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For years, schoolchildren heard the story of Jean Nicolet’s arrival in Wisconsin. But the popularized image of the hapless explorer landing with billowing robe and guns blazing, supposedly believing himself to have found a passage to China, is based on scant evidence—a false narrative perpetuated by fanciful artists’ renditions and repetition. 

In more recent decades, historians have pieced together a story that is not only more likely but more complicated and interesting. Patrick Jung synthesizes the research about Nicolet and his superior Samuel de Champlain, whose diplomatic goals in the region are crucial to understanding this much misunderstood journey across the Great Lakes. Additionally, historical details about Franco-Indian relations and the search for the Northwest Passage provide a framework for understanding Nicolet’s famed mission.

During the late Soviet period, the art collective known as the Mitki emerged in Leningrad. Producing satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance art, this group fashioned a playful, emphatically countercultural identity with affinities to European avant-garde and American hippie movements.

More broadly, Alexandar Mihailovic shows, the Mitki pioneered a form of political protest art that has since become a centerpiece of activism in post-Soviet Russia, most visibly today in groups such as Pussy Riot. He draws on extensive interviews with members of the collective and illuminates their critique of the authoritarian state, militarism, and social strictures from the Brezhnev years to the present.

When we make phone calls and use computers, electronic devices mediate how we communicate. In each instance, we exchange symbols and information just as we have since humans began speaking and writing. What, then—besides economy of space and time—differentiates electronic communications from ordinary speech and writing?

The difference, Mark Poster argues, is the profound effect electronic mediation exerts on the very way we perceive ourselves and reality. To help decode the linguistic dimensions of our multiple forms of social interaction, he plays upon Marx's theory of the mode of production—the shift to late capitalism has a parallel in the shift from the mode of production to that of information.

Enlisting poststructuralist theory, he links four modes of communication with four poststructuralists: TV ads with Baudrillard, data bases with Foucault, electronic writing with Derrida, and computer science with Lyotard. Mode of Information points the way to a poststructuralist strategy for writing history, a framework well suited to unearthing structures of domination and the means to their disruption.

"An informed, insightful, provocative account of phenomena that have transformed virtually every area of public and private life on our time."—Robert Anchor, American Historical Review

"The importance of Poster's book is unmistakable for he skillfully negotiates between and juxtaposes two wide theoretical domains—electronically mediated communications and poststructuralist theory—about which much has been written, but hardly with the acumen that he brings to bear in a long-awaited critical rapprochement."—Charles J. Stivale, Criticism

The Modern Age examines the discourses that have come to characterize adolescence and argues that commonplace views of adolescents as impulsive, conflicted, and rebellious are constructions inspired by broader cultural anxieties that characterized American society in early-twentieth-century America.

The idea of adolescence, argues Kent Baxter, came into being because it fulfilled specific historical and cultural needs: to define a quickly expanding segment of the population, and to express concerns associated with the movement into a new era. Adolescence—a term that had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses thereafter—is a “modern age” not only because it sprung from changes in American society that are synonymous with modernity, but also because it came to represent all that was threatening about “modern life.”

Baxter provides a preliminary history of adolescence, focusing specifically on changes in the American educational system and the creation of the juvenile justice system that carved out a developmental space between the child and the adult. He looks at the psychological works of G. Stanley Hall and the anthropological works of Margaret Mead and explores what might have inspired their markedly negative descriptions of this new demographic. He examines the rise of the Woodcraft Indian youth movement and its promotion of “red skin” values while also studying the proliferation of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American youth, where educators attempted to eradicate the very “red skin” values promoted by the Woodcraft movement.

Finally Baxter studies reading at the turn of the century, focusing specifically on Horatio Alger (the Ragged Dick series) and Edward Stratemeyer (the Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys series) and what those works reveal about the “problem” of adolescence and its solutions in terms of value, both economic and moral.

During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls wore sexy clothes and high heels; they applied lipstick and other cosmetics. Dressed in provocative attire and in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. Contemporaries debated whether the Modern Girl was looking for sexual, economic, or political emancipation, or whether she was little more than an image, a hollow product of the emerging global commodity culture. The contributors to this collection track the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period.

Scholars of history, women’s studies, literature, and cultural studies follow the Modern Girl around the world, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Along the way, they demonstrate how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries. In so doing, they highlight the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas. A mix of collaborative and individually authored chapters, the volume concludes with commentaries by Kathy Peiss, Miriam Silverberg, and Timothy Burke.

Contributors: Davarian L. Baldwin, Tani E. Barlow, Timothy Burke, Liz Conor, Madeleine Yue Dong, Anne E. Gorsuch, Ruri Ito, Kathy Peiss, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Mary Louise Roberts, Barbara Sato, Miriam Silverberg, Lynn M. Thomas, Alys Eve Weinbaum

The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.

This landmark study of American religion, recipient of the National Religious Book Award in 1976, is being brought back into print with an updated bibliography. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism traces the history of American Protestant thought from the early part of the nineteenth century to the present. William R. Hutchison deals especially with the "modernist" movement that flourished in the years around 1900, and with the colorful personalities and disputes associated with that movement.

            The masquerade's widespread appearance as a literary motif in works by such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Leonid Andreev, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Fyodor Sologub mirrored its popularity as a leisure-time activity and illuminated its integral role in the Russian modernist creative consciousness. Colleen McQuillen charts how the political, cultural, and personal significance of lavish costumes and other forms of self-stylizing evolved in Russia over time. She shows how their representations in literature engaged in dialog with the diverse aesthetic trends of Decadence, Symbolism, and Futurism and with the era's artistic philosophies.

The Modernist Nation examines why America's modern literary movements have come to be characterized as "generations" and "renaissances," such as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation or the Harlem, Southern, and San Francisco Renaissances. The metaphor of rebirth, Michael Soto argues, offered and continues to offer American writers a kind of shorthand for imagining American cultural history, especially as a departure from Old World (English) trappings.

Soto highlights the interracial dynamics of American literary movements, touching on authors as varied as James Weldon Johnson, Malcolm Cowley, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Kerouac. After assessing the origins of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, Soto traces the rise of the "bohemian artist" narrative, and demonstrates how a polyethnic cast of writers and critics constructed American literary production in terms of symbolic rebirth.


 

 

The period between World War I and World War II was an important time in the history of gender relations, and of American fatherhood. Revealing the surprising extent to which some of yesterday's fathers were involved with their children, The Modernization of Fatherhood recounts how fatherhood was reshaped during the Machine Age into the configuration we know today.

LaRossa explains that during the interwar period the image of the father as economic provider, pal, and male role model, all in one, became institutionalized. Using personal letters and popular magazine and newspaper sources, he explores how the social and economic conditions of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression—a period of technical innovation as well as economic hardship—fused these expectations into a cultural ideal. With chapters on the U.S. Children's Bureau, the fathercraft movement, the magazine industry and the development of Parent's Magazine, and the creation of Father's Day, this book is a major addition to the growing literature on masculinity and fatherhood.

Eddie Gottlieb-The Mogul -was one of the most colorful figures in Philadelphia sports history.  A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, he  founded, played and coached for the legendary South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (SPHAs) basketball team, helped form the National Basketball Association, owned the Warriors franchise, and created the NBA's annual schedule of games for over a quarter-century.  In baseball, he co-owned the Philadelphia Stars in the Negro Leagues and tried unsuccessfully to buy the Philadelphia Phillies.  Locally, he was the city's leading sports booking agent for activities ranging from sandlot baseball to semipro football to professional wrestling. 

Drawing upon sixty-plus interviews and many archival sources, well-known Philadelphia sports historian Rich Westcott vividly portrays Gottlieb's role in a pivotal era in city sports, in the process offering histories of the SPHAs, Warriors, and Stars and the role of Jews and African Americans in the city's sporting history.

In The Mojave Desert, thirty-eight scientists who are all specialists in desert ecology address the threats to the Mojave, as well as the potential for natural recovery and active restoration. The contributing authors discuss the desert from several perspectives: regional threats such as expanding human populations, climate change, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, and invasive plants; the impact of roads in a desert ecosystem; soils and plant communities; shrinking aquifers; and the monitoring and sustainability of this fragile ecosystem. Finally, they discuss the importance of long-term data and the ways scientists and resource managers can interact to enhance understanding of the processes of change in the Mojave Desert and to advance the preservation and restoration of its precious resources.The Mojave Desert offers the fruits of extensive research in a number of disciplines and a sound assessment of the current state and possible future of one of the world's major deserts. As human intrusion and climate change increasingly threaten the Mojave's ecosystem, studies like this are essential in helping scientists, land managers, and the general public understand what is at risk and what can be done to preserve this austere and hauntingly beautiful region.

The Moment of Racial Sight overturns the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the idea that race is constructed, that it operates by attaching visible marks of difference to arbitrary meanings and associations. Searching for the history of the constructed racial sign, Irene Tucker argues that if people instantly perceive racial differences despite knowing better, then the underlying function of race is to produce this immediate knowledge. Racial perception, then, is not just a mark of acculturation, but a part of how people know one another.

 

Tucker begins her investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, she describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, Tucker tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries—from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins’s realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin’s late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series The Wire. Rich with perceptive readings of unexpected texts, this ambitious book is an important intervention in the study of race.

The contemporary Monacan Nation had approximately 1,400 registered members in 2006, mostly living in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, in Amherst County, but some are scattered like any other large family. Records trace the Monacans of Virginia back to the late 1500s, with an estimated population of over 15,000 in the 1700s.

 

Like members of some other native tribes, the Monacans have a long history of struggles for equality in jobs, health care, and education and have suffered cultural, political, and social abuse at the hands of authority figures appointed to serve them. The critical difference for the Monacans was the actions of segregationist Dr. Walter A. Plecker, Director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until he retired at age 85 in 1946. A strong proponent and enforcer of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 (struck down in 1967), which prohibited marriage between races, Plecker’s interpretation of that law convinced him that there were only two races–white and colored–and anyone not bearing physically white genetic characteristics was “colored” and that included Indians. He would not let Indians get married in Virginia unless they applied as white or colored, he forced the local teachers to falsify the students’ race on the official school rolls, and he threatened court clerks and census takers with prosecution if they used the term “Indian” on any official form. He personally changed government records when his directives were not followed and even coerced postpartum Indian mothers to list their newborns as white or colored or they could not take their infants home from the hospital. Eventually the federal government intervened, directing the Virginia state officials to begin the tedious process of correcting official records. Yet the legacy of Plecker’s attempted cultural genocide remains. Through interviews with 26 Monacans, one Episcopal minister appointed to serve them, one former clerk of the court for Amherst County, and her own story, Whitlock provides first person accounts of what happened to the Monacan families and how their very existence as Indians was threatened.

 

The Money Doctor in the Andes is an account of the technical assistance missions to five Andean republics—Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru—undertaken by Princeton University economist Edwin Walter Kemmerer during the 1920s. Drake demonstrates that in each case the Kemmerer mission recommended an identical series of monetary, fiscal, and banking reforms, adding occasional recommendations on everything from administrative reorganization to penal code reform as local circumstances seemed to warrant. In each case, too, local legislatures adopted all the main Kemmerer proposals virtually without debate or modifications.

Drake links the Kemmerer missions to vital developments in the political economic history of the Andean republics in the interwar period. He analyzes the domestic interest groups and political forces whose convergent strategies gave the Kemmerer missions their remarkable record in achieving local success for the reforms proposed. Second, Drake situates the Kemmerer missions at the center of a process of political modernization that created new institutions and policy agencies in each of the five countries; the missions thereby contributed to the expansion of the central government as an agent of development in ways that later differed sharply from Kemmerer's orthodox policies. Finally, The Money Doctor in the Andes regards developments in the Andean countries in the context of the region's developing economic ties to the United States. Expectations that Kemmerer's plans would simultaneously attract foreign capital and control inflation drew support from sectors as diverse as trade unions and landowners. When the Depression deepened, Kemmerer's policies proved counterproductive and the fragile consensus that had installed them fell apart, but the political and administrative reforms endured—with far-reaching consequences.

In the West, monastic ideals and scholastic pursuits are complementary; monks are popularly imagined copying classics, preserving learning through the Middle Ages, and establishing the first universities. But this dual identity is not without its contradictions. While monasticism emphasizes the virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility, the scholar, by contrast, requires expensive infrastructure—a library, a workplace, and the means of disseminating his work. In The Monk and the Book, Megan Hale Williams argues that Saint Jerome was the first to represent biblical study as a mode of asceticism appropriate for an inhabitant of a Christian monastery, thus pioneering the enduring linkage of monastic identities and institutions with scholarship.

Revisiting Jerome with the analytical tools of recent cultural history—including the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Roger Chartier—Williams proposes new interpretations that remove obstacles to understanding the life and legacy of the saint. Examining issues such as the construction of Jerome’s literary persona, the form and contents of his library, and the intellectual framework of his commentaries, Williams shows that Jerome’s textual and exegetical work on the Hebrew scriptures helped to construct a new culture of learning. This fusion of the identities of scholar and monk, Williams shows, continues to reverberate in the culture of the modern university.

"[Williams] has written a fascinating study, which provides a series of striking insights into the career of one of the most colorful and influential figures in Christian antiquity. Jerome's Latin Bible would become the foundational text for the intellectual development of the West, providing words for the deepest aspirations and most intensely held convictions of an entire civilization. Williams's book does much to illumine the circumstances in which that fundamental text was produced, and reminds us that great ideas, like great people, have particular origins, and their own complex settings."—Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books

 

A pair of clever, cozy mysteries starring the beloved detective Judge Dee, whom the Los Angeles Times ranked with Sherlock Holmes

The Monkey and The Tiger includes two detective stories, "The Morning of the Monkey" and "The Night of the Tiger." In the first, a gibbon drops an emerald in the open gallery of Dee's official residence, leading the judge to discover a strangely mutilated body in the woods—and how it got there. In the second, Dee is traveling to the imperial capital to assume a new position when he is separated from his escort by a flood. Marooned in a large country house surrounded by fierce bandits, Dee confronts an apparition that helps him solve a mystery.

This journalistic account traces the impact of the Sendero Luminoso-inspired civil war from 1983 to the mid-1990s. The Monkey's Paw focuses on the civil defense brigades, Sendero's women in their prison setting, and campesino refugees in Lima who fled their highland villages as a result of the war. Based on extensive interviews by a journalist who is fully familiar with the topic, this is one of the best sources for testimonials about the war from those most affected by it. It should not be overlooked by specialists seeking clear insights into the attitudes of both senderistas and those the movement terrorized.

The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries to show how monsters were conceptualized at this particular locale and historical juncture—a period when the sacred was being supplanted by a secular, decidedly nonmagical way of looking at the world.
Noting that the word “monster” is derived from the Latin for “omen” or “warning,” Hanafi explores the monster’s early identity as a portent or messenger from God. Although monsters have always been considered “whatever we are not,” they gradually were tranformed into mechanical devices when new discoveries in science and medicine revealed the mechanical nature of the human body. In analyzing the historical literature of monstrosity, magic, and museum collections, Hanafi uses contemporary theory and the philosophy of technology to illuminate the timeless significance of the monster theme. She elaborates the association between women and the monstrous in medical literature and sheds new light on the work of Vico—particularly his notion of the conatus—by relating it to Vico’s own health. By explicating obscure and fascinating texts from such disciplines as medicine and poetics, she invites the reader to the piazzas and pulpits of seventeenth-century Naples, where poets, courtiers, and Jesuit preachers used grotesque figures of speech to captivate audiences with their monstrous wit.
Drawing from a variety of texts from medicine, moral philosophy, and poetics, Hanafi’s guided tour through this baroque museum of ideas will interest readers in comparative literature, Italian literature, history of ideas, history of science, art history, poetics, women’s studies, and philosophy.

Early on a windy morning in April 1953, the body of a young woman washed up on a beach outside of Rome. Her name was Wilma Montesi, and, as the papers reported, she had left her home in the city center a day earlier, alone. The police called her death an accidental drowning. But the public was not convinced. In the cafés around the Via Veneto, people began to speak-of the son of a powerful politician, lavish parties, movie stars, orgies, drugs.

How this news item of everyday life exploded into one of the greatest scandals of a modern democracy is the story Karen Pinkus tells in The Montesi Scandal. Wilma's death brought to the surface every simmering element of Italian culture: bitter aspiring actresses, corrupt politicians, nervous Jesuits in sunglasses, jaded princes. Italians of all types lined up to testify-in court or to journalists of varying legitimacy-about the death of the middle-class carpenter's daughter, in the process creating a media frenzy and the modern culture of celebrity. Witnesses sold their stories to the tabloids, only to retract them. They posed for pictures, pretending to shun the spotlight. And they in turn became celebrities in their own right.

Pinkus takes us through the alleys and entryways of Rome in the 1950s, linking Wilma's death to the beginnings of the dolce vita, now synonymous with modern Roman life. Pinkus follows the first paparazzi on their scooters as they shoot the protagonists and gives us an insider's view of the stories and trials that came to surround this lonely figure that washed up on the shores of Ostia. Full of the magnificent paparazzi photos of the protagonists in the drama and film stills from the era's landmark movies, The Montesi Scandal joins true crime with "high" culture in an original form, one true to both the period and the cinematic conception of life it created. More than a meditation of the intricate ties among movies, paparazzo photography, and Italian culture, The Montesi Scandal narrates Wilma's story and its characters as the notes for an unrealized film, but one that, as the reader discovers, seems impossible to produce.

The Moon is at once a face with a thousand expressions and the archetypal planet. Throughout history it has been gazed upon by people of every culture in every walk of life. From early perceptions of the Moon as an abode of divine forces, humanity has in turn accepted the mathematized Moon of the Greeks, the naturalistic lunar portrait of Jan van Eyck, and the telescopic view of Galileo.

Scott Montgomery has produced a richly detailed analysis of how the Moon has been visualized in Western culture through the ages, revealing the faces it has presented to philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists for nearly three millennia. To do this, he has drawn on a wide array of sources that illustrate mankind's changing concept of the nature and significance of heavenly bodies from classical antiquity to the dawn of modern science.

Montgomery especially focuses on the seventeenth century, when the Moon was first mapped and its features named. From literary explorations such as Francis Godwin's Man in the Moone and Cyrano de Bergerac's L'autre monde to Michael Van Langren's textual lunar map and Giambattista Riccioli's Almagestum novum, he shows how Renaissance man was moved by the lunar orb, how he battled to claim its surface, and how he in turn elevated the Moon to a new level in human awareness. The effect on human imagination has been cumulative: our idea of the Moon, and therefore the planets, is multilayered and complex, having been enriched by associations played out in increasingly complicated harmonies over time. We have shifted the way we think about the lunar face from a "perfect" body to an earthlike one, with corresponding changes in verbal and visual expression.

Ultimately, Montgomery suggests, our concept of the Moon has never wandered too far from the world we know best—the Earth itself. And when we finally establish lunar bases and take up some form of residence on the Moon's surface, we will not be conquering a New World, fresh and mostly unknown, but a much older one, ripe with history.

For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify.

The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America.

Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic.

Contributors:
Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal

What, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlier—and unjustly neglected—discussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany.
 
We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.

Now in paperback, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s classic study, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976). It is the only book to cover the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women’s status, Gordon shows how opposition to it has long been part of the entrenched opposition to gender equality.
 

In TheMorality of Everyday Life, Thomas Fleming offers an alternative to the enlightened liberalism espoused by thinkers as different as Kant, Mill, Rand, and Rawls. Philosophers in the liberal tradition, although they disagree on many important questions, agree that moral and political problems should be looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a rational perspective that is universally applied to all comparable cases.

Fleming instead places importance on the particular, the local, and moral complexity.  He advocates a return to premodern traditions, such as those exemplified in the texts of Aristotle, the Talmud, and the folk wisdom in ancient Greek literature, for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of universal abstractions.

While such modern philosophers as Kant and Kohlberg have regarded a mother’s self-sacrificing love for her children as beneath their level of morality, folk wisdom tells us it is nearly the highest morality, taking precedence over the duties of citizenship or the claims of humanity. Fleming believes that a modern type of “casuistry” should be applied to these moral conflicts in which the line between right and wrong is rarely clear.

This volume will appeal to students of ethics and classics, as well as the general educated reader, who will appreciate Fleming’s jargon-free prose. Teachers will find this text useful because each chapter is a self-contained essay that could be used as the basis for classroom discussion.   

The Morality of Revolution offers the first historical examination of urban cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. The book presents the camps as the template for independent Mozambique’s punitive society under Frelimo. Individuals who transgressed the law and socialist normative codes of behavior were targeted by the revolutionary party, which obsessively pursued putative wrongdoers in an effort to build a new society from the ruins of Portuguese colonialism. Benedito Luís Machava argues that the socialist experiment, while ushering in an era of economic development and social progress, sought also to remake the moral fabric of Mozambican society. At play was the contradictory combination of high modernist, socialist aspirations and conservative anxieties rooted in a moralist reading of society. From its inception in 1974 to its demise in the late 1980s, the reeducation program was a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Frelimo government, unable to finance and support the carceral regime, expected its agents and the detainees to carry out the ambitious project on their own. Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to enforce their own political education; and in many ways, to oversee their own incarceration. The state’s incapacity to translate the salvationist ideas of reeducation into planned action—a general feature of the socialist experiment in Mozambique—produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that negatively affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked with disciplining and reeducating them.

The year 1978 marked a watershed year in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it lifted a 126-year ban on ordaining black males for the priesthood. This departure from past practice focused new attention on Brigham Young's decision to abandon Joseph Smith's more inclusive original teachings. The Mormon Church and Blacks presents thirty official or authoritative Church statements on the status of African Americans in the Mormon Church. Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst comment on the individual documents, analyzing how they reflected uniquely Mormon characteristics and contextualizing each within the larger scope of the history of race and religion in the United States. Their analyses consider how lifting the ban shifted the status of African Americans within Mormonism, including the fact that African Americans, once denied access to certain temple rituals considered essential for Mormon salvation, could finally be considered full-fledged Latter-day Saints in both this world and the next. Throughout, Harris and Bringhurst offer an informed view of behind-the-scenes Church politicking before and after the ban. The result is an essential resource for experts and laymen alike on a much-misunderstood aspect of Mormon history and belief.

 The Mormon church today is led by an elite group of older men, nearly three-quarters of whom are related to current or past general church authorities. This dynastic hierarchy meets in private; neither its minutes nor the church’s finances are available for public review. Members are reassured by public relations spokesmen that all is well and that harmony prevails among these brethren.

But by interviewing former church aides, examining hundreds of diaries, and drawing from his own past experience as an insider within the Latter-day Saint historical department, D. Michael Quinn presents a fuller view. His extensive research documents how the governing apostles, seventies, and presiding bishops are likely to be at loggerheads, as much as united. These strong-willed, independent men–like directors of a large corporation or supreme court justices–lobby among their colleagues, forge alliances, out-maneuver opponents, and broker compromises.

There is more: clandestine political activities, investigative and punitive actions by church security forces, personal “loans” from church coffers (later written off as bad debts), and other privileged power-vested activities. Quinn considers the changing role and attitude of the leadership toward visionary experiences, the momentous events which have shaped quorum protocol and doctrine, and day-to-day bureaucratic intrigue from the time of Brigham Young to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The hierarchy seems at root well-intentioned and even at times aggressive in fulfilling its stated responsibility, which is to expedite the Second Coming. Where they have become convinced that God has spoken, they have set aside personal differences, offered unqualified support, and spoken with a unified voice. This potential for change, when coupled with the tempering effect of competing viewpoints, is something Quinn finds encouraging about Mormonism. But one should not assume that these men are infallible or work in anything approaching uninterrupted unanimity.