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"No one has done so much as Mr. Eliade to inform literature students in the West about 'primitive' and Oriental religions. . . . Everyone who cares about the human adventure will find new information and new angles of vision."—Martin E. Marty, New York Times Book Review

Allan H. Meltzer's monumental history of the Federal Reserve System tells the story of one of America's most influential but least understood public institutions. This first volume covers the period from the Federal Reserve's founding in 1913 through the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, which marked the beginning of a larger and greatly changed institution.

To understand why the Federal Reserve acted as it did at key points in its history, Meltzer draws on meeting minutes, correspondence, and other internal documents (many made public only during the 1970s) to trace the reasoning behind its policy decisions. He explains, for instance, why the Federal Reserve remained passive throughout most of the economic decline that led to the Great Depression, and how the Board's actions helped to produce the deep recession of 1937 and 1938. He also highlights the impact on the institution of individuals such as Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1920s, who played a key role in the adoption of a more active monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. Meltzer also examines the influence the Federal Reserve has had on international affairs, from attempts to build a new international financial system in the 1920s to the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the failure of the London Economic Conference of 1933.

Written by one of the world's leading economists, this magisterial biography of the Federal Reserve and the people who helped shape it will interest economists, central bankers, historians, political scientists, policymakers, and anyone seeking a deep understanding of the institution that controls America's purse strings.

"It was 'an unprecedented orgy of extravagance, a mania for speculation, overextended business in nearly all lines and in every section of the country.' An Alan Greenspan rumination about the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s? Try the 1920 annual report of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. . . . To understand why the Fed acted as it did—at these critical moments and many others—would require years of study, poring over letters, the minutes of meetings and internal Fed documents. Such a task would naturally deter most scholars of economic history but not, thank goodness, Allan Meltzer."—Wall Street Journal

"A seminal work that anyone interested in the inner workings of the U. S. central bank should read. A work that scholars will mine for years to come."—John M. Berry, Washington Post

"An exceptionally clear story about why, as the ideas that actually informed policy evolved, things sometimes went well and sometimes went badly. . . . One can only hope that we do not have to wait too long for the second installment."—David Laidler, Journal of Economic Literature

"A thorough narrative history of a high order. Meltzer's analysis is persuasive and acute. His work will stand for a generation as the benchmark history of the world's most powerful economic institution. It is an impressive, even awe-inspiring achievement."—Sir Howard Davies, Times Higher Education Supplement

Winner of the Missouri History Book Award, from the State Historical Society of Missouri
Winner of the Arkansiana Award, from the Arkansas Library Association

Geologic forces raised the Ozarks. Myth enshrouds these hills. Human beings shaped them and were shaped by them. The Ozarks reflect the epic tableau of the American people—the native Osage and would-be colonial conquerors, the determined settlers and on-the-make speculators, the endless labors of hardscrabble farmers and capitalism of visionary entrepreneurs. The Old Ozarks is the first volume of a monumental three-part history of the region and its inhabitants. Brooks Blevins begins in deep prehistory, charting how these highlands of granite, dolomite, and limestone came to exist. From there he turns to the political and economic motivations behind the eagerness of many peoples to possess the Ozarks. Blevins places these early proto-Ozarkers within the context of larger American history and the economic, social, and political forces that drove it forward. But he also tells the varied and colorful human stories that fill the region's storied past—and contribute to the powerful myths and misunderstandings that even today distort our views of the Ozarks' places and people. A sweeping history in the grand tradition, A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1: The Old Ozarks is essential reading for anyone who cares about the highland heart of America.

This new report, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students builds on the momentum of the 2004 report, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students. A Nation Deceived initiated a critical dialogue about academic acceleration, an under-used intervention. A Nation Deceived exposed to the nation the inconsistencies between research and practice and brought acceleration to prominence in the field.

Volume 1 and 2 of A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students equips students, families, and educators with facts to refute biased excuses. A Nation Empowered shifts the impetus from conversation to action. Empowerement  galvanizes determination with evidence. Volume 1 portrays the determination of students, educators, and parents to strive for excellence. Volume 2 reveals the evidence that trumps the excuses that hold bright students back.

Hamid Naficy is one of the world’s leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran’s peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own.

Volume 1 depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900, three years after the country’s first commercial film exhibitor saw the new medium in Great Britain. An artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Ruling until 1941, Reza Shah implemented a Westernization program intended to unite, modernize, and secularize his multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. Cinematic representations of a fast-modernizing Iran were encouraged, the veil was outlawed, and dandies flourished. At the same time, photography, movie production, and movie houses were tightly controlled. Film production ultimately proved marginal to state formation. Only four silent feature films were produced in Iran; of the five Persian-language sound features shown in the country before 1941, four were made by an Iranian expatriate in India.

A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

In A Social History of Modern Art, a sweeping multivolume social history of Western art from the French Revolution to World War I, Albert Boime moves beyond the concern with style and form that has traditionally characterized the study of art history and, in the tradition of Arnold Hauser, examines art in a broad historical context. Into his wide-ranging cultural inquiry Boime incorporates not only frequently studied mainstream artists and sculptors but also neglected and lesser known artists and unattributed popular imagery. He examines popular as well as official culture, the family as well as the state, and the conditions of the poor as well as of the affluent that affected cultural practice.

This inaugural volume explores the artistic repercussions of the major political and economic events of the latter half of the eighteenth century: the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution, and the English industrial revolution. Boime examines the prerevolutionary popularity of the rococo style and the emergence of the cult of antiquity that followed the Seven Years' War. He shows how the continual experiments of Jacques-Louis David and others with neoclassical symbols and themes in the latter part of the century actively contributed to the transformation of French and English politics. Boime's analyses reveal the complex relationship of art with a wide range of contemporary attitudes and conditions—technological innovation, social and political tensions, commercial expansion, and the growth of capitalism.

"Provocative and endlessly revealing."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

American Congregations, Volume 1: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities chronicles the founding, growth, and development of congregations that represent the diverse and complex reality of American local religious cultures. Some, like Center Church in New Haven, trace their stories back to colonial times. Others, like the Swaminarayan Hindu temple in suburban Chicago, are recent attempts to create local religious worlds. Ranging from congregations of Lebanese Muslims in Northern Canada to Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, the essays convey the distinctive character of each congregation and provide vivid evidence of the importance of congregations in daily life.

"This study refreshingly illuminates [congregations'] strengths as places where the public and private lives of their members meet in dynamic creativity and as havens of religious meaning and comfort in the midst of a secular world."—Choice

"A major contribution to how debates about American religion will be framed in the years ahead. . . . In giving us these case histories and a set of excellent interpretive essays, Wind and Lewis have reminded us that American religion must be understood in its particular, local, gathered, human forms. They remind us that congregations matter."—Nancy T. Ammerman, First Things

"Well-presented and engaging essays, by some of the foremost religious scholars working today, examining the histories of twelve diverse religious institutions. . . . A fascinating and important social history of religion."—Kirkus Reviews

"Scholarship and the religious traditions have been enriched by the labors of the Congregational History Project. Theologically, its pioneering research invites us to examine ourselves."—Gabriel Fackre, Christian Century

Arkansas Made is the culmination of Historic Arkansas Museum’s exhaustive investigations into the history of the state’s material culture. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume survey of cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and other artisans working in communities all over the state.

The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission to collect and preserve Arkansas’s creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. Artisans from across Arkansas’s rich cultural landscape come to life among the colorful quilts, playful temperance jugs, and inventive effigies included in Volume I. Readers will delight not only in the striking full-color images but also in the stories that weave them together across time and region to create a lively picture of art and artisanship in a state too little celebrated for its creative output.

From the expeditions of de Soto in the sixteenth century to the celebrated work of such contemporary writers as Maya Angelou, Ellen Gilchrist, and Miller Williams, Arkansas has enjoyed a rich history of letters. These two volumes gather the best work from Arkansas's rich literary history celebrating the variety of its voices and the national treasure those voices have become.

The language of classical Greek literature has been extensively studied since the Renaissance, and the most generally admired approach to Greek grammar and syntax has long been K. W. Krüger's Griechische Sprachlehre. In this translation Guy L. Cooper III accepts Krüger's simple and transparent organization, but greatly expands the substance of the earlier work by increasing the total number of citations from the original texts. Research since 1875, especially the contributions of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, is incorporated so as to create a reference work, in English, which covers the full range of this complex subject.

Krüger's original paragraph numbering has been maintained so that references in previously published works can be followed directly in the new work. However, every paragraph and chapter has been revised and expanded, opening up new subheadings within Krüger's format. The English has moved away from Krüger's laconic style to a more flowing, readable presentation, without jargon and unexplained technical language. A complete index of passages cited and the impressive number of citations make the work a running syntactic commentary on the whole range of Attic prose literature. The net result is a new comprehensive reference work, an essential reference for libraries and personal collections alike.

Guy L. Cooper III is Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Volume 2
cloth ISBN 0-472-10844-1

Set of Volumes 1 & 2
cloth ISBN 0-472-10844-1

The Basque language is one of Europe’s most ancient, its origins as mysterious as those of the Basque people themselves. It is also the official language of Euskadi, the bustling, modern Basque Autonomous Region of Spain, and the preferred tongue of tens of thousands of Basques and their descendants living in the European Basque Country and in diaspora around the world. Aurrera! is a comprehensive text for beginning-level students who are learning Basque (the Batua form approved by the Academy of the Basque Language) in a classroom setting or on their own. Each chapter introduces an element of grammar and offers students new vocabulary, written and spoken exercises, dialogues, and other activities that demonstrate the language in action, plus Basque reading texts that will entertain while they illustrate the material covered in the chapter. The complexities of Basque grammar are explained in clear, easy-to-understand terms, and the dialogues and exercises introduce students to common idioms and the basics of social conversation. Volume 1 covers material for the first two semesters of college-level language-classroom work. It is also designed to give independent learners a sound foundation in the language that will allow them to make their own way in a Basque-speaking environment and to read basic Basque texts.

"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review