28167 books match the query 'History' and 1583 start with m

cover of Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton

Model Machines

A History of the Asian as Automaton

Long T. Bui

Temple University Press, 2022

In the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity. In Model Machines, Long Bui investigates what he calls Asian roboticism or the ways Asians embody the machine and are given robotic characteristics. 

Bui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America. 

The case studies in Model Machines chart the representation of Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other examples to show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. Moreover, it offers examples of how artists and everyday people resisted that stereotype to consider different ways of being human. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large.

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cover of Modeling Nature

Modeling Nature

Sharon E. Kingsland

University of Chicago Press, 1995

The first history of population ecology traces two generations of science and scientists from the opening of the twentieth century through 1970. Kingsland chronicles the careers of key figures and the field's theoretical, empirical, and institutional development, with special attention to tensions between the descriptive studies of field biologists and later mathematical models. This second edition includes a new afterword that brings the book up to date, with special attention to the rise of "the new natural history" and debates about ecology's future as a large-scale scientific enterprise.
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cover of Models of Resistance for a Democracy in Crisis

Models of Resistance for a Democracy in Crisis

Geoff Eley

Disobedience Press, 2026

Models of Resistance for a Democracy in Crisis features three historians who examine how political opposition, anti-racist struggle, and artistic intervention serve as vital blueprints for safeguarding our precarious democracy.

Geoff Eley deconstructs Trump-era politics by identifying a dual crisis: the withering of democratic practices and a pervasive cynicism toward government. By analyzing how Germans of the 1930s might have resisted fascism, he reveals the specific forms of opposition needed to uphold democratic accountability today.

Jamon Jordan traces a lineage of anti-racist protest, from the rebellions of the enslaved to the legal and moral defiance of the abolitionist movement. By weaving public tactics, such as demonstrations and boycotts, with the enduring labor of building Black-led institutions and preserving cultural traditions, Jordan reveals a comprehensive framework for contemporary activists.

Megan Flattley examines how artworks challenge repressive regimes. These creative interventions bear witness to traumatic and unjust conditions, use cultural institutions as cover for political action, and stage provocations in public spaces to reveal latent violence and advocate for social change. 

 

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cover of Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel

Models of Value

Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel

James Thompson

Duke University Press, 1996

James Thompson examines the concept of value as it came to be understood in eighteenth-century England through two emerging and divergent discourses: political economy and the novel. By looking at the relationship between these two developing forms—one having to do with finance, the other with romance—Thompson demonstrates how value came to have such different meaning in different realms of experience. A highly original rethinking of the origins of the English novel, Models of Value shows the novel’s importance in remapping English culture according to the separate spheres of public and domestic life, men’s and women’s concerns, money and emotion.
In this account, political economy and the novel clearly arise as solutions to a crisis in the notion of value. Exploring the ways in which these different genres responded to the crisis—political economy by reconceptualizing wealth as capital, and the novel by refiguring intrinsic or human worth in the form of courtship narratives—Thompson rereads several literary works, including Defoe’s Roxana, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Burney’s Cecilia, along with influential contemporary economic texts. Models of Value also traces the discursive consequences of this bifurcation of value, and reveals how history and theory participate in the very novelistic and economic processes they describe. In doing so, the book bridges the opposition between the interests of Marxism and feminism, and the distinctions which, newly made in the eighteenth century, continue to inform our discourse today.
An important reformulation of the literary and cultural production of the eighteenth century, Models of Value will attract students of the novel, political economy, and of literary history and theory.
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cover of Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Moderate Modernity

The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Jochen Hung

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values.

The newspaper’s idea of a modern, democratic Germany was undermined by the political and economic crises that hit Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. The way the newspaper described German democracy changed under these pressures. Flappers, American fridges, and modern music—the things that Tempo had once marshalled as representatives of a German future—were now rejected by the newspaper as emblems of a bygone age. The changes in Tempo’s vision of Germany’s future show that descriptions of Weimar politics as a standoff between upright democrats and rabid extremists do not do justice to the historical complexity of the period. Rather, we need to accept the Nazis as a lethal product of a German democracy itself. The history of Tempo teaches us how liberal democracies can create and nurture their own worst enemies.
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cover of Modern American Grotesque: Literature and Photography

Modern American Grotesque

Literature and Photography

James Goodwin

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.
 
A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.  
 
 
 
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cover of Modern American Queer History

Modern American Queer History

Allida Black

Temple University Press, 2001

In the twentieth century, countless Americans claimed gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities, forming a movement to secure social as well as political equality. This collection of essays considers the history as well as the historiography of the queer identities and struggles that developed in the United States in the midst of widespread upheaval and change.

Whether the subject is an individual life story, a community study, or an aspect of public policy, these essays illuminate the ways in which individuals in various locales understood the nature of their desires and the possibilities of resisting dominant views of normality and deviance. Theoretically informed, but accessible, the essays shed light too on the difficulties of writing history when documentary evidence is sparse or "coded." Taken together these essays suggest that while some individuals and social networks might never emerge from the shadows, the persistent exploration of the past for their traces is an integral part of the on-going struggle for queer rights.
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cover of Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of It All, 1893-1919

Modern American Religion, Volume 1

The Irony of It All, 1893-1919

Martin E. Marty

University of Chicago Press, 1986

Martin E. Marty argues that religion in twentieth-century America was essentially shaped by its encounter with modernity. In this first volume, he records and explores the diverse ways in which American religion embraced, rejected, or cautiously accepted the modern world.

"Marty writes with the highest standards of scholarship and with his customary stylistic grace. No series of books is likely to tell us as much about the religious condition of our own time as "Modern American Religion."—Robert L. Spaeth, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The wealth of material and depth of insight are beyond reproach. This book will clearly stand as an important meteorological guide to the storm front of modernity as it swept Americans into the twentieth century."—Belden C. Lane, Review of Religions

"Whatever one thinks about Marty's theological or philosophical position as a historian, the charm of his friendly circumspective approach to American religious history is irresistible."—John E. Wilson, Theological Studies

"Marty attempts to impose historical order on the divergent ways a century of Americans have themselves tried to find order in their worlds. . . . [He] meets the challenge deftly. . . . It is a book relevant to our time. . . . Engages the heart and mind jointly."—Andy Solomon, Houston Post
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cover of Modern American Religion, Volume 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941

Modern American Religion, Volume 2

The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941

Martin E. Marty

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Not since the Civil War had America been so divided by conflict. Religion was the prime agent in this unusual war: Left versus Right, Fundamentalists versus Modernists; Christians versus Jews; Protestant versus Catholic; white versus black. In this volume, Martin E. Marty tells the riveting story of how America has survived religious disturbances and culturally prospered from them.

"He tells the story [of the 1920s and 1930s] with a verve seldom equaled and manages to condense in one volume the results of dozens of specialized monographs. . . . [It] bears the usual hallmarks of a Marty book: a smoothly flowing narrative, passages studded with suggestive insight inviting further research, and apt quotations that capture the gist of complicated issues. . . . [A] splendid book. . . . Deserves a wide readership and undoubtedly will receive it." —James H. Moorhead, Chicago Sunday Tribune

"There is simply no better source, certainly none so engaging, for the interactions of religion and the larger culture in the interwar period." —Robert Booth Fowler, Journal of American History

"[This book is] not merely a history of American religion, but what might better be called a religious history" —David M. Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960

Modern American Religion, Volume 3

Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960

Martin E. Marty

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In this third volume of his acclaimed chronicle of faith in twentieth-century America, Martin E. Marty presents the first authoritative account of American religious culture from the entry of the United States into World War II through the Eisenhower years.

Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 is the first book to systematically address religion and the roles it played in shaping the social and political life of mid-century America. A work of exceptional clarity and historical depth, it will interest general readers as well as historians of American and church history.

"The series will become a standard account of the nation's variegated religious culture during the current century. The four volumes, the fruition of decades of research, may rank as much honored Marty's most significant contribution to U.S. studies."—Richard N. Ostling, Time

"When America needs some advice or commentary on the state of modern theology, the person it turns to is Martin Marty."—Publishers Weekly
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cover of Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia

Modern Architecture in Latin America

Art, Technology, and Utopia

By Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara; foreword by Jorge Francisco Liernur

University of Texas Press, 2015

Designed as a survey and focused on key examples and movements arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this is the first comprehensive history of modern architecture in Latin America in any language.

Runner-up, University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, 2015

Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production.

Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries; historical, social, and political conditions; and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways—as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.

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cover of Modern Art: Selected Essays

Modern Art

Selected Essays

Leo Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2023

The fifth and final volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on modern artists.
 
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis that were always put into the service of interpretation.
 
Following the series publication on Pablo Picasso, this volume focuses on other modern artists, including Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Hans Haacke, and Jeff Koons. Included are seven unpublished lectures and essays, Steinberg’s landmark essay “Encounters with Rauschenberg,” a survey of twentieth-century sculpture, and an examination of the role of authorial predilections in critical writing. The final chapter presents a collection of Steinberg’s humorous pieces, witty forays penned for his own amusement. 
 
Modern Art is the fifth and final volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
 
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cover of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness

Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Deborah A. Thomas

Duke University Press, 2004

Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Analyzing nationalism, popular culture, and political economy in relation to one another, Deborah A. Thomas illuminates an ongoing struggle in Jamaica between the values associated with the postcolonial state and those generated in and through popular culture. Following independence in 1962, cultural and political policies in Jamaica were geared toward the development of a multiracial creole nationalism reflected in the country’s motto: “Out of many, one people.” As Thomas shows, by the late 1990s, creole nationalism was superseded by “modern blackness”—an urban blackness rooted in youth culture and influenced by African American popular culture. Expressions of blackness that had been marginalized in national cultural policy became paramount in contemporary understandings of what it was to be Jamaican.

Thomas combines historical research with fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica between 1993 and 2003. Drawing on her research in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston, she looks at how Jamaicans interpreted and reproduced or transformed on the local level nationalist policies and popular ideologies about progress. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neoliberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally.

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cover of Modern Bonds: Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul

Modern Bonds

Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul

Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

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cover of Modern Bonds: Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul

Modern Bonds

Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul

Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

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cover of Modern China and Opium: A Reader

Modern China and Opium

A Reader

Alan Baumler, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2001

The Chinese struggle to create a modern nation was tied closely to the opium trade. Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China's economy, politics, and society were steeped in opium and opium money. All of China's modern governments took the crusade to liberate the nation from this "plague" as one of their essential tasks. However, the opium problem proved to be more complex than many had imagined. There was much disagreement over both the nature of the problem and the solution. Was opium a relatively harmless substance--only a danger to the weak-willed--or a poison that would inevitably destroy the nation? How could the state control this slippery substance and the people who used it? These were more than abstract questions, as all Chinese states profited from the opium trade and most Chinese either used the substance or knew people who did. By presenting a selection of original source readings from the Qing dynasty, the Republic, and the Communist government, this book makes comprehensible the many debates among Chinese involving opium in the modern period. The readings are drawn from a variety of sources including memoirs, diplomatic reports, and journals. It will be of particular interest to students of modern China. Alan Baumler is Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
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cover of Modern China, 1840–1972: An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids

Modern China, 1840–1972

An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids

Andrew J. Nathan

University of Michigan Press, 1973

Graduate students have traditionally learned a good part of what they know about sources and research aids on modern China through hearsay and serendipity, in unsystematic and unreliable bits and pieces. The field has now developed to the point where this need not and ought not to be so. It is now possible for beginning researchers to start with some shared basic knowledge of research aids and documentary resources. This research guide is meant to provide that knowledge. The user of this guide is envisaged as an American graduate student in history or the social sciences who is already familiar with the major English-language secondary literature on modern China and is about to begin original research, either for a seminar paper or for a dissertation.
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cover of Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence

Modern China-Myanmar Relations

Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence

David I. Steinberg and Hongwei Fan

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

This volume examines the changing relations between China and Burma/Myanmar since Burmese independence in 1948 and the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Drawing on hitherto unavailable Chinese sources, it documents the negotiations and settlement of outstanding issues such as the border demarcation, the Chinese Nationalist forces in Burma, the status of the overseas Chinese residents, and the Burma Communist Party. The study documents the Sino-Burmese riots of 1967, the improvement of relations, culminating in the close bilateral association since 1988-89. It analyses in detail Myanmar's changing role in Chinese strategy, concentrating on trade and investment relations, oil, gas, hydroelectric power, natural resources and improved transportation. It outlines military cooperation, narcotics control, and migration while emphasizing Indian and ASEAN concerns and responses. The volume outlines a set of policy dilemmas facing the central and provincial Chinese authorities, the Myanmar government and Burmese ethnic minorities, while analysing dilemmas for the United States, India, ASEAN and Japan in responding to the changed interdependent Sino-Burmese relationship.
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cover of Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment: Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon

Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment

Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon

Peng Hsiao-yen

Hong Kong University Press, 2023

An examination of the Counter-Enlightenment movement in China.

In Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment, Peng Hsiao-yen argues that a trend of Counter-Enlightenment had grown from the late Qing to the May Fourth era in the 1910s to the 1920s and continued to the 1940s. She demonstrates how Counter-Enlightenment was manifested with case studies such as Lu Xun’s writings in the late 1900s, the Aesthetic Education movement from the 1910s to 1920s, and the Science and Lifeview debate in the 1920s. During the period, the life philosophy movement, highlighting the epistemic debate on affect and reason, is connected with its counterparts in Germany, France, and Japan. The movement had a widespread and long-term impact on Chinese philosophy and literature. Using the transcultural lexicon as methodology, this book traces how the German term Lebensanschauung (life view), a key concept in Rudolf Eucken’s life philosophy, constituted a global tide of Counter-Enlightenment that influenced the thought of leading Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era. Peng contends that Chinese intellectuals’ transcultural connections with others in the philosophical pursuit of knowledge triggered China’s self-transformation. She successfully reconstructs the missing link in the Chinese theater of the worldwide dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.
 
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cover of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory

Reimagining a Field

Rey Chow, ed.

Duke University Press, 2000

These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself. The wide range of topics addressed by this international group of scholars includes twentieth-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism; as well as the geographies of migration and diaspora.

One of the volume’s provocative suggestions is that the old model of area studies—an offshoot of U.S. Cold War strategy that found its anchorage in higher education—is no longer feasible for the diverse and multifaceted experiences that are articulated under the rubric of “Chineseness.” As Rey Chow argues in her introduction, the notion of a monolithic Chineseness bound ultimately to mainland China is, in itself, highly problematic because it recognizes neither the material realities of ethnic minorities within China nor those of populations in places such as Tibet, Taiwan, and post–British Hong Kong. Above all, this book demonstrates that, as the terms of a chauvinistic sinocentrism become obsolete, the critical use of theory—particularly by younger China scholars whose enthusiasm for critical theory coincides with changes in China’s political economy in recent years—will enable the emergence of fresh connections and insights that may have been at odds with previous interpretive convention.
Originally published as a special issue of the journal boundary 2, this collection includes two new essays and an afterword by Paul Bové that places its arguments in the context of contemporary cultural politics. It will have far-reaching implications for the study of modern China and will be of interest to scholars of theory and culture in general.

Contributors. Stanley K. Abe, Ien Ang, Chris Berry, Paul Bové, Sung-cheng Yvonne Chang, Rey Chow, Dorothy Ko, Charles Laughlin, Leung Ping-kwan, Kwai-cheung Lo, Christopher Lupke, David Der-wei Wang, Michelle Yeh

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cover of Modern Cows and Bovine Transformations: The Remaking of India's Cattle, 1790-1950

Modern Cows and Bovine Transformations

The Remaking of India's Cattle, 1790-1950

David Arnold

University of Chicago Press, 0

Examines how India’s cattle underwent profound changes during the years of British colonial rule.

Drawing on extensive, untapped archives, Modern Cowsand Bovine Transformations illustrates the radical remaking of India’s cattle against the backdrop of colonial policies, environmental change, and anticolonial politics. Historian David Arnold examines the history of cows in India from 1790 to 1950, focusing on science, technology, and medicine to provide a secular account of imperial animal husbandry.

Doing justice to the wide variety of Indian cattle breeds, Arnold unpacks “bovine technology” and its subaltern linkages, covering topics such as the role of cattle in agriculture and the military; haulage and transport; breeding strategies; bacteriology and nutrition science, and India’s milk revolution. He also examines the dispersal of Indian cattle around the globe and the role that colonial policies played in spreading knowledge of Indian cattle breeds and facilitating their export. Finally, he addresses the “cattle crisis” brought on by famines, droughts, and disease, and disputes between colonial rulers and Hindu nationalists. He concludes with the impact of World War II and Partition on bovine populations, illustrating the consequences for independent India’s attempts to restore the milk supply and rebuild cattle breeds while also respecting the Hindu cow protection agenda. In the end, Arnold argues, the history of cattle in India provides us with a new way of understanding the power of the colonial state, its ambitions to transform India, its appropriation of the Indian subcontinent’s resources, and the myriad contradictions of its policies.

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cover of Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation

Modern Czech Theatre

Reflector and Conscience of a Nation

Jarka M. Burian

University of Iowa Press, 2000

The story of Czech theatre in the twentieth century involves generations of mesmerizing players and memorable productions. Beyond these artistic considerations, however, lies a larger story: a theatre that has resonated with the intense concerns of its audiences acquires a significance and a force beyond anything created by striking individual talents or random stage hits. Amid the variety of performances during the past hundred years, that basic and provocative reality has been repeatedly demonstrated, as Jarka Burian reveals in his extraordinary history of the dramatic world of Czech theatre.

Following a brief historical background, Burian provides a chronological series of perspectives and observations on the evolving nature of Czech theatre productions during this century in relation to their similarly evolving social and political contexts. Once Czechoslovak independence was achieved in 1918, a repeated interplay of theatre with political realities became the norm, sometimes stifling the creative urge but often producing even greater artistry. When playwright Václav Havel became president in 1990, this was but the latest and most celebrated example of the vital engagement between stage and society that has been a repeated condition of Czech theatre for the past two hundred years. In Jarka Burian's skillful hands, Modern Czech Theatre becomes an extremely important touchstone for understanding the history of modern theatre within western culture.

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cover of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics

Modern French Jewish Thought

Writings on Religion and Politics

Edited by Sarah Hammerschlag

Brandeis University Press, 2018

“Modern Jewish thought” is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France’s development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the French milieu. This anthology of modern French Jewish writing offers the first look at how this significant and diverse body of work developed within the historical and intellectual contexts of France and Europe. Translated into English, these documents speak to two critical axes—the first between Jewish universalism and particularism, and the second between the identification and disidentification of French Jews with France as a nation. Offering key works from Simone Weil, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Memmi, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and many others, this volume is organized in roughly chronological order, to highlight the connections linking religion, politics, and history, as they coalesce around a Judaism that is unique to France.
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cover of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era

Modern Housing for America

Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era

Gail Radford

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In an era when many decry the failures of federal housing programs, this book introduces us to appealing but largely forgotten alternatives that existed when federal policies were first defined in the New Deal. Led by Catherine Bauer, supporters of the modern housing initiative argued that government should emphasize non-commercial development of imaginatively designed compact neighborhoods with extensive parks and social services. The book explores the question of how Americans might have responded to this option through case studies of experimental developments in Philadelphia and New York. While defeated during the 1930s, modern housing ideas suggest a variety of design and financial strategies that could contribute to solving the housing problems of our own time.

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cover of Modern Hungarian Society in the Making

Modern Hungarian Society in the Making

András Gero

Central European University Press, 1995

Illuminates the problems connected with Hungary's transition to a civil society while providing insights into the development of political culture and the rise of civil and national consequences.
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cover of Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Modern Inquisitions

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Irene Silverblatt

Duke University Press, 2004

Trying to understand how “civilized” people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt’s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition. Her analysis of the tribunal’s persecution of women and men in colonial Peru illuminates modernity’s intricate “dance of bureaucracy and race.”

Drawing on extensive research in Peruvian and Spanish archives, Silverblatt uses church records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides to explore how the emerging modern world was built, experienced, and understood by colonists, native peoples, and Inquisition officials: Early missionaries preached about world history and about the races and nations that inhabited the globe; Inquisitors, able bureaucrats, defined who was a legitimate Spaniard as they executed heretics for “reasons of state”; the “stained blood” of Indians, blacks, and descendants of Jews and Moors was said to cause their deficient character; and native Peruvians began to call themselves Indian.

In dialogue with Arendt and other theorists of modernity, Silverblatt shows that the modern world’s underside is tied to its origins in colonialism and to its capacity to rationalize violence. Modern Inquisitions forces the reader to confront the idea that the Inquisition was not only a product of the modern world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but party to the creation of the civilized world we know today.

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cover of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity

Modern Japanese Cuisine

Food, Power and National Identity

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka

Reaktion Books, 2015

Over the past two decades, the popularity of Japanese food in the West has increased immeasurably—a major contribution to the evolution of Western eating habits. But Japanese cuisine itself has changed significantly since pre-modern times, and the food we eat at trendy Japanese restaurants, from tempura to sashimi, is vastly different from earlier Japanese fare. Modern Japanese Cuisine examines the origins of Japanese food from the late nineteenth century to unabashedly adulterated American favorites like today’s California roll.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka demonstrates that key shifts in the Japanese diet were, in many cases, a consequence of modern imperialism. Exploring reforms in military catering and home cooking, wartime food management and the rise of urban gastronomy, Cwiertka shows how Japan’s numerous regional cuisines were eventually replaced by a set of foods and practices with which the majority of Japanese today ardently identify.

The result of over a decade of research, Modern Japanese Cuisine is a fascinating look at the historical roots of some of the world’s best cooking and will provide appetizing reading for scholars of Japanese culture and foodies alike.

[more]
cover of Modern Japanese Literary Studies

Modern Japanese Literary Studies

Seth Jacobowitz and Jonathan E. Abel, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Explores new directions in modern Japanese literature
[more]
cover of Modern Jungles: A Hmong Refugee's Childhood Story of Survival

Modern Jungles

A Hmong Refugee's Childhood Story of Survival

Pao Lor

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope. 

Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
[more]
cover of Modern Jungles: A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival

Modern Jungles

A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival

Pao Lor

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope. 

Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
[more]
cover of Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage

Modern Loves

The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage

Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2006

How are love, marriage, and desire changing? This collection confronts that question, examining how global cultural flows, changing gender relations, specific economic structures, and state policies are reshaping intimate life around the world. Grounded in cutting edge feminist anthropological theory, these essays discuss how women and men craft courtship, intimacy, and marriage around the world, situating intimate relations in their respective social and economic contexts and exposing the dynamics that are shared cross-culturally, as well as those characteristics that are specific to each site.

In this first comparative ethnographic look at the global transformation toward marital ideals characterized by emotional intimacy, companionship, and mutual choice—discussed here as "companionate marriage"—Modern Loves asks how this shift is occurring and explores the factors that promote and hinder it, just who is pushing for these more companionate relationships, and what advantages men and women see in modern love. The contributors analyze the intricate negotiations surrounding love, marriage, and sex in Mexico, India, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Singapore, and Hong Kong and among Latino youth in East Los Angeles. Modern Loves presents the new global approach to kinship studies, examining both the microlevel practices that constitute and bind relationships and the macrolevel forces that shape the landscape of love.
Contributors: Margaret E. Bentley, Selina Ching Chan, Pamela I. Erickson, Jessica Gregg, Jennifer Higgins, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Wynne Maggi, Constance A. Nathanson, Gayatri Reddy, Daniel Jordan Smith, and Holly Wardlow

Jennifer S. Hirsch is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. Holly Wardlow is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

"What‘s love got to do with it? Hirsch and Wardlow answer this question by demonstrating the relevance—indeed, centrality—of the ideologies and practices surrounding romantic love and companionate marriage to the study of social transformation more broadly. The essays compiled in this volume explore the material, structural, and demographic underpinnings of the global shift in marital ideals while also tracing some of the sources of this marital shift in mass media, missionization, and the spread of individualism. The contributors of the chapters provide ethnographically rich examples of the ways in which people living in different societies interpret and act upon these global forces and images in sometimes overlapping and sometimes varying ways. This volume is an important and thoughtful contribution to the study of emotion, gender, kinship, and social change." —Laura M. Ahearn, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

"With its rich descriptions of the nuances in romantic love and its lucid analysis of the political economy of conjugal relations, this book will be widely read and loved by anthropologists as well as the concerned public."
—Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, UCLA

"Modern Loves offers an overview of current scholarship on love in the context of sexual relationships cross-culturally, and provides a view of the complexity of varied aspects of emotion, social structure, and social change in contemporary sexual relationships. It clearly makes the case for a political economic understanding of the emergence of ideologies of love, marriage, and courtship as part of expanding global economies."
—Linda-Anne Rebhun, Department of Anthropology, Yale University
[more]
cover of Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations

Modern Mexican Culture

Critical Foundations

Edited by Stuart A. Day

University of Arizona Press, 2017

Diego Rivera’s mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.

Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.

Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.

Contributors:

Rafael Acosta Morales
Jacqueline E. Bixler
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
Debra A. Castillo
Christopher Conway
David S. Dalton
Stuart A. Day
Emily Hind
Robert McKee Irwin
Ryan Long
Dana A. Meredith
Magalí Rabasa
Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés
Fernando Fabio Sánchez
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Analisa Taylor
Oswaldo Zavala
[more]
cover of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958

Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought

Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958

Edited by Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

Brandeis University Press, 2013

This volume opens the canon of modern Jewish thought to the all too often overlooked writings of Jews from the Arab East, from the close of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Whether they identified as Sephardim, Mizrahim, anticolonialists, or Zionists, these thinkers engaged the challenges and transformations of Middle Eastern Jewry in this decisive period. Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite present Jewish culture and politics situated within overlapping Arabic, Islamic, and colonial contexts. The editors invite the reader to reconsider contemporary evocations of Levantine, Mizrahi, and Arab Jewish identities against the backdrop of writings by earlier Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals who critically assessed or contested the implications of Western presence and Western Jewish presence in the Middle East; religion and secularization; and the rise of nationalism, communism, and Zionism, as well as the State of Israel.
[more]
cover of Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America

Modern Mobility Aloft

Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America

Amy D. Finstein

Temple University Press, 2020

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals.

Modern Mobility Aloft is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers.

Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era.

[more]
cover of Modern Moonshine: The Revival of White Whiskey in the Twenty-First Century

Modern Moonshine

The Revival of White Whiskey in the Twenty-First Century

Cameron D. Lippard

West Virginia University Press, 2019

The craft of making moonshine—an unaged white whiskey, often made and consumed outside legal parameters—nearly went extinct in the late twentieth century as law enforcement cracked down on illicit producers, and cheaper, lawful alcohol became readily available. Yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of artisanal distilling, as both connoisseurs and those reconnecting with their heritage have created a vibrant new culture of moonshine. While not limited to Appalachia, moonshine is often entwined with the region in popular understandings.

The first interdisciplinary examination of the legal moonshine industry, Modern Moonshine probes the causes and impact of the so-called moonshine revival. What does the moonshine revival tell us about our national culture? How does it shape the image of Appalachia and rural America? Focusing mostly on southern Appalachia, the book’s eleven essays chronicle such popular figures as Popcorn Sutton and explore how and why distillers promote their product as “traditional” and “authentic.” This edited collection draws from scholars across the disciplines of anthropology, history, geography, and sociology to make sense of the legal, social, and historical shifts behind contemporary production and consumption of moonshine, and offers a fresh perspective on an enduring topic of Appalachian myth and reality.

[more]
cover of Modern Motherhood: An American History

Modern Motherhood

An American History

Vandenberg-Daves, Jodi

Rutgers University Press, 2014

 How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society. 

Modern Motherhood travels through redefinitions of motherhood over time, as mothers encountered a growing cadre of medical and psychological experts, increased their labor force participation, gained the right to vote, agitated for more resources to perform their maternal duties, and demonstrated their vast resourcefulness in providing for and nurturing their families. Navigating rigid gender role prescriptions and a crescendo of mother-blame by the middle of the twentieth century, mothers continued to innovate new ways to combine labor force participation and domestic responsibilities. By the 1960s, they were poised to challenge male expertise, in areas ranging from welfare and abortion rights to childbirth practices and the confinement of women to maternal roles. In the twenty-first century, Americans continue to struggle with maternal contradictions, as we pit an idealized role for mothers in children’s development against the social and economic realities of privatized caregiving, a paltry public policy structure, and mothers’ extensive employment outside the home.

Building on decades of scholarship and spanning a wide range of topics, Vandenberg-Daves tells an inclusive tale of African American, Native American, Asian American, working class, rural, and other hitherto ignored families, exploring sources ranging from sermons, medical advice, diaries and letters to the speeches of impassioned maternal activists. Chapter topics include: inventing a new role for mothers; contradictions of moral motherhood; medicalizing the maternal body; science, expertise, and advice to mothers; uplifting and controlling mothers; modern reproduction; mothers’ resilience and adaptation; the middle-class wife and mother; mother power and mother angst; and mothers’ changing lives and continuous caregiving. While the discussion has been part of all eras of American history, the discussion of the meaning of modern motherhood is far from over.
[more]
cover of Modern Muslims: A Sudan Memoir

Modern Muslims

A Sudan Memoir

Steve Howard

Ohio University Press, 2016

Steve Howard departed for the Sudan in the early 1980s as an American graduate student beginning a three-year journey in which he would join and live with the Republican Brotherhood, the Sufi Muslim group led by the visionary Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Taha was a religious intellectual who participated in the early days of Sudan’s anticolonial struggle, but quickly turned his movement into a religious reform effort based on his radical reading of the Qur’an. He was executed in 1985 for apostasy. Decades after returning to the life of an academic in the United States, Howard brings us this memoir of his time with the Republican Brotherhood, who advocated, among other things, equality for women. Modern Muslims describes Howard’s path to learning not only about Islam and Sufism but also about Sudan’s history and culture. When the Brotherhood was thrust into confrontation with Sudan’s then-president Jaafar Nimeiry, Howard had a front-line perspective on the difficult choices communities make as they try to reform and practice their faith freely. As well as a story of personal transformation, the book offers an insider’s perspective on a modernist nonviolent Islamic movement that thrived and was brutally suppressed. An important book for our times, Modern Muslims yields significant insights for our understanding of modern Islam, African history, and contemporary geopolitics.
[more]
cover of Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

Modern Nature

The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

Lynn K. Nyhart

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In Modern Nature,Lynn K. Nyhart traces the emergence of a “biological perspective” in late nineteenth-century Germany that emphasized the dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Examining this approach to nature in light of Germany’s fraught urbanization and industrialization, as well the opportunities presented by new and reforming institutions, she argues that rapid social change drew attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering a society—and nature—whole, functional, and healthy.

This quintessentially modern view of nature, Nyhart shows, stood in stark contrast to the standard naturalist’s orientation toward classification. While this new biological perspective would eventually grow into the academic discipline of ecology, Modern Nature locates its roots outside the universities, in a vibrant realm of populist natural history inhabited by taxidermists and zookeepers, schoolteachers and museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts and nature protectionists.

Probing the populist beginnings of animal ecology in Germany, Nyhart unites the history of popular natural history with that of elite science in a new way. In doing so, she brings to light a major orientation in late nineteenth-century biology that has long been eclipsed by Darwinism.

[more]
cover of Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001

Modern Noise, Fluid Genres

Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001

Jeremy Wallach

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods.
Integrating ground-level ethnographic research with insights drawn from contemporary cultural theory, he shows that access to globally circulating music and technologies has neither extinguished nor homogenized local music-making in Indonesia. Instead, it has provided young Indonesians with creative possibilities for exploring their identity in a diverse nation undergoing dramatic changes in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, he finds, the unofficial, multicultural nationalism of Indonesian popular music provides a viable alternative to the religious, ethnic, regional, and class-based extremism that continues to threaten unity and democracy in that country.
[more]
cover of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

Modern Occult Rhetoric

Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

Joshua Gunn

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Uncovering how secrecy, symbolism, and hidden meanings shape modern culture and communication.

The occult has traditionally been understood as the study of secrets of the practice of mysticism or magic. This book broadens our understanding of the occult by treating it as a rhetorical phenomenon tied to language and symbols and more central to American culture than is commonly assumed.

Joshua Gunn approaches the occult as an idiom, examining the ways in which acts of textual criticism and interpretation are occultic in nature, as evident in practices as diverse as academic scholarship, Freemasonry, and television production. Gunn probes, for instance, the ways in which jargon employed by various social and professional groups creates barriers and fosters secrecy. From the theory wars of cultural studies to the Satanic Panic that swept the national mass media in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gunn shows how the paradox of a hidden, buried, or secret meaning that cannot be expressed in language appears time and time again in Western culture.

These recurrent patterns, Gunn argues, arise from a generalized, popular anxiety about language and its limitations. Ultimately, Modern Occult Rhetoric demonstrates the indissoluble relationship between language, secrecy, and publicity, and the centrality of suspicion in our daily lives.

 

[more]
cover of Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites: Archaeology and Marine Conservation on San Miguel Island, California

Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites

Archaeology and Marine Conservation on San Miguel Island, California

Todd J Braje

University of Utah Press, 2010

There is a growing consensus in the scientific realm that the world’s oceans are reaching a state of crisis as commercial fisheries are more widely overexploited and many coastal ecosystems are approaching collapse. A number of scientists and resource managers have argued that a successful understanding of the current crisis can be found through the development of a deeper historical perspective of the ecology of coastal ecosystems and the impacts that humans have had on them. In Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites: Archaeology and Marine Conservation on San Miguel Island, California, Todd Braje works to provide just such an understanding, bridging the divide between the archaeological record and the modern crisis.
 
Using archaeological, paleoecological, and historical datasets from California’s Channel Islands and the larger Santa Barbara Channel region, Braje explores the evolving relationship between humans and fragile island ecosystems. San Miguel Island, westernmost of the Northern Channel Islands, holds archaeological records spanning 10,000 years, providing a backdrop for the examination of changes in human demography, subsistence, and technology over time. Braje’s systematic excavations of five well-preserved sitesranging from a 9500-year-old shell midden to a 150-year-old abalone fishing camptranslate into a long-term case study that enables a unique assessment of the human impacts on marine ecosystems.
 
Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites: Archaeology and Marine Conservation on San Miguel Island, California helps to provide a more complete picture of human sea and land use through time, offering vital information for understanding, interpreting, and managing the past, present, and future of both the Channel Islands and global marine ecosystems. Braje demonstrates the relevance of archaeological, historical, and paleoecological data to extant environmental problems and concludes with tangible and practical recommendations for managing modern marine ecosystems and fisheries.
[more]
cover of Modern Peru: A New History

Modern Peru

A New History

Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

Modern Peru: A New History offers a sweeping account of Peru’s history from the wars of independence to the present day. Delving into a past characterized by instability and a series of interrupted national projects, the contributors examine the legacies of Tupac Amaru’s 1780s rebellion and the intense ideological debates between conservatives and liberals about the newly independent nation. They analyze the mid-nineteenth-century guano state, the catastrophic defeat in the War of the Pacific, and the establishment of an exclusionary oligarchic state—the "Aristocratic Republic"—based on a diverse export economy. Outlining Peru’s twentieth-century transition from a rural, agrarian society to a primarily urban one, the contributors explore the 1968 coup and its unfulfilled promise of top-down social transformation, which was followed by years of democratic rule marked by internal armed conflict and economic mismanagement. This period culminated in the authoritarian neoliberal revolution of Alberto Fujimori, whose economic and political legacies in the new century resulted in a booming economy, now in abeyance, and a deeply dysfunctional democracy. Accessible and wide-ranging, Modern Peru provides a singularly panoramic perspective on Peru’s history.

Contributors. Eduardo Dargent, Paulo Drinot, Cynthia McClintock, José Luis Rénique, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Alberto Vergara, Charles Walker
[more]
cover of Modern Trends in Islam

Modern Trends in Islam

H. A. R. Gibb

University of Chicago Press, 1974

Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago 1945, Modern Trends in Islam analyzes the evolving religious beliefs of practicing Muslims during the author’s own time. It was one of the first texts in English to treat Islam not as an unchanging set of beliefs and practices but as a dynamic religion whose meaning is continually redefined by its adherents. In six chapters, this concise book covers Islam’s confrontation with Western Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century in realms of law, society, and religious thought. In doing so, these essays anticipate many of the tensions between progressivism and fundamentalism that have characterized Islamic life, thought, and politics over the last seventy years.

[more]
cover of Modernism - Dada - Postmodernism

Modernism - Dada - Postmodernism

Richard Sheppard

Northwestern University Press, 1999

This new collection updates, integrates, and contextualizes Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard examines responses of modernist writers, artists, and philosophers to a changed sense of reality and human nature. With its combination of previously published and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde-modernism debate in the U.S., the volume provides the specialist and the general reader insight into European scholarly discourse on this hotly debated subject.
[more]
cover of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

By Jonathan Goldman

University of Texas Press, 2011

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

[more]
cover of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939

Modernism and Colonialism

British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939

Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized.

Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire.

Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry

[more]
cover of Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925

Martin Hipsky

Ohio University Press, 2011

Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.

Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both “low modern” and “high modernist” British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats. 


[more]
cover of Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the United States Air Force Academy

Modernism at Mid-Century

The Architecture of the United States Air Force Academy

Edited by Robert Bruegmann

University of Chicago Press, 1994

One of the country's largest and most important postwar architectural projects, the United States Air Force Academy opened in 1958. With its spectacular natural setting and stunning Modernist design, the Academy was quickly hailed as a national landmark and attracts over a million visitors each year.

The contributors to this volume (Jory Johnson, Robert Nauman, Sheri Olson, James Russell, and Kristen Schaffer) and editor Robert Bruegmann chronicle the complex history of the planning, design, and construction of the Air Force Academy. As the most conspicuous commission of the American military at the height of the Cold War, the design of the Academy generated intense popular interest and was a lightning rod for conflicting values in postwar society. The design, by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has been hailed as the final triumph of the International Style and as a monument to military bureaucracy.
[more]
cover of Modernism in Relation: KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures

Modernism in Relation

KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures

Rebecca M. Brown

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

This innovative book reimagines modernism through the illegible scribbles and vibrant colors of southern Indian artist KCS Paniker.

KCS Paniker (1911–1977) is a canonical figure in India’s twentieth-century modernism. He was principal of the Madras School of Art and founder of one of the world’s longest-standing artists’ communities. Yet, even within India, he remains a marginal figure, positioned at the periphery of a dominant art world centered in the north. Paniker’s best-known body of work, the Words and Symbols series (1963–77), calls on us to reconsider how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a postcolonial, decolonizing world. These “written pictures”—paintings filled with symbols, tables, equations, and illegible scribbles—invite decoding, only to undermine the pursuit of wholeness or stable meaning.

Paniker famously called Paul Klee his “guru.” In this book, art historian Rebecca M. Brown explores what that might mean, moving beyond tracing influence and derivation to embrace a fuller sense of artistic relation across geography and time. Featuring over 100 stunning illustrations, Modernism in Relation explores the dynamic, twisting currents of modernism, tracing how Paniker navigated its waters on his own terms—abandoning prescriptions for what modern art should be or what Indian modernism should look like. The book reveals a maker seeking new creative languages, challenging ways of knowing, and exploring the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of relation.

[more]
cover of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents

Modernism

An Anthology of Sources and Documents

Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou

University of Chicago Press, 1998

From Bauhaus to Dada, from Virginia Woolf to John Dos Passos, the Modernist movement revolutionized the way we perceive, portray, and participate in the world. This landmark anthology is a comprehensive documentary resource for the study of Modernism, bringing together more than 150 key essays, articles, manifestos, and other writings of the political and aesthetic avant-garde between 1840 and 1950.

By favoring short extracts over lengthier originals, the editors cover a remarkable range and variety of modernist thinking. Included are not just the familiar high modernist landmarks such as Gustave Flaubert, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, but also a diverse representation from the sciences, politics, philosophy, and the arts, including Charles Darwin, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, Adolf Hitler, and Sergei Eisenstein. Another welcome feature is a substantial selection of hard-to-find manifestos from the many modernist movements, among them futurism, cubism, Dada, surrealism, and anarchism.
[more]