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

cover of The Curious Map Book

The Curious Map Book

Ashley Baynton-Williams

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Since that ancient day when the first human drew a line connecting Point A to Point B, maps have been understood as one of the most essential tools of communication. Despite differences in language, appearance, or culture, maps are universal touchstones in human civilization.
 
Over the centuries, maps have served many varied purposes; far from mere guides for reaching a destination, they are unique artistic forms, aides in planning commercial routes, literary devices for illuminating a story. Accuracy—or inaccuracy—of maps has been the make-or-break factor in countless military battles throughout history. They have graced the walls of homes, bringing prestige and elegance to their owners. They track the mountains, oceans, and stars of our existence. Maps help us make sense of our worlds both real and imaginary—they bring order to the seeming chaos of our surroundings.
 
With The Curious Map Book, Ashley Baynton-Williams gathers an amazing, chronologically ordered variety of cartographic gems, mainly from the vast collection of the British Library. He has unearthed a wide array of the whimsical and fantastic, from maps of board games to political ones, maps of the Holy Land to maps of the human soul. In his illuminating introduction, Baynton-Williams also identifies and expounds upon key themes of map production, peculiar styles, and the commerce and collection of unique maps. This incredible volume offers a wealth of gorgeous illustrations for anyone who is cartographically curious. 
[more]
cover of The Curious World of Dickens

The Curious World of Dickens

Clive Hurst and Violet Moller

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

Charles Dickens is among the greatest English novelists, and the power of his prose can be found in his portrayals of the harsh social realities of his time, from the depiction of poverty-stricken orphan Oliver Twist to the squalor of the slums and skewering of the justice system in Bleak House.

Published to celebrate the twohundredth anniversary of Dickens’s birth, this book brings together quotations from Dickens’s novels and letters with photographs of their original covers and Victorian-era images—among them, prints, posters, and newspaper pieces—that shed light on the topics about which Dickens writes. Ordered by theme, the book covers such topics as schools in Victorian England, domestic entertainment, the introduction of the railroad, and the poor conditions in prisons and workhouses, which loom large in Dickens’s novels—and, indeed, his own childhood. Dickens was also an avid theater enthusiast who arranged productions and public readings of many of his works, and this book explores his role throughout his later years in adroitly adapting his novels for the stage.

The Curious World of Dickens
breathes new life on this momentous occasion into the vibrant world inhabited by Dickens and his characters.
[more]
cover of The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era

The Currency of Truth

Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era

Emily H. C. Chua

University of Michigan Press, 2023

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.

In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West.  The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.
[more]
cover of The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914

The Cut of His Coat

Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914

Brent Shannon

Ohio University Press, 2006

The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change. In The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914, Brent Shannon examines familiar novels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, period advertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began to change.

While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond.

The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men’s interest in fashion and shopping to recover men’s significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.

[more]
cover of The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion

The Cybernetic Border

Drones, Technology, and Intrusion

Iván Chaar López

Duke University Press, 2024

In The Cybernetic Border, Iván Chaar López argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicizes the US government’s use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar López draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.
[more]
cover of The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future

The Cybernetic Brain

Sketches of Another Future

Andrew Pickering

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
[more]
cover of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

The Cycling City

Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

Evan Friss

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world.  Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.
[more]
cover of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

The Cycling City

Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

Evan Friss

University of Chicago Press, 2015

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

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world.  Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.
[more]
cover of The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life

The Cynical Society

The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The Cynical Society is a study of the political despair and abdication of (individual) responsibility Goldfarb calls cynicism—a central but unexamined aspect of contemporary American political and social life. Goldfarb reveals with vivid strokes how cynicism undermines our capacity to think about society's strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Allan Bloom and on such recent works as Beloved, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Mississippi Burning, The Cynical Society celebrates cultural pluralism's role in democracy.
[more]
cover of The Cypress and Other Writings of a German Pioneer in Texas

The Cypress and Other Writings of a German Pioneer in Texas

By Hermann Seele

University of Texas Press, 1979

When Hermann Seele anived in New Braunfels in 1845, the raw colony was plagued by poverty, disease, lack of food, and hostile Indians. This personal record of the Germans in Texas shows their evolution from struggling colonists to prosperous citizens.

From his viewpoint of a hardworking yet imaginative pioneer, Seele presents first a history of German immigration and settlement in Texas during the nineteenth century. Next, his autobiographical writings range from a "sentimental recollection" of his first Christmas Eve in Texas to his first day of teaching in New Braunfels, from accounts of the popular singing society to murder and justice along the Comal River. In addition, Seele's romantic novel, The Cypress, is a delightful though improbable tale of a traveling botanist, a chieftain's daughter, and a savage Indian cult.

Hermann Seele—farmer, lawyer, teacher, lay preacher, mayor, state representative, Civil War major, and editor—epitomizes the best of the German immigrants who established their communities as models of respectability and prosperity.

[more]
cover of The Czech Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Czech Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Jan Bazant, Nina Bazantová, and Frances Starn, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

The Czech Reader brings together more than 150 primary texts and illustrations to convey the dramatic history of the Czechs, from the emergence of the Czech state in the tenth century, through the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and the Czech Republic in 1993, into the twenty-first century. The Czechs have preserved their language, traditions, and customs, despite their incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Third Reich, and the Eastern Bloc. Organized chronologically, the selections in The Czech Reader include the letter to the Czech people written by the religious reformer and national hero Jan Hus in 1415, and Charter 77, the fundamental document of an influential anticommunist initiative launched in 1977 in reaction to the arrest of the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock band. There is a speech given in 1941 by Reinhard Heydrich, a senior Nazi official and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as one written by Václav Havel in 1984 for an occasion abroad, but read by the Czech-born British dramatist Tom Stoppard, since Havel, the dissident playwright and future national leader, was not allowed to leave Czechoslovakia. Among the songs, poems, folklore, fiction, plays, paintings, and photographs of monuments and architectural landmarks are “Let Us Rejoice,” the most famous chorus from Bedřich Smetana’s comic opera The Bartered Bride; a letter the composer Antonín Dvořák sent from New York, where he directed the National Conservatory of Music in the 1890s; a story by Franz Kafka; and an excerpt from Milan Kundera’s The Joke. Intended for travelers, students, and scholars alike, The Czech Reader is a rich introduction to the turbulent history and resilient culture of the Czech people.
[more]
cover of The Czech and Slovak Republics: Twenty years of Independence, 1993–2013

The Czech and Slovak Republics

Twenty years of Independence, 1993–2013

M. Mark Stolarik

Central European University Press, 2017

The essays in the book compare the Czech Republic and Slovakia since the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The papers deal with the causes of the divorce and discuss the political, economic and social developments in the new countries. This is the only English-language volume that presents the synoptic findings of leading Czech, Slovak, and North American scholars in the field.The authors include two former Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eight leading scholars (four Czechs and four Slovaks), and eight knowledgeable commentators from North America. The most significant new insight is that in spite of predictions by various pundits in the Western World that Czechia would flourish after the breakup and Slovakia would languish, the opposite has happened. While the Czech Republic did well in its early years, it is now languishing while Slovakia, which had a rough start, is now doing very well. Anyone interested in the history of the Czech and Slovak Republics over the last twenty years will find gratification in reading this book.
[more]
cover of The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon

The DNA Mystique

The Gene as a Cultural Icon

Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee

University of Michigan Press, 2004

The DNA Mystique suggests that the gene in popular culture draws on scientific ideas but is not constrained by the technical definition of the gene as a section of DNA that codes for a protein. In highlighting DNA as it appears in soap operas, comic books, advertising, and other expressions of mass culture, the authors propose that these domains provide critical insights into science itself.

With a new introduction and conclusion, this edition will continue to be an engaging, accessible, and provocative text for the sociology, anthropology, and bioethics classroom, as well as stimulating reading for those generally interested in science and culture.
[more]
cover of The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin

The Dada Cyborg

Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin

Matthew Biro

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Finding the cyborg in early twentieth-century German art

In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.

In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic. Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”
[more]
cover of The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age

The Daily Thomas Paine

A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age

Thomas Paine

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Thomas Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist, and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine famously said, “try men’s souls.” Whatever your politics, if you’re seeking to understand the political world we live in, where better to look than Paine?

​The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year’s worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure. Editor Edward G. Gray argues that we are living in a moment that Thomas Paine might recognize—or perhaps more precisely, a moment desperate for someone whose rhetoric can ignite a large-scale social and political transformation. Paine was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic aperçu, and this book offers a sleek and approachable sampler of some of the sharpest bits from his oeuvre. As Paine himself says in the entry for January 20: “The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflexion.” The Daily Thomas Paine should prove equally incendiary and inspirational for contemporary readers with an eye for politics, even those who prefer the tweet to the pamphlet.
 
[more]
cover of The Daley Show: Inside the Transformative Reign of Chicago's Richard M. Daley

The Daley Show

Inside the Transformative Reign of Chicago's Richard M. Daley

Forrest Claypool; Foreword by David Axelrod

University of Illinois Press, 2024

American cities once had mayors who actually governed.

For twenty-two years, Richard M. Daley ran Chicago with the type of authority that is unthinkable today. He reshaped downtown, triggered a jobs boom, delivered the iconic Millennium Park, turned around troubled public schools, and slashed violent crime to 40-year lows.  He outfoxed Republican legislators to retain control of O’Hare Airport and expand it into the nation’s premier international aviation hub. Leveraging carefully built national political ties, he sidelined a powerful nemesis to tear down Chicago’s infamous public housing projects. 

Rebuilding parts of his father’s legendary political machine through brazen (and illegal) patronage deals, he centralized power to a remarkable degree, cut deals behind closed doors, racked up piles of debt, and made long-term bets whose consequences are still unfolding.

This is not simply a biography. It is a challenge to contemporary urban orthodoxy:

Do cities thrive because of strong, decisive leaders—or despite them?

Through vivid storytelling, this book exposes how Daley consolidated power, aligned business and labor, navigated crises, survived damaging scandals, and imposed discipline on a sprawling city. It dares readers to reconsider what kind of leadership modern American cities truly need.

[more]
cover of The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City

The Dallas Myth

The Making and Unmaking of an American City

Harvey J. Graff

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The ninth largest city in the United States, Dallas is exceptional among American cities for the claims of its elites and boosters that it is a "city with no limits" and a "city with no history." Home to the Dallas Cowboys, self-styled as "America's Team," setting for the television series that glamorized its values of self-invention and success, and site of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dallas looms disproportionately large in the American imagination. Yet it lacks an identity of its own.

In The Dallas Myth, Harvey J. Graff presents a novel interpretation of a city that has proudly declared its freedom from the past. He scrutinizes the city's origin myth and its governance ideology, known as the "Dallas Way," looking at how these elements have shaped Dallas and served to limit democratic participation and exacerbate inequality. Advancing beyond a traditional historical perspective, Graff proposes an original, integrative understanding of the city's urban fabric and offers an explicit critique of the reactionary political foundations of modern Dallas: its tolerance for right-wing political violence, the endemic racism and xenophobia, and a planning model that privileges growth and monumental architecture at the expense of the environment and social justice.

Revealing the power of myths that have defined the city for so long, Graff presents a new interpretation of Dallas that both deepens our understanding of America's urban landscape and enables its residents to envision a more equitable, humane, and democratic future for all.
[more]
cover of The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II

The Dallas Story

The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II

Terrance Furgerson

University of North Texas Press, 2023

[more]
cover of The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia

The Dance That Makes You Vanish

Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia

Rachmi Diyah Larasati

University of Minnesota Press, 2013


Indonesian court dance, a purportedly pure and untouched tradition, is famed throughout the world for its sublime calm and stillness. Yet this unyieldingly peaceful surface conceals a time of political repression and mass killing. Between 1965 and 1966, some one million Indonesians—including a large percentage of the country’s musicians, artists, and dancers—were killed, arrested, or disappeared as Suharto established a virtual dictatorship that ruled for the next thirty years.


In The Dance That Makes You Vanish, an examination of the relationship between female dancers and the Indonesian state since 1965, Rachmi Diyah Larasati elucidates the Suharto regime’s dual-edged strategy: persecuting and killing performers perceived as communist or left leaning while simultaneously producing and deploying “replicas”—new bodies trained to standardize and unify the “unruly” movements and voices of those vanished—as idealized representatives of Indonesia’s cultural elegance and composure in bowing to autocratic rule. Analyzing this history, Larasati shows how the Suharto regime’s obsessive attempts to control and harness Indonesian dance for its own political ends have functioned as both smoke screen and smoke signal, inadvertently drawing attention to the site of state violence and criminality by constantly pointing out the “perfection” of the mask that covers it.


Reflecting on her own experiences as an Indonesian national troupe dancer from a family of persecuted female dancers and activists, Larasati brings to life a powerful, multifaceted investigation of the pervasive use of culture as a vehicle for state repression and the global mass-marketing of national identity.


[more]
cover of The Dance of Freedom: Texas African Americans during Reconstruction

The Dance of Freedom

Texas African Americans during Reconstruction

By Barry Crouch

University of Texas Press, 2007

This anthology brings together the late Barry A. Crouch's most important articles on the African American experience in Texas during Reconstruction. Grouped topically, the essays explore what freedom meant to the newly emancipated, how white Texans reacted to the freed slaves, and how Freedmen's Bureau agents and African American politicians worked to improve the lot of ordinary African American Texans. The volume also contains Crouch's seminal review of Reconstruction historiography, "Unmanacling Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective." The introductory pieces by Arnoldo De Leon and Larry Madaras recapitulate Barry Crouch's scholarly career and pay tribute to his stature in the field of Reconstruction history.

[more]
cover of The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi

The Dance of Politics

Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi

Lisa Gilman

Temple University Press, 2011

Election campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters. However, as Lisa Gilman explains, “praise performing” is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system.

Although political performances by women are not unique to Malawi, the case in Malawi is complicated by the fact that until 1994 all Malawianwomen were required to perform on behalf of the long-reigning political party and its self-declared “President for Life,” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda+. This is the first book to examine the present-day situation, where issues of gender, economics and politics collide in surprising ways. Along with its solid grounding in the relevant literature, The Dance of Politics draws strength from Gilman’s first-hand observations and her interviews with a range of participants in the political process, from dancers to politicians.

[more]
cover of The Dance of the Comedians: The People, the President, and the Performance of Political Standup Comedy in America

The Dance of the Comedians

The People, the President, and the Performance of Political Standup Comedy in America

Peter M. Robinson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

Why did Barack Obama court Jon Stewart and trade jokes with Stephen Colbert during the campaign of 2008? Why did Sarah Palin forgo the opportunity to earn votes on the Sunday morning political talk shows but embrace the chance to get laughs on Saturday Night Live? The Dance of the Comedians examines the history behind these questions—the merry, mocking, and highly contested anarchies of standup political comedy that have locked humorists, presidents, and their fellow Americans in an improvisational three-way “dance” since the early years of the American republic. 

Peter M. Robinson shows how the performance of political humor developed as a celebration of democracy and an expression of political power, protest, and commercial profit. He places special significance on the middle half of the twentieth century, when presidents and comedians alike—from Calvin Coolidge to Ronald Reagan, from Will Rogers to Saturday Night Live's “Not Ready for Prime Time Players”—developed modern understandings of the power of laughter to affect popular opinion and political agendas, only to find the American audience increasingly willing and able to get in on the act. These years put the long-standing traditions of presidential deference profoundly in play as all three parties to American political humor—the people, the presidents, and the comedy professionals—negotiated their way between reverence for the office of the presidency and ridicule of its occupants. 

Although the focus is on humor, The Dance of the Comedians illuminates the process by which Americans have come to recognize that the performance of political comedy has serious and profound consequences for those on all sides of the punch line.

[more]
cover of The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language

The Dancing Bees

Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language

Tania Munz

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. For centuries, beekeepers had observed these curious movements in hives, and others had speculated about the possibility of a bee language used to manage the work of the hive. But it took von Frisch to determine that the bees’ dances communicated precise information about the distance and direction of food sources. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich.

The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication.

This first in-depth biography of von Frisch paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a scientist at work under Nazi rule. The Dancing Bees will be welcomed by anyone seeking to better understand not only this chapter of the history of science but also the peculiar waggles of our garden visitors.
 
[more]
cover of The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions

The Danger of Romance

Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions

Karen Sullivan

University of Chicago Press, 2018

The curious paradox of romance is that, throughout its history, this genre has been dismissed as trivial and unintellectual, yet people have never ceased to flock to it with enthusiasm and even fervor. In contemporary contexts, we devour popular romance and fantasy novels like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, reference them in conversations, and create online communities to expound, passionately and intelligently, upon their characters and worlds. But romance is “unrealistic,” critics say, doing readers a disservice by not accurately representing human experiences. It is considered by some to be a distraction from real literature, a distraction from real life, and little more.

Yet is it possible that romance is expressing a truth—and a truth unrecognized by realist genres? The Arthurian literature of the Middle Ages, Karen Sullivan argues, consistently ventriloquizes in its pages the criticisms that were being made of romance at the time, and implicitly defends itself against those criticisms. The Danger of Romance shows that the conviction that ordinary reality is the only reality is itself an assumption, and one that can blind those who hold it to the extraordinary phenomena that exist around them. It demonstrates that that which is rare, ephemeral, and inexplicable is no less real than that which is commonplace, long-lasting, and easily accounted for. If romance continues to appeal to audiences today, whether in its Arthurian prototype or in its more recent incarnations, it is because it confirms the perception—or even the hope—of a beauty and truth in the world that realist genres deny.
[more]
cover of The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825

The Daring Trader

Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825

Kim Crawford

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A fur trader in the Michigan Territory and confidant of both the U.S. government and local Indian tribes, Jacob Smith could have stepped out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel. Controversial, mysterious, and bold during his lifetime, in death Smith has not, until now, received the attention he deserves as a pivotal figure in Michigan’s American period and the War of 1812. This is the exciting and unlikely story of a man at the frontier’s edge, whose missions during both war and peace laid the groundwork for Michigan to accommodate settlers and farmers moving west. The book investigates Smith’s many pursuits, including his role as an advisor to the Indians, from whom the federal government would gradually gain millions of acres of land, due in large part to Smith’s work as an agent of influence. Crawford paints a colorful portrait of a complicated man during a dynamic period of change in Michigan’s history.

[more]
cover of The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico

The Dark Abyss of Time

The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico

Paolo Rossi

University of Chicago Press, 1984

"A rich historical pastiche of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, science, and religion."—G. Y. Craig, New Scientist

"This book, by a distinguished Italian historian of philosophy, is a worthy successor to the author's important works on Francis Bacon and on technology and the arts. First published in Italian (in 1979), it now makes available to English readers some subtly wrought arguments about the ways in which geology and anthropology challenged biblical chronology and forced changes in the philosophy of history in the early modern era. . . . [Rossi] shows that the search for new answers about human origins spanned many disciplines and involved many fascinating intellects—Bacon, Bayle, Buffon, Burnet, Descartes, Hobbes, Holbach, Hooke, Hume, Hutton, Leibniz, de Maillet, Newton, Pufendorf, Spinoza, Toland, and, most especially, Vico, whose works are impressively and freshly reevaluated here."—Nina Gelbart, American Scientist

[more]
cover of The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow, as Revealed by Her Own Letters

The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow, as Revealed by Her Own Letters

Myra Helmer Pritchard, edited and annotated by Jason Emerson

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011


Written in 1927 but barred from timely publication by the Lincoln family, The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow, as Revealed by Her Own Letters is based on nearly two dozen intimate letters written between Mary Lincoln and her close friend Myra Bradwell mainly during the former's 1875 incarceration in an insane asylum. By the 1920s most accounts of Mrs. Lincoln focused on her negative qualities and dismissed her as "crazy." Bradwell's granddaughter Myra Helmer Pritchard wrote this distinctly sympathetic manuscript at the behest of her mother, who wished to vindicate Mary Lincoln in the public eye by printing the private correspondence. Pritchard fervently defends Mrs. Lincoln's conduct and sanity, arguing that she was not insane but rather the victim of an overzealous son who had his mother committed.

The manuscript and letters were thought to have been destroyed, but fortunately the Lincolns' family lawyer stored copies in a trunk, where historian Jason Emerson discovered them in 2005. While leaving the manuscript intact, Emerson has enhanced it with an introduction and detailed annotations. He fills in factual gaps; provides background on names, places, and dates; and analyzes Pritchard's interpretations, making clear where she was right and where her passion to protect Mrs. Lincoln led to less than meticulous research and incorrect conclusions. This volume features an easy-to-follow format that showcases Pritchard's text on the left-hand pages and Emerson's insightful annotations on the right-hand pages. 

Following one of the most revered and reviled, famous and infamous of the First Ladies, this book provides a unique perspective of Mrs. Lincoln's post-White House years, with an emphasis on her commitment to a sanitarium. Emerson's contributions make this volume a valuable addition to the study of the Lincoln family. This fascinating work gives today's Lincoln enthusiasts the chance to read this intriguing interpretation of the former First Lady that predates nearly every other book written about her.
[more]
cover of The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

The Dark Tree

Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

Steven L. Isoardi

Duke University Press, 2023

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.
[more]
cover of The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England

The Darkened Room

Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England

Alex Owen

University of Chicago Press, 2004

A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations.

The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society.

Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.
[more]
cover of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options

The Darker Side of Western Modernity

Global Futures, Decolonial Options

Walter D. Mignolo

Duke University Press, 2011

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of the world. Walter D. Mignolo argues that coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power that has been created and controlled by Western men and institutions from the Renaissance, when it was driven by Christian theology, through the late twentieth century and the dictates of neoliberalism. This cycle of coloniality is coming to an end. Two main forces are challenging Western leadership in the early twenty-first century. One of these, “dewesternization,” is an irreversible shift to the East in struggles over knowledge, economics, and politics. The second force is “decoloniality.” Mignolo explains that decoloniality requires delinking from the colonial matrix of power underlying Western modernity to imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited in the relentless quest for wealth accumulation.
[more]
cover of The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd Edition

The Darker Side of the Renaissance

Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd Edition

Walter D. Mignolo

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship.
Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.
[more]
cover of The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

The Darker Side of the Renaissance

Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

Walter D. Mignolo

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.
The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, geography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World.
Walter D. Mignolo locates the privileging of European forms of literacy at the heart of New World colonization. He examines how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, what role "the book" has played in colonial relations, and the many connections between writing, social organization, and political control. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that were validated by the Europeans. Yet no study until this one has so thoroughly analyzed either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through sign systems.
Starting with the contrasts between Amerindian and European writing systems, Mignolo moves through such topics as the development of Spanish grammar, the different understandings of the book as object and text, principles of genre in history-writing, and an analysis of linguistic descriptions and mapping techniques in relation to the construction of territoriality and understandings of cultural space.
The Darker Side of the Renaissance will significantly challenge commonplace understandings of New World history. More importantly, it will continue to stimulate and provide models for new colonial and post-colonial scholarship.
". . . a contribution to Renaissance studies of the first order. The field will have to reckon with it for years to come, for it will unquestionably become the point of departure for discussion not only on the foundations and achievements of the Renaissance but also on the effects and influences on colonized cultures." -- Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology
Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.
[more]
cover of The Darkest Evening

The Darkest Evening

William Durbin

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In the 1930s, some 6,000 Finnish Americans traveled to Karelia, a province in Northwestern Russia, hoping to leave the Depression behind and to establish a workers’ paradise. Based on these true events, The Darkest Evening chronicles the story of Jake Maki, whose father, caught up in the socialist fervor washing over their Finnish mining community in Minnesota, moves their family to the Soviet Union.

Instead of finding the utopia they were promised, Jake and his family encounter only disappointment and hardship. When Stalin’s secret police begin targeting Americans for arrest, his worst fears are confirmed, and Jake leads his family on a daring midwinter escape attempt on cross-country skis, fleeing toward the Finnish border.
[more]
cover of The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw

The Darwinian Revolution

Science Red in Tooth and Claw

Michael Ruse

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Originally published in 1979, The Darwinian Revolution was the first comprehensive and readable synthesis of the history of evolutionary thought. Though the years since have seen an enormous flowering of research on Darwin and other nineteenth-century scientists concerned with evolution, as well as the larger social and cultural responses to their work, The Darwinian Revolution remains remarkably current and stimulating.

For this edition Michael Ruse has written a new afterword that takes into account the research published since his book's first appearance.

"It is difficult to believe that yet another book on Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution could add anything new or contain any surprises. Ruse's book is an exception on all counts. Darwin scholars and the general reader alike can learn from it."—David L. Hull, Nature

"No other account of the Darwinian Revolution provides so detailed and sympathetic an account of the framework within which the scientific debates took place."—Peter J. Bowler, Canadian Journal of History

"A useful and highly readable synthesis. . .skillfully organized and written with verve, imagination, and welcome touches of humor."—John C. Greene, Science
[more]
cover of The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel

The Daughter's Dilemma

Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel

Paula Marantz Cohen

University of Michigan Press, 1993

The Daughter's Dilemma breaks new ground in literary studies through its application of family systems theory to the analysis of nineteenth-century domestic novels. Cohen argues for structural correspondences between families and novels: as systems seeking closure, they are governed by certain analogous laws. She argues further that the father-daughter dyad is the pivotal structure by which the nuclear family and the domestic novel were able to define themselves as closed systems. The study treats novels by Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen. Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James and places them in the context of the writers' individual family experiences. Drawing on recent work in literary and feminist criticism, anthropology, history, and psychoanalysis. as well as family systems theory, Cohen seeks to critique the limitations of these theoretical models even as she employs them lo illuminate the texts under discussion. The study's approach leads to insights about the contemporary family and about the present state of literature and literary criticism. Cohen concludes by suggesting that the modern period marked the demise of an ideology favoring closed systems. The result has been both a nostalgia for those systems and a redefinition of experience and relationship as open and subject to endless interpretation. Such an ideological reformulation helps explain the present insistence by literary theorists on the inescapability of the text and the "reality" of representation.
[more]
cover of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism

The Dawn of Green

Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism

Harriet Ritvo

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Located in the heart of England’s Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent—and continuing—environmental struggles.
[more]
cover of The Day I Fired Alan Ladd and Other World War II Adventures

The Day I Fired Alan Ladd and Other World War II Adventures

A. E. Hotchner

University of Missouri Press, 2002

"To perform heroically in a perilous situation is one thing, but I found that, in my case, the real difficulty was in getting myself into a spot where heroism was possible. Nobody on latrine duty ever got the Medal of Honor."

This delightful memoir of A. E. Hotchner’s World War II experiences explores a different side of the troubled war years. Hotchner, who grew up in St. Louis, was a rookie lawyer fresh out of Washington University Law School when the United States declared war. Like many others of his generation, he aspired to serve his country. He tried to enlist in the navy, first as a pilot and then as a deck officer, but he was rejected for faulty depth perception and flat feet, respectively. Drafted as a lowly GI into the air force branch of the army, he was accepted to bombardier school. But on the eve of his departure, he was ordered to write and perform in an air force musical comedy instead. He eventually went to Officer Candidate School and was assigned to the Anti-Submarine Command as a lieutenant adjutant, but just before his squadron’s departure for North Africa he was detached and, despite knowing nothing about moviemaking, ordered to make a film that glorified the Anti-Submarine Command’s role in combating U-boats.
All through his four-year military career, despite his efforts to get into combat, fate and the military bureaucracy thwarted him. The author skillfully recounts the events of those years, describing the encounters he had with many unforgettable characters, including a footsore and sentimental Clark Gable and an inept Alan Ladd—best known as the star of Shane. Ladd, then a GI, did such a poor job reading the narration for Hotchner’s film Atlantic Mission that Hotchner had to fire him. The author also describes his encounters with other well-known people, notably Tennessee Williams, with whom he attended a playwriting class at Washington University, and a wistful, vulnerable Dorothy Parker.
Although much of Hotchner’s memoir is lighthearted, it also provides a unique look at the impact of the war on everyday life in the United States. Hotchner’s fast-paced prose makes this memoir an insightful pleasure to read.
[more]
cover of The Day They Hanged Old Brown: The Making of Celebrity and Martyrdom in the Civil War Era

The Day They Hanged Old Brown

The Making of Celebrity and Martyrdom in the Civil War Era

John R. Van Atta

University of Missouri Press, 2025

Abolitionist, fanatic, terrorist, freedom fighter, alleged murderer—all of those labels fit John Brown. Yet he also qualified as a mid-nineteenth-century celebrity. Reserved only for a few, celebrity in Brown’s time was, in historian Carolyn Eastman’s words, a quality “of being well known, an attribute, a degree of popularity and fame—the state of being celebrated by others,” as Brown certainly was.
 
Brown’s lifespan covered most of the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, a time of the still-early beginnings of the United States. Only then had his kind of “celebrity” started to matter. From different economic and moral perspectives, politically aware Americans clashed over different visions for the future of the country. At that time, any disruptive figure might be taken as a barometer of the progress or the decline of the republic. A function of the widely varying newspapers and magazines of that day, celebrity offered Americans an angle of vision, happily or not, as to who they were or were becoming or believed themselves to be—as if by a mirror reflection.
 
In The Day They Hanged Old Brown, John Van Atta examines the creation of celebrity in John Brown’s time and how it differed from modern day perceptions. Yet, as applicable as the concept of celebrity is in this case, the story of Brown’s notoriety represents far more. To his admirers, Brown was not merely a celebrity; he was a hero and, after his sacrificial death, a martyr. Not all celebrities rise to such levels. This book traces the meaning of heroism and martyrdom—as well as the opposite side of that coin, villainy—and suggests that John Brown’s story and legacy helped to redefine these concepts for many Americans during the era of the Civil War, before modern historians began to deliberate him.
 
[more]
cover of The Day is Ours!: An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, November 1776-January 1777

The Day is Ours!

An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, November 1776-January 1777

Dwyer, William M

Rutgers University Press, 1998

The Day is Ours! is a dramatic account of two battles that turned the tide of the American Revolution. In this distinguished, highly readable, and richly detailed narrative history, William M. Dwyer reveals as vivid a picture as we are likely to see of a critical period in the American Revolution. He lets the participants--from American, British, and Hessian soldiers to myriad fearful and ambivalent citizens--tell the story in their own words.
[more]
cover of The Day of the Cattleman

The Day of the Cattleman

Ernest Staples Osgood

University of Minnesota Press, 1929

The Day of the Cattleman was first published in 1929. 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.

The legend of the Wild West, as celebrated in thousands upon thousands of western stories and movies, radio and television programs, has a firm grip on the imaginations of both young and old, not only in America but in many other lands. But, popular though such versions are, they do not tell how the west was really won. Professor Osgood's account sets the record straight for those who want authentic history rather than melodramatic fiction.

"The range cattleman," Professor Osgood writes, "has more solid achievements to his credit than the creation of a legend. He was the first to utilize the semi-arid plains. Using the most available natural resources, the native grasses, as a basis, he built up a great and lucrative enterprise, attracted eastern and foreign capital to aid him in the development of a new economic area, stimulated railroad building in order that the product of the ranges might get to an eastern market, and laid the economic foundation of more than one western commonwealth."

Professor Osgood traces the rise and fall of the range cattle industry, particularly in Montana and Wyoming, from 1845 to the turn of the century. He gives a detailed account of the activities of the stock growers' associations and of the cattlemen's relations with the railroads and with the Federal government.

The book has won critical acclaim both in this country and abroad. The Saturday Review has described it as an "honest, scientific, and thorough examination" of a "semi-epic phase of Western life, now almost completely dead." In England, the Times Literary Supplement called it "the only substantial record of this particular chapter in the history of the West."

[more]
cover of The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora

The Day the Dancers Stayed

Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora

Theodore S. Gonzalves

Temple University Press, 2009

Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification.

Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.

[more]
cover of The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1

The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

Edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore

University of Alabama Press, 2022

1993 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK, SPONSORED BY CHOICE MAGAZINE 

Unearthing the documents that shaped our earliest understanding of a continent.

The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.

The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.

For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact. 

[more]
cover of The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1

The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

Lawrence A. Clayton

University of Alabama Press, 1993

1993 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK, SPONSORED BY CHOICE MAGAZINE 

Unearthing the documents that shaped our earliest understanding of a continent.

The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.

The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.

For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact. 

[more]
cover of The De Soto Chronicles Vol 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

The De Soto Chronicles Vol 2

The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

Edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A critical expansion of the documentary record of the de Soto expedition.

The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.

The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.

For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact. 

[more]
cover of The De Soto Chronicles Vol 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

The De Soto Chronicles Vol 2

The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

Edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore

University of Alabama Press, 1993

A critical expansion of the documentary record of the de Soto expedition.

The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.

The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.

For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact. 

[more]
cover of The De Soto Chronicles, 2 Volume Set: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

The De Soto Chronicles, 2 Volume Set

The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543

Edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore

University of Alabama Press, 1995

1993 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK, SPONSORED BY CHOICE MAGAZINE 

Unearthing the documents that shaped our earliest understanding of a continent.

The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.

The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.

For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact. 

[more]
cover of The De-Definition of Art

The De-Definition of Art

Harold Rosenberg

University of Chicago Press, 1983

"Like the great German critic Walter Benjamin, Rosenberg is a master of dialectics whose sense of art is continuous with his sense of society, and (also like Benjamin) bears no taint of compromised, out-of-work radicalism. Instead, his radicalism is very much at work, enabling him to spot and skewer fallacies, false logic and the camouflaged nudity that is a large part of the art emperor's new wardrobe. [The De-definition of Art] detects with great sensitivity the forces that are deflecting and pressuring art in the direction of esthetic and moral nullity."—Jack Kroll, Newsweek
[more]
cover of The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

The Dead End Kids of St. Louis

Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

Bonnie Stepenoff

University of Missouri Press, 2021

Joe Garagiola remembers playing baseball with stolen balls and bats while growing up on the Hill. Chuck Berry had run-ins with police before channeling his energy into rock and roll. But not all the boys growing up on the rough streets of St. Louis had loving families or managed to find success. This book reviews a century of history to tell the story of the “lost” boys who struggled to survive on the city’s streets as it evolved from a booming late-nineteenth-century industrial center to a troubled mid-twentieth-century metropolis.
To the eyes of impressionable boys without parents to shield them, St. Louis presented an ever-changing spectacle of violence. Small, loosely organized bands from the tenement districts wandered the city looking for trouble, and they often found it. The geology of St. Louis also provided for unique accommodations—sometimes gangs of boys found shelter in the extensive system of interconnected caves underneath the city. Boys could hide in these secret lairs for weeks or even months at a stretch.
Bonnie Stepenoff gives voice to the harrowing experiences of destitute and homeless boys and young men who struggled to grow up, with little or no adult supervision, on streets filled with excitement but also teeming with sharpsters ready to teach these youngsters things they would never learn in school. Well-intentioned efforts of private philanthropists and public officials sometimes went cruelly astray, and sometimes were ineffective, but sometimes had positive effects on young lives.
Stepenoff traces the history of several efforts aimed at assisting the city’s homeless boys. She discusses the prison-like St. Louis House of Refuge, where more than 80 percent of the resident children were boys, and Father Dunne's News Boys' Home and Protectorate, which stressed education and training for more than a century after its founding. She charts the growth of Skid Row and details how historical events such as industrialization, economic depression, and wars affected this vulnerable urban population.
Most of these boys grew up and lived decent, unheralded lives, but that doesn’t mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Their lives offer a compelling glimpse into old St. Louis while reinforcing the idea that society has an obligation to create cities that will nurture and not endanger the young.
[more]
cover of The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

The Dead Ladies Project

Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

Jessa Crispin

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she’s still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.
          
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
         
Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
[more]
cover of The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research

The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective

A History of Research

Devorah Dimant

SBL Press, 2016

Now in paperback!

The volume covers Qumran scholarship in separate countries: the USA, Canada, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Each essay carries a detailed bibliography for the respective country. Biographies of all the major scholars active in the field are briefly given as well. This book thereby exhaustively surveys past and present Qumran research, outlining its particular development in various circumstances and national contexts. For the first time, perspectives and information not recorded in any other publication are highlighted.

Features:

  • Paperback format of an essential Brill resource
  • Twenty-seven articles by twenty-six of the top scholars in the field
  • Contributions represent the work of more than sixty years of scholarly research
  • [more]