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By the end of the 19th century it had become possible for American women to identify themselves as serious Artists. This was a relatively new phenomenon, one that became possible only after American women writers had dismantled the conceptual frameworks that had authorized their artistic production since the early days of the Republic.

Making the “America of Art” demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War.

Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women’s authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century’s end. Sofer argues that, counter to conventional wisdom, American women writers produced a large body of theoretical writing on the central aesthetic questions of the day. Although the writers Sofer studies were finally unable to construct viable new models for women’s artistic production, their attempts to do so are an essential piece of American literary history.

The greatest bibliographer of our time, was how historian Robert Darnton described D. F. McKenzie. Yet until now many of McKenzie's major essays, scattered in specialist journals and inaccessible publications, have circulated mainly in tattered photocopies. This volume, edited by two of McKenzie's former students, brings together for the first time a wide range of his writings on bibliography, the book trade, and the “sociology of texts.” Selected by the author himself before his sudden death in 1999, the essays range from the material transmission of Shakespeare's plays in the seventeenth century to the connections among oral, manuscript, and print cultures. 

Making Meaning reflects McKenzie's virtuosity as a traditional bibliographer and reveals how his thought-provoking scholarship made him a driving force in the genesis and development of the new interdisciplinary field of book history. His refusal to recognize the traditional boundary between bibliography and literary history re-energized the study of the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of book production and reception. 

The editors' introduction and headnotes situate McKenzie's innovative and controversial thinking in the debates of his time.

Whitelaw Reid, according to H. Wayne Morgan, was a “leading newspaperman, more than an occasional diplomat, a power in his party’s politics, a supporter of some of the best in his era’s culture . . . Of all his legacy, perhaps the record he left of his part in the Peace of Paris is the most significant and most interesting. It not only reveals the workings of his mind and of the peace conference, but also suggests the complex currents that carried his country into the realities of world power in the twentieth century.”

In editing Reid’s diary, Morgan used much material pertinent to the Paris Peace Conference of 1898, employed here for the first time. This material is a rich assortment of archival matter: the Reid Papers, the John Hay Papers, the John Bassett Moore Papers, and the McKinley Papers, in the Library of Congress; the Peace Commission records, in the National Archives; and unpublished materials in the Central Files of the Department of State.

Whitelaw Reid, as a war correspondent during the Civil War, as clerk of the House Military Affairs Committee, and later as a successor to Horace Greeley on the Tribune, gained access to the leaders of his times and insight into their actions. In 1889 he was appointed U.S. Minister to France by Harrison, and in 1892 he had the dubious honor of being chosen as Harrison’s running mate on the losing presidential ticket. An influential friend and supporter of President McKinley and an occasional advisor to him, Reid was no stranger to politics and to international diplomacy when McKinley appointed him to the Peace Commission that wrote the treaty concluding the Spanish-American War. As a matter of fact, Reid’s opinion reflected the administration’s attitude of expansionism, the policy of Manifest Destiny—or “imperialism,” as it was later called.

Reid’s diary records the details of the sessions of the Joint Peace Commission of Paris from September through a large part of December of 1898. His day-by-day entries reveal the complexity of issues to be considered, the tactics of both the Spanish and the American Commissions in attempting to gain advantage for their respective governments, the interplay of the personalities of the once-proud Spaniards and the brash Americans, the political objectives influencing the points of view of the various members, and the maneuverings that brought about the final resolution of debated issues.

How did political power function in the communist regimes of East Central Europe after 1945? Making Sense of Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus on the acquiescent behavior of the majority of the population until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism and its authoritarian world.

The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to which the relationship between citizens and the state was collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption and leisure, and the everyday experiences of “ordinary people,” single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles.

Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of everyday life under dictatorial regimes.

Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism.
The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Yet rather than being a mass taken advantage of by populist leaders, the working class Musić presents is one with agency and voice, a force that played an important role in shaping the fate of the country. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

In 1933 American oilmen representing what later became the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) signed a concession agreement with the Saudi Arabian king granting the company sole proprietorship over the oil reserves in the country's largest province. As drilling commenced and wells proliferated, Aramco soon became a major presence in the region. In this book Chad H. Parker tells Aramco's story, showing how an American company seeking resources and profits not only contributed to Saudi “nation building” but helped define U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War.

In the years following World War II, as Aramco expanded its role in Saudi Arabia, the idea of “modernization” emerged as a central component of American foreign policy toward newly independent states. Although the company engaged in practices supportive of U.S. goals, its own modernizing efforts tended to be pragmatic rather than policy-driven, more consistent with furthering its business interests than with validating abstract theories. Aramco built the infrastructure necessary to extract oil and also carved an American suburb out of the Arabian desert, with all the air-conditioned comforts of Western modern life. At the same time, executives cultivated powerful relationships with Saudi government officials and, to the annoyance of U.S. officials, even served the monarchy in diplomatic disputes. Before long the company became the principal American diplomatic, political, and cultural agent in the country, a role it would continue to play until 1973, when the Saudi government took over its operation.

Mapping Wider Worlds uncovers how early professional women writers in Britain invented a genre of women’s travel fiction in an era of increased mobility and exploration. As marketplace authorship began to take shape, writers such as Delarivier Manley, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood turned to this genre to challenge the link between women’s travel and promiscuity, positioning travel instead as a site of knowledge production and self-discovery. In this book, Yoojung Choi reveals how these women authors not only reshaped cultural attitudes toward women’s mobility, but also redefined professional authorship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, preceding and paving the way for travel literature by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Piozzi, and Mary Wollstonecraft. 

The chapters in this book represent successive phases of one story – that of Mariupol, formerly Ukraine’s tenth largest city, and the second largest in the Donbas region. The author, a young Slovak academic, conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in this coastal town between November 2018 and August 2021. She was one of the last academics to do research in Mariupol before its invasion and eventual occupation by Russia.

During these years, Hana Jošticová was overwhelmed by acts of mobilization and resistance that went in opposite directions: support for a Western direction of Ukraine’s future, and support for the status quo that the victory of the Euromaidan seemed to threaten.

She noted the sequence of events presented in the media and through the lens of individual frames and narratives. Her book is a collection and interpretation of memories and testimonies from both sides: those who actively resisted Russian influence; and those who sparked their own revolution, the ‘Russian Spring.’ Her focus is on self-mobilized individuals who resorted to action outside of established organizational structures spontaneously, autonomously, without resources and guarantees of safety. Her evidence indicates that popular support for the Russian Spring had less to do with Russia than with the social, economic, or cultural characteristics of the Donetsk region.

Years of immersive research convinced the author that individuals are as important as masses, ideas are as powerful as material resources, and beliefs and emotions are as critical as weapons.

Many biographies of Mark Twain cover his entire life, while others focus on specific periods, especially his later years. In this innovative new work, John Bird takes an entirely different approach. Mark Twain’s 1884: A Pivotal Year in the Life is a “micro-biography” that homes in on a single—and pivotal—year. 

In 1884, Twain stood at the height of his powers as a writer and enjoyed one of the happiest years in his domestic family life. During the course of the year he was readying his greatest work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for publication, which occurred in England near the end of the year; he was launching his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, after becoming disillusioned with his previous publishers; and he publicly embroiled himself in presidential politics in a way that presaged his later involvement with American and international politics. Finally, Twain’s 1884 ended with a great deal more public exposure thanks to an extensive multi-city lecture tour he undertook with George Washington Cable, as well as the beginnings of his ultimately successful attempt to secure publishing rights for Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.

The level of detail provided by a day-to-day narrative gives the reader a chance to imaginatively live that year in Twain’s life: his work, his family life, his correspondence, his business dealings, his travels, his recreational pursuits, and his political involvement. Bird enlarges upon a great many moments in and aspects of Twain’s life that other biographies barely touch on or ignore completely. 

In this new approach to biography, Bird gives readers a broader appreciation not only of Mark Twain the author but of Mark Twain the husband, father, uncle, and friend, and national celebrity and persona.
 

Examining the legal lives of early modern women through Milton’s literary works

In his History of Britain, John Milton writes, “Laws are Masculin Births . . . nothing [is] more awry from the Law of God and Nature, then that a Woman should give Laws to Men.” In this interdisciplinary study, Lynne Greenberg explores the normative and nonnormative legal lives of early modern women as depicted in Milton’s works—unmarried and married women, mothers, heiresses, widows, and queens—providing cogent overviews of the laws of multiple jurisdictions to offer critical context for each case study. Greenberg explores a wide range of legal-juridical materials and previously unexplored archival and private family documents. As she demonstrates, while Milton’s narratives are at times enmeshed in existing jural paradigms, they also offer resistant responses to marital, custodial, property, inheritance, and criminal laws and even imagine alternative jural paradigms for women. Through Masculine Births: Milton, Women and the Law, Greenberg deftly reveals that Milton both reproduces seventeenth-century legal constructs and gives birth to laws that move us toward greater equality for women.

This seminal scholarly work examines T. S. Eliot's literary development and philosophical outlook through the lens of modernist dialectics, exploring the tension between mastery and escape as central to understanding both his poetry and critical thought. Edited and written by acclaimed Eliot scholar Jewel Spears Brooker, this volume presents expert studies of key intellectual influences on Eliot's modernism—particularly Stéphane Mallarmé, Sir James George Frazer, F. H. Bradley, and T. E. Hulme—yielding fresh and original insights into how these thinkers shaped the poet's artistic vision.

Through careful textual analysis and intellectual history, Brooker investigates how Eliot grappled with fundamental modernist anxieties: the desire for artistic mastery and transcendence alongside the simultaneous impulse toward escape from the constraints of tradition, rationality, and conventional form. She demonstrates how Eliot's poetry and prose reflect a dialectical movement, a constant interplay between opposing forces, that defines both his modernist aesthetics and his philosophical positions.

 An essential resource for scholars seeking comprehensive understanding of modernism's philosophical foundations and poetic achievements, Brooker is devoted to tracing both dialectical movements and biographical developments in Eliot's career.