28167 books match the query 'History' and 1092 start with f

cover of Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly"

Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly"

Cathryn Halverson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Winner of the 2020 Thomas J. Lyon Award from the Western Literature Association
In the first decades of the twentieth century, famed Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick chose to publish a group of nontraditional writers he later referred to as “Faraway Women,” working-class authors living in the western United States far from his base in Boston. Cathryn Halverson surveys these enormously popular Atlantic contributors, among them a young woman raised in Oregon lumber camps, homesteaders in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta, and a world traveler who called Los Angeles and Honolulu home.

Faraway Women and the “Atlantic Monthly” examines gender and power as it charts an archival journey connecting the least remembered writers and readers of the time with one of its most renowned literary figures, Gertrude Stein. It shows how distant friends, patrons, publishers, and readers inspired, fostered, and consumed the innovative life narratives of these unlikely authors, and it also tracks their own strategies for seizing creative outlets and forging new protocols of public expression. Troubling binary categories of east and west, national and regional, and cosmopolitan and local, the book recasts the coordinates of early twentieth-century American literature.

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cover of Fare Well, Illyria

Fare Well, Illyria

David Binder

Central European University Press, 2014

As a reporter for the prestigious New York Times the author interviewed many of the leading political figures of the Balkans (Illyria). He also sought out the area's intellectuals, many of them critical of their leaders, and everyday people who provide a sense of daily life. He devotes a chapter to each ethnic group from Vlachs to Serbs, talks about their differences and similarities, and does so without giving offense. He also provides a short historical account of the various places he visits, which deepens our understanding of the local cultures. The reader meets people from all walks of life: politicians, poets, literary and art critics, journalists, handymen, car mechanics, fishermen and farmers. From Milovan Djilas and Nicolae Ceausescu to Markos Vafiadis and Sali Berisha to the Serbian “majstor” Misha and an un-named Bosnian bar singer, Binder's book features a remarkable gallery of people whose presence contributes authenticity and human warmth to the narrative.
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cover of Farewell to Prosperity: Wealth, Identity, and Conflict in Postwar America

Farewell to Prosperity

Wealth, Identity, and Conflict in Postwar America

Lisle A. Rose

University of Missouri Press, 2014

Farewell to Prosperity is a provocative, in-depth study of the Liberal and Conservative forces that fought each other to shape American political culture and character during the nation’s most prosperous years. The tome’s central theme is the bitter struggle to fashion post–World War II society between a historic Protestant Ethic that equated free-market economics and money-making with Godliness and a new, secular Liberal temperament that emerged from the twin ordeals of depression and world war to stress social justice and security.



Liberal policies and programs after 1945 proved key to the creation of mass affluence while encouraging disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and social groups to seek equal access to power. But liberalism proved a zero-sum game to millions of others who felt their sense of place and self progressively unhinged. Where it did not overturn traditional social relationships and assumptions, liberalism threatened and, in the late sixties and early seventies, fostered new forces of expression at radical odds with the mindset and customs that had previously defined the nation without much question.



When the forces of liberalism overreached, the Protestant Ethic and its millions of estranged religious and economic proponents staged a massive comeback under the aegis of Ronald Reagan and a revived Republican Party. The financial hubris, miscalculations, and follies that followed ultimately created a conservative overreach from which the nation is still recovering. Post–World War II America was thus marked by what writer Salman Rushdie labeled in another context “thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics.” This “politics” and its meaning form the core of the narrative.



Farewell to Prosperity is no partisan screed enlisting recent history to support one side or another. Although absurdity abounds, it knows no home, affecting Conservative and Liberal actors and thinkers alike.
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cover of Farm Girl: A Wisconsin Memoir

Farm Girl

A Wisconsin Memoir

Beuna Coburn Carlson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

When Bunny Coburn was growing up, neighbors came together in times of hardship. No matter the trouble, they faced it with determination, camaraderie, and resourcefulness. In the midst of the Great Depression, despite record-breaking heat and crop failure, growing up on the family farm was nevertheless filled with bucolic pleasures.
Farm Girl is Beuna "Bunny" Coburn Carlson's loving tribute to the gently rolling hills of western Wisconsin. With an inviting and fluid voice, she shares intimate moments of happinesses from her childhood: collecting butternuts for homemade maple candy, watching her father read by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp, and the joy of finding a juicy orange at the bottom of a Christmas stocking. Underlying each vignette is the courage of a strong family surviving adversity and finding comfort in one another. Hers is a memoir that readers can dip in and out of with pleasure.
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cover of Farm House: College Farm to University Museum

Farm House

College Farm to University Museum

Atherly, Mary E.

University of Iowa Press, 1995

Now available for the first time in paperback, Farm House tells the story of the first structure built on the Iowa State University campus. Mary Atherly provides a comprehensive history of the Farm House from its founding days to its role as the center of activity for the new college to its second life as a welcoming museum visited by thousands each year. This second edition includes a discussion of the archaeological dig of 1991, which carefully excavated the area under the Farm House, and thoroughly documents the extensive renovation and reconstruction of the exterior of the house during the 1990s. New photographs add to the first edition’s rich array of images and a foreword by Gregory Geoffroy, ISU’s president since 2001, adds to its historical content. The history of Iowa’s only land-grant university and its impressive cultural and educational impact on the state and the nation as it evolved from model farm to college to modern multipurpose university is inseparable from the history of the Farm House.
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cover of Farm: A Multimodal Reader

Farm

A Multimodal Reader

Joyce Kinkead

Utah State University Press, 2020

In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, leading students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States.
 
The text guides the reader through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.
 
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cover of Farmcarts to Fords: A History of the Military Ambulance, 1790-1925

Farmcarts to Fords

A History of the Military Ambulance, 1790-1925

John S. Haller

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

This book is the first history of the techniques, systems, and technologies used to evacuate wounded from the battlefield. Historically, the word ambulance described those facilities that provided temporary assistance to the wounded, thus distinguishing them from stationary hospitals where military personnel received more permanent care. Americans and British, however, applied the term to the two-to four-wheeled transport conveyances that carried wounded from the battlefield to the war hospitals.

With the aid of fifty-four illustrations, John S. Haller traces the histories of both meanings of the word from the Napoleonic era through the Great War and its aftermath. He concentrates on the development of British and American evacuation procedures and technology with a focus on hand conveyances and wheeled vehicles. His intent is not to cover all aspects of medical evacuation but to accurately recount the common medical evacuation problems, incongruities, and controversies that existed for warring nations.

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cover of Farmers in Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and People's Party in Texas

Farmers in Rebellion

The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and People's Party in Texas

By Donna A. Barnes

University of Texas Press, 1984

The years after the Civil War brought struggle to the Southern farmer as the economic mainstay of the South—cotton—steadily dropped in price. Prompted by hard times, farmers in Lampasas County, Texas, gathered in 1877 to discuss what could be done. From these modest origins emerged the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, later known as the Southern Farmers Alliance, a powerful protest movement that played an important role in the formation in 1892 of a new political force, the People's party. In the "solid South," particularly in Texas, large numbers of voters abandoned the Democratic party for the new party. Yet despite this support, the decline of the People's party after 1894 was swift.

Farmers in Rebellion recounts the compelling story of these two crucial and closely related movements. Donna A. Barnes examines their developmental histories, asking such important questions as: Under what conditions do protest movements remain weak? Under what conditions do they prosper, amassing large numbers of supporters? And under what conditions do successful protest movements lose their momentum and die? The author explores these complex questions with deft use of archival data that allows her to reflect on the adequacy of the past sociological answers to these questions.

Farmers in Rebellion is a book rich in detail and scope in its look at a critical juncture in the growth of national populist movements. Of interest to sociologists, historians, and political scientists, it stands as an important contribution to our understanding of a pivotal time in Texas, and national, history.

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cover of Farmers' Markets of the Heartland

Farmers' Markets of the Heartland

Janine MacLachlan

University of Illinois Press, 2012

A visual feast of the Midwest's homegrown bounty

In this splendidly illustrated book, food writer and self-described farm groupie Janine MacLachlan embarks on a tour of seasonal markets and farmstands throughout the Midwest, sampling local flavors from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. She conducts delicious research as she meets farmers, tastes their food, and explores how their businesses thrive in the face of an industrial food supply. She tells the stories of a pair of farmers growing specialty crops on a few acres of northern Michigan for just a few months out of the year, an Ohio cattle farm that has raised heritage beef since 1820, and a Minnesota farmer who tirelessly champions the Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying pepper. Along the way, she savors vibrant red carrots, slurpy peaches, vast quantities of specialty cheeses, and some of the tastiest pie to cross anyone's lips.

Informed by debates about eating local, seasonal crops, organic farming, sanitation, and biodiversity, Farmers' Markets of the Heartland tantalizes with special recipes from farm-friendly chefs and dozens of luscious color photographs that will inspire you to harvest the homegrown flavors in your own neighborhood.

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cover of Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains

Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists

Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains

Edited by Katherine A. Spielmann

University of Arizona Press, 1991

Eight contributors discuss early trade relations between Plains and Pueblo farmers, the evolution of interdependence between Plains hunter-gatherers and Pueblo farmers between 1450 and 1700, and the later comanchero trade between Hispanic New Mexicans and the Plains Comanche.
 
Contributors:
Timothy G. Baugh
Judith A. Habicht-Mauche
Frances Levine
Christopher Lintz
David H. Snow
John D. Speth
Katherine A. Spielmann
David R. Wilcox
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cover of Farmers, Kings, and Traders: The People of Southern Africa, 200-1860

Farmers, Kings, and Traders

The People of Southern Africa, 200-1860

Martin Hall

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In this overview of the origins and development of black societies in southern Africa, Martin Hall reconstructs the region's past by throughly examining both the archaeological and the historical records. Beginning with the gradual southward movement of the earliest farmers nearly two thousand years ago, Hall tracks the emergence of precolonial states such as Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. Farmers, Kings, and Traders concludes with the devastating effects of colonialism.

Through a close reading of the accounts of early travelers, colonialists, archaeologists, and historians, Hall places in context the often contradictory histories that have been written of this region. The result is an illuminating look at how ideas about the past have themselves changed over time.
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cover of Farming and Famine: Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991

Farming and Famine

Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991

Donald E. Crummey; Edited by James C. McCann

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

In modern times, Ethiopia has suffered three grievous famines, two of which—in 1973–74 and in 1984–85—caught the world's attention. It is often assumed that population increase drove Ethiopia's farmers to overexploit their environment and thus undermine the future of their own livelihoods, part of a larger global process of deforestation. In Farming and Famine, Donald E. Crummey explores and refutes these claims based on his research in Wallo province, an epicenter of both famines.

Crummey draws on photographs comparing identical landscapes in 1937 and 1997 as well as interviews with local farmers, among other sources. He reveals that forestation actually increased due to farmers' tree-planting initiatives. More broadly, he shows that, in the face of growing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. Yet the threat of famine remains because of constricted access to resources and erratic rainfall. To avoid future famines, Crummey suggests, Ethiopia's farmers must transform agricultural productivity, but they cannot achieve that on their own.
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cover of Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World

Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World

By Amber M. VanDerwarker

University of Texas Press, 2006

The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute.

In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.

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cover of Fascinating Foods from the Deep South: Favorite Recipes from the University Club of Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Fascinating Foods from the Deep South

Favorite Recipes from the University Club of Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Alline P. Van Duzor

University of Alabama Press, 2010

250 Recipes from the University of Alabama’s famed University Club in Tuscaloosa

The historic mansion at the corner of University Boulevard and Queen City Avenue in Tuscaloosa, Alabama has been home to the University of Alabama University Club since 1944. In its early years, the Club took shape around the vision and culinary expertise of the formidable Atlantan Alline P. Van Duzor, still remembered in Tuscaloosa for her impeccable and exacting standards. This book reveals her most beloved recipes.

Commissioned in the early 1960s by a New York publisher, this collection of her gastronomic creations sold through more than eight printings, further spreading her reputation.

The more than 250 favorite Southern recipes in this now-classic cookbook are written in Van Duzor’s straight-forward style, using common fresh and store-bought ingredients. This new edition has been augmented by a guide to portions and food brand names, an index to the recipes, and an appendix of past presidents of the University Club Board.

Cookbook collectors, local history buffs, the university community, and happy cooks everywhere will welcome this reissue of a popular cookbook that has won decades of fans. 

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cover of Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man

Fascination with the Persecutor

George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man

Emilio Gentile and and Stanley G. Payne, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism.
 
This translation makes Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking study of Mosse’s life and work available to English language readers. A leading authority on fascism, totalitarianism, and Mosse’s legacy, Gentile draws on a wealth of published and unpublished material, including letters, interviews, lecture plans, and marginalia from Mosse’s personal library. Gentile details how the senior scholar eschewed polemics and employed rigorous academic standards to better understand fascism and the “catastrophe of the modern man”—how masculinity transformed into a destructive ideology. As long as wars are waged over political beliefs in popular culture, Mosse’s theories of totalitarianism will remain as relevant as ever.
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cover of Fascism and Antifascism since 1945

Fascism and Antifascism since 1945

Mark Bray, Jessica Namakkal, Giulia Riccò, and Eric Roubinek, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2020

Contributors to this special issue of Radical History Review study histories of fascism and antifascism after 1945 to show how fascist ideology continues to circulate and be opposed transnationally despite its supposed death at the end of World War II. The essays cover the use of fascism in the 1970s construction of the Latinx Left, the connection of antifascism and anti-imperialism in 1960s Italian Communist internationalism, post-dictatorship Argentina and the transhistorical alliance between Las Madres and travestí activism, cultures of antifascism in contemporary Japan, and global fascism as portrayed through the British radical right's attempted alliance with Qathafi's Libya. The issue also includes a discussion about teaching fascism through fiction in the age of Trump, a reflection on the practices of archiving and displaying antifascist objects to various publics, and reviews of recent works on antifascism, punk music, and the Rock Against Racism movement.

Contributors. Benjamin Bland, Mark Bray, Rosa Hamilton, Jessica Namakkal, Giulia Riccò, Cole Rizki, Eric Roubinek, Antonino Scalia, Stuart Schrader, Vivian Shaw, Michael Staudenmaier
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cover of Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977

Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977

Stanley G. Payne

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, by celebrated historian Stanley G. Payne, is the most comprehensive history of Spanish fascism to appear in any language. This authoritative study offers treatment of all the major doctrines, personalities, and defining features of the Spanish fascist movement, from its beginnings until the death of General Francisco Franco in 1977.

Payne describes and analyzes the development of the Falangist party both prior to and during the Spanish Civil War, presenting a detailed analysis of its transformation into the state party of the Franco regime—Falange Española Tradicionalista—as well as its ultimate conversion into the pseudofascist Movimiento Nacional. Payne devotes particular attention to the crucial years 1939–1942, when the Falangists endeavored to expand their influence and convert the Franco regime into a fully Fascist system. Fascism in Spain helps us to understand the personality of Franco, the way in which he handled conflict within the regime, and the reasons for the long survival of his rule. Payne concludes with the first full inquiry into the process of “defascistization,” which began with the fall of Mussolini in 1943 and extended through the Franco regime’s later efforts to transform the party into a more viable political entity.

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cover of Fascism: Comparison and Definition

Fascism

Comparison and Definition

Stanley G. Payne

University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

“An impressive review of reputed fascist movements, at once setting them apart from other authoritarian nationalist organizations and bringing them together within a qualified generic category.  Running throughout the volume, and valuable to readers at every level, is a careful critique of the major debates that divide scholars on this most unintelligible ‘ism’ of them all.  Payne precisely defines issues, cites the best literature in the major European languages, and offers with moderation and intelligence his own conclusions on the question.”—Gilbert Allardyce, American Historical Review
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cover of Fascism: History and Theory

Fascism

History and Theory

David Renton

Pluto Press, 2020

Across Europe and the world, far right parties have been enjoying greater electoral success than at any time since 1945. Right-wing street movements draw huge supporters and terrorist attacks on Jews and Muslims proliferate. It sometimes seems we are returning to the age of fascism. 

To explain this disturbing trend, David Renton surveys the history of fascism in Europe from its pre-war origins to the present day, examining Marxist responses to fascism in the age of Hitler and Mussolini, the writings of Trotsky and Gramsci and contemporary theorists. Renton theorizes that fascism was driven by the chaotic and unstable balance between reactionary ambitions and the mass character of its support. This approach will arm a new generation of anti-fascists to resist those who seek to re-enact fascism.

Rewritten and revised for the twentieth anniversary of its first publication, Renton's classic book synthesizes the Marxist theory of fascism and updates it for our own times.
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cover of Fascism: The History of a Word

Fascism

The History of a Word

Federico Marcon

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A wide-ranging history of the term “fascism,” what it has meant, and what it means today.
 
The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
 
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.
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cover of Fascism: Theory and Practice

Fascism

Theory and Practice

David Renton

Pluto Press, 1999

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cover of Fashion Nation: Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century

Fashion Nation

Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century

Sandra Tomc

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Fashion Nation argues that popular images of the United States as a place of glitter and lights, of gaudy costumes and dizzying visual surfaces—usually understood as features of technomodernity—were in fact brewed in the rich, strange world of early nineteenth-century British and European folk nationalism when nations were compelled to offer visual manifestations of their allegedly true ancestral form. Showing that folk and ethnic nationalism played a central role in writing and culture, the book draws on a rare and colorful visual archive of national costumes, cartoons, theatrical spectacles, and immersive entertainments to show how the United States sprung to life as a visual space for transatlantic audiences. Fashion Nation not only includes chapters on major U.S. travel writers like Nathaniel Parker Willis and James Fenimore Cooper, but it also presents explorations of the vogue for folk and ethnic costume, the role of Indigenous dress in Wild West spectacles, and the nationalistic décor on display at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs and amusement parks. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Fashion Nation opens the door to a forgotten legacy of visual symbols that still inhabit ethnic and white nationalism in the United States today, showing how fantasies of glittery surfaces were designed to draw the eye away from a sordid history.
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cover of Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Fashion, Desire and Anxiety

Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Arnold, Rebecca

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

[more]
cover of Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Fashion, Desire and Anxiety

Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Arnold, Rebecca

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

[more]
cover of Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads

Fashionable Food

Seven Decades of Food Fads

Sylvia Lovegren

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Though the Roaring Twenties call to mind images of flappers dancing the Charleston and gangsters dispensing moonshine in back rooms, Sylvia Lovegren here playfully reminds us what these characters ate for dinner: Banana and Popcorn Salad. Like fashions and fads, food—even bad food—has a history, and Lovegren's Fashionable Food is quite literally a cookbook of the American past.

Well researched and delightfully illustrated, this collection of faddish recipes from the 1920s to the 1990s is a decade-by-decade tour of a hungry American century. From the Three P's Salad—that's peas, pickles, and peanuts—of the post-World War I era to the Fruit Cocktail and Spam Buffet Party loaf—all the rage in the ultra-modern 1950s, when cooking from a can epitomized culinary sophistication—Fashionable Food details the origins of these curious delicacies. In two chapters devoted to "exotic foods of the East," for example, Lovegren explores the long American love affair with Chinese food and the social status conferred upon anyone chic enough to eat pu-pu platters from Polynesia. Throughout, Lovegren supplements recipes—some mouth-watering, some appalling—from classic cookbooks and family magazines, with humorous anecdotes that chronicle how society and kitchen technology influenced the way we lived and how we ate.

Equal parts American and culinary history, Fashionable Food examines our collective past from the kitchen counter. Even if it's been a while since you last had Tang Pie and your fondue set is collecting dust in the back of the cupboard, Fashionable Food will inspire, entertain, and inform.
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cover of Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making

Fashioning Celebrity

Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making

Laura Engel

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

This volume takes a new approach to the study of late eighteenth-century British actresses by examining the significance of leading actresses’ autobiographical memoirs, portraits, and theatrical roles together as significant strategies for shaping their careers.
 
In an era when acting was considered a suspicious profession for women, eighteenth-century actresses were “celebrities” in a society obsessed with fashion, gossip, and intrigue. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making, by Laura Engel, considers the lives and careers of four actresses: Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, Mary Wells, and Fanny Kemble. Using conventions of the era’s portraiture, fashion, literature, and the theater in order to create their personas on and off stage, these actresses provided a series of techniques for fashioning celebrity that still survive today.
 
By emphasizing the importance of reading narratives through visual and theatrical frameworks and visual and theatrical representations through narrative models, Engel demonstrates the ways in which actresses’ identities were imagined through a variety of discourses that worked dialectically to construct their complex self-representations.
 
Fashioning Celebrity suggests that eighteenth-century practices of self-promotion mirror contemporary ideas about marketing, framing, and selling the elusive self, providing a way to begin to chart a history of our contemporary obsession with fame and our preoccupation with the rise and fall of famous women.
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cover of Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Fashioning Change

The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Andrea Denny-Brown

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Medieval European culture was obsessed with clothing. In Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High-and Late-Medieval England, Andrea Denny-Brown explores the central impact of clothing in medieval ideas about impermanence and the ethical stakes of human transience. Studies of dress frequently contend with a prevailing cultural belief that bodily adornment speaks to interests that are frivolous, superficial, and cursory. Taking up the vexed topic of clothing’s inherent changeability, Denny-Brown uncovers an important new genealogy of clothing as a representational device, one imbued with a surprising philosophical pedigree and a long history of analytical weightiness.
Considering writers as diverse as Boethius, Alain de Lille, William Durand, Chaucer, and Lydgate, among others, Denny-Brown tracks the development of a literary and cultural trope that begins in the sixth century and finds its highest expression in the vernacular poetry of fifteenth-century England. Among the topics covered are Boethian discourses on the care of the self, the changing garments of Lady Fortune, novelty in ecclesiastical fashions, the sartorial legacy of Chaucer’s Griselda, and the emergence of the English gallant. These literary treatments of vestimentary variation—which develop an aesthetics of change itself—enhance our understanding of clothing as a phenomenological and philosophical category in medieval Europe and illustrate the centrality of the Middle Ages to theories of aesthetics, of materiality, and of cultural change.
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cover of Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama

Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama

Karen Newman

University of Chicago Press, 1991

By examining representations of women on stage and in the many printed materials aimed at them, Karen Newman shows how female subjectivity—both the construction of the gendered subject and the ideology of women's subjection to men—was fashioned in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Her emphasis is not on "women" so much as on the category of "femininity" as deployed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Through the critical lens of poststructuralism, Newman reads anatomies, conduct and domesticity handbooks, sermons, homilies, ballads, and court cases to delineate the ideologies of femininity they represented and produced. Arguing that drama, as spectacle, provides a peculiarly useful locus for analyzing the management of femininity, Newman considers the culture of early modern London to reveal how female subjectivity was fashioned and staged in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and others.
[more]
cover of Fashioning Inland Communities: Trade and Popular Culture in Central East Africa

Fashioning Inland Communities

Trade and Popular Culture in Central East Africa

Yaari Felber-Seligman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

When viewed from the economic centers of the Indian or Atlantic Oceans, the Ruvuma region of East Africa, crossing an area that is now southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique, would look like a periphery. But the same factors that marginalize the region historically brought distinct opportunities. In Fashioning Inland Communities, Yaari Felber-Seligman traces the long history—from the first millennium CE into the twentieth century—of Ruvuma trade practices within a changing world. Felber-Seligman argues that Ruvuma trade should be understood fundamentally as a set of voluntary choices undertaken and revised to further communities’ aspirations. 

Ruvuma used fashion to build varied communities, from local to pan-regional, reflecting the dynamic relationships among inland groups. Examples of Ruvuma popular fashions reveal processes of meaning making and community building that call for us to expand our attention to the ways in which East African peoples interacted alongside, as well as beyond, trade networks that sourced prestige and commercial goods. Popular culture here emerges as a heterarchical force that shaped lasting multidirectional connections across and between Ruvuma and their neighbors. As both a subject and a strategy for analysis, the history of popular fashion shifts how we view histories of small, decentralized societies as they encounter larger economies. Felber-Seligman demonstrates that this has implications for our understanding not only of trade but of material culture, community, gender, and family.
[more]
cover of Fast Combat Support Ship HNLMS Zuiderkruis

Fast Combat Support Ship HNLMS Zuiderkruis

Jantinus Mulder

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

HNLMS Zuiderkruis (1975-2012) was the second Fast Combat Support Ship of the Royal Netherlands Navy. It was primarily intended for Replenishment At Sea, fueling task groups and NATO units. As a modern design Zuiderkruis enabled a “one stop replenishment” and also carried AVCAT, fresh water and spare parts. A helicopter deck facilitated vertical replenishment.
[more]
cover of Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930

Fast Forward

The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930

Tim Harte

University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence.
    Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects.     
    Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.
[more]
cover of Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood

Fast and Furious Franchising

How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood

Dan Hassler-Forest

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

What the popularity of the Fast and Furious film franchise says about Hollywood blockbusters and media production

Fast and Furious Franchising charts the transformation of Hollywood through the story of one of its most successful cinematic universes. Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious became an unexpected hit, developing into a seven-billion-dollar media franchise with nine direct sequels (so far), one “sidequel,” copious spin-offs, and licensing deals from board games to theme park rides.

Dan Hassler-Forest shows how Fast and Furious paved the way for a new form of serialized storytelling that balanced new distribution practices and expansion into international markets with a savvy awareness of representational politics. By following the series’s development over the past twenty-five years, Fast and Furious Franchising reveals distinct phases that reflect larger media-industrial trends: the postclassical blockbuster era of the early 2000s; the emergence of the megafranchise between 2008 and 2014; the franchise’s “imperial” era, from 2015 through 2019; and the postpandemic crisis era of media saturation and franchise fatigue.

While examining this rapidly changing media landscape, Hassler-Forest offers lively, insightful analyses of the films as they have embraced ever-more-ludicrous plots and unlikely character turns while always maintaining their signature faith in the power of family. As he illuminates the role of the Fast and Furious movies in the global entertainment industry, Hassler-Forest shows how the films’ improbable success proves Dominic Toretto’s adage that, whether “you win by an inch or a mile . . . winning’s winning.”

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture

Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!

Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture

Tim Harte

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

The revival of the Olympic games in 1896 and the subsequent rise of modern athletics prompted a new, energetic movement away from more sedentary habits. In Russia, this ethos soon became a key facet of the Bolsheviks' shared vision for the future. In the aftermath of the revolution, glorification of exercise persevered, pointing the way toward a stronger, healthier populace and a vibrant Socialist society.
With interdisciplinary analysis of literature, painting, and film, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! traces how physical fitness had an even broader impact on culture and ideology in the Soviet Union than previously realized. From prerevolutionary writers and painters glorifying popular circus wrestlers to Soviet photographers capturing unprecedented athleticism as a means of satisfying their aesthetic ideals, the nation's artists embraced sports in profound, inventive ways. Though athletics were used for doctrinaire purposes, Tim Harte demonstrates that at their core, they remained playful, joyous physical activities capable of stirring imaginations and transforming everyday realities.
[more]
cover of Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300-1541: II: Hereford Diocese

Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300-1541

II: Hereford Diocese

Edited by Joyce M. Horn and revised by David Lepine

University of London Press, 2009

After the First World War, Britain faced a number of challenges as it sought to adapt to domestic conditions of mass democracy while maintaining its position in the empire in the face of national independence movements. As politicians at home and abroad sought to legitimize their position, new efforts were made to conceptualize nationality and citizenship, with attempts to engage the public using mass media and greater emphasis on governing in the public interest. Brave New World reappraises the domestic and imperial history of Britain in the inter-war period, investigating how 'nation building' was given renewed impetus by the upheavals of the First World War. The essays in this collection address how new technologies and approaches to governance were used to forge new national identities both at home and in the empire, covering a wide range of issues from the representation of empire on film to the convergence of politics and 'star culture'. The book is an invaluable resource for scholars of British social, political and imperial history, as well as being of interest to the general reader.
[more]
cover of Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857: The Welsh Dioceses XIV

Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857

The Welsh Dioceses XIV

Compiled by William H. Campbell

University of London Press, 2026

A detailed history of the Church of England’s Welsh dioceses, including the building of cathedrals and churches.

The volumes in this series trace the process of reorganization and reform that took place in the Church of England after the Norman conquest, with the building of new cathedrals, the establishment of new constitutions for their chapters, and the appointment of foreign clergy. In this period, when many documents are undated, the chronological framework is provided by the careers of bishops, dignitaries, canons, and cathedral priors.  

​This volume covers the years 1541 to 1857, with a focus on the Welsh dioceses. During this period, six new dioceses were created out of larger dioceses, with former abbey churches named as their cathedrals. These fourteen cathedrals were known as the New Foundation, as compared with the thirteen medieval secular cathedrals of the Old Foundation. Further substantial reorganization took place in the 1830s, and additional dioceses were created to meet the needs of the period. This volume offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the period, making it an essential research tool for historians.

[more]
cover of Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Fatal Isolation

The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Richard C. Keller

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors--their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths.

Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster--the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.
[more]
cover of Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union

Fate in My Hands

The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union

Yana Skorobogatov

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.

From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.

[more]
cover of Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist: A Critical History of Women, Patriarchy, and Mexican National Discourse

Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist

A Critical History of Women, Patriarchy, and Mexican National Discourse

Carlos Monsiváis, edited by Norma Kahn and Ilana Luna

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

This critical anthology of writings by Carlos Monsiváis represents a foundational set of texts by an exceptional (yet under‑translated) Mexican cultural critic. Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist situates the urgencies of social movements as they developed in real time. Spanning from 1973 to 2008, Monsiváis’s essays, which were originally compiled by scholar Marta Lamas, analyze the role of women in a patriarchal culture from pre‑Columbian times to the present. This critical edition offers extensive annotation and cultural background to understand the cogent, but particularly Mexican arguments that Monsiváis makes, many of which are extremely relevant in today’s political economy in the US and the world. Norma Klahn and Ilana Luna’s translation, critical introduction, and commentary consider issues of context, history, and conventions, framing Monsiváis’s debates in relation to global feminist history and human rights struggles.
[more]
cover of Father Christmas' ABC

Father Christmas' ABC

F. Warne & Co.

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2005

Q is the Quadrille, danced at our party
R is for the Reindeer, of Santa Claus hearty

W is for waggon laden with holly
X is for Xmas tree all light and toys jolly

The celebration of Christmas throughout history is marked by rich traditions around the globe, yet British festive customs—exchanging gifts, singing carols, trimming the magnificent tree, and sipping wassail—take pride of place in our imaginations. Allowing us a glimpse of some of these customs is a facsimile edition of an Father Christmas' ABC, an1894 Victorian classic that chronicles the activities surrounding the holiday more than a century ago.
Each charming color painting, one for each letter of the alphabet, reveals a custom of a Victorian Christmas. From the lighting of candles on the tree to bell ringing, ice skating, and making jam tarts, the beautiful illustrations vividly bring to life the spirit of the holiday and its history.
Accompanying the illustrations are clever ABC verses that at the time were an alphabet primer and now are an intimate glimpse of Victorian domestic life. The lively verse recounts various holiday traditions, transporting us to the warmth and cozy comfort of a British home at Christmastime.
Together, the rich illustrations and captivating verses create a unique and enchanting picture book on the special moments of Christmas. Father Christmas' ABC will appeal to readers of all ages as a nostalgic window into Christmases of a bygone time.
[more]
cover of Father Groppi: Marching for Civil Rights

Father Groppi

Marching for Civil Rights

Stuart Stotts

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

Father Groppi Marched to Change Milwaukee


"Father Groppi: Marching for Civil Rights" tells the story of Father James Groppi, a Catholic priest from Milwaukee, Wis., who stood up for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s.

This important new addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers also tells about a turbulent time in Wisconsin history and sheds light on the civil rights movement and its place in the North.

Growing up on the south side of Milwaukee as the son of Italian immigrants, young James Groppi learned early on what it felt like to be made fun of just because of who you are, and he learned to respect people from other races and ethnic groups. Later, while studying to become a priest, he saw the discrimination African Americans faced. It made him angry, and he vowed to do whatever he could to fight racism.

Father Groppi marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. But he knew there was work to be done in his own city. In Milwaukee, he teamed up with the NAACP and other organizations, protesting discrimination and segregation wherever they saw it. It wasn't always easy, and Father Groppi and the other civil rights workers faced great challenges.

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cover of Father Mathew's Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America

Father Mathew's Crusade

Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America

John F. Quinn

University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

For centuries, the Irish have been famed, and often derided, for their attachment to alcohol. Yet in the 1830s and 1840s, Ireland became a temperance stronghold. The man almost singlehandedly responsible for this surprising transformation was Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), a popular Franciscan friar. Over a ten-year period, five million Irish men, women, and children took the pledge at his hands, while hundreds of public houses were forced to shut their doors or switch to selling coffee and tea. 

By the end of the 1840s, however, Mathew's “miracle” was already coming undone. The Great Famine was ravaging Ireland and Mathew's years of nonstop campaigning had left him sick, exhausted, and bankrupt. Undeterred, he traveled to the United States in 1849 to generate support and administer the pledge to as many new immigrants as he could find. Failing health forced him to return to Ireland where he died in 1856, leaving behind a weak and fragmented movement. 

In the late nineteenth century, several Irish priests revived Mathew's crusade. In the United States, Irish American bishops supported the Catholic Total Abstinence Union (CTAU) and joined hands with the Women's Christian Temperance Union in their war against liquor. In Ireland, Father James Cullen formed the Pioneers, a total abstinence association for devout Catholics. While the CTAU languished after the United States Congress passed the Prohibition Amendment in 1919, the Pioneers continued to thrive in Ireland into the 1960s. Although the group's membership has declined in recent years, there are still today a large number of Irish teetotalers.

[more]
cover of Fathers of Botany: The Discovery of Chinese Plants by European Missionaries

Fathers of Botany

The Discovery of Chinese Plants by European Missionaries

Jane Kilpatrick

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2014

Many of the world’s most renowned and exciting ornamental plants—including magnolias, roses, rhododendrons, tree peonies, lilies, and blue poppies—have their origins in China. In the mid-nineteenth century, professional plant hunters were dispatched by nurseries and botanic gardens to collect living botanical specimens from China for cultivation in Europe, and it is these adventurers and nurserymen who are often credited with the explosive bloom of Chinese flowers in the West.

But as Jane Kilpatrick shows in Fathers of Botany, the first Westerners to come upon and document this bounty were in fact cut from a different cloth: the clergy. Following the Opium Wars, European missionaries were the first explorers to dig further into the Chinese interior and send home evidence of one of the richest and most varied floras ever seen, and it was their discoveries that caused a sensation among Western plantsmen. Both men of faith and talented botanists alike, these missionaries lent their names to many of the plants they discovered, but their own stories disappeared into the leaf litter of history. Drawing on their letters and contemporary accounts, Kilpatrick focuses on the lives of four great French missionary botanists—Pères Armand David (of Davidia involucrata—the dove tree—and discoverer of the giant panda), Jean Marie Delavay, Paul Guillaume Farges, and Jean André Soulié—as well as a group of other French priests, Franciscan missionaries, and a single German Protestant pastor who all amassed significant plant collections, as she unearths a lost chapter of botanical history. In so doing, she reminds today’s gardeners and botanists—and any of us who stop to smell the roses—of the enormous debt owed to these obscure fathers of botany.
[more]
cover of Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: Black Masculinity in U.S. History and Literature, 1820–1945

Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men

Black Masculinity in U.S. History and Literature, 1820–1945

Timothy R. Buckner

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

 Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: Black Masculinity in U.S. History and Literature, 1820–1945,edited by Timothy R. Buckner and Peter Caster, brings together scholars of history and literature focused on the lives and writing of black men during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. The interdisciplinary study demonstrates the masculine character of cultural practices developed from slavery through segregation. Black masculinity embodies a set of contradictions, including an often mistaken threat of violence, the belief in its legitimacy, and the rhetorical union of truth and fiction surrounding slavery, segregation, resistance, and self-determination. The attention to history and literature is necessary because so many historical depictions of black men are rooted in fiction. The essays of this collection balance historical and literary accounts, and they join new descriptions of familiar figures such as Charles W. Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois with the less familiar but critically important William Johnson and Nat Love.

 
The 2008 election of Barack Obama is a tremendously significant event in the vexed matter of race in the United States. However, the racial subtext of recent radical political movements and the 2009 arrest of scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., demonstrate that the perceived threat posed by black masculinity to the nation’s unity and vitality remains an alarming one in the cultural imagination.
[more]
cover of Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry

Faulkner and Hemingway

Biography of a Literary Rivalry

Joseph Fruscione

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

In the first book of its kind, Joseph Fruscione examines the contentious relationship of two titans of American modernism—William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. At times, each voiced a shared literary and professional respect; at other times, each thought himself the superior craftsman and spoke of the other disparagingly. Their rivalry was rich, nuanced, and vexed, embodying various attitudes—one-upmanship, respect, criticism, and praise. Their intertextual contest—what we might call their modernist dialectic—was manifested textually through their fiction, nonfiction, letters, Nobel Prize addresses, and spoken remarks.
Their intertextual relationship was highly significant for both authors: it was unusual for the reclusive Faulkner to engage so directly and so often with a contemporary, and for the hypercompetitive Hemingway to admit respect for—and possible inferiority to—a rival writer. Their joint awareness spawned an influential, allusive, and sparring intertext in which each had a psychocompetitive hold on the other. Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry—part analytical study, part literary biography—illustrates how their artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed frequently, as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence.
 
Although previous scholarship has noted particular flare-ups and textual similarities, most of it has tended to be more implicit in outlining the broader narrative of Faulkner and Hemingway as longtime rivals. Building on such scholarship, Faulkner and Hemingway offers a more overt study of how these authors’ published and archival work traces a sequence of psychological influence, cross-textual reference, and gender performance over some three decades.
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cover of Faulkner the Storyteller

Faulkner the Storyteller

Blair Labatt

University of Alabama Press, 2006

A study exploring the role of event and plot in William Faulkner’s fiction.

Faulkner the Storyteller addresses the role of event and plot in Faulkner's fiction and the creation of an implied teller behind the tale. Novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are often thought of as canonical modernist texts antagonistic to traditional notions of plot and storytelling. Blair Labatt, however, argues that Faulkner's fiction, regardless of its modernist gestures, is filled and driven by sophisticated manifestations of plot—willed challenges, structural targets, gambits, designs, engagements, and battles—a language of competition and conflict and a syntax of events.

Labatt examines Faulkner's short stories, such as "Mountain Victory," "That Evening Sun," and "Barn Burning," and the architecture of the Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion), and finds that Faulkner's deployment of cause and effect is central to his narratives. Labatt also explores how Faulkner's use of plot creates an implied voice that lends a humorous element to his story's twists and turns that often brackets and encloses the pathos of his characters.

[more]
cover of Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Edited & Intro Claude J. Summers & Ted-Lary Pebworth

University of Missouri Press, 2002

Written by various experts in the field, this volume of thirteen original essays explores some of the most significant theoretical and practical fault lines and controversies in seventeenth-century English literature. The turn into the twenty-first century is an appropriate time to take stock of the state of the field, and, as part of that stock-taking, the need arises to assess both where literary study of the early modern period has been and where it might desirably go. Hence, many of the essays in this collection look both backward and forward. They chart the changes in the field over the past half century, while also looking forward to more change in the future.
            Some of the essays collected here explore the points of friction, vulnerability, and division that have emerged in literary study of all periods at the end of the twentieth century, such as theory, gender, sexuality, race, and religion. Others are more narrowly focused on fault lines and controversies peculiar to the study of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature. At the same time nearly all of these essays examine and illuminate particular works of literature. They engage theory, but they also illustrate their points concretely by enacting practical criticism of works by authors ranging from Bacon to Milton. What emerges from the collection is a sense of the field’s dynamism and vitality. The dominant mood of the essays is a cautious optimism, and, while the contributors are by no means complacent, they all share a belief that the fault lines that have emerged in the field are variously and valuably instructive. 
By exposing these fault lines the essayists seek a means of acknowledging differences and disagreements without covering them up. They also constructively suggest ways of addressing the issues as a prerequisite to bridging them. By broaching some of the most significant questions that animate the study of early modern literature at the turn into a new century, this volume will be of great value to any student or scholar of seventeenth-century literature.
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cover of Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky: Brushes with Nature's Wisdom

Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky

Brushes with Nature's Wisdom

Trudy Dittmar

University of Iowa Press, 2003

"[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams. . . . It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar's first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power." --Robert Finch,Los Angeles Times Book Review "Honest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific knowledge she's gleaned through training and reading." --The Bloomsbury Review "Trudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I have ever read." --Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story "Dittmar writes about life with the precision of a scientist and the introspective lyricism of a poet, illuminating for us those parts of the world we barely remember to notice...from the complex emotional lives of cows and pronghorns to the dazzling leaves of a silver maple to the teeming hidden pools of bright salamanders. Reading this book is like finding a geode in a stream bed--crack it open and it sparkleso--Jo Ann Beard "Dittmar, who won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer' Award in 2000 and whose writings have appeared in numerous publications . . . provides a fascinating look at natural and personal history in these ten essays on animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. . . . An excellent choice for both public and academic libraries." --Library Journal In essays with settings that range from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Trudy Dittmar weaves personal experience with diverse threads of subject matter to create unexpected connections between human nature and nature at large. Life stories, elegantly combined with mindful observations of animals, plants, landscape and the skies, theories in natural science, environmental considerations, and touches of art criticism and popular culture, offer insights into the linked analogies of nature and soul. A glacial pond teeming with salamanders in arrested development is cause for reflection on the limits of a life that knows only bounty. The hot blue lights of celestial phenomena are a metaphor for fast, flashy men--he loves of a life--and a romantic career is interpreted. Watching a pronghorn buck battling for, and ultimately losing, his harem leads to a meditation on a kind of immortality. Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky is testimony to the bearing and consequence of nature in one life, and to the richness of understanding it can bring to all human lives. Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey and her cabin in Wyoming.
[more]
cover of Fawn Island

Fawn Island

Douglas Wood

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Fawn Island is a place where crows serve as alarm clocks, white-throated sparrows leave the tracks of their songs upon the evening hush, and chickadees help a woodsman learn to whistle. The island is also a jumping-off place for journeys large and small, earthly and spiritual-to nearby Mallard Island, Gull Island, or Bald Rock, by sea kayak into the wild recesses of sprawling Voyageurs National Park, or on a midnight paddle in which the paddler can reach the silent wilderness of the stars themselves. In his latest book, best-selling author Douglas Wood guides the reader on a deep journey into the heart of the North Woods.

For Wood, Fawn Island is not merely a charming wilderness hideaway; it is the entry to realms of thought and meaning as well. From its pine-clad shores he probes for insights into the nature of neighborliness and independence, of community and solitude. Out of an ancient Ojibwe legend comes an exploration of personal loss and life after death. Wood questions the notion of being a “force of nature” and the concept of the passage of time in the context of seemingly eternal trees, lakes, rock ledges, and stars. From beneath the ascending trunks of pines comes an inquiry into the principles of optimism and, finally, a personal response to the eternal question: Is the universe a friendly place?

Embedded in the text like roots of the island’s pines is Wood’s gentle, self-effacing humor and the author’s own original pen-and-ink drawings that superbly evoke the poetry and mystery of this “small bit of rock and tree,” this “lucky place” in the wilderness. 

[more]
cover of Fear Reverence Terror

Fear Reverence Terror

Carlo Ginzburg

Seagull Books, 2017

An invitation to slow down our looking and attend to the power structures embedded in images. 
 
We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy, scaring us, dazzling us.

Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso’s Guernica, the “Lord Kitchener Wants You” World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political—an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question.
 
[more]
cover of Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought

Fear of Diversity

The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought

Arlene W. Saxonhouse

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This wide-ranging book locates the origin of political science in the everyday world of ancient Greek life, thought, and culture. Arlene Saxonhouse contends that the Greeks, confronted by the puzzling diversity of the physical world, sought a force that would unify, constrain, and explain it. This drive toward unity did more than value the mind over the senses: it led the Greeks to play down the very real complexities—particularly regarding women, the family, and sexuality—in both their political and personal lives.

Saxonhouse opens up fresh understandings of such issues as the Greeks' fear of the feminine and their attempts to ignore the demands that gender, reproduction, and the family inevitably make on the individual.
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