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Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as “anchor texts” for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books. 

In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood. 

Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the “past we choose to remember” on behalf of our children.

There is a considerable difference between real history and discourse history - this book stems from this idea. The author points out that history is constantly reconstructed, adapted and sometimes mythified from the perspective of the present day, of present states of mind and ideologies. Boia closely examines the process of historical culture and conscience in nineteenth and twentieth century Romania, particularly concentrating on the impact of the national ideology on history. Based upon his findings, the author identifies several key mythical configurations and analyses the manner in which Romanians have reconstituted their own highly ideologized history over the last two centuries.

The strength of History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness lies in the author's ability to fully deconstruct the entire Romanian historiographic system and demonstrate the increasing acuteness of national problems in general, and in particular the exploitation of history to support national ideology.

At a moment when American film reflects a deepening preoccupation with the Bush administration's War on Terror, this authoritative and timely book offers the first comprehensive account of Hollywood's propaganda role during the defining ideological conflict of the twentieth century: the Cold War. In an analysis of films dating from America's first Red Scare in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Tony Shaw examines the complex relationship between filmmakers, censors, politicians, and government propagandists. 

Movies, Shaw demonstrates, were at the center of the Cold War's battle for hearts and minds. Hollywood's comedies, love stories, musicals, thrillers, documentaries, and science fiction shockers played a critical dual role: on the one hand teaching millions of Americans why communism represented the greatest threat their country had ever faced, and on the other selling America's liberal-capitalist ideas around the globe. Drawing on declassified government documents, studio archives, and filmmakers' private papers, Shaw reveals the different ways in which cinematic propaganda was produced, disseminated, and received by audiences during the Cold War. In the process, he addresses subjects as diverse as women's fashions, McCarthyism, drug smuggling, Christianity, and American cultural diplomacy in India. Anyone seeking to understand wartime propaganda today will find striking contemporary resonance in his conclusions about Hollywood's versatility and power.

Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945

Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate.

Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language. 

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeling captivated by works of art? In Hooked, Rita Felski challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is a part of modern intellectuals’ self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read as Felski’s book, The Limits of Critique.

Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences.

In How Women Must Write, Olga Peters Hasty takes us from an emphatically male Romantic age to a modernist period preoccupied with women’s creativity but also with its containment. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, the woman poet was invented: by women poets themselves, by readers who projected gender biases into their poems, and by male poets who wrote posing as women. Examining Karolina Pavlova and Evdokiia Rostopchina, who inspired those writing after them, as well as two women invented by men, Cherubina de Gabriak and Briusov’s Nelli, and challenges to male authority by Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, this book shows women as purposeful actors realizing themselves creatively and advancing the woman poet’s cause. It will appeal to the general reader and to specialists in Russian literature, women’s studies, and cultural history.

    David Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offers the first book to examine in depth the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men. The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide?
    Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also the protests conceived by ACT-UP and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.

Examining philosophical views of human identity and calling for a shift in how we discuss this essential concept

The problem of identity is one of the most debated contemporary issues in philosophy and the social sciences. Human Identity does not approach this question from a sociological or political position but rather seeks to take a step away from the dominant approach in metaphysics and analytical philosophy, putting forward a dialogical concept of identity inspired mainly by the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition. Claude Romano argues that the question of identity can only be satisfactorily formulated from the point of view of an intrinsically social understanding of the human being: The identity that matters in our lives is the one we can assume before others in truthful conduct and thus the one for which we can bear responsibility in the first person.

Romano carefully examines the full historical sweep of the philosophy of identity, referencing not only classic thinkers, including Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Husserl, but also contemporary interlocutors, such as Richard Moran and Charles Larmore. He engages in a sustained dialogue with these fellow philosophers, historical and current, while arguing for a complete paradigm shift in our approach to identity. Romano contends that we need to move on from the question Who?, as used by a prosecutor or judge to identify a guilty party, and instead look to the question used by Montaigne to define himself: Who am I?

Against the backdrop of media representations of Africa through persistent and pervasive images of emaciated, starving Africans and the critical need to marshall food aid in response, Hungry Subjects places Africa’s food anxiety within a broader historical context and expands ongoing food scholarship beyond its current confines in the social sciences. Njeri Githire weaves together coming-of-age texts across the African and African diasporic literary landscape in English, French, and Portuguese expression to ask how African writers incorporate food into their storylines to transmit cultural information, question norms, and propose alternatives. Eating is an intimately personal yet inherently social experience codified by public rituals and commerce, invariably linked to a larger tapestry of historical, cultural, economic, and political dynamics. Delving into the political dynamics of food as a tool of power and control alongside subversive potentialities, Hungry Subjects appraises the narrative and political thrust of (not-)eating and exposes the ways in which postcolonial manifestations of colonial-era power relations are symbolized in food’s many functions and meanings.