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Examining playhouses of the super-rich to understand how architecture contributed to the construction of elite identity and modern childhood

Playhouses and Privilege explores children’s playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and the mid-1930s. Different from the prefabricated buildings that later populated suburban backyards, these playhouses were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. As Abigail A. Van Slyck shows, these buildings were more than extravagant spaces to cultivate children’s imaginations and fantasy lives.

Reviewing a rich archive that includes extant buildings, site plans, family photographs, baby books, and intimate household correspondence, Van Slyck demonstrates that these structures were tools of social reproduction shaped by elite parents’ attitudes toward child-rearing, education, and class privilege. Recognizing playhouses as stages for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, she illuminates their importance in influencing children to internalize gendered codes of conduct as they enacted rituals of hospitality and learned how to supervise servants.

From Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Swiss Cottage, built on their Osborne estate in 1853, to the children’s cottage constructed on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion in 1886, and from the miniature bungalow commissioned in 1926 for the Dodge Brothers Motor Company heiress to the corporate-sponsored glass-block playhouse given to Shirley Temple in 1936, Van Slyck surveys a variety of playhouses and their milieus to trace the evolution of elite childhood and the broader social practices of wealth. Playhouses and Privilege makes clear that, far from being frivolous, playhouses were carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, integral to the reproduction of class privilege.

How domestic life shaped identity, gender, and power in the American West

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.”  From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike.

The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles.  Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.

The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

Reveals the role of amateur Black football and basketball in Virginia before integration as a form of resistance to white supremacy

In Playing for Power, Marvin T. Chiles offers a fascinating account of amateur sports in Jim Crow Virginia, revealing how, in addition to churches, workspaces, and civil rights organizations, sports were also a key arena for Black resistance to white supremacy. Drawing from a rich trove of primary sources, Chiles recounts the development of Black football and basketball culture at the high school and college levels in Virginia from the 1890s to the early 1970s. Looking beyond their role as leisure pastimes, Chiles demonstrates how amateur sports strengthened education, neutralized class divisions, shaped Black masculinity, mentored Black male leadership, cultivated race pride, and reflected Black desires for urban modernity.

Illuminating the ways Black athletes created a world that pushed for racial progress through objective, meritocratic achievement anchored by masculine leadership and institutional success, Playing for Power traces how amateur sports coalesced into a key cultural institution that fostered Black Virginians’ collective sense of community, achievement, and purpose during segregation, cornerstones of later advances in the Civil Rights Movement. Playing for Power also contributes to a larger understanding of sports history and how amateur sports became favorite American spectacles and markers of Southern identity. Chiles’s groundbreaking work will interest historians, scholars, and individuals interested in the intersection of sports and civil rights and the history of Black sports during the Jim Crow era.

Catherine and Darius Brubeck’s 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world.

The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath.

Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders’ accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.

A history of film distribution in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s, concentrating on booking, circuiting, and packaging marketing practices.

Told not as a “golden age” narrative of films, stars, or individual studios but as an economic history of the industry’s film distribution practices, Playing the Percentages is the story of how Hollywood’s vertically integrated studio system came to be. Studying the history of distribution during the growth of Hollywood, Derek Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the result of struggles over distribution practices.

Through a combination of archival research, critical surveys of the film industry trade press, and economic analysis, Long uncovers a complex and ever-shifting system of wrangling between distributors and exhibitors. Challenging the overemphasis within scholarship on “block booking” as a monolithic distribution mode, and attending to distribution practices beyond simple circulation, Long highlights the crucial changes in film distribution brought about by live theater, the rise of features, and the transition to sound. Playing the Percentages is a comprehensive history of film distribution in the United States during the silent era that illustrates the importance of power struggles between distributors and exhibitors over booking, pricing, and playing time.

This is an Auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

An in-depth look at how the ideas formulated by the interwar League of Nations shaped American thinking on the modern global order.
 
In Plowshares into Swords, David Ekbladh recaptures the power of knowledge and information developed between World War I and World War II by an international society of institutions and individuals committed to liberal international order and given focus by the League of Nations in Geneva. That information and analysis revolutionized critical debates in a world in crisis. In doing so, Ekbladh transforms conventional understandings of the United States’ postwar hegemony, showing that important elements of it were profoundly influenced by ideas that emerged from international  exchanges. The League’s work was one part of a larger transnational movement that included the United States and which saw the emergence of concepts like national income, gross domestic product, and other attempts to define and improve the standards of living, as well as new approaches to old questions about the role of government. Forged as tools for peace these ideas were beaten into weapons as World War II threatened. Ekbladh recounts how, though the US had never been a member of the organization, vital parts of the League were rescued after the fall of France in 1940 and given asylum at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  However, this presence in the US is just one reason its already well-regarded economic analyses and example were readily mobilized by influential American and international figures for an Allied “war of ideas,” plans for a postwar world, and even blueprints for the new United Nations. How did this body of information become so valuable? As Ekbladh makes clear, the answer is that information and analysis themselves became crucial currencies in global affairs: to sustain a modern, liberal global order, a steady stream of information about economics, politics, and society was, and remains, indispensable.

Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.

This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

A stunning reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, transcribed and translated for today’s readers.

Undoubtedly, the Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most important documents in British history. The tapestry is a visual narrative account of the events leading up to, and including, the Norman Conquest during the eleventh century; as such, the tapestry’s historical significance is unparalleled in its depiction of one of the United Kingdom’s most pivotal time periods. This book reproduces the full cycle of images of the Bayeux Tapestry made in the nineteenth century by Victor Sansonetti, based on drawings made by Charles Alfred Stothard and published in his Vetusta Monumenta (1821-23) for the Society of Antiquaries. This edition not only translates the Latin tituli and includes an accessible introduction, but each tapestry scene is beautifully reproduced to maximum effect and accompanied by both the text and translation.

Written in journals and notebooks by ordinary soldiers who fought against American forces in Vietnam, the poems collected in this volume fill a longstanding void in the literature of that war. In addition to offering a revealing window into another culture – a culture that prizes poetry as an integral part of social life – the pieces provide a rare look at the conflict from the perspective of those who served in the National Liberation Front, the People’s Armed Forces, and the People’s Army of Vietnam. 

The format of this edition is bilingual, to enable both Vietnamese and American readers to share and appreciate these poignant and deeply personal documents, which were often written under fire and always in the face of death. 

Thomas Pavel has written extensively on poetics, linguistics, and narratology. In this book he proposes an original theory and methodology of plot analysis—a reading that draws upon the most fruitful aspects of literary structuralism and upon contemporary linguistic models (specifically generative grammar). Theorists have tended to use formal plot analysis to examine relatively simple literary artifacts, like folk tales and short stories; Pavel, however, applies his model to a group of English Renaissance tragedies and demonstrates that plot analysis can make a major contribution to the understanding of sophisticated literary texts.

Experimental poetry responded to historical change in the decades after World War II, with an attitude of such casual and reckless originality that its insights have often been overlooked. However, as Benjamin Lee argues, to ignore the scenes of self and the historical occasions captured by experimental poets during the 1950s and 1960s is to overlook a rich and instructive resource for our own complicated transition into the twenty-first century.

Frank O’Hara and fellow experimental poets like Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg offer us a set of perceptive responses to Cold War culture, lyric meditations on consequential changes in U.S. social life and politics, including the decline of the Old Left, the rise of white-collar workers, and the emergence of vernacular practices like hipsterism and camp. At the same time, they offer us opportunities to anatomize our own desire for historical significance and belonging, a desire we may well see reflected and reconfigured in the work of these poets.