28167 books match the query 'History' and 6372 start with t

cover of Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria, 1930-1970

Theaters of Time and Space

American Planetaria, 1930-1970

Marche, Jordan

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Every year, millions of Americans visit planetariums and are captivated by their strikingly realistic portrayal of the night sky. Today, it is indeed difficult to imagine astronomy education without these magnificent celestial theaters. But projection planetariums, first developed in Germany, have been a part of American museum pedagogy only since the early twentieth century and were not widespread until the 1960s.

In this unique social history,former planetarium director and historian of science Jordan D. Marché II offers the first complete account of the community of individuals and institutions that, during the period between 1930 and 1970, made planetariums the popular teaching aids they are today. Marché addresses issues such as the role of gender and social developments within the planetarium community, institutional patronage, and the popularization of science. He reveals how, at different times, various groups, including financial donors, amateur scientists, and government officials, viewed the planetarium as an instrument through which they could shape public understanding and perceptions of astronomy and space science.

Offering an insightful, wide-ranging look into the origins of an institution that has fascinated millions, Theaters of Timeand Space brings new perspectives to how one educational community changed the cultural complexion of science, helped shape public attitudes toward the U.S. space program, and even contributed to policy decisions regarding allocations for future space research.

 

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cover of Theaters of Translation: Cosmopolitan Vernaculars in Shakespeare's England

Theaters of Translation

Cosmopolitan Vernaculars in Shakespeare's England

Andrew S. Keener

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Explores the profound influence of multilingual dictionaries, dialogues, and grammars on English Renaissance playwrights

In Theaters of Translation, Andrew S. Keener offers a fascinating account of the ways that plays by Thomas Kyd, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, and their fellow English contemporaries were shaped by and part of a multilingual Europe where dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning materials circulated widely. He proposes a fresh, multilingual approach to English Renaissance drama that challenges the histories of early modern European languages as sites of national and linguistic cohesion.

Covering the period between 1570 and 1640, when England’s drama and the English language itself were evolving, Keener uses the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to examine how nonclassical European languages modeled transnational forms of belonging for playgoers, readers, and authors in Renaissance England. Combining recent contributions to cosmopolitan theory and transnational studies of early modern literature and culture, Keener highlights both the ways in which cosmopolitanism manifests through Europe’s vernacular languages—in print and performance—and the ways languages themselves can exhibit cosmopolitanism for those who encounter them on the page or on the stage.

Theaters of Translation opens up new transnational interpretations of English Renaissance plays and casts fresh light on historical anecdotes, such as Jonson inscribing a copy of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous Italian dialogues or Shakespeare’s First Folio being advertised for sale in Germany before its London publication. It offers much of interest to readers and scholars of Renaissance Europe, early modern drama, and the development of national European languages.

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cover of Theaters of the American Revolution: Northern, Middle, Southern, Western, Naval

Theaters of the American Revolution

Northern, Middle, Southern, Western, Naval

James Kirby Martin

Westholme Publishing, 2023

Understanding the Course of the War for American independence through Geographical Regions
Identifying discrete geographical areas in order to better understand a conflict that moves across hundreds of thou­sands of square miles of land and water, such as the American Civil War and World War II, has been a valuable historical method. During this time of greater study of the war that made America, the authors of Theaters of the American Revolution take this approach for the first time. The result is a stimulating volume that will allow readers to see how the war flowed from region to region from 1775 to 1781, beginning in the Northern colonies and Canada, through the dark months in the Middle colonies, to a shift to the South and culmination at Yorktown. Simultaneously, the war raged up and down the western frontier, with the Patriots working to keep the British and their Indian allies from disrupting the main battle armies to the east. Equally important was the war at sea, where American privateers and a fledgling navy attempted to harass the British; but with the entrance of France to the conflict, the control of the sea took a much more balanced—and important— aspect. With specially commissioned maps and colorful descriptions of eighteenth century American terrain, settle­ments, and cities, as well as key battles, Theaters of the American Revolution provides an ideal introduction to understanding one of the most important wars in world history in its totality.

Contents
Introduction • James Kirby Martin and David L. Preston
The Northern Theater • James Kirby Martin
The Middle Theater • Edward G. Lengel and Mark Edward Lender
The Southern Theater • Jim Piecuch
The Western Theater • Mark Edward Lender
The Naval Theater • Charles Neimeyer 
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cover of Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage

Theaters of the Everyday

Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage

Jacob Gallagher-Ross

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage reveals a vital but little-recognized current in American theatrical history: the dramatic representation of the quotidian and mundane. Jacob Gallagher-Ross shows how twentieth-century American theater became a space for negotiating the demands of innovative form and democratic availability.

Offering both fresh reappraisals of canonical figures and movements and new examinations of theatrical innovators, Theaters of the Everyday reveals surprising affinities between artists often considered poles apart, such as John Cage and Lee Strasberg, and Thornton Wilder and the New York experimentalist Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Gallagher-Ross persuasively shows how these creators eschew conventional definitions of dramatic action and focus attention on smaller but no less profound dramas of perception, consciousness, and day-to-day life.

Gallagher-Ross traces some of the intellectual roots of the theater of the everyday to American transcendentalism, with its pragmatic process philosophy as well as its sense of ordinary experience as the wellspring of aesthetic awareness.
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cover of Theatre History Studies 2015, Vol. 34

Theatre History Studies 2015, Vol. 34

Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Volume 34 of Theatre History Studies revisits the foundations of theatre, explores the boundaries and definitions of theatre, and illuminates how writing about the history of theatre is itself a form of historiography.
 
The five essays are arranged chronologically, starting with Alan Sikes’s discussion of the Abydos Passion Play. Sikes challenges the long-held interpretation of that ritualized annual reenactment of the death, dismemberment, and return to life of Egyptian god-king Osiris as the world’s first recorded dramatic production. In analyzing the “Passion Play”—Sikes argues the term is not apt—he applies semiotic theory using "sign and referent" to revise general concepts of mimesis, and in so doing clarifies the fundamental answer to the question, “What is theatre?”
 
In a pair of essays, Andrew Gibb and Nicole Berkin both explore theatre during America’s antebellum period. Gibb examines minstrelsy in antebellum California, exploding narrow definitions of minstrelsy as a primarily Eastern phenomenon and one reflecting a stark interaction of two races. Following the story of Jewish African Caribbean immigrant William Alexander Leidesdorff, Gibb demonstrates that national forms are always affected by their local productions and audiences. Berkin’s essay focuses on the struggles over cultural power that took place between popular entertainers and theatre managers. She examines how both parties used touring strategically to engage with antebellum notions of deception and fraud.
 
The last two essays, by Megan Geigner and Heide Nees, present findings from performance studies which, by examining a wide array of dramatic and performative texts, expands the interdisciplinary foundations of theatre history studies. This fascinating collection is rounded out by an expanded selection of insightful reviews of recent literature in the area.
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cover of Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39

Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39

Edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference 

Reframing the past to illuminate the future of performance.

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to excellence in theatre historiography. Volume 38, edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, features three distinct sections: foundational studies in theatre history, a special section on hemispheric historiographies, and award-winning essays from the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Contributors examine topics ranging from Shakespeare and racial antagonism to systemic dramaturgy, labor unions in regional theatre, and digital diasporic activism. The volume also includes visual histories and decolonial methodologies that challenge Eurocentric narratives and foreground Latinx, feminist, and socialist performance traditions. With 272 pages and 18 black-and-white figures, this edition is a rich resource for scholars seeking to expand the scope and methods of theatre history.


 

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cover of Theatre History Studies 2026, Vol 44

Theatre History Studies 2026, Vol 44

Edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner

University of Alabama Press, 2026

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The purposes of the conference are to unite people and organizations within the region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is cataloged in numerous periodical indexes and databases.

Along with sixteen book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions and nine essays total. In the general section, three essays consider performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches. The special section on queer historiographies responds to calls for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of trans histories and for centralizing contemporary queer performers. In part III, the Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2024 MATC conference by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi addresses erasures in the theatrical archive and highlights the long legacy of queer, Southwest Asian, and North African representation in dramatic texts. Taken together, volume 44 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.

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cover of Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century

Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War

German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century

Carlson, Marvin

University of Iowa Press, 2009

In almost every area of production, German theatre of the past forty years has achieved a level of distinction unique in the international community. This flourishing theatrical culture has encouraged a large number of outstanding actors, directors, and designers as well as video and film artists. The dominant figure throughout these years, however, has remained the director. In this stimulating and informative book, noted theatre historian Marvin Carlson presents an in-depth study of the artistic careers, working methods, and most important productions of ten of the leading directors of this great period of German staging.

Beginning with the leaders of the new generation that emerged in the turbulent late 1960s—Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann, all still major figures today—Carlson continues with the generation that appeared in the 1980s, particularly after reunification—Frank Castorf, Anna Viebrock, Andrea Breth, and Christoph Marthaler—and concludes with the leading directors to emerge after the turn of the century, Stefan Pucher, Thomas Ostermeier, and Michael Thalheimer. He also provides information not readily available elsewhere in English on many of the leading actors and dramatists as well as the designers whose work, much of it for productions of these directors, has made this last half century a golden age of German scenic design.

During the late twentieth century, no country produced so many major theatre directors or placed them so high in national cultural esteem as Germany. Drawing on his years of regular visits to the Theatertreffen in Berlin and other German productions, Carlson will captivate students of theatre and modern German history and culture with his provocative, well-illustrated study of the most productive and innovative theatre tradition in Europe.

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cover of Theatre Symposium, Vol. 22: Broadway and Beyond: Commercial Theatre Considered

Theatre Symposium, Vol. 22

Broadway and Beyond: Commercial Theatre Considered

David S. Thompson

University of Alabama Press, 2014

That theatre is a business remains a truth often ignored by theatre insiders and consumers of the performing arts alike. The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 22 explore theatre as a commercial enterprise both historically and as a continuing part of the creation, production, and presentation of contemporary live performance.
 
The eleven contributors to this fascinating collection illuminate many aspects of commercial theatre and how best to examine it. George Pate analyzes the high-stakes implication of a melodramatic legal battle. Christine Woodworth recounts the difficulties encountered by British actresses near the turn of the twentieth century, while Boone J. Hopkins considers newly found images of Margo Jones along with the commercial appeal they represent.
 
The volume continues with articles that follow developments with ties to commercial theatre, such as the interplay between Broadway companies and regional theatres, musical productions in communist Poland, and the influence of Korean popular culture on theatre and the unique production arrangements that have resulted. Other essays investigate alternative concepts related to commercial themes with regard to audience interaction and the burgeoning world of geek theatre.
 
Edited by David S. Thompson, this latest publication by the largest regional theatre organization in the United States collects the most current scholarship on theatre history and theory.
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cover of Theatre Symposium, Vol. 25: Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Global Stage

Theatre Symposium, Vol. 25

Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Global Stage

Edited by Becky K. Becker

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Addresses the ways that theatre both shapes cross-cultural dialogue and is itself, in turn, shaped by those forces.

Globalization may strike many as a phenomenon of our own historical moment, but it is truly as old as civilization: we need only look to the ancient Silk Road linking the Far East to the Mediterranean in order to find some of the earliest recorded impacts of people and goods crossing borders. Yet, in the current cultural moment, tensions are high due to increased migration, economic unpredictability, complicated acts of local and global terror, and heightened political divisions all over the world.
 
Thus globalization seems new and a threat to our ways of life, to our nations, and to our cultures. In what ways have theatre practitioners, educators, and scholars worked to support cross-cultural dialogue historically? And in what ways might theatre embrace the complexities and contradictions inherent in any meaningful exchange? The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25 reflect on these questions.

Featured in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25
  • “Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning” by Anita Gonzalez
  • “Certain Kinds of Dances Used among Them: An Initial Inquiry into Colonial Spanish Encounters with the Areytos of the Taíno in Puerto Rico” by E. Bert Wallace
  • “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season as Transatlantic Production Impersonations” by Sunny Stalter-Pace
  • “Greasing the Global: Princess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the ‘Orient’ to Pitch Products in the American Medicine Show” by Chase Bringardner
  • “Dismembering Tennessee Williams: The Global Context of Lee Breuer’s A Streetcar Named Desire” by Daniel Ciba
  • “Transformative Cross-Cultural Dialogue in Prague: Americans Creating Czech History Plays” by Karen Berman
  • “Finding Common Ground: Lessac Training across Cultures” by Erica Tobolski and Deborah A. Kinghorn
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cover of Theatre Symposium, Vol. 26: In Other Habits: Theatrical Costume

Theatre Symposium, Vol. 26

In Other Habits: Theatrical Costume

Sarah McCarroll

University of Alabama Press, 2018

A substantive exploration of theatrical costume
 
Stage costumes reveal character. They tell audiences who the character is or how a character functions within the world of the play, among other things. Theatrical costuming, however, along with other forms of theatre design, has often been considered merely a craft, rather than part of the deeply systemic creation of meaning onstage. In what ways do our clothes shape and reveal our habits of behavior? How do stage costumes work to reveal one kind of habit via the manipulation of another? How might theatre practitioners learn to most effectively exploit this dynamic? Theatre Symposium, Volume 26 analyzes the ways in which meaning is conveyed through costuming for the stage and explores the underlying assumptions embedded in theatrical practice and costume production.

THEATRE SYMPOSIUM, VOLUME 26

MICHELE MAJER
Plus que Reine: The Napoleonic Revival in Belle Epoque Theatre and Fashion

CAITLIN QUINN
Creating a Realistic Rendering Pedagogy: The Fashion Illustration Problem

ALY RENEE AMIDEI
Where'd I Put My Character?: The Costume Character Body and Essential Costuming for the Ensemble Actor

KYLA KAZUSCHYK
Embracing the Chaos: Creating Costumes for Devised Work

DAVID S. THOMPSON
Dressing the Image: Costumes in Printed Theatrical Advertising

LEAH LOWE
Costuming the Audience: Gentility, Consumption, and the Lady’s Theatre Hat in Gilded Age America

JORGE SANDOVAL
The RuPaul Effect: The Exploration of the Costuming Rituals of Drag Culture in Social Media and the Theatrical Performativity of the Male Body in the Ambit of the Everyday

GREGORY S. CARR
A Brand New Day on Broadway: The Genius of Geoffrey Holder’s Artistry and His Intentional Evocation of the African Diaspora

ANDREW GIBB
On the [Historical] Sublime: J. R. Planché’s King John and the Romantic Ideal of the Past
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cover of Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories

Theatre Things

Material Theories and Histories

Edited by Andrew Friedman and Eero Laine

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories considers key theatrical objects through a comparative approach, examining the uses and histories of different parts of the theatre throughout time and across culture and geography. The ten “theatre things” at the heart of the book are: entrances, tickets, programs, concessions, seats, lights, curtains, stages, trapdoors, and exits. For every object, three different scholars offer short chapters that examine it from different angles across eras, places, and performance traditions to result in a set of diverse and provocative accounts of the many ways objects have functioned throughout theatre history. Written in an accessible style, the book draws on real examples from theatre history around the world to reveal that even the smallest details—where you sit, how the lights shift, what the program says—carry meaning. Whether you’re a regular theatregoer or a curious fan, Theatre Things offers a fresh way to look at the spaces and objects that shape every night at the theatre—and makes them feel newly interesting long after the curtain call.

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cover of Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas

Theatre and Cartographies of Power

Repositioning the Latina/o Americas

Edited by Jimmy A. Noriega and Analola Santana

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

From the colonial period to independence and into the twenty-first century, Latin American culture has been mapped as a subordinate “other” to Europe and the United States. This collection reconsiders geographical space and power and the ways in which theatrical and performance histories have been constructed throughout the Americas. Essays bridge political, racial, gender, class, and national divides that have traditionally restricted and distorted our understanding of Latin American theatre and performance. Contributors—scholars and artists from throughout the Americas, including well-known playwrights, directors, and performers—imagine how to reposition the Latina/o Americas in ways that offer agency to its multiple peoples, cultures, and histories. In addition, they explore the ways artists can create new maps and methods for their creative visions.
 
Building on hemispheric and transnational models, this book demonstrates the capacity of theatre studies to challenge the up-down/North-South approach that dominates scholarship in the United States and presents a strong case for a repositioning of the Latina/o Americas in theatrical histories and practices.
 
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cover of Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia

Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia

Catherine A. Schuler

University of Iowa Press, 2009

What role did the theatre—both institutionally and literally—play in Russia’s modernization? How did the comparatively harmonious relationship that developed among the state, the nobility, and the theatre in the eighteenth century transform into ideological warfare between the state and the intelligentsia in the nineteenth? How were the identities of the Russian people and the Russian soul configured and altered by actors in St. Petersburg and Moscow? Using the dramatic events of nineteenth-century Russian history as a backdrop, Catherine Schuler answers these questions by revealing the intricate links among national modernization, identity, and theatre.

Schuler draws upon contemporary journals written and published by the educated nobility and the intelligentsia—who represented the intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural groups of the day—as well as upon the laws of the Russian empire and upon theatrical memoirs. With fascinating detail, she spotlights the ideologically charged binaries ascribed to prominent actors—authentic/performed, primitive/civilized, Russian/Western—that mirrored the volatility of national identity from the Napoleonic Wars through the reign of Alexander II.

If the path traveled by Russian artists and audiences from the turn of the nineteenth century to the era of the Great Reforms reveals anything about Russian culture and society, it may be that there is nothing more difficult than being Russian in Russia. By exploring the ways in which theatrical administrators, playwrights, and actors responded to three tsars, two wars, and a major revolt, this carefully crafted book demonstrates the battle for the hearts and minds of the Russian people.
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cover of Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation, 2003-2011: Lamentation, Homeland, Identity

Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation, 2003-2011

Lamentation, Homeland, Identity

James Al-Shamma

University of Iowa Press, 2025

From its inception in the northern city of Mosul in the late nineteenth century, Iraqi theatre leaned toward the utopian. Iraqis saw themselves as inheritors of the ancient culture of Mesopotamia, and dramatists frequently referred to the region’s rich history as they imagined the future.

However, in 2003, the United States invasion of Iraq propelled Iraqi theatre in an altogether different direction. Global media published photographs documenting the torture of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers and sectarian violence broke out, as Shiʿa and Sunni militias struggled for power. Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation examines the occupation’s impact on Iraqi theatre as eliciting lamentation over loss of homeland and identity, and as an assault on the Iraqi character itself. The first volume in English dedicated solely to theatre in Iraq, James Al-Shamma and Amir Al-Azraki’s insights don’t just offer a significant contribution to cultural studies, they bridge foreign policy and art in real time.
 
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cover of Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.
 
The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.
 
 
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cover of Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London

Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London

Mark Bayer

University of Iowa Press, 2011

 Taking to heart Thomas Heywood’s claim that plays “persuade men to humanity and good life, instruct them in civility and good manners, showing them the fruits of honesty, and the end of villainy,” Mark Bayer’s captivating new study argues that the early modern London theatre was an important community institution whose influence extended far beyond its economic, religious, educational, and entertainment contributions. Bayer concentrates not on the theatres where Shakespeare’s plays were performed but on two important amphitheatres, the Fortune and the Red Bull, that offer a more nuanced picture of the Jacobean playgoing industry. By looking at these playhouses, the plays they staged, their audiences, and the communities they served, he explores the local dimensions of playgoing. 

 
Focusing primarily on plays and theatres from 1599 to 1625, Bayer suggests that playhouses became intimately engaged with those living and working in their surrounding neighborhoods. They contributed to local commerce and charitable endeavors, offered a convivial gathering place where current social and political issues were sifted, and helped to define and articulate the shared values of their audiences. Bayer uses the concept of social capital, inherent in the connections formed among individuals in various communities, to construct a sociology of the theatre from below—from the particular communities it served—rather than from the broader perspectives imposed from above by church and state. By transacting social capital, whether progressive or hostile, the large public amphitheatres created new and unique groups that, over the course of millions of visits to the playhouses in the Jacobean era, contributed to a broad range of social practices integral to the daily lives of playgoers.
 
In lively and convincing prose that illuminates the significant reciprocal relationships between different playhouses and their playgoers, Bayer shows that theatres could inform and benefit London society and the communities geographically closest to them.
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cover of Theatre, Time and Temporality: Melting Clocks and Snapped Elastics

Theatre, Time and Temporality

Melting Clocks and Snapped Elastics

David Ian Rabey

Intellect Books, 2016

Theatre, Time and Temporality is the first book-length exploration of the subject of temporality within theater and performance. David Ian Rabey brings in sources ranging from medieval and Renaissance theater to contemporary performances—in addition to recent writings from physics, philosophy, and psychology—to analyze ways that time can be presented, communicated, and transformed in the theater. How do we experience time in theater, and how can that experience be altered or manipulated? Rabey’s analysis and exploration will spark discussion among students and scholars of drama, as well as among practicing performers and dramatic writers.
 
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cover of Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947

Theatres of Independence

Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947

Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker

University of Iowa Press, 2005

Theatres of Independence is the first comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre.

The first part of Dharwadker’s study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multilingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book’s ten appendixes collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres. Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.
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cover of Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

Belinda Bozzoli

Ohio University Press, 2004

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings.

Belinda Bozzoli’s aim is to examine how the residents of Alexandra, a poverty-stricken segregated township in Johannesburg, manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time, and power in their sequestered world. She explains how they used political theater to convey, stage, and dramatize their struggle and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones. It is an important study of collective action that will be of great interest to sociologists and to scholars of Africa, particularly to those interested in the antiapartheid struggle.

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cover of Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia

Theatres of the Body

Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia

Lynn Matluck Brooks

Temple University Press, 2025

Theatres of the Body is Lynn Matluck Brooks’ critical examination of danced stage productions in antebellum Philadelphia. Starting in the 1820s, Brooks explores visual art and social and theatrical dancing across different classes, focusing on the work of E. W. Clay. Continuing through the 1830s, she looks at pantomime ballets and blackface minstrelsy through a political lens, asking questions regarding citizenship, slavery, and freedom. At the time, the city boasted the largest number of native-born ballet dancers in the young nation. Philadelphia also became a creative home to blackface star T. D. Rice, who helped popularize that performance genre.

Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.

Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.
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cover of Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism

Theatrical Consciousness

The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism

Alisa Ballard Lin

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.

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cover of Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan

Theatricality of the Closet

Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan

Michelle Liu Carriger

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities

Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity.

By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

 

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cover of Thedford II: A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario

Thedford II

A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario

D. Brian Deller and Christopher J. Ellis with a foreword by Henry T. Wright

University of Michigan Press, 1992

A detailed and profusely illustrated analysis of material recovered from this Early Paleo-Indian Parkhill site.
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cover of Their Day In The Sun

Their Day In The Sun

Ruth Howes

Temple University Press, 1999

The public perception of the making of the atomic bomb is yet an image of the dramatic efforts of a few brilliant male scientists. However, the Manhattan Project was not just the work of a few and it was not just in Los Alamos. It was, in fact, a sprawling research and industrial enterprise that spanned the country from Hanford in Washington State to Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and the Met labs in Illinois.

The Manhattan Project also included women in every capacity. During World War II the manpower shortages opened the laboratory doors to women and they embraced the opportunity to demonstrate that they, too, could do "creative science." Although women participated in all aspects of the Manhattan Project, their contributions are either omitted or only mentioned briefly in most histories of the project. It is this hidden story that is presented in Their Day in the Sun through interviews, written records, and photographs of the women who were physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and technicians in the labs.

Authors Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg have uncovered accounts of the scientific problems the women helped solve as well as the opportunities and discrimination they faced. Their Day in the Sun describes their abrupt recruitment for the war effort and includes anecdotes about everyday life in these clandestine improvised communities. A chapter about what happened to the women after the war and about their attitudes now, so many years later, toward the work they did on the bomb is included.
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cover of Their Day In The Sun: Women Of The Manhattan Project

Their Day In The Sun

Women Of The Manhattan Project

Ruth H. Howes

Temple University Press, 2003

The public perception of the making of the atomic bomb is yet an image of the dramatic efforts of a few brilliant male scientists. However, the Manhattan Project was not just the work of a few and it was not just in Los Alamos. It was, in fact, a sprawling research and industrial enterprise that spanned the country from Hanford in Washington State to Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and the Met labs in Illinois. The Manhattan Project also included women in every capacity. During World War II the manpower shortages opened the laboratory doors to women and they embraced the opportunity to demonstrate that they, too, could do "creative science." Although women participated in all aspects of the Manhattan Project, their contributions are either omitted or only mentioned briefly in most histories of the project. It is this hidden story that is presented in Their Day in the Sun through interviews, written records, and photographs of the women who were physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and technicians in the labs. Authors Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg have uncovered accounts of the scientific problems the women helped solve as well as the opportunities and discrimination they faced. Their Day in the Sun describes their abrupt recruitment for the war effort and includes anecdotes about everyday life in these clandestine improvised communities. A chapter about what happened to the women after the war and about their attitudes now, so many years later, toward the work they did on the bomb is included.
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cover of Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina

Their Determination to Remain

A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina

Lance Greene

University of Alabama Press, 2023

The remarkable story of a North Carolina Cherokee community who avoided forced removal on the Trail of Tears

During the 1838 forced Cherokee removal by the US government, a number of close-knit Cherokee communities in the Southern Appalachian Mountains refused to relinquish their homelands, towns, and way of life. Using a variety of tactics, hundreds of Cherokees avoided the encroaching US Army and remained in the region.

In his book Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, Lance Greene explores the lives of wealthy plantation owners Betty and John Welch who lived on the southwestern edge of the Cherokee Nation. John was Cherokee and Betty was White. Although few Cherokees in the region participated in slavery, the Welches held nine African Americans in bondage.

During removal, the Welches assisted roughly 100 Cherokees hiding in the steep mountains. Afterward, they provided land for these Cherokees to rebuild a new community, Welch’s Town. Betty became a wealthy and powerful plantation mistress because her husband could no longer own land. Members of Welch’s Town experienced a transitional period in which they had no formal tribal government or clear citizenship yet felt secure enough to reestablish a townhouse, stickball fields, and dance grounds.

Greene’s innovative study uses an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical narrative and archaeological data, to examine how and why the Welches and members of Welch’s Town avoided expulsion and reestablished their ways of life in the midst of a growing White population who resented a continued Cherokee presence. The Welch strategy included Betty’s leadership in demonstrating outwardly their participation in modern Western lifestyles, including enslavement, as John maintained a hidden space—within the boundaries of their land—for the continuation of traditional Cherokee cultural practices. Their Determination to Remain explores the complexities of race and gender in this region of the antebellum South and the real impacts of racism on the community.
 

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cover of Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930

Their Sisters' Keepers

Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930

Estelle B. Freedman

University of Michigan Press, 1984

This study of prison reform adds a new chapter to the history of women's struggle for justice in America
[more]
cover of Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

Them Goon Rules

Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

Marquis Bey

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Marquis Bey’s debut collection, Them Goon Rules, is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know.

A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms.

Fashioning fugitive Blackness and feminism around a line from Lil’ Wayne’s “A Millie,” Them Goon Rules is a work of “auto-theory” that insists on radical modes of thought and being as a refrain and a hook that is unapologetic, rigorously thoughtful, and uncompromising.
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cover of Theme Park

Theme Park

Scott A. Lukas

Reaktion Books, 2008

Theme parks are a uniquely interactive and enduring form of entertainment that have influenced architecture, technology, and culture in surprising ways for more than a century, as Scott Lukas now reveals in his compelling historical chronicle.

Theme Park takes the primitive amusements of pleasure gardens as its starting point and launches from there into a rich, in-depth investigation of the evolution of the theme park over the twentieth century. Lukas examines theme parks in countries around the world—including in the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, China, South Africa, and Australia—and how themed fairs and parks developed through diverse means and in a variety of settings. The book examines world-famous and lesser-known parks, including the early parks of Coney Island; Madrid’s Movieworld; a series of World Fairs and their luxurious exhibition halls; Six Flags parks and virtual theme parks today; and, of course, the unparalleled achievements of Disneyland and Disney World.

Lukas analyzes the theme park as a living entity that unexpectedly shapes people, their relationships, and the world around them. Theme parks have now become complex representations of the human mind itself, he contends, through its interpretations of books, feature films, video games, and Web sites. Ultimately, Theme Park reveals, the wider influence of theme parks can be found in the shopping malls, branded stores, and casinos that employ the tricks and techniques of amusement parks to dominate our entertainment world today.
Packed with captivating illustrations, Theme Park takes us on historical roller coaster ride that both reanimates the places that shaped our childhoods and anticipates the future of escapism and fantasy fun.
 
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cover of Themes in West Africa’s History

Themes in West Africa’s History

Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

Ohio University Press, 2006

There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa’s history. In Themes in West Africa’s History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa’s prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines.

The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The first part of the book examines paths to a West African past, including perspectives from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two probes environment, society, and agency and historical change through essays on the slave trade, social inequality, religious interaction, poverty, disease, and urbanization. Part three sheds light on contemporary West Africa in exploring how economic and political developments have shaped religious expression and identity in significant ways.

Themes in West Africa’s History represents a range of intellectual views and interpretations from leading scholars on West Africa’s history. It will appeal to college undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the way it draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa’s history, from prehistory to the present.

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cover of Themistius and the Imperial Court: Oratory, Civic Duty, and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius

Themistius and the Imperial Court

Oratory, Civic Duty, and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius

John Vanderspoel

University of Michigan Press, 1995

For generations the debate has continued: can politicians, or mid-level administrators, speak freely and say what they think, or must they describe their superiors in purely flattering ways and abandon any philosophy of independent thought? The politician and philosopher Themistius faced these same issues in the later fourth century, in composing and delivering his panegyrics for several Roman emperors.
John Vanderspoel examines the relationship between Themistius and the emperors whom he served, and assesses realistically how philosopher and emperor interacted. Themistius' speeches cover a range of periods and topics, and offer an important body of evidence for governmental affairs in the later fourth century.
Themistius and the Imperial Court includes chapters on Themistius himself, as well as on his relations with the emperors Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valens, and Theodosius. Appendices discuss Themistius' philosophical works and extant speeches, present translations of selected sections of his Orations, and offer a chronology of Themistius' speeches, among other topics.
Themistius and the Imperial Court will be of interest to ancient historians, classicists, students and scholars of the ancient Near East, and all those interested in power politics within governing classes.
John Vanderspoel is Associate Professor of Ancient History, University of Calgary. He has written numerous articles and reviews on late antiquity.
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cover of Theodore Roosevelt in the Field

Theodore Roosevelt in the Field

Michael R. Canfield

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Never has there been a president less content to sit still behind a desk than Theodore Roosevelt. When we picture him, he's on horseback or standing at a cliff’s edge or dressed for safari. And Roosevelt was more than just an adventurer—he was also a naturalist and campaigner for conservation. His love of the outdoor world began at an early age and was driven by a need not to simply observe nature but to be actively involved in the outdoors—to be in the field. As Michael R. Canfield reveals in Theodore Roosevelt in the Field, throughout his life Roosevelt consistently took to the field as a naturalist, hunter, writer, soldier, and conservationist, and it is in the field where his passion for science and nature, his belief in the manly, “strenuous life,” and his drive for empire all came together.
 
Drawing extensively on Roosevelt’s field notebooks, diaries, and letters, Canfield takes readers into the field on adventures alongside him.  From Roosevelt’s early childhood observations of ants to his notes on ornithology as a teenager, Canfield shows how Roosevelt’s quest for knowledge coincided with his interest in the outdoors. We later travel to the Badlands, after the deaths of Roosevelt’s wife and mother, to understand his embrace of the rugged freedom of the ranch lifestyle and the Western wilderness. Finally, Canfield takes us to Africa and South America as we consider Roosevelt’s travels and writings after his presidency. Throughout, we see how the seemingly contradictory aspects of Roosevelt’s biography as a hunter and a naturalist are actually complementary traits of a man eager to directly understand and experience the environment around him.   
 
As our connection to the natural world seems to be more tenuous, Theodore Roosevelt in the Field offers the chance to reinvigorate our enjoyment of nature alongside one of history’s most bold and restlessly curious figures.
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cover of Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life

Theodore Roosevelt

A Literary Life

Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin

University Press of New England, 2018

Of all the many biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, none has presented the twenty-sixth president as he saw himself: as a man of letters. This fascinating account traces Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with books and discusses his writings from childhood journals to his final editorial, finished just hours before his death. His most famous book, The Rough Riders—part memoir, part war adventure—barely begins to suggest the dynamism of his literary output. Roosevelt read widely and deeply, and worked tirelessly on his writing. Along with speeches, essays, reviews, and letters, he wrote history, autobiography, and tales of exploration and discovery. In this thoroughly original biography, Roosevelt is revealed at his most vulnerable—and his most human.
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cover of Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man

Theodoret of Cyrrhus

The Bishop and the Holy Man

Theresa Urbainczyk

University of Michigan Press, 2002

The writing of a saint's life can be as political as it is pious. In this, her second book, Theresa Urbainczyk demonstrates how one collection of saints' lives--the Religious History of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus--both prescribes and describes the relationship between ascetics and the early Church.
With the conversion of Constantine and his subsequent championing of the Christian cause, the Church rapidly began to increase its wealth and status. As coins filled the coffers of God, some Christians came to feel that their religion had become corrupted. They fled to the desert wastes, seeking a purer, holier life. These recluses and ascetics are the subjects of Theodoret's Religious History. The Syrian bishop had known many of them, some for all his life.
Urbainczyk argues that Theodoret's work was not merely written as an act of piety, but was in fact a very political treatise, addressing the theological disputes of his day. The main tensions of the early fifth century lay between the sees of Syrian Antioch and Egyptian Alexandria. One of Theodoret's aims was to show that Syria had produced individuals as pious as those of Egypt, about whom much had already been written. Urbainczyk studies the social background of these Syrian ascetics, describes the relationship between Theodoret's heroes and the Church community, and investigates how Theodoret presents his own personal relationship with the holy men.
This book is the first to examine Theodoret's role in his own work. Urbainczyk argues that the intimate details of Theodoret's life were not let slip accidentally but were inserted deliberately to buttress his own threatened position and to show how these independent men of God deferred to no one but himself.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus is an invaluable study for students of late antiquity, scholars of early Church history, early medieval historiographers and hagiographers.
Theresa Urbainczyk is College Lecturer in Classics, University College, Dublin.
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cover of Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson

Resisting Secularism

Melvyn New

University of Delaware Press, 2012

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age “resisted secularism” is by no means to argue that resistance was blindly doctrinal or rigidly uniform. The many ways secularism could be resisted is the subject of the collection.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
[more]
cover of Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom

Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom

Etienne Gilson

St. Augustine's Press, 2015

[more]
cover of Theology of the Hebrew Bible, Volume 1: Methodological Studies

Theology of the Hebrew Bible, Volume 1

Methodological Studies

Marvin A. Sweeney

SBL Press, 2019

Diverse approaches to biblical theology

This volume presents a collection of studies on the methodology for conceiving the theological interpretation of the Hebrew Bible among Jews and Christians as well as the treatment of key issues such as creation, the land of Israel, and divine absence. Contributors include Georg Fischer, SJ, David Frankel, Benjamin J. M. Johnson, Soo J. Kim, Wonil Kim, Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Julia M. O’Brien, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Marvin A. Sweeney, and Andrea L. Weiss.

Features:

  • Examination of metaphor, repentance, and shame in the presence of God
  • Ten essays addressing the nature of biblical theology from a Jewish, Christian, or critical perspective
  • Discussion of the changes that have taken place in the field of biblical theology since World War II
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cover of Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece: Manipulating Material Culture

Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece

Manipulating Material Culture

Lisa C. Nevett, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2017

In the modern world, objects and buildings speak eloquently about their creators. Status, gender identity, and cultural affiliations are just a few characteristics we can often infer about such material culture. But can we make similar deductions about the inhabitants of the first millennium BCE Greek world? Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece offers a series of case studies exploring how a theoretical approach to the archaeology of this area provides insight into aspects of ancient society.

An introductory section exploring the emergence and growth of theoretical approaches is followed by examinations of the potential insights these approaches provide. The authors probe some of the meanings attached to ancient objects, townscapes, and cemeteries, for those who created, and used, or inhabited them.

The range of contexts stretches from the early Greek communities during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, through Athens between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, and on into present day Turkey and the Levant during the third and second centuries BCE. The authors examine a range of practices, from the creation of individual items such as ceramic vessels and figurines, through to the construction of civic buildings, monuments, and cemeteries. At the same time they interrogate a range of spheres, from craft production, through civic and religious practices, to funerary ritual.

 

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cover of Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History

Theories and Narratives

Reflections on the Philosophy of History

Alex Callinicos

Duke University Press, 1995

At a time when philosophy of history is decidedly out of fashion, Theories and Narratives explores the relationship between historical writing and theoretical understanding and seeks to establish the legitimate scope of large-scale theories to grasp historical processes as a whole.
Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama’s rehabilitation of Hegel’s philosophy of history and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White and others to deny the existence of a past independent of our representations of it. In these cases philosophical arguments are pursued in tandem with discussions of historical interpretations or, respectively, Stalinism and the Holocaust. Leading theories of history—Marx’s and Weber’s—are then examined in the context of recent work by writers such as Michael Mann, W. G. Runciman, and Robert Brenner
Finally, the politics of historical theory is explored in a discussion of Marxism’s claims to be a universal theory of human progress. Contradicting current fashion, Callinicos rebuts the claims made by many postmodernists that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric in both its conceptual structures and its political practice. Marx’s project of human emancipation, he concludes, still define our political horizons.
Theories and Narratives will interest all readers for whom the role of history in the understanding of contemporary civilizations is an essential issue.
[more]
cover of Theories of Imperialism

Theories of Imperialism

Wolfgang J. Mommsen

University of Chicago Press, 1982

"In recent years the discussion of imperialism has become so compartmentalized that it is difficult for somebody who is not directly involved to put the often polemical discussion and the various scientific and political positions forward into a relevant context. Mommsen's survey is an excellent guide."—German Studies, on the German edition.

"Theories of Imperialism is the most succinct, fairest, and most sophisticated statement I have seen of the range of theories of imperialism. Each set of theorists is come at in their own terms, described fairly, and summarized fully. The book is objective, readable, and short."—Robin W. Winks, Yale University
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cover of Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

Theories of Translation

An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

Edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Spanning the centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth, and ranging across cultures, from England to Mexico, this collection gathers together important statements on the function and feasibility of literary translation. The essays provide an overview of the historical evolution in thinking about translation and offer strong individual opinions by prominent contemporary theorists.

Most of the twenty-one pieces appear in translation, some here in English for the first time and many difficult to find elsewhere. Selections include writings by Scheiermacher, Nietzsche, Ortega, Benjamin, Pound, Jakobson, Paz, Riffaterre, Derrida, and others.

A fine companion to The Craft of Translation, this volume will be a valuable resource for all those who translate, those who teach translation theory and practice, and those interested in questions of language philosophy and literary theory.
[more]
cover of Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler

Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler

David C. Lindberg

University of Chicago Press, 1981

Kepler's successful solution to the problem of vision early in the seventeenth century was a theoretical triumph as significant as many of the more celebrated developments of the scientific revolution. Yet the full import of Kepler's arguments can be grasped only when they are viewed against the background of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance visual theory. David C. Lindberg provides this background, and in doing so he fills the gap in historical scholarship and constructs a model for tracing the development of scientific ideas.

David C. Lindberg is professor and chairman of the department of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
[more]
cover of Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric

Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric

Edited by Michelle Ballif

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

 During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, historians of rhetoric, composition, and communication vociferously theorized historiographical motivations and methodologies for writing histories in their fields. After this fertile period of rich, contested, and impassioned theorization, scholars busily undertook the composition of numerous historical works, complicating master narratives and recovering silenced voices and rhetorical practices. Yet, though historians in these fields have gone about the business of writing histories, the discussion of theorization has been quiet. In this welcome volume, fifteen scholars consider, once again, the theory of historiography, asking difficult questions about the purposes and methodologies of writing histories of rhetoric, broadly defined, and questioning what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, and communication.

The topics addressed include the privileging of the literary and the textual over material artifacts as prime sources of evidence in the study of classical rhetoric, the use of rhetorical hermeneutics as a methodology for interpreting past practices, the investigation of feminist methodologies that do not fit into the dominant modes of feminist historiographical work and the examination of archives with a queer eye to better construct nondiscriminatory narratives. Contributors also explore the value of approaching historiography through the lenses of jazz improvisation and complexity theory, and the historiographical method of writing the future in ways that refigure our relationships to time and to ourselves.           

Consistently thoughtful and carefully argued, these essays successfully revive the discussion of historiography in rhetoric, inspiring fresh avenues of exploration in the field.                                                 

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cover of Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship

Theorizing Myth

Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship

Bruce Lincoln

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others.

He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded.

In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
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cover of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism

Theorizing NGOs

States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism

Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma
 
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cover of Theory And The Premodern Text

Theory And The Premodern Text

Paul Strohm

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A major reconsideration of relations between new theories and old texts.

Medieval Studies/Literary Theory

A major reconsideration of relations between new theories and old texts. The work of Paul Strohm allies the most distinguished traditions of medieval study with the most challenging and innovative of theoretical approaches. These features, working together to revise and expand our understanding of both medieval texts and contemporary critical practice, are apparent in full and compelling force in this collection of essays, most now in print for the first time. In a range of theoretical engagements with late medieval texts, dealing with social practice, time, and narrative, this volume proposes a "practical" relation between the text and the theory that illuminates it.Insisting on the imaginative multiplicity of the text, Strohm finds in theory an augmentation of interpretive possibilities-an augmentation that sometimes requires respectful disagreement with what a work says-or seems to want known-about itself. He thus defines theory as "any standpoint from which we might challenge a text’s self-understanding." Coupled with this strategic disrespect is a new and amplified form of respect-for the text as a meaning-making system, for its unruly power and its unpredictable effects in the world.In this spirit, Strohm offers new and illustrative readings of Hoccleve’s "Male Regle" and Regiment of Princes, Ricardian coronation documents, Chaucer’s "Cook’s Tale," Capgrave’s chronicle, the Gesta Henrici Quinti, records of the king’s bench, Malory’s "Knight of the Cart," and other later medieval texts. Throughout, Strohm traverses categories of "literary" and "non-literary" in the service of a more comprehensive understanding of texts and the resourcefulness with which they accomplish their social work.Medieval Cultures Series, volume 26Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
[more]
cover of Theory and History of Folklore

Theory and History of Folklore

Vladimir Propp

University of Minnesota Press, 1984

[more]
cover of Theory and History of Narrative, Volume 24

Theory and History of Narrative, Volume 24

Meir Sternberg

Duke University Press, 0

[more]
cover of Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance

The German-French Connection

Tilden Russell

University of Delaware Press, 2017

This book is about the intersection of two evolving dance-historical realms—theory and practice—during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. France was the source of works on notation, choreography, and repertoire that dominated European dance practice until the 1780s. While these French inventions were welcomed and used in Germany, German dance writers responded by producing an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines consequences in Germany of this asymmetrical confrontation of dance perspectives.

Between 1703 and 1717 in Germany, a coherent theory of dance was postulated that called itself dance theory, comprehended why it was a theory, and clearly, rationally distinguished itself from practice. This flowering of dance-theoretical writing was contemporaneous with the appearance of Beauchamps-Feuillet notation in the Chorégraphie of Raoul Auger Feuillet (Paris, 1700, 1701). Beauchamps-Feuillet notation was the ideal written representation of the dance style known as la belle danse and practiced in both the ballroom and the theater. Its publication enabled the spread of belle danse to the French provinces and internationally. This spread encouraged the publication of new practical works (manuals, choreographies, recueils) on how to make steps and how to dance current dances, as well as of new dance treatises, in different languages.

The Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, by Gottfried Taubert (Leipzig, 1717), includes a translated edition of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie. Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance addresses how Taubert and his contemporary German authors of dance treatises (Samuel Rudolph Behr, Johann Pasch, Louis Bonin) became familiar with Beauchamps-Feuillet notation and acknowledged the Chorégraphie in their own work, and how Taubert’s translation of the Chorégraphie spread its influence northward and eastward in Europe. This book also examines the personal and literary interrelationships between the German writers on dance between 1703 and 1717 and their invention of a theoria of dance as a counterbalance to dance praxis, comparing their dance-theoretical ideas with those of John Weaver in England, and assimilating them all in a cohesive and inclusive description of dance theory in Europe by 1721.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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