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This is the first full-length introduction to the life and works of significant American composer Marga Richter (born 1926), who has written more than one hundred works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance, opera, voice, chorus, piano, organ, and harpsichord. Still actively composing in her eighties, Richter is particularly known for her large-scale works performed by ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and for other pieces performed by prominent artists including pianist Menahem Pressler, conductor Izler Solomon, and violinist Daniel Heifetz. 

Interspersing consideration of Richter's musical works with discussion of her life, her musical style, and the origins and performances of her works, Sharon Mirchandani documents a successful composer's professional and private life throughout the twentieth century. Covering Richter's formative years, her influences, and the phases of her career from the 1950s to the present, Mirchandani closely examines Richter's many interesting, attractive musical works that draw inspiration from distinctly American, Irish/English, and Asian sources. Drawing extensively on interviews with the composer, Mirchandani also provides detailed descriptions of Richter's scores and uses reviews and other secondary sources to provide contexts for her work, including their relationship to modern dance, to other musical styles, and to 1970s feminism.

These essays mark the maturation of scholarship on Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), one of the most important public intellectuals of the nineteenth century and a writer whose works have been much revived in recent decades. The authors—leading scholars of Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the antebellum period—consider anew Fuller the critic, the journalist, the reformer, the traveler, and the social and cultural observer, and make fresh contributions to the study of her life and work. Drawing on developments in gender theory, transatlantic studies, and archival excavations of the networks of reform, this volume defines Fuller as a significant intellectual precursor, a critic who analyzed and challenged the dominant interpretive paradigms of her own time and who remains strikingly relevant for ours.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about other cultures, traditions, and identities.
    This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller’s genius and character. Treating the last several years of Margaret Fuller’s short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller’s unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From the origins and articulations of Fuller’s cosmopolitanism to her examination of “the woman question,” and from her fascination with the European “other” to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to the present.

Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is the intellectual autobiography of cultural anthropologist Esther Newton, a pioneer in gay and lesbian studies. Chronicling the development of her ideas from the excitement of early feminism in the 1960s to friendly critiques of queer theory in the 1990s, this collection covers a range of topics such as why we need more precise sexual vocabularies, why there have been fewer women doing drag than men, and how academia can make itself more hospitable to queers. It brings together such classics as “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian” and “Dick(less) Tracy and the Homecoming Queen” with entirely new work such as “Theater: Gay Anti-Church.”

Newton’s provocative essays detail a queer academic career while offering a behind-the-scenes view of academic homophobia. In four sections that correspond to major periods and interests in her life—”Drag and Camp,” “Lesbian-Feminism,” “Butch,” and “Queer Anthropology”—the volume reflects her successful struggle to create a body of work that uses cultural anthropology to better understand gender oppression, early feminism, theatricality and performance, and the sexual and erotic dimensions of fieldwork. Combining personal, theoretical, and ethnographic perspectives, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay also includes photographs from Newton’s personal and professional life.

With wise and revealing discussions of the complex relations between experience and philosophy, the personal and the political, and identities and practices, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is important for anyone interested in the birth and growth of gay and lesbian studies.

"In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it."
-Marian Seldes

"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."
-Oscar Brockett


Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72).

This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women.

Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.

Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.

Margins in the Classroom was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

For today's teacher of literature, facing a minefield of politics and theory, this book arrives as a much needed guide through the multiplying cultural anxieties of the college classroom. Margins in the Classroom brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution.

Grounded in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, political economy, sociology, and philosophy, these essays apply new theoretical models to the traditional canon, identify new bodies of literature, and show how theory can be used to analyze these new literatures. Focusing on the politics of teaching and theory in the classroom, the authors explore the present practice and future implications of changing textual analysis, literary theory, and pedagogy. Their essays address the politics of literature as it affects the classroom, the design of courses, and the creation of new courses. They mold theory to the variety of classroom populations and materials the teacher of literature encounters today. The resulting volume bridges the differences between the languages of the classroom instructor and the contemporary theorist. Margins in the Classroom is unique in both the breadth and the depth of its concern over the disturbing, if electric, impact of changes in criticism, theory, and pedagogy in college literature classes as we approach the next century of academic instruction.

Kostas Myrsiades is professor of comparative literature, and Linda S. Myrsiades is professor of English, both at West Chester University. Kostas Myrsiades is editor of College Literature, where Linda S. Myrsiades is an associate editor.

Published by the University of Cincinnati Press

While the adage may go, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” the story of Maria Longworth Storer necessitates a new adage—at the front of every great city is a great woman. After being shunted into the biographies and history books of other people, Longworth Storer is now finally given center stage on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of her birth.

Maria Longworth Storer: From Music and Art to Popes and Presidents is the most comprehensive biography of this one of a kind Cincinnatian. Known as the founder of the first female-run manufacturing company in the United States, Rookwood Pottery, Longworth Storer was passionate about women’s rights, her city, and issues of poverty and the arts. She owned Rookwood pottery for nine years, and then transferred ownership after earning recognition at the Exhibition of American Art Industry in Philadelphia and receiving a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Aside from her success with Rookwood, Longworth Storer was central to making the Queen City the major cultural landmark it is today. Although the rest of her life was no less remarkable as the wife of notorious diplomat Bellamy Storer, later embroiled in the famous Roosevelt-Storer scandal, little has been written about her contributions and exploits in diplomatic relations and her powerful influence on turn-of-the-twentieth-century political leaders.

Featuring new archival research, and never before seen photos of the Storer family, authors Constance J. Moore and Nancy M. Broermann have compiled a portrait of Maria Longworth Storer that is rich in detail, fitting to both the wide, often eclectic, breadth of Longworth Storer’s projects, and to the depth of her impact on leaders from Washington D.C. to Europe.

Moving through major moments in both American and Cincinnati history, and intersecting with significant historical figures including Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Moore and Broermann expose the broader historical narrative of Longworth Storer’s life without letting her unique spirit and individual accomplishments become overshadowed by them.

Through thoughtful, balanced narrative, readers get to know a remarkable woman whose fascinating and dramatic life as a political figure, women’s rights advocate, and patron of the arts has had a long lasting legacy on the Queen City and the Shaping of our nation’s diplomatic policies.

The first book-length treatment of one of John James Audubon’s background painters.
 
Maria Martin (1796–1863) was an evangelical Lutheran from Charleston, South Carolina, who became an accomplished painter within months of meeting John James Audubon. Martin met Audubon through her brother-in-law, Reverend John Bachman, who befriended Audubon while passing through Charleston on route to Florida where he expected to find new avian species. Martin was an amateur artist, but by the time Audubon left, she had familiarized herself with his style of drawing. Six months after their initial meeting, her background botanicals were deemed good enough to embellish Audubon’s exquisite bird paintings.
 
Martin’s botanicals and insects appeared in volumes two and four of The Birds of America (1830–1838). She painted snakes for John Edwards Holbrook’s North American Herpetology (1842) and assisted in drafting the descriptive taxonomies prepared by John Bachman—who later became her husband in 1848 following the death of her older sister—for The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846–1854). Until now, her contributions have been unknown to all but the most astute students of natural history and art history and a close circle of family and friends.
 
Maria Martin’s World is a heavily illustrated volume examining how Maria Martin learned to paint aesthetically beautiful botanicals with exacting accuracy. Drawing on deep research into archival documents and family-held artifacts, Debra Lindsay brings Maria Martin out from behind the curtain of obscurity and disinformation that has previously shrouded her and places her centrally in her own time and milieu. In the telling of Maria Martin’s story, Lindsay also uncovers many nuances of the behavior and actions of the two prominent men in her life that readers interested in Audubon and Bachman will find noteworthy.

Martin was a gifted artist recognized for having contributed beautiful paintings to a natural history. But beyond the natural world this is a biography of an evangelical Lutheran steeped in the faith of her German ancestors and raised to respect the patriarchal norms of her time. Maria Martin pursued her scientific and artistic interests only when they did not conflict with her religious and familial responsibilities.

This book examines the strategic possibilities of poetic self-restraint. Marianne Moore,Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson all wrote poetry that is marked by a certain reserve--precisely the motive against which most feminist poets and critics of the last thirty years have established themselves. Kirstin Hotelling Zona complicates this dichotomy by examining the conceptions of selfhood upon which it depends. She argues that Moore, Bishop, and Swenson expressed their commitment to feminism by exposing its most treasured assumptions: they not only challenge the ideal of autonomous self-definition, but also contest the integrity of a bodily or sexual authenticity by which that ideal is often measured.
In recent years critical studies of Bishop and Moore have flourished, a large percentage of them devoted to explorations of sexuality and gender. A gap is growing, however, between feminist repossessions of Moore and Bishop and recent readings of their antiessentialist poetics. On the one hand, these poets are appearing more frequently in the feminist canon, but the price of this inclusion is usually the suppression of their strategies of self-restraint. While Zona questions the poetic privileging of self-expression, she establishes contiguity between feminist poetry and developments in American poetry at large. In doing so she asserts the centrality of feminist poetry within discussions of contemporary American poetry, thereby challenging the common perception of feminist poetry as an "alternative" (which often means auxiliary) genre.
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Illinois State University.

Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as "a centrally important 20th-century figure." Through such landmark works as The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, and American Civilization, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. "There is little doubt," wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, "that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century." In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a "totalitarian" Ahab and a "democratic, American" Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose "captain of industry" leads the "mariners, renegades and castaways" of its crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era. It is precisely this personal, deeply original material that was excised from the only subsequent edition. With a new introduction by Donald E. Pease that places the work in its critical and cultural context, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways is once again available in its complete form.

Dominant history would have us believe that colonialism belongs to a previous era that has long come to an end. But as Native people become mobile, reservation lands become overcrowded and the state seeks to enforce means of containment, closing its borders to incoming, often indigenous, immigrants.

In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, demonstrating how it persists in the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization. The book argues that it is vital to refocus the efforts of Native nations beyond replicating settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Through an examination of twentieth-century Native women’s poetry and prose, Goeman illuminates how these works can serve to remap settler geographies and center Native knowledges. She positions Native women as pivotal to how our nations, both tribal and nontribal, have been imagined and mapped, and how these women play an ongoing role in decolonization.

In a strong and lucid voice, Goeman provides close readings of literary texts, including those of E. Pauline Johnson, Esther Belin, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich. In addition, she places these works in the framework of U.S. and Canadian Indian law and policy. Her charting of women’s struggles to define themselves and their communities reveals the significant power in all of our stories.

The definitive biography of one of the most-loved artists of the twentieth century, a book the New York Times called "the best life of an American painter yet written"

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century—a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's personal papers and over one hundred interviews with artists, patrons, and dealers, James Breslin tells the story of a life in art—the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, the clash of culture and commerce. Breslin offers us not only an enticing look at Rothko as a person, but delivers a lush, in-depth portrait of the New York art scene of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Klein, which would influence artists for generations to come.

 

Blending cultural history, biography, and literary criticism, this book explores how one of America's greatest icons used the French to help build a new sense of what it is to be “American” in the second half of the nineteenth century.

While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twain’s relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twain’s use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as “the representative American.” Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, and a chronology of his visits to France, the book offers close readings of writings that have been largely ignored, such as The Innocents Adrift manuscript and the unpublished chapters of A Tramp Abroad, combining literary analysis, socio-historical context and biographical research.

 Mark Twain has always been America’s spokesman, and his comments on a wide range of topics continue to be accurate, valid, and frequently amusing. His opinions on the medical field are no exception. While Twain’s works, including his popular novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are rich in medical imagery and medical themes derived from his personal experiences, his interactions with the medical profession and his comments about health, illness, and physicians have largely been overlooked.

In Mark Twain and Medicine, K. Patrick Ober remedies this omission. The nineteenth century was a critical time in the development of American medicine, with much competition among the different systems of health care, both traditional and alternative. Not surprisingly, Mark Twain was right in the middle of it all. He experimented with many of the alternative care systems that were available in his day—in part because of his frustration with traditional medicine and in part because he hoped to find the “perfect” system that would bring health to his family.

Twain’s commentary provides a unique perspective on American medicine and the revolution in medical systems that he experienced firsthand. Ober explores Twain’s personal perspective in this area, as he expressed it in fiction, speeches, and letters. As a medical educator, Ober explains in sufficient detail and with clarity all medical and scientific terms, making this volume accessible to the general reader.

Ober demonstrates that many of Twain’s observations are still relevant to today’s health care issues, including the use of alternative or complementary medicine in dealing with illness, the utility of placebo therapies, and the role of hope in the healing process.

Twain’s evaluation of the medical practices of his era provides a fresh, humanistic, and personalized view of the dramatic changes that occurred in medicine through the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth. Twain scholars, general readers, and medical professionals will all find this unique look at his work appealing.

A century after Samuel Clemens’s death, Mark Twain thrives. One way fans still celebrate the first true American writer and his work is by visiting any number of Mark Twain destinations. They believe they can learn something unique by visiting the places where he lived. Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism untangles the complicated ways that Clemens’s houses, now museums, have come to tell the stories that they do about Twain and, in the process, reminds us that the sites themselves are the products of multiple agendas and, in some cases, unpleasant histories. 

Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography stands as the last of Twain’s great yarns. Here he tells his story in his own way, freely expressing his joys and sorrows, his affections and hatreds, his rages and reverence—ending, as always, tongue-in-cheek: “Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.”
    More than the story of a literary career, this memoir is anchored in the writer’s relation to his family—what they meant to him as a husband, father, and artist. It also brims with many of Twain’s best comic anecdotes about his rambunctious boyhood in Hannibal, his misadventures in the Nevada territory, his notorious Whittier birthday speech, his travels abroad, and more.
    Twain published twenty-five “Chapters from My Autobiography” in the North American Review in 1906 and 1907. “I intend that this autobiography . . . shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel.”
    For this second edition, Michael Kiskis’s introduction references a wealth of critical work done on Twain since 1990. He also adds a discussion of literary domesticity, locating the autobiography within the history of Twain’s literary work and within Twain’s own understanding and experience of domestic concerns. 

This collection seeks to place Pudd’nhead Wilson—a neglected, textually fragmented work of Mark Twain’s—in the context of contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors’ introduction argues the virtues of using Pudd’nhead Wilson as a teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally of race, class, and gender.

In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in the text itself. Such wrinkles and gaps, the authors find, are the symptoms of an inconclusive, even evasive, but culturally illuminating struggle to confront and resolve difficult questions bearing on race and sex. Such fresh, intellectually enriching perspectives on the novel arise directly from the broad-based interdisciplinary foundations provided by the participating scholars. Drawing on a wide variety of critical methodologies, the essays place the novel in ways that illuminate the world in which it was produced and that further promise to stimulate further study.

Contributors. Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter, Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar, Eric Sundquist

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize for best manuscript in American Literature

With the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain embarked on a long and successful career as the 19th century's best-selling travel writer. Jeffrey Melton treats Twain's travel narratives in depth, and in the context of his contemporary travel writers and a burgeoning tourism culture. As Melton shows, Twain's five major travel narratives--The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator--demonstrate Twain's mastery and reinvention of the genre.


 

Before Mark Twain became a national celebrity with his best-selling The Innocents Abroad, he was just another struggling writer perfecting his craft—but already “playin’ hell” with the world. In the first book in more than fifty years to examine the initial phase of Samuel Clemens’s writing career, James Caron draws on contemporary scholarship and his own careful readings to offer a fresh and comprehensive perspective on those early years—and to challenge many long-standing views of  Mark Twain’s place in the tradition of American humor.

Tracing the arc of Clemens’s career from self-described “unsanctified newspaper reporter” to national author between 1862 and 1867, Caron reexamines the early and largely neglected writings—especially the travel letters from Hawaii and the letters chronicling Clemens’s trip from California to New York City. Caron connects those sets of letters with comic materials Clemens had already published, drawing on all known items from this first phase of his career—even the virtually forgotten pieces from the San Francisco Morning Call in 1864—to reveal how Mark Twain’s humor was shaped by the sociocultural context and how it catered to his audience’s sensibilities while unpredictably transgressing its standards.

Caron reveals how Sam Clemens’s contemporaries, notably Charles Webb, provided important comic models, and he shows how Clemens not only adjusted to but also challenged the guidelines of the newspapers and magazines for which he wrote, evolving as a comic writer who transmuted personal circumstances into literary art. Plumbing Mark Twain’s cultural significance, Caron draws on anthropological insights from Victor Turner and others to compare the performative aspects of Clemens’s early work to the role of ritual clowns in traditional societies

Brimming with fresh insights into such benchmarks as “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” and “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” this book is a gracefully written work that reflects both patient research and considered judgment to chart the development of an iconic American talent. Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter should be required reading for all serious scholars of his work, as well as for anyone interested in the interplay between artistic creativity and the literary marketplace.

From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.


These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.
 

Poverty among the elderly is sharply gendered—women over sixty-five are twice as likely as men to live below the poverty line. Older women receive smaller Social Security payments and are less likely to have private pensions. They are twice as likely as men to need a caregiver and twice as likely as men to be a caregiver. Recent efforts of some in Washington to reduce and privatize social welfare programs threaten to exacerbate existing gender disparities among older Americans. They also threaten to exacerbate inequality among women by race, class, and marital status. Madonna Harrington Meyer and Pamela Herd explain these disparities and assess how proposed policy reforms would affect inequality among the aged. Market Friendly or Family Friendly? documents the cumulative disadvantages that make it so difficult for women to achieve economic and health security when they retire. Wage discrimination and occupational segregation reduce women's lifetime earnings, depressing their savings and Social Security benefits. While more women are employed today than a generation ago, they continue to shoulder a greater share of the care burden for children, the disabled, and the elderly. Moreover, as marriage rates have declined, more working mothers are raising children single-handedly. Women face higher rates of health problems due to their lower earnings and the high demands associated with unpaid care work.  There are also financial consequences to these family and work patterns. Harrington Meyer and Herd contrast the impact of market friendly programs that maximize individual choice, risk, and responsibility with family friendly programs aimed at redistributing risks and resources. They evaluate popular policies on the current agenda, considering the implications for inequality. But they also evaluate less discussed policy proposals. In particular, minimum benefits for Social Security, as well as credits for raising children, would improve economic security for all, regardless of marital status. National health insurance would also reduce inequality, as would reforms to Medicare, particularly increased coverage of long term care. Just as important are policies such as universal preschool and paid family leave aimed at reducing the disadvantages women face during their working years. The gender gaps that women experience during their work and family lives culminate in income and health disparities between men and women during retirement, but the problem has received scant attention. Market Friendly or Family Friendly? is a comprehensive introduction to this issue, and a significant contribution to the debate over the future of America's entitlement programs. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

 Although historians have written extensively on propaganda during Napoleon III’s regime and Vichy, they have virtually ignored the Third Republic. Focusing on Third Republic policies, Marketing Marianne suggests that Americans’ long-lasting love affair with French culture is no accident. Robert J. Young argues that the French used subtle but effective means to influence U.S. policy in Europe. He examines French propaganda efforts and the methods of the French Foreign Ministry, always highlighting the wider cultural and social context of Franco-American relations. French propagandists believed that the steady promotion of their nation as the cultural capital of the world was the best way to foster goodwill among Americans. They slowly recognized the important role the United States played in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Young argues that the French deliberately exploited America’s sense of cultural inferiority when faced with Europe’s rich heritage, and the rise of new technologies and modern forms of government in France encouraged the development of more sophisticated forms of propaganda.

Are advanced industrialized countries converging on a market response to reform their systems of social protection? By comparing the health care reform experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 1990s, Susan Giaimo explores how countries pursue diverse policy responses and how such variations reflect distinctive institutions, actors, and reform politics in each country.

In Britain, the Thatcher government's plan to inject a market into the state-administered national health service resulted in a circumscribed experiment orchestrated from above. In Germany, the Kohl government sought to repair defects in the corporatist arrangement with doctors and insurers, thus limiting the market experiment and designing it to enhance the solidarity of the national health insurance system. In the United States, private market actors foiled Clinton's bid to expand the federal government's role in the private health care system through managed competition and national insurance. But market reform continued, albeit led by private employers and with government officials playing a reactive role. Actors and institutions surrounding the existing health care settlement in each country created particular reform politics that either militated against or fostered the deployment of competition.

The finding that major transformations are occurring in private as well as public systems of social protection suggests that studies of social policy change expand their focus beyond statutory welfare state programs. The book will interest political scientists and policymakers concerned with welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies; social scientists interested in the changing balance among state, market, and societal interests in governance; and health policy researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals.

Susan Giaimo is an independent scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned an MSc in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the Politics and Government of Western Europe as the branch of study. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, University of California at Berkeley, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Scholars Program in Comparative Public Policy and Comparative Institutions, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She taught in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. During that period she won the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Founder's Prize for "Adapting the Welfare State: The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States," a paper she coauthored with Philip Manow. She has also worked for health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and medical practices in the United States.

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a sobering exploration of the privatization of vital social services under market-driven governance. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies subcontracted disaster relief to private companies that turned the humanitarian work of recovery into lucrative business. These enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated inequalities based on race and class and leaving residents to rebuild almost entirely on their own.

Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. And as political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture.
In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, McCrossen expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that doesn’t merely value time but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American.

Today, when fifty percent of  couples who marry eventually get divorced, it's clear that we have moved from a culture in which "marriage is forever" to one in which "marriage is contingent." Author Karla Hackstaff looks at intact marriages to examine the impact of new expectations in a culture of divorce.

Marriage in a Culture of Divorce examines the shifting meanings of divorce and gender for  two generations of  middle-class, married couples. Hackstaff finds that new social and economic conditions both support and undermine the efforts of spouses to redefine the meaning of marriage in a culture of divorce. The definitions of marriage, divorce, and gender have changed for all, but more for the young than the old, and more for women than for men. While some spouses in both generations believe that marriage is for life and that men should dominate in marriage, the younger generation of spouses increasingly construct marriage as contingent rather than forever.

Hackstaff presents this evidence in archival case studies of couples married in the 1950s, which she then contrasts with her own case studies of people married during the 1970s, finding evidence of a significant shift in who does the emotional work of maintaining the relationship. It is primarily the woman in the '50s couples who "monitors" the marriage, whereas in the '70s couples both husband and wife support a "marital work ethic," including couples therapy in some cases.

The words and actions of the couples Hackstaff follows in depth - the '50s Stones, Dominicks, Hamptons, and  McIntyres, and the '70s Turners, Clement-Leonettis, Greens, Kason-Morrises, and Nakatos -- reveal the changes and contradictory tendencies of married life in the U.S. There are traditional relationships characterized by male dominance, there are couples striving for gender equality, there are partners pulling together, and partners pulling apart.

Those debating "family values" should not forget, Hackstaff contends, that there are costs associated with marriage culture as well as divorce culture, and they should view divorce as a transitional means for defining marriage in an egalitarian direction. She convincingly illustrates her controversial position, that although divorce has its cost to society, the divorce culture empowers wives and challenges the legacy of male dominance that previously set the conditions for marriage endurance.

The couplings of millionaires with stenographers, servants, and other so-called working girls supplied early twentieth-century newspapers with sensational headlines and swarms of eager readers. Carole Srole delves into how the media prominence and popularity of these unions reflected unease over the rapid changes shaking American society.

Women’s desire for autonomy, a rising divorce rate, the declining power of the upper class, new ideas of beauty and sexuality—newspaper tales of cross-class nuptials brought a host of anxieties about gender and class to the front page. Srole focuses particular attention on the economic changes faced by working-class women while also surveying newspaper attacks on their morality and womanhood, and their complicity in their own poverty. As she shows, working women and their advocates persevered by asserting an independence they pursued through union activism, professionalism, land ownership, and filling traditionally male jobs.

An engaging merger of media and women’s history, Marriage Making News looks at a rags-to-riches genre and illuminates the forces of change at work behind the stories.

The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California. Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families. Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.

At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), author Donna M. Cassidy brilliantly appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark late art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region—the North Atlantic folk, the Maine coast, and Mount Katahdin—producing work that demands an interpretive approach beyond art history's customary biographical, stylistic, and thematic methodologies.

Cassidy, sensitive to the psychological and gender analysis traditionally central to interpretations of Hartley, becomes the first scholar to reassess his late work in light of contemporary American perceptions of race, ethnicity, place, and history. This remarkable new book resonates not only as a seminal Hartley study and a complex art and cultural period history, but as a superb example of applied early twentieth-century American intellectual history informed by an impressive command of primary and secondary interdisciplinary literature. Numerous and rich illustrations, as well as transcriptions of several key essays by Hartley, some never before published, including "This Country of Maine" (1937–38), round out this insightful, nuanced, and revolutionary treatment. Donna M. Cassidy's Marsden Hartley will engage general readers as well as scholars and students.

William Gilmore Simms’s (1806–1870) body of work, a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all its regional diversity, with its literary and intellectual issues, is probably more comprehensive than any other nineteenth-century southern author. Simms’s career began with a short novel, Martin Faber, published in 1833. This Gothic tale is reminiscent of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Sinner and was written four years before Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” Narrated in the first person, it is considered a pioneering examination of criminal psychology. Martin seduces then murders Emily so that he might marry another woman, Constance. Martin confesses to his friend and is killed after attempting to stab Constance when she visits him in jail. The book was immediately successful and was well received by the northern media, thus starting Simms’s successful career as a writer, one that would rank him as the only major southern literary figure besides Poe before the Civil War. As with other volumes in the Arkansas Edition of Simms’s work, this volume includes a critical introduction by the editor and a Simms chronology, as well as appendices dealing with textual matters. This edition also includes Simms’s 1829 story, “Confessions of a Murderer,” which was the germ for his first book of fiction.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is as relevant today as he was when he led civil rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. He was an agent and a prophet of political change in this country, and the election of President Barack Obama is his direct legacy.

Now from one of Britain's most experienced political observers comes a new, accessible biography of the man and his works. The story of King is dramatic, and Godfrey Hodgson presents it with verve, clarity, and acute insight based in part on his own reporting on-scene at the time. He interviewed King half a dozen times or more; heard his speech at the March on Washington; was in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago; and met many of the characters in King's life story. Martin Luther King combines the best of his own reporting, plus the work of other biographers and researchers, to trace the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist culture in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.

Hodgson describes the political minefield in which King operated; follows how he gradually persuaded President Kennedy that he could not stand by and allow the civil rights movement to be frustrated; and describes how, on the verge of success, his career was threatened by President Johnson's anger at King's principled decision to come out against the Vietnam War. He also puts King's career into the context of American history in the crisis of the 1960s. In his life, King was frustrated; but in death, he has been triumphant.

Martin Luther King allows the charisma and power of King's personality to shine through, showing in gripping narrative style exactly how one man helped America to progress toward its truest ideals. Hodgson's extensive research and detail help paint an accurate, complex portrait of one of America's most important leaders.

Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of a dozen well-received books about U.S. politics and recent history, including America in Our Time, a history of the United States in the 1960s; More Equal than Others, on politics and society in twentieth-century America; and most recently, a biography of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York. Hodgson met King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967. He recently retired as director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University and is a visiting journalism professor at City University in London.

PRAISE FOR America in Our Time

"A critique so stimulating and compelling that I can only say read it."
---Richard Lingeman, The New York Times

"It simply gets right, without great fuss, the detail and proportion of things like the civil rights movement, student unrest, the stages of our Vietnam engagement."
---Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books

PRAISE FOR More Equal than Others

"The most thoughtful, thorough and sorrowful book imaginable on what has happened in these years."
---Bernard Crick, The Independent