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Table Talk
Building Democracy One Meal at a Time
Janet A. Flammang
University of Illinois Press, 2016

The civic virtues of a seat at the table

Etiquette books insist that we never discuss politics during a meal. In Table Talk, Janet A. Flammang offers a polite rebuttal, presenting vivid firsthand accounts of people's lives at the table to show how mealtimes can teach us the conversational give-and-take foundational to democracy. Delving into the ground rules about listening, sharing, and respect that we obey when we break bread, Flammang shows how conversations and table activities represent occasions for developing our civil selves. If there are cultural differences over practices--who should speak, what behavior is acceptable, what topics are off limits, how to resolve conflict--our exposure to the making, enforcement, and breaking of these rules offers a daily dose of political awareness and growth. Political table talk provides a forum to practice the conversational skills upon which civil society depends. It also ignites the feelings of respect, trust, and empathy that undergird the idea of a common good that is fundamental to the democratic process.

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Tabloid Culture
Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television
Kevin Glynn
Duke University Press, 2000
During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the “tabloidization” of the nation’s media took hold. In Tabloid Culture Kevin Glynn draws on diverse theoretical sources and an unprecedented range of electronic and print media in order to analyze important aspects and key debates that have emerged around this phenomenon.
Glynn begins by situating these media shifts within the context of Reaganism, which gave rise to distinctive ideological currents in society and led the socially and economically disenfranchised to access new forms of information via the exploding television industry. He then tackles specific daytime talk shows and tabloid newscasts such as Jerry Springer and A Current Affair, reality-TV programs such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted, and two different supermarket tabloids’ coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Tabloid Culture is the first book to treat these diverse yet related media forms and events in tandem. Rejecting the elitist dismissal of sensationalist media, Glynn instead traces the cultural currents and countercurrents running through their forms and products. Locating both reactionary and oppositional meanings in these texts, he demonstrates how these particular media genres draw on and contribute to important cultural struggles over the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, “normality,” “truth,” and “reality.” The study ends by discussing how the growing use of the Internet provides an entirely new realm in which such material can circulate, distort, inform, and flourish.
This innovative and provocative study of contemporary mainstream media culture in the United States will be valuable to those interested in both print and television media, the cultural-political influence of the Reagan era, and American culture in general.
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Taboo
Boyer Rickel
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

An impressionistic memoir offers images of a life in progress, including scenes from Boyer Rickel’s rural Tempe, Arizona, childhood in the 1950s; his relationship with a physically shrinking father; his eccentric teenage friendships; his growing awareness of his sexuality among young, Hispanic gays; and a trip through Italy with his lover. A personal book, but also wholly universal, Taboo investigates the way one breaks through taboos and becomes a self-realized adult.

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Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Ella Shohat
Duke University Press, 2006
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time a selection of trailblazing essays by Ella Shohat, an internationally renowned theorist of postcolonial and cultural studies of Iraqi-Jewish background. Written over the past two decades, these twelve essays—some classic, some less known, some new—trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the consequences of a deep critique of Eurocentric epistemology, whether to rethink feminism through race, nationalism through ethnicity, or colonialism through sexuality.

Shohat’s critical method boldly transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries. She explores such issues as the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, the paradoxical repercussions for audio-visual media of the “graven images” taboo, the allegorization of race through the refiguring of Cleopatra, the allure of imperial popular culture, and the gender politics of medical technologies. She also examines the resistant poetics of exile and displacement; the staging of historical memory through the commemorations of the two 1492s, the anomalies of the “national” in Zionist discourse, the implications of the hyphen in the concept “Arab-Jew,” and the translation of the debates on orientalism and postcolonialism across geographies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the concerns that have animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades; it also points toward new scholarly possibilities.

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Taboo Subjects
Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis
Gwen Bergner
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening - frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing - often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene. Noting this parallel between specular births of racial and sexual subjectivity, Gwen Bergner uses a comparative analysis of psychoanalytic theory and American literature to develop a theory of racialization - the process through which individuals assume an identity as black or white. Examining the primal scenes of double consciousness in works by Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, among others, alongside the formative visual traumas of psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Freud, Taboo Subjects reveals how literature disrupts psychoanalysis's conventional models of race and gender identification, forcing a reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts. And from psychoanalysis Bergner derives a critical vocabulary for theorizing racialization as it intersects with sex and gender, for both black and white Americans.
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Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
Harry Collins
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Much of what humans know we cannot say. And much of what we do we cannot describe. For example, how do we know how to ride a bike when we can’t explain how we do it? Abilities like this were called “tacit knowledge” by physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, but here Harry Collins analyzes the term, and the behavior, in much greater detail, often departing from Polanyi’s treatment.

In Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concept’s disparate domains by explaining explicit knowledge and classifying tacit knowledge. Collins then teases apart the three very different meanings, which, until now, all fell under the umbrella of Polanyi’s term: relational tacit knowledge (things we could describe in principle if someone put effort into describing them),  somatic tacit knowledge (things our bodies can do but we cannot describe how, like balancing on a bike), and collective tacit knowledge (knowledge we draw that is the property of society, such as the rules for language). Thus, bicycle riding consists of some somatic tacit knowledge and some collective tacit knowledge, such as the knowledge that allows us to navigate in traffic. The intermixing of the three kinds of tacit knowledge has led to confusion in the past; Collins’s book will at last unravel the complexities of the idea.

Tacit knowledge drives everything from language, science, education, and management to sport, bicycle riding, art, and our interaction with technology.  In Collins’s able hands, it also functions at last as a framework for understanding human behavior in a range of disciplines.

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Tacit Racism
Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck
University of Chicago Press, 2020
We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions.

Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged—but endangering the society itself.

Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.
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Tacit Subjects
Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press, 2011
Tacit Subjects is a pioneering analysis of how gay immigrant men of color negotiate race, sexuality, and power in their daily lives. Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.
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Tacky’s Revolt
The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations
Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize
Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize
Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award
Finalist for the Cundill Prize


“Brilliant…groundbreaking…Brown’s profound analysis and revolutionary vision of the Age of Slave War—from the too-often overlooked Tacky’s Revolt to the better-known Haitian Revolution—gives us an original view of the birth of modern freedom in the New World.”
—Cornel West

“Not only a story of the insurrection, but ‘a martial geography of Atlantic slavery,’ vividly demonstrating how warfare shaped every aspect of bondage…Forty years after Tacky’s defeat, new arrivals from Africa were still hearing about the daring rebels who upended the island.”
Harper’s

“A sobering read for contemporary audiences in countries engaged in forever wars…It is also a useful reminder that the distinction between victory and defeat, when it comes to insurgencies, is often fleeting: Tacky may have lost his battle, but the enslaved did eventually win the war.”
New Yorker

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended their domain, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.

Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event, Tacky’s Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

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The Taco Truck
How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City
Robert Lemon
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Icons of Mexican cultural identity and America's melting pot ideal, taco trucks have transformed cityscapes from coast to coast. The taco truck radiates Mexican culture within non-Mexican spaces with a presence—sometimes desired, sometimes resented—that turns a public street corner into a bustling business.

Drawing on interviews with taco truck workers and his own skills as a geographer, Robert Lemon illuminates new truths about foodways, community, and the unexpected places where ethnicity, class, and culture meet. Lemon focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio, to show how the arrival of taco trucks challenge preconceived ideas of urban planning even as cities use them to reinvent whole neighborhoods. As Lemon charts the relationships between food practices and city spaces, he uncovers the many ways residents and politicians alike contest, celebrate, and influence not only where your favorite truck parks, but what's on the menu.

[more]

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Tactical Inclusion
Difference and Vulnerability in U.S. Military Advertising
Jeremiah Favara
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence.

Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

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Tactical Media
Rita Raley
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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Tactics of the Human
Experimental Technics in American Fiction
Laura Shackelford
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider these narratives’ comparative literary print methods of critically engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley Jackson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth L. Ozeki, and Jeffrey Eugenides, by creatively transposing digital writing, material formats, and spatiotemporal orientations into print, registers shifting relations to technologies at multiple sites and scales. Grappling with the digital practices catalyzed by post–World War II biological, information, and systems theory, these literary narratives tactically enlist, and enable speculative diagnoses of, emerging relations to digital technologies. Their experimental technics comparatively retrace emerging relations to the digital as these impact American nationalisms and their transnational economic networks; processes of gendering and racialization that remain crucial to differential discourses of the human; and as they enter, unnoticed, into micropractices of everyday life and lived space.

In the midst of expanding technoscientific processes of digital de- and re-materialization that render multiple, charged boundaries of the human increasingly plastic, Tactics of the Human illustrates why it is ever more crucial to query and assess the divergent (re)understandings of the human now categorized, quite loosely, as posthumanisms with particular attention to women’s, subalterns’, and other knowledges already considered liminal to the human. It identifies here and pursues strains of systems thinking, informed by feminist, new materialist, queer, and subaltern understandings of material practices, revealing why these are so pivotal to ongoing efforts to assess current limits to digital technics and expand upon their biological, cultural, social, and poetic potentialities.
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Tahitians
Mind and Experience in the Society Islands
Robert I. Levy
University of Chicago Press, 1975
This seminal work in several fields—person-centered anthropology, comparative psychology, and social history—documents the inner life of the Tahitians with sensitivity and insight. At the same time Levy reveals the ways in which private and public worlds interact. Tahitians is an ethnography focused on private but culturally organized behavior resulting in a wealth of material for the understanding of the interaction among historical, cultural, and personal spheres.

"This is a unique addition to anthropological literature. . . . No review could substitute for reading it."—Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist
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Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
James R. Brennan
Ohio University Press, 2012

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

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Take Me to My Paradise
Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands
Cohen, Colleen B
Rutgers University Press, 2010
The British Virgin Islands (BVI) markets itself to international visitors as a paradise. But just whose paradise is it? Colleen Ballerino Cohen looks at the many players in the BVI tourism culture, from the tourists who leave their graffiti at beach bars that are popularized in song, to the waiters who serve them and the singers who entertain them.

Interweaving more than twenty years of field notes, Cohen provides a firsthand analysis of how tourism transformed the BVI from a small neglected British colony to a modern nation that competes in a global economic market. With its close reading of everything from advertisements to political manifestos and constitutional reforms, Take Me to My Paradise deepens our understanding of how nationalism develops hand-in-hand with tourism, and documents the uneven impact of economic prosperity upon different populations. We hear multiple voices, including immigrants working in a tourism economy, nationalists struggling to maintain some control, and the anthropologist trying to make sense of it all. The result is a richly detailed and accessible ethnography on the impact of tourism on a country that came into being as a tourist destination.
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Take the Young Stranger by the Hand
Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA
John Donald Gustav-Wrathall
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Now associated with family health clubs, the YMCA's bland image is the result of relentless outreach and the studied avoidance of controversy. But, as John Gustav-Wrathall shows in his revealing social history of the organization, the life of the YMCA has been filled with strife, tragedy, and irony, a life that itself reflects the struggle over the shifting societal mores regarding masculine friendship and intimacy. Take the Young Stranger by the Hand presents the YMCA as an institution of profound contradictions, reflective of society's views of same-sex love and sexuality.

"Gustav-Wrathall's book offers an in-depth history of the origins and purposes of the Young Men's Christian Association and how it evolved into—and out of—a gay playland."—Arnie Kantrowitz, Lambda Book Report

"The book's absorbing exploration of the sometimes schismatic, sometimes synergistic relationship between spirituality and sexuality is a fascinating addition to the growing body of social history."—Jim Van Buskirk, San Francisco Bay Guardian
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Take Two
Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film
Barbara Tepa Lupack
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
From Edwin S. Porter to Mike Nichols, from D. W. Griffith to Steven Spielberg, American filmmakers have looked to the novel for story ideas.
    Different in its complexities from the classic novels of Dickens, London, and Tolstoy to which earlier filmmakers turned, the contemporary American novel poses a real challenge to the filmmaker, who must translate its occasionally unfilmable essence for a new audience. Take Two closely analyzes the adaptations of ten such works: Catch-22, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, The World According to Garp, Sophie’s Choice, The Color Purple, Ironweed, Tough Guys Don't Dance, and Billy Bathgate.
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Take Up the Black Man's Burden
Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865-1939
Charles E. Coulter
University of Missouri Press, 2006
 
Unlike many cities farther north, Kansas City, Missouri—along with its sister city in Kansas—had a significant African American population by the midnineteenth century and also served as a way station for those migrating north or west. “Take Up the Black Man’s Burden” focuses on the people and institutions that shaped the city’s black communities from the end of the Civil War until the outbreak of World War II, blending rich historical research with first-person accounts that allow participants in this historical drama to tell their own stories of struggle and accomplishment.
 
Charles E. Coulter opens up the world of the African American community in its formative years, making creative use of such sources as census data, black newspapers, and Urban League records. His account covers social interaction, employment, cultural institutions, housing, and everyday lives within the context of Kansas City’s overall development, placing a special emphasis on the years 1919 to 1939 to probe the harsh reality of the Depression for Kansas City blacks—a time when many of the community’s major players also rose to prominence.
 
“Take Up the Black Man’s Burden” is a rich testament not only of high-profile individuals such as publisher Chester A. Franklin, activists Ida M. Becks and Josephine Silone Yates, and state legislator L. Amasa Knox but also of ordinary laborers in the stockyards, domestics in white homes, and railroad porters. It tells how various elements of the population worked together to build schools, churches, social clubs, hospitals, the Paseo YMCA/YWCA, and other institutions that made African American life richer. It also documents the place of jazz and baseball, for which the community was so well known, as well as movie houses, amusement parks, and other forms of leisure.
While recognizing that segregation and discrimination shaped their reality, Coulter moves beyond race relations to emphasize the enabling aspects of African Americans’ lives and show how people defined and created their world. As the first extensive treatment of black history in Kansas City, “Take Up the Black Man’s Burden” is an exceptional account of minority achievement in America’s crossroads. By showing how African Americans saw themselves in their own world, it gives readers a genuine feel for the richness of black life during the interwar years of the twentieth century.
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Taking Chances
The Coast after Hurricane Sandy
O'Neill, Karen M.
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Humanity is deeply committed to living along the world’s shores, but a catastrophic storm like Sandy—which took hundreds of lives and caused many billions of dollars in damages—shines a bright light at how costly and vulnerable life on a shoreline can be. Taking Chances offers a wide-ranging exploration of the diverse challenges of Sandy and asks if this massive event will really change how coastal living and development is managed. 
 
Bringing together leading researchers—including biologists, urban planners, utilities experts, and climatologists, among others—Taking Chances illuminates reactions to the dangers revealed by Sandy. Focusing on New Jersey, New York, and other hard-hit areas, the contributors explore whether Hurricane Sandy has indeed transformed our perceptions of coastal hazards, if we have made radically new plans in response to Sandy, and what we think should be done over the long run to improve coastal resilience. Surprisingly, one essay notes that while a large majority of New Jerseyans identified Sandy with climate change and favored carefully assessing the likelihood of damage from future storms before rebuilding the Shore, their political leaders quickly poured millions into reconstruction. Indeed, much here is disquieting. One contributor points out that investors scared off from further investments on the shore are quickly replaced by new investors, sustaining or increasing the overall human exposure to risk. Likewise, a study of the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn shows that, even after Sandy swamped the area with toxic flood waters, plans to convert abandoned industrial lots around the canal into high-density condominiums went on undeterred. By contrast, utilities, emergency officials, and others who routinely make long-term plans have changed operations in response to the storm, and provide examples of adaptation in the face of climate change.
 
Will Sandy be a tipping point in coastal policy debates—or simply dismissed as a once-in-a-century anomaly? This thought-provoking collection of essays in Taking Chances makes an important contribution to this debate.
 
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Taking Her Seriously
Penelope and the Plot of Homer's Odyssey
Richard Heitman
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"[Heitman] provides a sensitive critical study of the Odyssey in which he strives to better appreciate the poem by focusing on the familial interactions in Ithaca . . . Heitman's interpretations . . . are unfailingly clear and thought-provoking. Highly recommended."
---Choice
"It is an example of a neat and valuable contribution which is both intelligible to non-specialists and inspiring for psychologists and classicists. It demonstrates that research into Homer still is . . . capable of extracting ever-new exciting ideas from Homer's texts."
---Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Taking Her Seriously is a reevaluation of Penelope, one of the most universally admired female characters in Western classical literature. Casting her in a new light, Richard Heitman emphasizes the courage, steadfastness, and integrity of this iconic figure while she faces potentially tragic decisions.
Homer's treatment of events in Ithaca and the motivations of Penelope throughout the denser books of the Odyssey reveals a complicated, serious, independent, and insightful thinker whose actions are crucial to guaranteeing the well-being of her home and a safe future for her son, and for Odysseus as well.
Through this thematic approach to the text, Penelope comes into focus as a loving wife whose role is far more important than passive fidelity to a wandering husband. Her integrity and wisdom in Odysseus' absence set the stage for his violent and triumphant return, and secure her place as a female role model in even the most modern of contexts.
Richard Heitman is Assistant Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Carthage College.
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Taking It to the Streets
The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka
Harry J. Elam, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The performances of Luis Valdez's El Teatro Campesino, the farmworkers' theater, and Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones's) Black Revolutionary Theater (BRT) during the 1960s and 1970s, offer preeminent examples of social protest theater during a momentous and tumultuous historical juncture. The performances of these groups linked the political, the cultural, and the spiritual, while agitating against the dominant power structure and for the transformation of social and theatrical practices in the U.S. Founded during the Delano Grape Pickers' Strike and Black Power rebellions of the mid-1960s, both El Teatro and the BRT professed cultural pride and group unity as critical corollaries to self-determination and revolutionary social action.
Taking It to the Streets compares the performance methodologies, theories, and practices of the two groups, highlighting their cross-cultural commonalties, and providing insights into the complex genre of social protest performance and its interchange with its audience. It examines the ways in which ritual can be seen to operate within the productions of El Teatro and the BRT, uniting audience and performers in subversive, celebratory protest by transforming spectators into active participants within the theater walls --and into revolutionary activists outside. During this critical historical period, these performances not only encouraged community empowerment, but they inculcated a spirit of collective faith and revolutionary optimism. Elam's critical reexamination and recontextualization of the ideologies and practices of El Teatro and the BRT aid in our understanding of contemporary manipulations of identity politics, as well as current strategies for racial representation and cultural resistance.
"A major contribution to our understanding of how social protest came to be so strong and how Black and Chicano theatre contributed to the synergy of those times." --Janelle Reinelt, University of California, Davis
Harry J. Elam, Jr., is Associate Professor of Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts, Stanford University.
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Taking Leave, Taking Liberties
American Troops on the World War II Home Front
Aaron Hiltner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn’t only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by the “good war.” To the contrary, millions of American and Allied troops regularly poured into ports like New York and Los Angeles while on leave. Euphemistically called “friendly invasions,” these crowds of men then forced civilians to contend with the same kinds of crime and sexual assault unfolding in places like Britain, France, and Australia.

With unsettling clarity, Aaron Hiltner reveals what American troops really did on the home front. While GIs are imagined to have spent much of the war in Europe or the Pacific, before the run-up to D-Day in the spring of 1944 as many as 75% of soldiers were stationed in US port cities, including more than three million who moved through New York City. In these cities, largely uncontrolled soldiers sought and found alcohol and sex, and the civilians living there—women in particular—were not safe from the violence fomented by these de facto occupying armies. Troops brought their pocketbooks and demand for “dangerous fun” to both red-light districts and city centers, creating a new geography of vice that challenged local police, politicians, and civilians. Military authorities, focused above all else on the war effort, invoked written and unwritten legal codes to grant troops near immunity to civil policing and prosecution.

The dangerous reality of life on the home front was well known at the time—even if it has subsequently been buried beneath nostalgia for the “greatest generation.” Drawing on previously unseen military archival records, Hiltner recovers a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II history, demonstrating that the war’s ill effects were felt all over—including by those supposedly safe back home.
 
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Taking Liberties
Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989
Halina Filipowicz
Ohio University Press, 2014

As narrow, nationalist views of patriotic allegiance have become widespread and are routinely invoked to justify everything from flag-waving triumphalism to xenophobic bigotry, the concept of a nonnationalist patriotism has vanished from public conversation. Taking Liberties is a study of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights, respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity, and, overall, open-minded and inclusive.

Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Halina Filipowicz turns to the plays themselves and to archival materials, ranging from parliamentary speeches to polemical pamphlets and verse broadsides, to explore the cultural phenomenon of transgressive patriotism and its implications for society in the twenty-first century.

In addition to recovering lost or forgotten materials, the author builds an innovative conceptual and methodological framework to make sense of those materials. The result is not only a significant contribution to the debate over the meaning and practice of patriotism, but a masterful intellectual history.

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Taking Off the White Gloves
Southern Women and Women Historians
Edited & Intro by Michele Gillespie & Catherine Clinton
University of Missouri Press, 1998

When southern women remove their gloves, they speak their minds. The ten timely and provocative essays in Taking Off the White Gloves represent the collective wisdom of some of the finest scholars on women's history in the American South. On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Southern Association for Women Historians, this volume brings together some of the outstanding lectures delivered by distinguished members of the association over the past fifteen years.

Spanning four centuries of women's experiences in the South, the topics featured in Taking Off the White Gloves range from Native American sexuality and European conquest to woman suffrage in the South, from black women's protest history to the status of women in the historical profession at the end of the twentieth century.

Despite diverse subject matter, these rich essays share a number of important qualities. They take an integrative approach, combining literary analysis, social history, cultural interpretation, labor history, popular culture, and oral history. Embracing the distinctiveness of the southern past and women's experiences within that past, they also recognize the inextricability of critical categories such as sexuality and gender, race and gender, and women and work. Finally, these essays emphasize the authors' commitment to the belief that the personal is political; they reveal the subtle and not so subtle ways that women transform theory into practice.

Taking Off the White Gloves invites a new understanding of the complexities that surround the history of southern women across race, class, place, and time. A model of innovative and imaginative scholarly historical writing, this book provides fertile ground for young scholars and is sure to inspire new research. This thought- provoking volume has much to offer scholars and students, as well as the general reader.

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Taking Possession
The Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House
Heidi Aronson Kolk
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
West of downtown St. Louis sits an 1851 town house that bears no obvious relationship to the monumental architecture, trendy condominiums, and sports stadia of its surroundings. Originally the residence of a fur-trade tycoon and now the Campbell House Museum, the house has been subject to energetic preservation and heritage work for some 130 years.

In Taking Possession, Heidi Aronson Kolk explores the complex and sometimes contradictory motivations for safeguarding the house as a site of public memory. Crafting narratives about the past that comforted business elites and white middle-class patrons, museum promoters assuaged concerns about the city's most pressing problems, including racial and economic inequality, segregation and privatization, and the legacies of violence for which St. Louis has been known since Ferguson. Kolk's case study illuminates the processes by which civic pride and cultural solidarity have been manufactured in a fragmented and turbulent city, showing how closely linked are acts of memory and forgetting, nostalgia and shame.
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Taking Society's Measure
A Personal History of Survey Research
Herbert Hyman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1991
How are we, as members of a society, informed of conditions that affect our social welfare? How does the government register the impact of its actions on its citizens? The turbulent 1930s saw the emergence of sample survey research as an increasingly valuable technique of social inquiry. Perhaps no one championed this nascent discipline as vigorously as Herbert Hyman, one of those pioneering investigators whose talents were so closely associated with the rapid growth of survey research that their professional careers and reputations became virtually indistinguishable from the field itself. Hyman's personal account is a remarkable contribution to the history and sociology of social research. His experiences with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of War Information, the U.S. Bombing Surveys of Germany and Japan, the National Opinion Research Center, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research are all documented with fascinating insight into the critical events and prominent individuals that shaped the field of survey research between the late 1930s and the late 1950s.
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Taking Stock of Homicide
Trends, Emerging Themes, and Research Challenges
Edited by Karen F. Parker, Richard Stansfield, and Ashley M. Mancik
Temple University Press, 2024
Taking Stock of Homicide provides a critical look at homicide, offering a comprehensive review of the major areas of homicide research, including topics largely unexplored in the literature, such as qualitative and historical accounts.  

Featuring leading scholars, this volume is organized around key themes and areas that reflect major contemporary trends and patterns in criminological literature. Chapters consider fundamentals such as data collection, sources, and histories; structural dynamics, including methodologies and fieldwork plus factors involving race and public health; the circumstances, types, and variations in homicide, from intimate partner violence to gangs, drugs, and firearms; as well as the prevention of and responses to homicide.  

An essential state-of-the-discipline examination, Taking Stock of Homicide expands our knowledge while offering a toolkit for how to conduct future research on this serious, violent crime.

Contributors: Mark Berg, Laura Boisten, Anthony Braga, Fiona Brookman, Shytierra Gaston, Veronica Valencia Gonzalez, Elizabeth Griffiths, Chris Guerra, John Hipp, John Jarvis, Helen Jones, Sharon Jones-Eversley, Jungmyung Kim, Kenneth Land, Marieke Liem, Michael Light, Xiaoshuang Iris Luo, Amy Magnus, Patricia McCall, Erin Orrick, Alex Piquero, William Pridemore, David Pyrooz, Arnaldo Rabolini, Kasey Ragan, Wendy Regoeczi, Johnny Rice II, Jacqueline Rhoden-Trader, Ethan Rogers, Meghan Rodgers, Randolph Roth, Jose Antonio Sanchez, Daniel Semenza, James Tuttle, Jolien van Breen, Kirk Williams, and the editors
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Taking The Field
Women, Men, and Sports
Michael A. Messner
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A hard-hitting look at the persistent inequities in women's sports participation. In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls' and women's dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations. To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men's violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men's investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport. Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions-interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport. "For many years, Michael Messner has provided unparalleled insights into gender issues in the arena of sport. With Taking the Field he opens our eyes and ears to how much work still lies ahead before girls and women truly take the field with equal societal approval as boys and men. We're thirty years beyond the passing of Title IX, but when you read Taking the Field, you realize we're not yet where we want to be." --Diana Nyad Michael A. Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. His previous books include Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (1995) and Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements (1997).
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Taking the Heat
Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen
Harris, Deborah A
Rutgers University Press, 2015
A number of recent books, magazines, and television programs have emerged that promise to take viewers inside the exciting world of professional chefs. While media suggest that the occupation is undergoing a transformation, one thing remains clear: being a chef is a decidedly male-dominated job. Over the past six years, the prestigious James Beard Foundation has presented 84 awards for excellence as a chef, but only 19 were given to women. Likewise, Food and Wine magazine has recognized the talent of 110 chefs on its annual “Best New Chef” list since 2000, and to date, only 16 women have been included. How is it that women—the gender most associated with cooking—have lagged behind men in this occupation?
 
Taking the Heat examines how the world of professional chefs is gendered, what conditions have led to this gender segregation, and how women chefs feel about their work in relation to men. Tracing the historical evolution of the profession and analyzing over two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, as well as in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs, Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre reveal a great irony between the present realities of the culinary profession and the traditional, cultural associations of cooking and gender. Since occupations filled with women are often culturally and economically devalued, male members exclude women to enhance the job’s legitimacy. For women chefs, these professional obstacles and other challenges, such as how to balance work and family, ultimately push some of the women out of the career. 
 
 
 
 
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Taking Their Word
Literature and the Signs of Central America
Arturo Arias
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Central Americans are one of the largest Latino population groups in the United States. Yet, Arturo Arias argues, the cultural production of Central Americans remains little known to North Americans.

In Taking Their Word, Arias complicates notions of the cultural production of Central America, from Mexico in the North to Panama in the South. He charts the literature of Central America’s liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, its transformation after peace treaties were signed, the emergence of a new Maya literature that decenters Latin American literature written in Spanish, and the rise and fall of testimonio. Arias demonstrates that Central America and its literature are marked by an indigenousness that has never before been fully theorized or critically grasped. Never one to avoid controversy, Arias proffers his views of how the immigration of Central Americans to North America has changed the cultural topography of both zones.

With this groundbreaking work, Arias establishes the importance of Central American literature and provides a frame for future studies of the region’s culture.

Arturo Arias is director of Latin American studies at the University of Redlands. He is the author of six novels in Spanish and editor of The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minnesota, 2001).

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Taking Time
Mindy Fried
Temple University Press, 1998
There is a growing movement among corporations to provide family benefits in order to attract and retain women workers. They recognize that these benefits have become a cost of doing business. Many of these benefits, like child care and older care, are aimed at supporting employees' ability to stay on the job. Parental leave policies are an exception, because they involve taking time away from the job.

This timely book provides an inside look at life in a major U.S. corporation, focusing on the impact of workplace culture on the use of parental leave and those who use it. Fried begins by describing why parental leave is critical to making parenting the job of both parents in two-parent families. She examines the varied experiences of different levels of workers in how parental leave policy is used.

The author tells a rich and textured tale of day-to-day life in the skyscraper offices of a large corporation. How people dress, what their offices look like, which cafeteria they eat in, how the supervisors and supervised talk -- all these things are part of the fabric of corporate culture that Fried describes.

Most of us live in work cultures that value overtime. Fried argues that, as a "time policy" parental leave clashes with the powerful norm that corporate employees must work long and hard. Taking time for parenting -- a job that is devalued in our culture -- may be perceived as "taking time away" from the company, and, in particular, from the company's productivity.
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Taking Up McLuhan's Cause
Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality
Edited by Corey Anton, Robert K. Logan, and Lance Strate
Intellect Books, 2017
This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan’s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan’s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan’s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.
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Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution
Selected Writings
Talcott Parsons
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Talcott Parsons is regarded, by admirers and critics alike, as a major creator of the sociological thought of our time. Despite the universal recognition of his influence, however, Parsons's thought is not well understood, in part because his work presents the reader with almost legendary difficulties. Most of his important essays and books presume that the reader is familiar with his rather specialized vocabulary, and even when Parsons begins by defining basic terms, his special uses for words and his style of exposition strike many readers as forbidding.

In his extensive introduction to this volume, Leon H. Mayhew brings a new focus and clarity to Talcott Parsons's work. Explicating Parsons on his own terms, Mayhew discusses the basic tools of Parsonian analysis and interprets the larger themes of his work. He provides a chronological account of the development of Parsons's thought, his presuppositions, and his position on the ideological spectrum of social thought.

Mayhew then presents twenty of Parsons's essays, touching on each of the major aspects of his work, including "action" theory and the celebrated four-function scheme. Other topics covered include the role of theory in social research, evolutionary universals in society, influence, control, and the mass media.

"Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution will become a standard reference for those studying that development of his sociological ideas."—Martin Bulmer, The Times Higher Education Supplement

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The Tale of Matsura
Fujiwara Teika’s Experiment in Fiction
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Wayne P. Lammers
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Fujiwara Teika is known as the premier poet and literary scholar of the early 13th century. It is not so widely known that he also tried his hand at fiction: Mumyōzōshi (Untitled Leaves; ca. 1201) refers to “several works” by Teika and then names Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura; ca. 1190) as the only one that can be considered successful. The work is here translated in full, with annotation.
Set in the pre-Nara period, The Tale of Matsura is the story of a young Japanese courtier, Ujitada, who is sent to China with an embassy and has a number of supernatural experiences while there. Affairs of the heart dominate The Tale of Matsura, as is standard for courtly tales. Several of its other features break the usual mold, however: its time and setting; the military episode that would seem to belong instead in a war tale; scenes depicting the sovereign’s daily audiences, in which formal court business is conducted; a substantial degree of specificity in referring to things Chinese; a heavy reliance on fantastic and supernatural elements; an obvious effort to avoid imitating The Tale of Genji as other late-Heian tales had done; and a most inventive ending. The discussion in the introduction briefly touches upon each of these features, and then focuses at some length on how characteristics associated with the poetic ideal of yōen inform the tale. Evidence relating to the date and authorship of the tale is explored in two appendixes.
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A Tale of Three Villages
Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in Southwestern Alaska, 1740–1950
Liam Frink
University of Arizona Press, 2016
People are often able to identify change agents. They can estimate possible economic and social transitions, and they are often in an economic or social position to make calculated—sometimes risky—choices. Exploring this dynamic, A Tale of Three Villages is an investigation of culture change among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of the southwestern Alaskan coast from just prior to the time of Russian and Euro-North American contact to the mid-twentieth century.

Liam Frink focuses on three indigenous-colonial events along the southwestern Alaskan coast: the late precolonial end of warfare and raiding, the commodification of subsistence that followed, and, finally, the engagement with institutional religion. Frink’s innovative interdisciplinary methodology respectfully and creatively investigates the spatial and material past, using archaeological, ethnoecological, and archival sources.

The author’s narrative journey tracks the histories of three villages ancestrally linked to Chevak, a contemporary Alaskan Native community: Qavinaq, a prehistoric village at the precipice of colonial interactions and devastated by regional warfare; Kashunak, where people lived during the infancy and growth of the commercial market and colonial religion; and Old Chevak, a briefly occupied “stepping-stone” village inhabited just prior to modern Chevak. The archaeological spatial data from the sites are blended with ethnohistoric documents, local oral histories, eyewitness accounts of people who lived at two of the villages, and Frink’s nearly two decades of participant-observation in the region.

Frink provides a model for work that examines interfaces among indigenous women and men, old and young, demonstrating that it is as important as understanding their interactions with colonizers. He demonstrates that in order to understand colonial history, we must actively incorporate indigenous people as actors, not merely as reactors.
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A Tale of Two Bridges
The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges of 1936 and 2013
Stephen Mikesell
University of Nevada Press, 2017

A Tale of Two Bridges is a history of two versions of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge: the original bridge built in 1936 and a replacement for the eastern half of the bridge finished in 2013. The 1936 bridge revolutionized transportation in the Bay Area and profoundly influenced settlement patterns in the region. It was also a remarkable feat of engineering. In the 1950s the American Society of Civil Engineers adopted a list of the “Seven Engineering Wonders” of the United States. The 1936 structure was the only bridge on the list, besting even the more famous Golden Gate Bridge. One of its greatest achievements was that it was built on time (in less than three years) and came in under budget. Mikesell explores in fascinating detail how the bridge was designed by a collection of the best-known engineers in the country as well as the heroic story of its construction by largely unskilled laborers from California, joined by highly skilled steel workers.

By contrast, the East Span replacement, which was planned between 1989 and 1998, and built between 1998 and 2013, fell victim to cost overruns in the billions of dollars, was a decade behind schedule, and suffered from structural problems that has made it a perpetual maintenance nightmare.

This is narrative history in its purest form. Mikesell excels at explaining highly technical engineering issues in language that can be understood and appreciated by general readers. Here is the story of two very important bridges, which provides a fair but uncompromising analysis of why one bridge succeeded and the other did not.

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A Tale of Two Plantations
Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia
Richard S. Dunn
Harvard University Press, 2014

Forty years ago, after publication of his pathbreaking book Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn began an intensive investigation of two thousand slaves living on two plantations, one in North America and one in the Caribbean. Digging deeply into the archives, he has reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of three generations of slaves on the Mesopotamia sugar estate in Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in tidewater Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery could take. Dunn’s stunning achievement is a rich and compelling history of bondage in two very different Atlantic world settings.

From the mid-eighteenth century to emancipation in 1834, life in Mesopotamia was shaped and stunted by deadly work regimens, rampant disease, and dependence on the slave trade for new laborers. At Mount Airy, where the population continually expanded until emancipation in 1865, the “surplus” slaves were sold or moved to distant work sites, and families were routinely broken up. Over two hundred of these Virginia slaves were sent eight hundred miles to the Cotton South.

In the genealogies that Dunn has painstakingly assembled, we can trace a Mesopotamia fieldhand through every stage of her bondage, and contrast her harsh treatment with the fortunes of her rebellious mulatto son and clever quadroon granddaughter. We track a Mount Airy craftworker through a stormy life of interracial sex, escape, and family breakup. The details of individuals’ lives enable us to grasp the full experience of both slave communities as they labored and loved, and ultimately became free.

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Tales from Luristan
Sekandar Amanolahi
Harvard University Press, 1986
Little is known of the Luri dialect of Khurramabad, but Professor Amanolahi of Shiraz University has collected various stories from his native town in the local language. Together with Wheeler Thackston of Harvard he has prepared a compact volume covering the tales in transcription, translations into English, a short grammatical sketch, and a Luri-English vocabulary (Luristan is a province of western Iran in the Zagros Mountains). The traditional grammatical analysis of the dialect is easy to follow and the translations of both poetry and prose closely follow the original, a tribute to the close collaboration of the two scholars. This unique volume will be of great interest to students of the folklore, linguistics, and customs of the inhabitants of the center of Luristan.
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Tales from the Basotho
By Minnie Postma
University of Texas Press, 1974

"They say that the eldest of the chief's daughters..." So begins a tale from the Basotho, unfolded by the meager light of a dung fire that burns smokily behind the reed screen sheltering the entrance of the hut. The old ones of the tribe wait until dark before telling their stories, for everyone knows horns will grow from the head of one who tells a story during daylight hours. Tales from the Basotho abounds with elements familiar to folk narrative. The heroes and heroines are the chiefs and their wives, their sons and their daughters. Fantastic creatures frequent the narratives. exhibiting their awful powers.

Rustic peace and beauty pervade the stories, as Minnie Postma amply demonstrates in her versions of the tales. Something fearful may be occurring—the dreaded Koeoko pulling the only son of the chief under water—but, at the same time, girls with babies tied to their backs are searching for edible bulbs in the veld, and an old woman dreams in the gentle sunlight in front of the huts.

These tales from the Basotho are for entertainment only. There is a tabu against telling tales while the sun shines, because daylight hours must be saved for work. The telling itself is the· reason the story exists, for the audience is already aware of the outcome of each tale. As Wm. Hugh Jansen emphasizes in his foreword, "text" and "context" are often easily interpreted and made accessible in a translation, but Tales from the Basotho is ultimately successful for its rendering of "texture." And texture is doubly hard to convey when the telling itself is of primary importance. Minnie Postma and Susie McDermid have transferred the art of the Basotho raconteur onto the printed page. All the simple, understandable formulas, exclamations, and repetitions used so skillfully by the native storyteller are present. Rhythm is an important element in the tales, and a word, a phrase, even a whole paragraph will be repeated until the rhythm satisfies the storyteller, in tum increasing the appreciation of the listeners.

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Tales of Canyonlands Cowboys
Richard Negri
Utah State University Press, 1997

Richard Negri interviews cattlemen and women about ranching in the rugged canyonlands region of southeastern Utah. Personal stories and anecdotes from the colorful characters who ground out a hard living on ranches of the are in the early twentieth century.

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Tales of Heichu
Susan Downing Videen
Harvard University Press, 1989

For a thousand years Heichū has appeared and reappeared in Japanese literature, always a grand but fickle lover, and usually a hapless one. One of the earliest references to him, an allusion in The Tale of Genji to his having blackened his face inadvertently with ink, reflects the comic strand that has run through stories of his career from the beginning. Yet the eleventh-century Heichū monogatari in the uta monogatari form provides narrative occasions for 153 poems of great beauty and force. In this earliest version, Heichū is romantic, pensive, touched as much by pathos as by humor.

In Heichū Monogatari and the Heichū Legend, Susan Downing Videen translates the Heian Tale of Heichū, traces the legend from its origins in the life of the court poet Taira no Sadafun through many literary developments over the centuries, and discusses successive versions critically with translations of relevant episodes and tales.

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Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age
Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920-1936
Peter Keppy
National University of Singapore Press, 2019
Luis Borromeo was the Philippines’s “King of Jazz,” who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia’s 1920s Jazz Age.
This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo’s and Riboet’s styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local.
Leaning on cultural studies and the work on cosmopolitanism and modernity by Henry Jenkins and Joel Kahn, Peter Keppy examines pop culture at this time as a contradictory social phenomenon. He challenges notions of Southeast Asia’s popular culture as lowbrow entertainment created by elites and commerce to manipulate the masses, arguing instead that audiences seized on this popular culture to channel emancipatory activities, to articulate social critique, and to propagate an inclusive nationalism without being radically anticolonial.
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Tales of the Earth
Native North American Creation Mythology
David Leeming
Reaktion Books, 2021
A revealing analysis of key themes in Native American origin myths—and their stark contrast with the exceptionalist values of the United States.
 
Tales of the Earth is a comprehensive yet concise overview of Native American mythologies. After outlining theories of the origins of Native North Americans, David Leeming considers the creation myths of many tribes, emphasizing four commonly occurring figures: the Great Spirit, the trickster, the goddess, and the hero. Leeming suggests that in addition to these figures, Native American mythologies have in common a deep reverence for the earth and for community responsibility as opposed to individualism—tenets that stand in stark contrast to the concepts of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny that characterize the United States, a nation that was built on ancient tribal land.
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Tales of the Field
On Writing Ethnography
John Van Maanen
University of Chicago Press, 1988

For more than twenty years, John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field has been a definitive reference and guide for students, scholars, and practitioners of ethnography and beyond. Originally published in 1988, it was the one of the first works to detail and critically analyze the various styles and narrative conventions associated with written representations of culture. This is a book about the deskwork of fieldwork and the various ways culture is put forth in print. The core of the work is an extended discussion and illustration of three forms or genres of cultural representation—realist tales, confessional tales, and impressionist tales. The novel issues raised in Tales concern authorial voice, style, truth, objectivity, and point-of-view. Over the years, the work has both reflected and shaped changes in the field of ethnography.

In this second edition, Van Maanen’s substantial new Epilogue charts and illuminates changes in the field since the book’s first publication. Refreshingly humorous and accessible, Tales of the Field remains an invaluable introduction to novices learning the trade of fieldwork and a cornerstone of reference for veteran ethnographers.  

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Tales of the Field
On Writing Ethnography, Second Edition
John Van Maanen
University of Chicago Press, 2011

For more than twenty years, John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field has been a definitive reference and guide for students, scholars, and practitioners of ethnography and beyond. Originally published in 1988, it was the one of the first works to detail and critically analyze the various styles and narrative conventions associated with written representations of culture. This is a book about the deskwork of fieldwork and the various ways culture is put forth in print. The core of the work is an extended discussion and illustration of three forms or genres of cultural representation—realist tales, confessional tales, and impressionist tales. The novel issues raised in Tales concern authorial voice, style, truth, objectivity, and point-of-view. Over the years, the work has both reflected and shaped changes in the field of ethnography.

In this second edition, Van Maanen’s substantial new Epilogue charts and illuminates changes in the field since the book’s first publication. Refreshingly humorous and accessible, Tales of the Field remains an invaluable introduction to novices learning the trade of fieldwork and a cornerstone of reference for veteran ethnographers.  

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Tales of the Metric System
A Novel
Imraan Coovadia
Ohio University Press, 2016
In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.
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Tales of the Wild Horse Desert
By Betty Bailey Colley and Jane Clements Monday
University of Texas Press, 2001

Highly skilled, hard-working, and loyal to each other and to the ranches that employ them, the Mexican and Mexican American vaqueros who work on the famous King and Kenedy Ranches of South Texas' Wild Horse Desert are some of America's best cowboys. Many of them come from families who have lived and worked on the ranches for over a hundred years. They preserve the memories of ranch life handed down by their grandparents and great-grandparents, even as they use modern technologies to keep the ranches running smoothly in the twenty-first century.

This book tells the stories of the vaqueros of the Wild Horse Desert for fourth- through eighth-grade students. It begins with a brief history of the vaqueros and the King and Kenedy Ranches. Then, using in the words of today's vaqueros and their families, it describes many aspects of past and present life on the ranches. Young readers will learn what it's like to grow up on the ranches and how vaqueros learn their work. They'll also discover how much goes into being a vaquero, from using all the different ropes and equipment, to working a round-up, to showing prize-winning cattle and horses. Teachers and parents will appreciate all the supplemental material in the appendix, including a glossary, lists of related books and websites, hands-on learning activities, and even range and camp house recipes.

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Tales of Times Now Past
Sixty-Two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection
Marian Ury
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Tales of Times Now Past is a translation of 62 outstanding tales freshly selected from Konjaku monogatari shu, a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work, unique in world literature, contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan. “Konjaku” in particular has aroused the enthusiasm of such leading 20th-century writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.
The stories, with sources in both traditional lore and contemporary gossip, cover an astonishing range—homiletic, sentimental, terrifying, practical-minded, humorous, ribald. Their topics include the life of the Buddha, descriptions of Heaven and Hell, feats of warriors, craftsmen, and musicians, unsuspected vice, virtue, and ingenuity, and the ways and wiles of bandits, ogres, and proverbially greedy provincial governors, to name just a few. Composed perhaps a century after the refined, allusive, aristocratic Tale of Genji, Konjaku represents a masculine outlook and comparatively plebeian social orientation, standing in piquant contrast to the earlier masterpiece. The unknown compiler was interested less in exploring psychological subtleties than in presenting vivid portraits of human foibles and eccentricities. The stories in the present selection have been chosen to provide an idea of the scope and structure of the book as a whole, and also for their appeal to the modern reader. And the translation is based on the premise that the most faithful rendering is also the liveliest.
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Tales of Two Cities
Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America
By Camilla Townsend
University of Texas Press, 2000

With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.

Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

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Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women
Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work
Karen W. Tice
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Writing case records was central to the professionalization of social work, a task that by its very nature "created clients, authorities, problems, and solutions." In Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women, Karen W. Tice argues that when early social workers wrote about their clients they transformed individual biographies into professional representations. Because the social workers were attuned to the intricacies of language, case records became focal points for debates on science, art, representation, objectivity, realism, and gender in public charity and reform. Tice uses 150 case records of early practitioners from a number of reform organizations and considers myriad books on the specifics of case recording to analyze the competing models of record-keeping, both in the field and outside it.

"An original and important study, this is the first major work I know of to carry out a contextual analysis of case records and to discuss the role case records have played in the development of social work." -- Leslie Leighninger, author of Social Work, Social Welfare, and American Society
 
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Tales Out of School
Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film
Jo Keroes
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Jo Keroes's scope is wide: she examines the teacher as represented in fiction and film in works ranging from the twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise to contemporary films such as Dangerous Minds and Educating Rita. And from the twelfth through the twentieth century, Keroes shows, the teaching encounter is essentially erotic.

Tracing the roots of eros from cultural as well as psychological perspectives, Keroes defines erotic in terms broader than the merely sexual. She analyzes ways in which teachers serve as convenient figures on whom to map conflicts about gender, power, and desire. To show how portrayals of men and women differ, she examines pairs of texts, using a film or a novel with a woman protagonist (Up the Down Staircase, for example) as counterpoint to one featuring a male teacher (Blackboard Jungle) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie balanced against Dead Poets Society.

The portrayals of teachers, like all images a culture presents of itself, reveal much about our private and social selves. Keroes points out authentic accounts of authoritative women teachers who are admired and respected by colleagues and students alike. Real teachers differ from the stereotypes we see in fiction and film, however. Male teachers are often portrayed as heroes in film and fallibly human in fiction, whereas women in either genre are likely to be monstrous or muddled and are virtually never women of color. Among other things, Keroes demonstrates, the tension between reality and representation reveals society's ambivalence about power in the hands of women.

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The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
Robert D. Crews
Harvard University Press, 2009

The Taliban remain one of the most elusive forces in modern history. A ragtag collection of clerics and madrasa students, this obscure movement emerged out of the rubble of the Cold War to shock the world with their draconian Islamic order. The Taliban refused to surrender their vision even when confronted by the United States after September 11, 2001. Reinventing themselves as part of a broad insurgency that destabilized Afghanistan, they pledged to drive out the Americans, NATO, and their allies and restore their "Islamic Emirate."

The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan explores the paradox at the center of this challenging phenomenon: how has a seemingly anachronistic band of religious zealots managed to retain a tenacious foothold in the struggle for Afghanistan's future? Grounding their analysis in a deep understanding of the country's past, leading scholars of Afghan history, politics, society, and culture show how the Taliban was less an attempt to revive a medieval theocracy than a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Shunning journalistic accounts of its conspiratorial origins, the essays investigate broader questions relating to the character of the Taliban, its evolution over time, and its capacity to affect the future of the region.

Offering an invaluable guide to "what went wrong" with the American reconstruction project in Afghanistan, this book accounts for the persistence of a powerful and enigmatic movement while simultaneously mapping Afghanistan's enduring political crisis.

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Talk about Sex
How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right
Janice M. Irvine
Temple University Press, 2023
Praise for Talk about Sex

“Must reading for scholars, sexuality researchers, activists, and public policy and public health planners engaged in efforts to promote education on sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV infection prevention for adolescents in schools.”—JAMA 
 
Talk about Sex is a rich social history about the political transformations, cultural dynamics, and emotional rhetorical strategies that helped the right wing manufacture controversies on the local and national levels in the United States. Although the emergence of a politicized Christian Right is commonly dated at the mid-seventies, with the founding of groups like the Moral Majority, Talk about Sex tells the story of a powerful right-wing Christian presence in politics a full decade earlier. These activists used inflammatory sexual rhetoric—oftentimes deceptive and provocative—to capture the terms of public debate, galvanize voters, and reshape the culture according to their own vision. 

This 20th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface and epilogue by the author that examines current controversies over public education on sexuality, gender, and race. 
 
Demonstrating how the right wing draws on the cultural power of sexual shame and fear to build a political movement, Talk about Sex explores the complex entanglements of sexual knowledge, politics, and discourses.
 
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Talk of Love
How Culture Matters
Ann Swidler
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.
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Talkative Polity
Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda
Florence Brisset-Foucault
Ohio University Press, 2019

For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called “People’s Parliaments,” were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society.

Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda’s complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn’t want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.

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Talkin' With Your Mouth Full
Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin
Steve Fagin, ed.
Duke University Press, 1998
Steve Fagin is an artist whose videos incorporate, challenge, and cross over into the realm of literary and cultural studies. Talkin’ with Your Mouth Full includes not only scripts of Fagin’s works but critical responses to—and meditations on—a variety of his influential videos by a distinguished, if intriguingly disparate, group of artists and scholars.
Combining elements of criticism with various modes of artistic expression, these responses take the form of reviews, letters, interviews, and in one case an imaginary TV programming schedule. Interspersed with—and sometimes literally interrupting—the video scripts, these contributions interact with one another on multiple levels and complement Fagin’s scripts. Historical, political, and theoretical issues dovetail, ricochet, and interplay in this book, revealing a multiplicity of voices, concerns, and cultural revelations.
Unique in its structure and intellectual approach, Talkin’ with Your Mouth Full will appeal equally to those who have seen Fagin’s videos and those who have not. Students of art history and cultural critique, and anyone interested in the ongoing dialogue between artists and theorists, will find particular value in this book.

Contributors. Gregg Bordowitz, Constance DeJong, Leslie Dick, Steve Fagin, Barry Gifford, Victoria Gill, Bill Horrigan, Bertha Jottar, Ivone Margulies, Patricia Mellencamp, Margaret Morse, Constance Penley, Vicente L. Rafael, Mark Rappaport, Andrew Ross, Vivian Sobchack, Trinh T. Minh-ha, John Welchman, Peter Wollen




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Talking about Race
Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference
Katherine Cramer Walsh
University of Chicago Press, 2007

It is a perennial question: how should Americans deal with racial and ethnic diversity? More than 400 communities across the country have attempted to answer it by organizing discussions among diverse volunteers in an attempt to improve race relations. In Talking about Race, Katherine Cramer Walsh takes an eye-opening look at this strategy to reveal the reasons behind the method and the effects it has in the cities and towns that undertake it.

With extensive observations of community dialogues, interviews with the discussants, and sophisticated analysis of national data, Walsh shows that while meeting organizers usually aim to establish common ground, participants tend to leave their discussions with a heightened awareness of differences in perspective and experience. Drawing readers into these intense conversations between ordinary Americans working to deal with diversity and figure out the meaning of citizenship in our society, she challenges many preconceptions about intergroup relations and organized public talk. Finally disputing the conventional wisdom that unity is the only way forward, Walsh prescribes a practical politics of difference that compels us to reassess the place of face-to-face discussion in civic life and the critical role of conflict in deliberative democracy.

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Talking Art
The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education
Gary Alan Fine
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In Talking Art, acclaimed ethnographer Gary Alan Fine gives us an eye-opening look at the contemporary university-based master’s-level art program. Through an in-depth analysis of the practice of the critique and other aspects of the curriculum, Fine reveals how MFA programs have shifted the goal of creating art away from beauty and toward theory. Contemporary visual art, Fine argues, is no longer a calling or a passion—it’s a discipline, with an academic culture that requires its practitioners to be verbally skilled in the presentation of their intentions. Talking Art offers a remarkable and disconcerting view into the crucial role that universities play in creating that culture.
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Talking Back
Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture
Edited by Joyce Antler
Brandeis University Press, 1998
Fourteen provocative essays challenge traditional notions of Jewish female identity presented in mass media images, films, narrative, and stories by portraying the American Jewish woman not only as subject but as shaper of American popular culture. Sometimes internalizing negative presentations but more often "talking back" to them, Jewish women created alternative images that became tools of rebellion, subverting and dismantling such stereotypes as the "Yiddishe Mama," the Jewish Mother, and the Jewish American Princess. Over the course of the century -- and particularly as a consequence of feminism -- Jewish female novelists, screenwriters, dramatists, entertainers, and grass-roots feminists were able to create new possibilities for the expression of Jewish women's voices.
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Talking Back to the West
How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order
Bilge Yesil
University of Illinois Press, 2024
In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership.

Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power.

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Talking #browntv
Latinas and Latinos on the Screen
Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Like two friends sitting down in front of the television together, in Talking #browntv, Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio dialogue about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities, Aldama and Nericcio analyze the ways in which Latinx performers have been mediated—with varying degrees of complexity—on the American screen. A comprehensive review of the history of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Hispanics, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Latinx performers in television and film, Talking #browntv boldly interrogates one of the largest paradoxes in the history of American television: Why are there so few Latina/os on television, and why, when they do appear, are they so often narcos, maids, strumpets, tarts, flakes, and losers?
 
From the subversive critiques embedded in well-loved children’s characters like Speedy Gonzalez to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in modern-era pornography, from Eva Longoria as ethnic mannequin to J-Lo flipping the sexy Latina music video on its head in “I Luh Ya Papi,” and with more than 150 full-color images, Aldama and Nericcio seek to expose the underlying causes as to why Latina/os constitute only 2 percent of mainstream cultural production when they’re the majority minority in the US. In a moment when anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric oozes from TV sets and medias platform, Talking #browntv emerges as a bold antidote, an eloquent rejoinder, and a thoughtful meditation on Latina/os on the American screen and in America today.
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Talking Indian
Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
Jenny L. Davis
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award

In south-central Oklahoma and much of “Indian Country,” using an Indigenous language is colloquially referred to as “talking Indian.” Among older Chickasaw community members, the phrase is used more often than the name of the specific language, Chikashshanompa’ or Chickasaw. As author Jenny L. Davis explains, this colloquialism reflects the strong connections between languages and both individual and communal identities when talking as an Indian is intimately tied up with the heritage language(s) of the community, even as the number of speakers declines.

Today a tribe of more than sixty thousand members, the Chickasaw Nation was one of the Native nations removed from their homelands to Oklahoma between 1837 and 1838. According to Davis, the Chickasaw’s dispersion from their lands contributed to their disconnection from their language over time: by 2010 the number of Chickasaw speakers had radically declined to fewer than seventy-five speakers.

In Talking Indian, Davis—a member of the Chickasaw Nation—offers the first book-length ethnography of language revitalization in a U.S. tribe removed from its homelands. She shows how in the case of the Chickasaw Nation, language programs are intertwined with economic growth that dramatically reshape the social realities within the tribe. She explains how this economic expansion allows the tribe to fund various language-­learning forums, with the additional benefit of creating well-paid and socially significant roles for Chickasaw speakers. Davis also illustrates how language revitalization efforts are impacted by the growing trend of tribal citizens relocating back to the Nation.
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Talking Leadership
Conversations with Powerful Women
Hartman, Mary
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Talking Leadership presents a though-provoking look at differences and commonalities in the lives and leadership approaches of some of today's outstanding women in areas ranging from philanthropy to politics, and from business to academia. Regardless of their backgrounds and areas of expertise, these women are committed to social change--change that includes improving women's lives and options. 

Well beyond personal details and entertaining anecdotes, these conversations capture a variety of fascinating experiences and insights reflecting what it is like to be a woman and a major leader in America at the close of the twentieth century. Many of these women hold positions in which womanhood sets them apart--not infrequently in uncomfortable ways. Talking Leadership gives testimony not only to how far women have come, but also how far they still have to go to claim their places as leaders. 

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Talking Leadership
Conversations with Powerful Women
Hartman, Mary
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Whether we love it, hate it, or use it just to pass the time, most adults in the United States are watching more television than ever, up to four hours a day by some estimates. Our devotion to commercial television gives it unprecedented power in our lives.

Advertisers and television executives want us to spend as much time as we can in front of our sets, for it is access to our brains that they buy and sell. Yet the most important effect of television may be one that no one intends-accelerated destruction of the natural environment.

Consuming Environments explores how, with its portrayal of a world of simulated abundance, television has nurtured a culture of consumerism and overconsumption. The average person in the US consumers more than twice the grain and ten times the oil of a citizen of Brazil or Indonesia. And people in less industrialized countries suffer while their resources while their resources are commandeered to support comfortable lifestyles in richer nations.

Using detailed examples illustrated with images from actual commercials, news broadcasts, and television shows, and authors demonstrate how ads and programs are put together in complex way s to manipulate viewers, and they offer specific ways to counteract the effects of TV and overconsumption's assault on the environment.

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Talking Rocks
Geology and 10,000 Years of Native American Tradition in the Lake Superior Region
Ron Morton
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Join the conversation as an earth scientist and a Native American elder—wise men from two cultures—explore the natural history of the Lake Superior region, examining both the science and the spirit of the land. 

As the geologist carefully presents a modern scientific perspective, the storyteller eloquently recounts a traditional Native American understanding, passed on through tales, myths, and symbols that illustrate how intimately his people have known and honored the earth and its history for over a hundred centuries. 

Talking Rocks is not only a story of geological history told from two perspectives, it is also a chronicle of two people from very different cultural and scientific heritages learning to understand and appreciate each other’s distinct yet complementary ways of viewing the land we share. 


 
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Talking Stone
Rock Art of the Cosos
Paul Goldsmith
University of Utah Press, 2017

Hidden away in the canyons of a highly restricted military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the largest concentration of rock art in North America, possibly in the world. Images of animals, shamans, and puzzling abstract forms were pecked and painted on stone over thousands of years by a now long-gone culture. Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos is a multivocal investigation of this art.

Acclaimed cinematographer Paul Goldsmith takes the reader on a visual journey through this limited access area with more than 160 stunning color photographs. The book is structured around Goldsmith’s treks into the remote desert canyons and his meetings with archaeologists, Native Americans, a psychologist, an artist, bow hunters, and the commanding officer in charge of the military base. The result is a visually striking book that gives the viewer a personal and visceral experience of this enigmatic art.

Includes 160 color photographs.

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Talking Taino
Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective
William F. Keegan and Lisabeth A. Carlson
University of Alabama Press, 2008

Keegan and Carlson, combined, have spent over 45 years conducting archaeological research in the Caribbean, directing projects in Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, the Turks & Caicos Islands, and throughout the Bahamas. Walking hundreds of miles of beaches, working without shade in the Caribbean sun, diving in refreshing and pristine waters, and studying the people and natural environment around them has given them insights into the lifeways of the people who lived in the Caribbean before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Sadly, harsh treatment extinguished the culture that we today call Taíno or Arawak.

In an effort to repay their debt to the past and the present, the authors have focused on the relationship between the Taínos of the past (revealed through archaeological investigations) and the present natural history of the islands.  Bringing the past to life and highlighting commonalities between past and present, they emphasize Taíno words and beliefs about their worldview and culture.

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Talking to the Dead
Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant
Duke University Press, 2014
Talking to the Dead is an ethnography of seven Gullah/Geechee women from the South Carolina lowcountry. These women communicate with their ancestors through dreams, prayer, and visions and traditional crafts and customs, such as storytelling, basket making, and ecstatic singing in their churches. Like other Gullah/Geechee women of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, these women, through their active communication with the deceased, make choices and receive guidance about how to live out their faith and engage with the living. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant emphasizes that this communication affirms the women's spiritual faith—which seamlessly integrates Christian and folk traditions—and reinforces their position as powerful culture keepers within Gullah/Geechee society. By looking in depth at this long-standing spiritual practice, Manigault-Bryant highlights the subversive ingenuity that lowcountry inhabitants use to thrive spiritually and to maintain a sense of continuity with the past.
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Talking Together
Public Deliberation and Political Participation in America
Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Challenging the conventional wisdom that Americans are less engaged than ever in national life and the democratic process, Talking Together paints the most comprehensive portrait available of public deliberation in the United States and explains why it is important to America’s future.

The authors’ original and extensive research reveals how, when, and why citizens talk to each other about the issues of the day.  They find that—in settings ranging from one-on-one conversations to e-mail exchanges to larger and more formal gatherings—a surprising two-thirds of Americans regularly participate in public discussions about such pressing issues as the Iraq War, economic development, and race relations. Pinpointing the real benefits of public discourse while considering arguments that question its importance, Talking Together presents an authoritative and clear-eyed assessment of deliberation’s function in American governance. In the process, it offers concrete recommendations for increasing the power of talk to foster political action.

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Talking Union
Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin
University of Illinois Press, 1996
As an institutional, political,
        and cultural oral history of the struggle to unionize the River Rouge
        Plant near Detroit during the 1930s and 40s, this book affords us a rare
        insight into the difficulties of organizing a union in the face of the
        then anti-union Ford Motor Company. Against a backdrop of the depression
        and entrenched racism, history was made by courageous individuals whose
        rich, eloquent stories illuminate the character and views of others like
        them across the nation, from all backgrounds: left, right, and center;
        black and white; native and foreign born, Jew and gentile.
 
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Tall Tale American Folklore Literature
Carolyn S. Brown
University of Tennessee Press, 1989

Drawing on previous research and her own original fieldwork, the author develops a definition of the tall tale as a genre of folklore, and she then explores how tall tale methods and meanings have been translated into literary humor.

The work moves from the Crockett Almanacs, sketches, newspaper hoaxes, and frontier frame tales to present new readings of such standard works as George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood and Mark Twain’s Autobiography.
Brown views the tall tale as a challenge and an entertainment as well as a story that identifies and binds a folk group and helps people to cope with a stressful world.

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Tambo
Life in an Andean Village
By Julia Meyerson
University of Texas Press, 1990

Perhaps the best way to sharpen one's power's of observation is to be a stranger in a strange land. Julia Meyerson was one such stranger during a year in the village of 'Tambo, Peru, where her husband was conducting anthropological fieldwork. Though sometimes overwhelmed by the differences between Quechua and North American culture, she still sought eagerly to understand the lifeways of 'Tambo and to find her place in the village. Her vivid observations, recorded in this field journal, admirably follow Henry James's advice: "Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost."

With an artist's eye, Meyerson records the daily life of 'Tambo—the cycles of planting and harvest, the round of religious and cultural festivals, her tentative beginnings of friendship and understanding with the Tambinos. The journal charts her progress from tolerated outsider to accepted friend as she and her husband learn and earn, the roles of daughter and son in their adopted family.

With its wealth of ethnographic detail, especially concerning the lives of Andean women, 'Tambo will have great value for students of Latin American anthropology. In addition, scholars preparing to do fieldwork anywhere will find it a realistic account of both the hardships and the rewards of such study.

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The Tamburitza Tradition
From the Balkans to the American Midwest
Richard March
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
The Tamburitza Tradition is a lively and well-illustrated comprehensive introduction to a Balkan folk music that now also thrives in communities throughout Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Tamburitza features acoustic stringed instruments, ranging in size from tamburas as small as a ukulele to ones as large as a bass viol.
            Folklorist Richard March documents the centuries-old origins and development of the tradition, including its intertwining with nationalist and ethnic symbolism. The music survived the complex politics of nineteenth-century Europe but remains a point of contention today. In Croatia, tamburitza is strongly associated with national identity and supported by an artistic and educational infrastructure. Serbia is proud of its outstanding performers and composers who have influenced tamburitza bands on four continents. In the United States, tamburitza was brought by Balkan immigrants in the nineteenth century and has become a flourishing American ethnic music with its own set of representational politics.
            Combining historical research with in-depth interviews and extensive participant-observer description, The Tamburitza Tradition reveals a dynamic and expressive music tradition on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, illuminating the cultures and societies from which it has emerged.
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The Tame and the Wild
People and Animals after 1492
Marcy Norton
Harvard University Press, 2023

A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.

When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarization: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

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Tamil Brahmans
The Making of a Middle-Class Caste
C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan
University of Chicago Press, 2014
A cruise along the streets of Chennai—or Silicon Valley—filled with professional young Indian men and women, reveals the new face of India. In the twenty-first century, Indians have acquired a new kind of global visibility, one of rapid economic advancement and, in the information technology industry, spectacular prowess. In this book, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one particularly striking group who have taken part in this development: Tamil Brahmans—a formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed themselves into a new middle-class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere.

Fuller and Narasimhan offer one of the most comprehensive looks at Tamil Brahmans around the world to date. They examine Brahman migration from rural to urban areas, more recent transnational migration, and how the Brahman way of life has translated to both Indian cities and American suburbs. They look at modern education and the new employment opportunities afforded by engineering and IT. They examine how Sanskritic Hinduism and traditional music and dance have shaped Tamil Brahmans’ particular middle-class sensibilities and how middle-class status is related to the changing position of women. Above all, they explore the complex relationship between class and caste systems and the ways in which hierarchy has persisted in modernized India. 
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The Taming of the Samurai
Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan
Eiko Ikegami
Harvard University Press, 1995

Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.

This book demonstrates how Japan’s so-called harmonious collective culture is paradoxically connected with a history of conflict. Ikegami contends that contemporary Japanese culture is based upon two remarkably complementary ingredients, honorable competition and honorable collaboration. The historical roots of this situation can be found in the process of state formation, along very different lines from that seen in Europe at around the same time. The solution that emerged out of the turbulent beginnings of the Tokugawa state was a transformation of the samurai into a hereditary class of vassal-bureaucrats, a solution that would have many unexpected ramifications for subsequent centuries.

Ikegami’s approach, while sociological, draws on anthropological and historical methods to provide an answer to the question of how the Japanese managed to achieve modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries. The result is a work of enormous depth and sensitivity that will facilitate a better understanding of, and appreciation for, Japanese society.

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Tan Men/Pale Women
Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach
Mary Ann Eaverly
University of Michigan Press, 2013

One of the most obvious stylistic features of Athenian black-figure vase painting is the use of color to differentiate women from men. By comparing ancient art in Egypt and Greece, Tan Men/Pale Women uncovers the complex history behind the use of color to distinguish between genders, without focusing on race. Author Mary Ann Eaverly considers the significance of this overlooked aspect of ancient art as an indicator of underlying societal ideals about the role and status of women. Such a commonplace method of gender differentiation proved to be a complex and multivalent method for expressing ideas about the relationship between men and women, a method flexible enough to encompass differing worldviews of Pharaonic Egypt and Archaic Greece. Does the standard indoor/outdoor explanation—women are light because they stay indoors—hold true everywhere, or even, in fact, in Greece? How “natural” is color-based gender differentiation, and, more critically, what relationship does color-based gender differentiation have to views about women and the construction of gender identity in the ancient societies that use it?

The depiction of dark men and light women can, as in Egypt, symbolize reconcilable opposites and, as in Greece, seemingly irreconcilable opposites where women are regarded as a distinct species from men. Eaverly challenges traditional ideas about color and gender in ancient Greek painting, reveals an important strategy used by Egyptian artists to support pharaonic ideology and the role of women as complementary opposites to men, and demonstrates that rather than representing an actual difference, skin color marks a society’s ideological view of the varied roles of male and female.

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T’ang Transformation Texts
A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China
Victor H. Mair
Harvard University Press, 1989

This is the most comprehensive study of pien-wen (“transformation texts” i.e., tales of metamorphosis) in any language since the manuscripts were discovered at the beginning of this century in a remote cave complex in northwest China. They are the earliest written vernacular narratives in China and are thus extremely important in the history of Chinese language and literature.

Numerous scholarly controversies have surrounded the study of the texts in the last three quarters of a century; this volume seeks to resolve some of them—the extent, origins, and formal characteristics of the texts, the meaning of pien wen, the identity of the authors who composed these popular narratives and the scribes who copied them, the relationship of the texts to oral performance, and the reasons for the apparently sudden demise of the genre around the beginning of the Sung dynasty.

This is a multi-disciplinary study that integrates findings from religious, literary, linguistic, sociological, and historical materials, carried out with intellectual rigor. It includes an extensive bibliography of relevant sources in many languages.

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Tangled Goods
The Practical Life of Pro Bono Advertising
Iddo Tavory, Sonia Prelat and Shelly Ronen
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A novel investigation of pro bono marketing and the relationship between goods, exploring the complex moral dimensions of philanthropic advertising.
 
The advertising industry may seem like one of the most craven manifestations of capitalism, turning consumption into a virtue. In Tangled Goods, authors Iddo Tavory, Sonia Prelat, and Shelly Ronen consider an important dimension of the advertising industry that appears to depart from the industry’s consumerist foundations: pro bono ad campaigns. Why is an industry known for biting cynicism and cutthroat competition also an industry in which people dedicate time and effort to “doing good”?
 
Interviewing over seventy advertising professionals and managers, the authors trace the complicated meanings of the good in these pro bono projects. Doing something altruistic, they show, often helps employees feel more at ease working for big pharma or corporate banks. Often these projects afford them greater creative leeway than they normally have, as well as the potential for greater recognition. While the authors uncover different motivations behind pro bono work, they are more interested in considering how various notions of the good shift, with different motivations and benefits rising to the surface at different moments. This book sheds new light on how goodness and prestige interact with personal and altruistic motivations to produce value for individuals and institutions and produces a novel theory of the relationship among goods: one of the most fraught questions in sociological theory.
 
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Tangled Loyalties
Conflict of Interest in Legal Practice
Susan P. Shapiro
University of Michigan Press, 2002
In Tangled Loyalties, Susan P. Shapiro charts a journey across the state of Illinois. To explore the role of conflict-of-interest in the private practice of law she looks at a wide variety of law firms, including those located near lakes, rivers, and corn fields; in strip malls, storefronts, and historic landmarks; in town squares, residential neighborhoods, deteriorating downtown areas, and glittering high rises.
This unique, empirical study examines the actual attitudes and perceptions of legal practitioners. The author discusses the realities of the profession--what lawyers face day to day, how they deal with conflicts of interest, and how those experiences vary from LaSalle Street to Wall Street to Main Street, from megafirms to solo practices. In describing how conflicts arise in their daily work, Shapiro sheds light on the nature of legal work--on clients, colleagues, law firm power and politics, economics, markets, malpractice insurance, careers, ethics, values, business judgments, and lawyers' most anguishing moments. In short, we learn what it means to be a lawyer at the end of the twentieth century.
Tangled Loyalties also looks at how these conflicts in law affect other fiduciaries--accountants, doctors, psychotherapists, journalists, and academics--and the way in which they respond to competing interests and the honoring of those interests.
Tangled Loyalties will appeal to readers interested in the legal and other professions, social institutions and relations, and issues of trust, ethics, social control and regulation.
Susan P. Shapiro is Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation.
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The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2003

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home.

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism—a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice.

People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places—but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains.

While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.

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Tangled Roots
The Emergence of Israeli Culture
Israel Bartal
SBL Press, 2020

A new interpretation of the roots of Israeli culture

In Tangled Roots: The Emergence of Israeli Culture, Israel Bartal traces the history of modern Hebrew culture prior to the emergence of political Zionism. Bartal examines how traditional and modernist ideals and Western and non-European Jewish cultures merged in an unprecedented encounter between an ancient land (Israel) and a multigenerational people (the Jews). Premodern Jewish traditionalists, Palestinian locals, foreign imperial forces, and Jewish intellectuals, writers, journalists, and party functionaries each affected the Israeli culture that emerged. As this new Hebrew culture was taking shape, the memory of the recent European past played a highly influential role in shaping the image of the New Hebrew, that mythological hero who was meant to supplant the East European exilic Jew.

Features

  • A critical revision of most contemporary politicized histories of Jewish nationalism
  • An examination of the history of modern Hebrew culture prior to political Zionism
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The Tango Machine
Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency
Morgan James Luker
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In Argentina, tango isn’t just the national music—it’s a national brand. But ask any contemporary Argentine if they ever really listen to it and chances are the answer is no: tango hasn’t been popular for more than fifty years. In this book, Morgan James Luker explores that odd paradox by tracing the many ways Argentina draws upon tango as a resource for a wide array of economic, social, and cultural—that is to say, non-musical—projects. In doing so, he illuminates new facets of all musical culture in an age of expediency when the value and meaning of the arts is less about the arts themselves and more about how they can be used.
           
Luker traces the diverse and often contradictory ways tango is used in Argentina in activities ranging from state cultural policy-making to its export abroad as a cultural emblem, from the expanding nonprofit arts sector to tango-themed urban renewal projects. He shows how projects such as these are not peripheral to an otherwise “real” tango—they are the absolutely central means by which the values of this musical culture are cultivated. By richly detailing the interdependence of aesthetic value and the regimes of cultural management, this book sheds light on core conceptual challenges facing critical music scholarship today.  
 
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Tangweera
Life and Adventures among Gentle Savages
By C. Napier Bell
University of Texas Press, 1989

In the 1980s, conflicts between the Miskito people of Nicaragua's eastern coast and the Sandinistas drew international attention. Indeed, the Miskitos' struggle to defend their cultural autonomy and land rights points out a curious historical anomaly. This native group has long had closer ties to British and American culture than to Hispanic Nicaraguan culture. C. Napier Bell, son of a British trader, grew up on the Miskito Coast in the nineteenth century and spoke the Miskito language fluently.

Tangweera, first published in 1899, is Bell's autobiographical account of his boyhood experiences. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book records an idyllic life of hunting, fishing, and trading. Bell describes the social customs and beliefs of the various Indian peoples he knew, as well as the relations among the coastal Miskito, the black creole population, and the tribes of the interior—the latter a subject of continuing importance. Although Bell shared common nineteenth-century ideas about the inferiority of “savage” races, his affection for the Miskito people and his love of their land fill Tangweera. Anthropologists, historians, naturalists, and travelers in the region will find this fascinating reading.

The introduction by Philip A. Dennis, Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech University, provides a modern observer's view of Miskito culture and discusses important changes and continuities since Bell's time.

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Tania León's Stride
A Polyrhythmic Life
Alejandro L. Madrid
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Acclaimed composer, sought-after conductor, esteemed educator, tireless advocate for the arts--Tania León’s achievements encompass but also stretch far beyond contemporary classical music. Alejandro L. Madrid draws on oral history, archival work, and ethnography to offer the first in-depth biography of the artist. Breaking from a chronological account, Madrid looks at León through the issues that have informed and defined moments in her life and her professional works. León’s words become a starting ground--but also a counterpoint--to the accounts of the people in her orbit. What emerges is more than an extraordinary portrait of an artist's journey. It is a story of how a human being reacts to the challenges thrown at her by history itself, be it the Cuban revolution or the struggle for civil and individual rights.

Nuanced and multifaceted, Tania León's Stride looks at the life, legacy, and milieu that created and sustained one of the most important figures in American classical music.

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A Tanizaki Feast
The International Symposium in Venice
Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
This volume presents 18 eighteen essays, written by scholars from six countries, on Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965), one of the great writers of the 20th century. The essays were originally prepared for a landmark international symposium in Venice in 1995, at which 22 speakers addressed an audience of about two hundred students and scholars in the Aula Magna of the University of Venice. Topics include Tanizaki’s fiction, plays, and film scenarios; his aesthetics; his place in Japanese intellectual history; his depiction of the West; his use of humor; and film adaptations of his works. In 1964 Tanizaki was elected to honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first Japanese to be so honored; and it is widely believed that he was being considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Tantalisingly Close
An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media
Imar De Vries
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
While studies of mobile wireless communication devices usually focus on their social implications, De Vries proposes to venture into a more historical and comparative direction to shed light on our preoccupation with them in the first place. He constructs an archaeological view of the development of communication technologies over the past 200 years, providing a comprehensive account of how persistent hopes and beliefs have come to give mobile wireless media such a prominent position today. Our expectations and uses of them are surprisingly similar to those of older media; consequently, they reconfirm the idea that living in an ‘anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere’ world is both a blessing and a curse, and that the desire for sublime communication is a tragic yet highly powerful regulative principle in our media evolution.
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Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques
Edited by Livia Kohn, in cooperation with Yoshinobu Sakade
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques covers the major areas of Taoist meditation and longevity techniques in roughly chronological order. The book addresses itself to the China area specialist or the scholar of religion and the history of science who wishes to know more about (and perhaps even must teach) aspects of Chinese culture that involve Taoism and traditional medicine. [viii, ix]
Other topics include Japanese interpretations of longevity techniques, drugs and immortality, visualization and ecstatic experience, and qigong and gymnastics.
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Tape Recorded Interview 2Nd Ed
Manual Field Workers Folklore Oral History
Edward D. Ives
University of Tennessee Press, 1995

Since 1980, The Tape-Recorded Interview has been an essential resource for folklorists and oral historians—indeed, for anyone who uses a tape recorder in field research. Now, Sandy Ives has updated this manual to reflect the current preferences in tape-recording technology and equipment.

When this book was first published, the reel-to-reel recorder was the favored format for fieldwork. Because the cassette recorder has almost completely replaced it, Ives has revised the first chapter, “How a Tape Recorder Works,” accordingly and has included a useful discussion of the differences between analog and digital recording. He has also added a brief section on video, updated the bibliography, and reworked his original comments on tape cataloging and transcription.

As in the first edition, Ives’s emphasis is on documenting the lives of common men and women. He offers a careful, step-by-step tour through the collection process—finding informants, making advance preparations, conducting the actual interview, obtaining a release—and then describes the procedures for processing the taped interview and archiving such materials for future use. He also gives special treatment to such topics as recording music, handling group interviews, and using photographs or other visual material during interviews.

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Tarahumara
Where Night is the Day of the Moon
Bernard L. Fontana; Photographs by John P. Schaefer
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Inhabiting the Sierra Madre Occidental of southwestern Chihuahua in Mexico, the Tarahumara (or Rarámuri) are known in their language as the "foot runners" due to the way in which they must navigate their rugged terrain. This book offers an accessible ethnography of their history, customs, and current life, accompanied by photographs that offer striking images of these gentle people.

The subtitle of the book derives from the Tarahumara's belief that the soul works at night while the body sleeps and that during this "day of the moon" both the spirits of the dead and the souls of the living move about in their mysterious ways.

As the authors observe, the fact that "so many men, women, and children persist in distinctive, centuries-old cultural traditions in spite of their nearness to all the complexities and attractions of modern industrial society is an importatn part of the story." Their book tells that story and brings readers closer to understanding the Tarahumara world and way of life.
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The Task of Cultural Critique
Teresa L. Ebert
University of Illinois Press, 2008
In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness.

Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

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A Taste for Brown Sugar
Black Women in Pornography
Mireille Miller-Young
Duke University Press, 2014
A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.
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The Taste for Civilization
Food, Politics, and Civil Society
Janet A. Flammang
University of Illinois Press, 2009

This book explores the idea that table activities--the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining--lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy. In our industrialized and profit-centered culture, however, foodwork is devalued and civility is eroding.

Looking at the field of American civility, Janet A. Flammang addresses the gendered responsibilities for foodwork's civilizing functions and argues that any formulation of "civil society" must consider food practices and the household. To allow space for practicing civility, generosity, and thoughtfulness through everyday foodwork, Americans must challenge the norms of unbridled consumerism, work-life balance, and domesticity and caregiving. Connecting political theory with the quotidian activities of the dinner table, Flammang discusses practical ideas from the "delicious revolution" and Slow Food movement to illustrate how civic activities are linked to foodwork, and she points to farmers' markets and gardens in communities, schools, and jails as sites for strengthening civil society and degendering foodwork.

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The Taste of Art
Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices
Silvia Bottinelli
University of Arkansas Press, 2017

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society.

The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere.

Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

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Taste of Control
Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality under American Rule
R. Alexander D. Orquiza, Jr.
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Gourmand Awards, Asian Section & Culinary History Section

Filipino cuisine is a delicious fusion of foreign influences, adopted and transformed into its own unique flavor. But to the Americans who came to colonize the islands in the 1890s, it was considered inferior and lacking in nutrition. Changing the food of the Philippines was part of a war on culture led by Americans as they attempted to shape the islands into a reflection of their home country.

Taste of Control tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine. Food historian René Alexander D. Orquiza, Jr. turns to a variety of rare archival sources to track these changing attitudes, including the letters written by American soldiers, the cosmopolitan menus prepared by Manila restaurants, and the textbooks used in local home economics classes. He also uncovers pockets of resistance to the colonial project, as Filipino cookbooks provided a defense of the nation’s traditional cuisine and culture.

Through the topic of food, Taste of Control explores how, despite lasting less than fifty years, the American colonial occupation of the Philippines left psychological scars that have not yet completely healed, leading many Filipinos to believe that their traditional cooking practices, crops, and tastes were inferior. We are what we eat, and this book reveals how food culture served as a battleground over Filipino identity.

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The Taste of Nostalgia
Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru
Amy Cox Hall
University of Texas Press, 2024

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A Taste of the Hocking Hills
Matt Rapposelli
Ohio University Press, 2018

When chef Matt Rapposelli left the National Park Service to attend culinary school in New England, he was moving from one passion to another. What later brought those passions together was a job in the Hocking Hills, southeast Ohio’s stunning, wild landscape, where the restaurants he helmed—at Hocking Hills Lodge and Lake Hope Lodge—gained a resounding reputation for classic dishes that, driven by the regional vernacular and the natural seasonal abundance of Appalachia, were impeccably fresh and flavorful.

A Taste of the Hocking Hills intermingles delicious recipes with striking photographs of a region to which thousands trek each year. Rapposelli presents dishes by the season, noting the specialties that appear on his menus in a given time of year. Whether enjoying a winter evening or a summer morning, cooks will be able to bring a bit of the Hocking Hills home.

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Taste of the Nation
The New Deal Search for America's Food
Camille Bégin
University of Illinois Press, 2016
During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats project sought nothing less than to sample, and report upon, the tremendous range of foods eaten across the United States.
 
Camille Begin shapes a cultural and sensory history of New Deal-era eating from the FWP archives. From "ravioli, the diminutive derbies of pastries, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned paste" to barbeque seasoning that integrated "salt, black pepper, dried red chili powder, garlic, oregano, cumin seed, and cayenne pepper" while "tomatoes, green chili peppers, onions, and olive oil made up the sauce", Begin describes in mouth-watering detail how Americans tasted their food. They did so in ways that varied, and varied widely, depending on race, ethnicity, class, and region. Begin explores how likes and dislikes, cravings and disgust operated within local sensory economies that she culls from the FWP’s vivid descriptions, visual cues, culinary expectations, recipes and accounts of restaurant meals. She illustrates how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as "American."
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Tasteful Domesticity
Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940
Sarah W. Walden
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity. Taste discourse engages cultural values as well as physical constraints, and thus serves as a bridge between the contested space of the self and the body, particularly for women in the nineteenth century. Cookbooks represent important contact zones of social philosophies, cultural beliefs, and rhetorical traditions, and through their rhetoric, we witness women’s roles as republican mothers, sentimental evangelists, wartime fundraisers, home economists, and social reformers. Beginning in the early republic and tracing the cookbook through the publishing boom of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive era, and rising racial tensions of the early twentieth century, Sarah W. Walden examines the role of taste as an evolving rhetorical strategy that allowed diverse women to engage in public discourse through published domestic texts.
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