Results by title

The first extensive examination of Stein's notebooks, manuscripts and letters, prepared over a period of twenty years, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein. This definitive study give us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of Stein, the great modernist, throughout one of her most productive periods. From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to Lectures In America in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time.

Teenage life is tough. You’re at the mercy of parents, teachers, and siblings, all of whom insist on continuing to treat you like a kid and refuse to leave you alone. So what do you do when it all gets to be too much? You retreat to your room (and maybe slam the door).

Even in our era of Snapchat and hoverboards, bedrooms remain a key part of teenage life, one of the only areas where a teen can exert control and find some privacy. And while these separate bedrooms only became commonplace after World War II, the idea of the teen bedroom has been around for a long time. With Get Out of My Room!, Jason Reid digs into the deep historical roots of the teen bedroom and its surprising cultural power. He starts in the first half of the nineteenth century, when urban-dwelling middle-class families began to consider offering teens their own spaces in the home, and he traces that concept through subsequent decades, as social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused it to become more widespread. Along the way, Reid shows us how the teen bedroom, with its stuffed animals, movie posters, AM radios, and other trappings of youthful identity, reflected the growing involvement of young people in American popular culture, and also how teens and parents, in the shadow of ongoing social changes, continually negotiated the boundaries of this intensely personal space.

Richly detailed and full of surprising stories and insights, Get Out of My Room! is sure to offer insight and entertainment to anyone with wistful memories of their teenage years. (But little brothers should definitely keep out.)

From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Food became purer, clothing more revealing, sex more orgiastic, and home decor more rustic and authentic.

Through a sociological analysis of the countercultural print culture of the 1970s, Sam Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class. He describes the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Amateurish and rough in production quality, these popular books and magazines blended Eastern mysticism, Freudian psychology, environmental ecology, and romantic American pastoralism as they offered “expert” advice—about how to be more in touch with the natural world, how to release oneself into trusting relationships with others, and how to delve deeper into the body’s rhythms and natural sensuality. Binkley examines dozens of these publications, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Rainbook, the Catalog of Sexual Consciousness, Celery Wine, Domebook, and Getting Clear.

Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the “yuppie” 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding.

This groundbreaking study finds Southern Baptists more diverse in their attitudes toward segregation than previously assumed

Focusing on the eleven states of the old Confederacy, Getting Right with God examines the evolution of Southern Baptists’ attitudes toward African Americans during a tumultuous period of change in the United States. Mark Newman not only offers an in-depth analysis of Baptist institutions from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and state conventions to colleges and churches but also probes beyond these by examining the response of pastors and lay people to changing race relations.
 
The SBC long held that legal segregation was in line with biblical teachings, but after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision in favor of desegregating public institutions, some Southern Baptists found an inconsistency in their basic beliefs. Newman identifies three major blocs of Baptist opinion about race relations: a hard-line segregationist minority that believed God had ordained slavery in the Bible; a more moderate majority that accepted the prevailing social order of racial segregation; and a progressive group of lay people, pastors, and denominational leaders who criticized and ultimately rejected discrimination as contrary to biblical teachings.
 
According to Newman, the efforts of the progressives to appeal to Baptists’ primary commitments and the demise of de jure segregation caused many moderate and then hard-line segregationists to gradually relinquish their views, leading to the 1995 apology by the SBC for its complicity in slavery and racism. Comparing Southern Baptists with other major white denominations, Newman concludes that lay Baptists differed little from other white southerners in their response to segregation.
 

"A readable and concise overview of how U.S. transportation came to its present pass. . . . Goddard is at his best when recounting the complex and interesting history of what has come to be called 'the highway lobby.'. . . An excellent book for the general reader with an interest in getting around."—Larry Fish, Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is a riveting story: of mighty railroads hamstrung almost overnight by government bureaucrats; of road interests led by General Motors Corp. conspiring in city after city to destroy efficient trolley systems . . . and of freeways that are far from free."—Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press

"The combination of forces and fates that turned America into a giant parking lot from sea to shining sea is the subject of Stephen B. Goddard's lively pop history. . . . As Mr. Goddard ably points out, road-building and the creation of car-dependent suburbs have become ends in themselves."—James Howard Kunstler, Wall Street Journal

"The strength of Goddard's book is that he understands the complexities of manipulating public opinion to influence legislatures."—David Young, Chicago Tribune

"[Goddard's] book is a deft and easily read history of how transportation has shaped the nation and its economy, and ultimately, how a federation of truck and car interests drastically tilted national policies. . . . For many reasons this is an exceptionally important work."—Jim Dwyer, New York Newsday

Getting Around Brown is both the first history of school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, and the first case study to explore the interplay of desegregation, business, and urban development in America.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including over sixty interviews, the book details the causes and consequences of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education (1977). Gregory S. Jacobs argues that school desegregation in Columbus failed to produce equal educational opportunity, not because it was inherently detrimental to learning, but because it was incompatible with urban development. As a consequence, the long-term health of the city school district was sacrificed to preserve the growth of the city itself. The resulting middle-class abandonment of urban education in Columbus produced an increasingly poor, African-American city school system and a powerful form of defensive activism within the overwhelmingly white suburban systems.

The title of the book refers not only to the elaborate tools used to circumvent the spirit of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision but also to the need to move beyond the flawed dichotomies and failed policies that have come to define desegregation. The book calls for a reconsideration of the complicated relationship race, class, and housing patterns have with city school reform efforts, a relationship obscured by this country’s vitriolic and occasionally violent battle over busing. Jacobs concludes his study with a “modest proposal,” in which he recommends the abolition of the Columbus Public School District, the dispersal of its students throughout surrounding suburban systems, and the creation of a choice-based “experimental education zone” within the old city school district boundaries.

Readable and relevant, Getting around Brownis essential reading for scholars of recent American history, urban studies, civil rights and race relations, and educational policy, as well as anyone interested in public education and politics.

Alan Gewirth's Reason and Morality directed philosophical attention to the possibility of presenting a rational and rigorous demonstration of fundamental moral principles. Now, these previously unpublished essays from some of the most distinguished philosophers of our generation subject Gewirth's program to thorough evaluation and assessment. In a tour de force of philosophical analysis, Professor Gewirth provides detailed replies to all of his critics—a major, genuinely clarifying essay of intrinsic philosophical interest.

Isaiah Spiegel was an inmate of the Lodz Ghetto from its inception in 1940 until its liquidation in 1944. While there, he wrote short stories depicting Jewish life in the ghetto and managed to hide them before he was deported to Auschwitz. After being freed, he returned to Lodz to retrieve and publish his stories.
​
The stories examine the relationship between inmates and their families, their friends, their Christian former neighbors, the German soldiers, and, ultimately, the world of hopelessness and desperation that surrounded them. In using his creative powers to transform the suffering and death of his people into stories that preserve their memory, Spiegel succeeds in affirming the humanity and dignity the Germans were so intent on destroying.

Originally published as Malchut geto (Malkhes geto) in Yiddish.

Even as China is central to the contemporary global economy, its socialist past continues to shape its capitalist present. This volume's contributors see contemporary China as haunted by the promises of capitalism, the institutional legacy of the Maoist regime, and the spirit of Marxist resistance. China's development does not result from historical imperatives or deliberate economic strategies, but from the effects of discrete practices the contributors call protocols, which stem from an overlapping mix of socialist and capitalist institutional strategies, political procedures, legal regulations, religious rituals, and everyday practices. Analyzing the process of urbanization and the ways marginalized communities and migrant workers are positioned in relation to the transforming social landscape, the contributors show how these protocols constitute the Chinese national imaginary while opening spaces for new emancipatory possibilities. Offering a nuanced theory of contemporary China's hybrid political economy, Ghost Protocol situates China's development at the juncture between the world as experienced and the world as imagined.

Contributors. Yomi Braester, Alexander Des Forges, Kabzung, Rachel Leng, Ralph A. Litzinger, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Bryan Tilt, Robin Visser, Biao Xiang, Emily T. Yeh

For more than a century, Ghost Ranch has attracted people of enormous energy and creativity to the high desert of northern New Mexico. Occupying twenty-two thousand acres of the Piedra Lumbre basin, this fabled place was the love of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, and her depictions of the landscape catapulted Ghost Ranch to international recognition.

Building on the history of the Abiquiu region that she told in Valley of Shining Stone, Ghost Ranch historian Lesley Poling-Kempes now unfolds the story of this celebrated retreat. She traces its transformation from el Rancho de los Brujos, a hideout for legendary outlaws, to a renowned cultural mecca and one of the Southwest’s premier conference centers.

First a dude ranch, Ghost Ranch became a magical sanctuary where the veil between heaven and earth seemed almost transparent. Focusing on those who visited from the 1920s and ’30s until the 1990s, Poling-Kempes tells how O’Keeffe and others—from Boston Brahmin Carol Bishop Stanley to paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert, Los Alamos physicists to movie stars—created a unique community that evolved into the institution that is Ghost Ranch today. For this book, Poling-Kempes has drawn on information not available when Valley of Shining Stone was written. The biography of Juan de Dios Gallegos has been enhanced and definitively corrected. The Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson) years at Ghost Ranch are recounted with reminiscences from family members. And the memories of David McAlpin Jr. shed light on how the Princeton circle that included the Packs, the Johnson brothers, the Rockefellers, and the McAlpins ended up as summer neighbors on the high desert of New Mexico.

After Arthur Pack’s gift of the ranch to the Presbyterian Church in 1955, Ghost Ranch became a spiritual home for thousands of people still awestruck by the landscape that O’Keeffe so lovingly committed to canvas; yet the care taken to protect Ghost Ranch’s land and character has preserved its sense of intimacy. By relating its remarkable story, Poling-Kempes invites all visitors to better appreciate its place as an honored wilderness—and to help safeguard its future.

From Sylvia Plath’s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering “bits” to AIDS elegies’ assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe’s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed “scraps,” the condition of being too late is one that haunts post-World War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it literally and figuratively by distorting chronology, boundary, and syntax, by referring to events indirectly, and by binding the condition of lateness to the impossibility of verifying the past. The speakers of these poems often indicate that they are too late by repetitively chronicling distorted events, refusing closure or resolution, and forging ghosts out of what once was tangible.

Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.”
 
That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.
 
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.
 
Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?
 
Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

 

During star-pitcher Bob Gibson’s most brilliant season, the turbulent summer of 1968, he started thirty-four games and pitched every inning in twenty-eight of them, shutting out the opponents in almost half of those complete games. After their record-breaking season, Gibson and his teammates were stunned to lose the 1968 World Series to the Detroit Tigers. For the next six years, as Bob Gibson struggled to maintain his pitching excellence at the end of his career, changes in American culture ultimately changed the St. Louis Cardinals and the business and pastime of baseball itself.

Set against the backdrop of American history and popular culture, from the protests of the Vietnam War to the breakup of the Beatles, the story of the Cardinals takes on new meaning as another aspect of the changes happening at that time. In the late 1960s, exorbitant salaries and free agency was threatening to change America’s game forever and negatively impact the smaller-market teams in Major League Baseball. As the Cardinals’ owner August A. Busch Jr. and manager Albert “Red” Schoendienst attempted to reinvent the team, restore its cohesiveness, and bring new blood in to propel the team back to contention for the pennant, Gibson remained the one constant on the team.

In looking back on his career, Gibson mourned the end of the Golden Era of baseball and believed that the changes in the game would be partially blamed on him, as his pitching success caused team owners to believe that cash-paying customers only wanted base hits and home runs. Yet, he contended, the shrinking of the strike zone, the lowering of the mound, and the softening of the traditional rancor between the hitter and pitcher forever changed the role of the pitcher in the game and created a more politically correct version of the sport.

Throughout Gibson’s Last Stand, Doug Feldmann captivates readers with the action of the game, both on and off the field, and interjects interesting and detailed tidbits on players’ backgrounds that often tie them to famous players of the past, current stars, and well-known contemporary places. Feldmann also entwines the teams history with Missouri history: President Truman and the funeral procession for President Eisenhower through St. Louis; Missouri sports legends Dizzy Dean, Mark McGwire, and Stan “the Man” Musial; and legendary announcers Harry Caray and Jack Buck. Additionally, a helpful appendix provides National League East standings from 1969 to 1975.

Bob Gibson remains one of the most unique, complex, and beloved players in Cardinals history. In this story of one of the least examined parts of his career—his final years on the team—Feldmann takes readers into the heart of his complexity and the changes that swirled around him.

Recounting the many live vaudeville acts and films that graced the theatre’s stage and screen, The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful” presents a social history of entertainment through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Sixties and the Seventies. Of note is the Springfield theatre’s hosting of three movie world premieres—with future U. S. president Ronald Reagan appearing in each.

The period 1885 to 1917 saw thousands of American crusaders working hard to “save the fallen women,” but little on the part of American social protest writers. In this first work on the subject, Laura Hapke examines how writers attempted to turn an outcast into a heroine in a literature otherwise known for its puritanical attitude toward the fallen woman. She focuses on how these authors (all male) expressed late-Victorian conflicts about female sexuality. If, as they all maintained, women have an innate preference for chastity, how could they account for the prostitute? Was she a sinner, suggesting the potential waywardness of all women? Or, if she was a victim, what of her “depravity”?
 

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association
Long-listed for the 2017 Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation​

Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.
 
Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
 
Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.   

"C.L. Franklin, the most imitated soul preacher in history, was a combination of soul and science and substance and sweetness."--Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, from the Foreword
Few black preachers have been better known that the Reverend C. L. Franklin; none has been considered a better preacher. This collection of twenty of Franklin's best sermons shows the development of his style. A learned man, Franklin had attended both seminary and college, yet in his sermons used the old-fashioned, extemporaneous style of preaching, "whooping" or chanting, combining oratory and intoned poetry to reach both head and heart.
Dozens of Franklin's sermons were released on record albums, and he went on preaching tours with gospel groups that included his daughter, Aretha Franklin, reaching virtually every corner of the United States.
This volume begins with Franklin's life history, told in his own words.
In an afterword, Jeff Titon reviews the African-American sermon tradition
and Franklin's place in it.
 

As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901–1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York’s artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn’t finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.
     In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott’s long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott’s private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.

Globalization is a set of processes that are weakening national boundaries. Both transnational and local social movements develop to resist the processes of globalization--migration, economic interdependence, global media coverage of events and issues, and intergovernmental relations. Globalization not only spurs the creation of social movements, but affects the way many social movements are structured and work. The essays in this volume illuminate how globalization is caught up in social movement processes and question the boundaries of social movement theory.

The book builds on the modern theory of social movements that focuses upon political process and opportunity, resource mobilization and mobilization structure, and the cultural framing of grievances, utopias, ideologies, and options. Some of the essays deal with the structure of international campaigns, while others are focused upon conflicts and movements in less developed countries that have strong international components. The fourteen essays are written by both well established senior scholars and younger scholars in anthropology, political science, sociology, and history. The essays cover a range of time periods and regions of the world.

This book is relevant for anyone interested in the politics and social change processes related to globalization as well as social-movement theory.

Mayer Zald is Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan. Michael Kennedy is Vice Provost for International Programs, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Russian and East European Affairs, University of Michigan. John Guidry is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Augustana College.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

This volume offers a fascinating look at the complex relationship between Jews and Europe during the past two hundred years, and how the European Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia interpreted the modern Jewish experience, primarily in Germany, Russia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Beginning with premodern European attitudes toward Jews, Reinharz and Shavit move quickly to “the glorious nineteenth century,” a period in which Jewish dreams of true assimilation came up against modern antisemitism. Later chapters explore the fin-de-siècle “crisis of modernity”; the myth of the modern European Jew; expectations and fears in the interwar period; differences between European nations in their attitude toward Jews; the views of Zionists and early settlers of Palestine and Israel toward the Europe left behind; and views of contemporary Israeli intellectuals toward Europe, including its new Muslim population—the latest incarnation of the Jewish Question in Europe.

Before Rosa Parks and the March on Washington, four African American women risked their careers and freedom to defy the United States Army over segregation. Women Army Corps (WAC) privates Mary Green, Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy, and Alice Young enlisted to serve their country, improve their lives, and claim the privileges of citizenship long denied them. Promised a chance at training and skilled positions, they saw white WACs assigned to those better jobs and found themselves relegated to work as orderlies. In 1945, their strike alongside fifty other WACs captured the nation's attention and ignited passionate debates on racism, women in the military, and patriotism. Glory in Their Spirit presents the powerful story of their persistence and the public uproar that ensued. Newspapers chose sides. Civil rights activists coalesced to wield a new power. The military, meanwhile, found itself increasingly unable to justify its policies. In the end, Green, Morrison, Murphy, and Young chose court-martial over a return to menial duties. But their courage pushed the segregated military to the breaking point ”and helped steer one of American's most powerful institutions onto a new road toward progress and justice.

Go-go is the conga drum–inflected black popular music that emerged in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s. The guitarist Chuck Brown, the "Godfather of Go-Go," created the music by mixing sounds borrowed from church and the blues with the funk and flavor that he picked up playing for a local Latino band. Born in the inner city, amid the charred ruins of the 1968 race riots, go-go generated a distinct culture and an economy of independent, almost exclusively black-owned businesses that sold tickets to shows and recordings of live go-gos. At the peak of its popularity, in the 1980s, go-go could be heard around the capital every night of the week, on college campuses and in crumbling historic theaters, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, backyards, and city parks.

Go-Go Live is a social history of black Washington told through its go-go music and culture. Encompassing dance moves, nightclubs, and fashion, as well as the voices of artists, fans, business owners, and politicians, Natalie Hopkinson's Washington-based narrative reflects the broader history of race in urban America in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. In the 1990s, the middle class that had left the city for the suburbs in the postwar years began to return. Gentrification drove up property values and pushed go-go into D.C.'s suburbs. The Chocolate City is in decline, but its heart, D.C.'s distinctive go-go musical culture, continues to beat. On any given night, there's live go-go in the D.C. metro area.

These essays and interviews from 1970-76 are lively, pointed, often polemical. They derive from a unified point of view about creativity and about the function of poetry. For the interested reader they can provide a key to the universe of the contemporary poet. In this work, Donald Hall speaks in a conversational way about his poetry and about his poetic wishes, endeavors, failures, and successes.

Americans have long considered their country to be good—a nation "under God" with a profound role to play in the world. Yet nothing tests that proposition like war. Raymond Haberski argues that since 1945 the common moral assumptions expressed in an American civil religion have become increasingly defined by the nation's experience with war. 

God and War traces how three great postwar “trials”—the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror—have revealed the promise and perils of an American civil religion. Throughout the Cold War, Americans combined faith in God and faith in the nation to struggle against not only communism but their own internal demons. The Vietnam War tested whether America remained a nation "under God," inspiring, somewhat ironically, an awakening among a group of religious, intellectual and political leaders to save the nation's soul. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Americans might now explore whether civil religion can exist apart from the power of war to affirm the value of the nation to its people and the world.

How evangelical businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s joined their religious and business lives.

The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What’s less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessmen at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal—on both theological and economic grounds—and in doing so claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the kind of visionary pragmatism that they practiced in the boardroom.

In God’s Businessmen, Sarah Ruth Hammond explores not only these men’s personal trajectories but also those of the service clubs and other institutions that, like them, believed that businessmen were God’s instrument for the Christianization of the world. Hammond presents a capacious portrait of the relationship between the evangelical business community and the New Deal—and in doing so makes important contributions to American religious history, business history, and the history of the American state.

More than any other individual, William Bell Riley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, inspired the resurgence of Protestant fundamentalism in 1930s America.  Trollinger explores the development of Riley’s theology and social thought, examining in detail the rise of the Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School and other similar institutions.  He sheds light upon the nature, successes, and failures of fundamentalist crusades and makes it clear that, to understand fundamentalist religion in America, one must focus upon its regional and local roots.

God's Plagiarist is an entertaining account of the abbe Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time.

How did he do it?

Migne harnessed a deep well of personal energy and a will of iron to the latest innovations in print technology, advertising, and merchandising. His assembly-line production and innovative marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism.

Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical yarn.

"An unforgettable, Daumier-like portrait, sharp and satirical, of this enterprising, austere and somewhat crazed merchandiser of sacred learning. . . . Bloch deserves great credit for the wit and style of his effort to explore the Pedantic Park of nineteenth-century learning, that island of monsters which scholars have found, as yet, no escape."—Anthony Grafton, New Republic

"Bloch is an exhilarating guide to the methods which made Migne the Napoleon of the Prospectus, a publicist of genius, Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum rolled into one."—David Coward, Times Literary Supplement

"Mercifully, Bloch's sense of humour has none of that condescending mock-bewilderment commonly applied to the foreign or ancient. . . . It enables Bloch to promote Migne as a forerunner of the department store and to place him on a continuum running from St. Paul to the Tupperware party: the quality of the merchandise is increasingly irrelevant, still more the nature of its contents."—Graham Robb, London Review of Books

As America, carried along by the expanding rail system, moved westward in the nineteenth century, few occupations seemed more exciting or romantic than that of railroad engineer. And in the mountains and plains of the West, long hours, backbreaking labor, bitter temperatures, and faulty brakes were the crucible in which the best of the early railroaders were formed: only the most dedicated and skilled men passed the tests the narrow-gauge lines of Colorado meted out.

Goin' Railroading is the story of two generations of such men, four members of the Speas family who, from the open cabs of narrow-gauge steam engines, watched Colorado grow.

Sam Speas tells the story of his father, Sam Speas Sr., who left Missouri in 1883 to become an engineer in Colorado, and recounts his own experiences and those of his brothers and fellow railroaders on the Colorado and Southern Railway, from the golden era of the narrow-gauge lines in South Park to the final days of steam power on the Front Range and the coming of the diesel engine.

His stories are a profound document of a vanished way of life, a testament to the courage and tenacity of the early citizens of Colorado, and a tribute to the rough-hewn, often gallant men who took the trains through incredible, almost unbelievable, hazards. Funny, tragic, bittersweet, and poignant, Goin' Railroading is a remarkable book that brings a portion of the history and people of an earlier Colorado to vibrant life.

Why, Benedict Anderson once asked, did Javanese become Indonesian in 1945 whereas the Vietnamese balked at becoming Indochinese? In this classic study, Goscha shows that Vietnamese of all political colours came remarkably close to building a modern national identity based on the colonial model of Indochina while Lao and Cambodian nationalists rejected this precisely because it represented a Vietnamese entity. First published in 1995, the revised edition of this remarkable study is augmented with new material by the author and a foreword by Eric Jennings.

Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today’s farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.