscriptions on public banquets from the Roman West; and an extensive bibliography of scholarship produced in the last ten years. It will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of the ancient world, but also to anthropologists and sociologists interested in food and social group dynamics.
Examining a wealth of archaelogical and literary evidence in light of central place theory, and using sound statistical techniques, Engels reconstructs the human geography of the Corinthia, including an estimate of the population. He shows that—given the amount of cultivatable land—rents and taxes levied onthe countryside could not have supported a highly populated city like Corinth. Neither could its inhabitants have supported themselves directly by farming.
Rather, the city constituted a thriving market for domestic, regional, and overseas raw materials, agricultural products, and manufactured goods, at the same time satisfying the needs of those who plied the various land and sea routes that converged there. Corinth provided key governmental and judicial services to the province of Achaea, and its religious festivals, temples, and monuments attracted numerous visitors from all corners of the Roman world. In accounting for the large portion of residents who participated in these various areas outside of the traditional consumer model, Engels reveals the depth and sophistication of the economics of ancient cities.
Roman Corinth is a much-needed critique of the currently dominant approach of ancient urbanism. It will be of crucial interest to scholars and students in classics, ancient history, and urban studies.
Interest in goddess worship is growing in contemporary society, as women seek models for feminine spirituality and wholeness. New cults are developing around ancient goddesses from many cultures, although their modern adherents often envision and interpret the goddesses very differently than their original worshippers did.
In this thematic study of the Roman goddess Ceres, Barbette Spaeth explores the rich complexity of meanings and functions that grew up around the goddess from the prehistoric period to the Late Roman Empire. In particular, she examines two major concepts, fertility and liminality, and two social categories, the plebs and women, which were inextricably linked with Ceres in the Roman mind. Spaeth then analyzes an image of the goddess in a relief of the Ara Pacis, an important state monument of the Augustan period, showing how it incorporates all these varied roles and associations of Ceres. This interpretation represents a new contribution to art history.
With its use of literary, epigraphical, numismatic, artistic, and archaeological evidence, The Roman Goddess Ceres presents a more encompassing view of the goddess than was previously available. It will be important reading for all students of Classics, as well as for a general audience interested in New Age, feminist, or pagan spirituality.
The mosaics in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum span the second through the sixth centuries AD and reveal the diversity of compositions found throughout the Roman Empire during this period. Elaborate floors of stone and glass tesserae transformed private dwellings and public buildings alike into spectacular settings of vibrant color, figural imagery, and geometric design. Scenes from mythology, nature, daily life, and spectacles in the arena enlivened interior spaces and reflected the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This online catalogue documents all of the mosaics in the Getty Museum’s collection, presenting their artistry in new color photography as well as the contexts of their discovery and excavation across Rome's expanding empire—from its center in Italy to provinces in southern Gaul, North Africa, and ancient Syria.
The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/, includes zoomable high-resolution photography, embedded glossary terms and additional comparative images, and interactive maps drawn from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue, and JPG and PPT downloads of the main catalogue images.
William Slater's new volume Roman Theater and Society brings an important perspective to the much-maligned status of the Roman theater, which has only recently been reappraised and appreciated as uniquely Roman rather than criticized for not being Greek. From this point of embarkation, William Slater and the nine contributors discuss theater in Rome and the Greek east with a definition of performance incorporating not only stage performances but also dinnertime entertainment, sporting events, and political events. Contributors are T. D. Barnes, K. M. Coleman, J. C. Edmonson, E. R. Gebhard, J. R. Green, E. J. Jory, W. D. Lebek, and D. S. Potter.
Individual chapters combine literary evidence with archaeological, thereby engendering a deeper appreciation for the social and political roles of Roman theater. It becomes clear that these roles were of great influence in giving voice to the popular demands of the average Roman. In examining the roles of theater the contributors turn to the players and audience themselves for deeper understanding.
Roman Theater and Society will be of great interest to classicists, theater specialists, and anyone interested in the interplay among plays, theaters, and the people on stage and in the audience.
William J. Slater is Professor of Classics, McMaster University.
Writers examined include Jack Kerouac, Jim Dodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Least Heat Moon, Robert M. Pirsig, Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mona Simpson, and Walt Whitman.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press