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A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach.

With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age.

This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context.  Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

Tracing the development of communication markets and the regulation of international communications from the 1840s through World War I, Jill Hills examines the political, technological, and economic forces at work during the formative century of global communication. 

Hills analyzes power relations within the arena of global communications from the inception of the telegraph through the successive technologies of submarine telegraph cables, ship-to-shore wireless, broadcast radio, shortwave wireless, the telephone, and movies with sound. As she shows, global communication began to overtake transportation as an economic, political, and social force after the inception of the telegraph, which shifted communications from national to international. From that point on, information was a commodity and ownership of the communications infrastructure became valuable as the means of distributing information. The struggle for control of that infrastructure occurred in part because British control of communications hindered the growing economic power of the United States. 

Hills outlines the technological advancements and regulations that allowed the United States to challenge British hegemony and enter the global communications market. She demonstrates that control of global communication was part of a complex web of relations between and within the government and corporations of Britain and the United States. Detailing the interplay between American federal regulation and economic power, Hills shows how these forces shaped communications technologies and illuminates the contemporary systems of power in global communications.

The story of the Rwandan Genocide has been told many times by scholars and journalists. Over the course of a hundred days in the spring and summer of 1994, about eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered by their extremist Hutu compatriots. Those hundred days were the final phase of a four-year civil war, also known as the Struggle for Liberation, which formed the immediate context of the genocide. Though scholars have researched preparations for the genocide and the international community’s role in it, none has placed the Struggle for Liberation at the heart of the narrative. However, the preparation of the genocide, the rise and fall of the moderate opposition, the degradation of the Forces armées rwandaises (FAR) from a respected fighting force to a genocidal militia, the role of the international community, the Arusha negotiations, and the execution of the genocide all took place in the context of that war. John Burton Kegel contends that the Struggle for Liberation forms the bedrock of any genuine understanding of Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, and indeed beyond. The Struggle for Liberation, which eventually led to the genocide, was fought between the FAR and the civilians and soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its armed wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). The civil war started on October 1, 1990, when the RPF entered Rwanda from Uganda, where Rwandan refugees had lived throughout the Great Lakes region since roughly 1959. This book traces the history of those refugees—and Rwanda’s deeper Hutu-Tutsi divide—from the precolonial period up to 1990. It also provides a wholly new take on how the disciplined RPF, which rules Rwanda to this day, was born and organized.

In 1733, General James Edward Oglethorpe officially established the colony of Georgia, and within three years had fortified the coast southward toward St. Augustine.  Although this region, originally known as the provinces of Guale and Mocama, had previously been under Spanish control for more than a century, territorial fighting had emptied the region of Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and their Indian allies.  Spanish officials maintained that the long history of Spanish authority over the territory guaranteed Spain the right to defy and repel the English intruders.  By 1739, with diplomatic negotiations failing and the potential for war imminent, King Philip V requested that Don Manuel de Montiano, Governor of Spanish Florida, provide him with every document from both governmental and ecclesiastical sources that would demonstrate prior Spanish presence and control over the region.  Original documents and translations were delivered within the year and safely filed for future use--then forgotten.  With the outbreak of open war six months earlier, the diplomatic utility of the documents had passed.

For over 250 years, the documents languished safely in the Archive of the Indies in Seville until recognized, recovered, translated, and published by John Worth.  Within this volume, Worth brings to light the history of the documents, provides complete translations and full explanations of their contents and a narrative exposition of the Spanish presence along the Atlantic coast never before fully understood.  David Hurst Thomas provides an introduction that places Worth's translations and his historical overview into the context of ongoing archaeological excavations on the Georgia coast.  With the publication of this volume, one of the least known chapters of Georgia history is finally examined in detail.

Connecting Cather's work to the southern literary tradition and the South of her youth

A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and her southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination.

Joyce McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. For McDonald, however, what most links Cather and her work to the South and to the southern literary tradition is her use of pastoral modes.

Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power and her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.

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

How might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's Ulysses have anything in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the first postcolonial novel? Exploring the relation of Ulysses to the colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a postcolonial modernism and in so doing traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a violent anticolonial war. Duffy juxtaposes Ulysses with documents and photographs from the archives of both empire and insurgency, as well as with recent postcolonial literary texts, to analyze the political unconscious of subversive strategies, twists on class and gender, that render patriarchal colonialist culture unfamiliar.

Enda Duffy is assistant professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School, demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject, and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized, modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity, Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians, photographers, and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan.

The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.

José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.

This book seeks to explore how Barbara Pym subverts the discourse of the romance novel through her use of food, clothes, heroine and hero characterizations, and marriage customs.