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The fascinating story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century obstetrician ostracized for his strident advocacy of disinfection as a way to prevent childbed fever.

In Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, Theodore G. Obenchain traces the life story of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician who was shunned and marginalized by the medical establishment for advancing a far-sighted but unorthodox solution to the appalling mortality rates that plagued new mothers of the day.

In engrossing detail, Obenchain recreates for readers the sights, smells, and activities within a hospital of that day. In an era before the acceptance of modern germ science, physicians saw little need for cleanliness or hygiene. As a consequence, antiseptic measures were lax and rudimentary. Especially vulnerable to contamination were new mothers, who frequently contracted and died from childbed fever (puerperal fever). Genius Belabored follows Semmelweis’s awakening to the insight that many of these deaths could be avoided with basic antiseptic measures like hand washing.

The medical establishment, intellectually unprepared for Semmelweis’s prescient hypothesis, rejected it for a number of reasons. It was unorthodox and went against the lingering Christian tradition that the dangers of childbirth were inherent to the lives of women. Complicating matters, colleagues did not consider Semmelweis an easy physician to work with. His peers described him as strange and eccentric. Obenchain offers an empathetic and insightful argument that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder and illuminates how his colleagues, however dedicated to empirical science they might have been, misjudged Semmelweis’s methods based upon ignorance and their emotional discomfort with him.

In Genius Belabored, Obenchain identifies Semmelweis’s rightful place in the pantheon of scientists and physicians whose discoveries have saved the lives of millions. Obenchain’s biography of Semmelweis offers unique insights into the practice of medicine and the mindsets of physicians working in the premodern era. This fascinating study offers much of interest to general readers as well as those interested in germ theory, the history of medicine and obstetrics, or anyone wishing to better understand the trajectory of modern medicine.

This book offers lively description and convincing interpretation of the most significant events, cruxes and ongoing themes in German history from the end of the Second World War up to the present. The main features of the last fifty years are not only succinctly and vividly presented and interpreted, they are also placed in the context of international political developments.

The chronologies that accompany each chapter record the most important dates, facts and names occurring in the narrative. Jürgen Weber’s text supplies the reader with a combination of vivid descriptive history, easily absorbed chronology, and a reliable reference work for the parallel lives of the two Germanies, a product of the Cold War.

    Historian Gilad Margalit eloquently fills a tragic gap in the historical record with this sweeping examination of the plight of Gypsies in Germany before, during, and since the era of the Third Reich.
    Germany and Its Gypsies reveals the painful record of the official treatment of the German Gypsies, a people whose future, in the shadow of Auschwitz, remains uncertain. Margalit follows the story from the heightened racism of the nineteenth century to the National Socialist genocidal policies that resulted in the murder of most German Gypsies, from the shifting attitudes in the two Germanys in 1945 through reunification and up to the present day.
    Drawing upon a rich variety of sources, Margalit considers the pivotal historic events, legal arguments, debates, and changing attitudes toward the status of the German Gypsies and shines a vitally important light upon the issue of ethnic groups and their victimization in society. The result is a powerful and unforgettable testament.

A free black woman in antebellum America, Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) was an independent itinerant preacher and religious visionary who founded a Shaker community in Philadelphia that survived her death by twenty-five years. Gifts of Power contains her complete extant writings, covering the period 1830 to 1864.

The key to understanding Deleuze's complete body of work.

The long-awaited conclusion to Derrida’s seminar on the gift and time.
 
In 1991, Jacques Derrida published the first half of a seminar delivered from 1978 to 1979 on gifts and time, but the second installment (though expected) was not completed in his lifetime. Given Time II completes the seminar with eight sessions that showcase Derrida’s most advanced work on the problematic of the gift in Heidegger, with deep dives into some of the most difficult texts in the Heideggerian corpus, including “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “The Thing,” and “On Time and Being.”

Beyond Heidegger, Derrida engages Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and others on the act of giving and receiving, the sacrificial gift, and more. Throughout, Derrida identifies a paradox of gift giving: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since gifts often involve a cycle of debt and repayment. Given Time II is a uniquely Derridean treatment of an important subject in the work of Heidegger and beyond.

How the “glance” rather than the “gaze” in nineteenth-century literature and art anticipates the turn to modernism

The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the “possessive gaze,” signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things.

Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies—the sentimental gaze and the slave trader’s glance—highlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinson’s syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James’s vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williams’s imagist poetics as a response to early cinema’s use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar.

Each of these literary artists—via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them—refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth century’s twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.
 

This book argues for an original, unorthodox conception about the relationship between globalization and contemporary nationalism. While the prevailing view holds that nationalism and globalization are forces of clashing opposition, Sabanadze establishes that these tend to become allied forces. It acknowledges that nationalism does react against the rising globalization and represents a form of resistance against globalizing influences, but the Basque and Georgian cases prove that globalization and nationalism can be complementary rather than contradictory tendencies.

Nationalists have often served as promoters of globalization, seeking out globalizing influences and engaging with global actors out of their very nationalist interests. In the case of both Georgia and the Basque Country, there is little evidence suggesting the existence of strong, politically organized nationalist opposition to globalization.

Globalization and Nationalism discusses why, on a broader scale, different forms of nationalism develop differing attitudes towards globalization and engage in different relationships.

This groundbreaking volume explores two early and opposing Spanish medical perspectives on chocolate and other New World substances. In the early 1600s, doctors Bartolomé Marradón and Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma returned from travels to the Americas with starkly different views: Marradón cautioned against tobacco and offered only limited approval of chocolate, while Colmenero vigorously defended chocolate’s health benefits. Their writings, translated and circulated across Europe, helped transform chocolate from a medicinal drink into a global commodity. Featuring the first bilingual edition of Marradón’s Dialogue (1618)—in full Spanish and English—and a new bilingual presentation of Colmenero’s influential Curious Treatise (1631), this book provides rare insight into early modern medical thought, cultural exchange, and the globalization of taste. Essential for readers of food history, early modern medicine, and transatlantic interchange, it uniquely reveals how debates over health, culture, and commerce brewed in a cup of chocolate.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Polish author Witold Gombrowicz’s famously chaotic masterpiece, Cosmos, was profoundly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges—particularly by three key stories from Ficciones. Drawing on evidence that Gombrowicz read Ficciones in 1960, as well as handwritten marginalia in Gombrowicz’s copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel, this groundbreaking study argues that Cosmos responded to Borges’s literary transformations of cartography, mathematical combinatorics, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Along the way, it introduces the concept of “immaterial bibliography” to analyze imaginary texts appearing in literary works. Finally, it examines the tension between Borges’s explicit racism and the ethical and aesthetic vision suggested by his fiction, revealing how rumor, rebellion, and literary inheritance shaped Gombrowicz’s reading of Borges, which in turn influenced the composition of his prizewinning last novel. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

To the Menominee people, the "good seeds” of life are the manomin, or wild rice, that also gives the tribe its name. In this unique food memoir, Tribal member Thomas Pecore Weso takes readers on a cook’s journey through Wisconsin’s North Woods tribal lands, connecting Menominee food—beaver, trout, blackberry, wild rice, maple sugar, partridge—to the colorful individuals who taught him Indigenous values and traditions. Featuring more than forty recipes, Good Seeds keeps those traditions alive for future generations.

With a rare perspective as a Native American anthropologist and artist, Weso mixes a poignant personal story with the seeds of Menominee cooking traditions. He tells of the foods and the people who helped shape the person he became. His grandfather Moon was a medicine man, whose morning prayers formed the foundation for all the day’s meals. His grandmother Jennie “made fire” each morning in a wood-burning stove and oversaw huge breakfasts of wild game, fish, and fruit pies. His uncles taught him to hunt bear, deer, squirrels, raccoons, and skunks for the daily larder. Along with authentic family recipes, Weso recalls favorite foods served at the Menominee fair and at local diners.

In Good Seeds, adventurous cooks will gain insight and inspiration from Weso’s recipes, and readers of all stripes will appreciate the often-humorous stories about reservation life during the mid-twentieth century.

Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy traces the life and career of the talented colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who rose to become governor of Hong Kong and then the Straits Settlements. He governed Hong Kong at a time of revolutionary upheaval in China which brought the city to its economic knees and threatened Britain’s possession of the territory. Clementi strongly objected to London’s attempts to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and sought to protect Hong Kong from the intellectual currents sweeping through the mainland by making the city a bastion of traditional Chinese culture. As Governor of Straits Settlements and High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States, he championed the traditional rights of the Malay rulers and suppressed national sentiment among Malaya’s swelling Chinese population. Alarmed by his determination to press ahead with such policies despite opposition, the government in London forced Clementi into early retirement.

This is the first full-length biography of a highly gifted colonial administrator who spent half of his roughly 30-year career in Hong Kong and played a major role in the city’s history. As a young official, Clementi quickly mastered Chinese and published translations of Cantonese poetry. He undertook epic journeys across China on intelligence-gathering missions, was closely involved in the land settlement in the New Territories, and the creation of Hong Kong University. As governor, he championed the development of Kai Tak airport and the provision of Hong Kong’s water supply. He also appointed the first Chinese member of the city’s Executive Council. Yet he resisted reforms to the controversial mui-tsai system under which Chinese girls served as housemaids to Chinese families on the grounds that it was a Chinese "tradition." This study of his career, in which he was also posted to British Guiana and Ceylon, sheds light on how Britain administered the far-flung territories that formed its empire.

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe.

The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.