28164 books match the query 'History' and 259 start with v

cover of Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes

Vertical Empire

The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes

Jeremy Ravi Mumford

Duke University Press, 2012

In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered more than one million native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, rather than destroying the web of Andean communities, the General Resettlement added another layer to indigenous culture, a culture that the Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely.
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cover of Vesna Pavlovic: Stagecraft

Vesna Pavlovic

Stagecraft

Vesna Pavlovic

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft features four extensive bodies of the photographer's work, spanning from the early 2000s to today—photographs of the Yugoslav socialist modernist hotel spaces from her internationally recognized series "Hotels"; photographs of the ceremonial space of the Yugoslav Presidential Palace in Belgrade from the series "Collection/Kolekcija" and the recent "Fabrics of Socialism" and "Sites of Memory" series exploring the archives of the Museum of Yugoslav History.

The book includes critical essays that contextualize and expound on Pavlović's unique treatment of the photographic medium, in which a photographic moment is expanded to include the conditions of image making, production, documentation, and representation.
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cover of Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion

Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons

Women in Roman Religion

By Sarolta A. Takács

University of Texas Press, 2007

Roman women were the procreators and nurturers of life, both in the domestic world of the family and in the larger sphere of the state. Although deterred from participating in most aspects of public life, women played an essential role in public religious ceremonies, taking part in rituals designed to ensure the fecundity and success of the agricultural cycle on which Roman society depended. Thus religion is a key area for understanding the contributions of women to Roman society and their importance beyond their homes and families.

In this book, Sarolta A. Takács offers a sweeping overview of Roman women's roles and functions in religion and, by extension, in Rome's history and culture from the republic through the empire. She begins with the religious calendar and the various festivals in which women played a significant role. She then examines major female deities and cults, including the Sibyl, Mater Magna, Isis, and the Vestal Virgins, to show how conservative Roman society adopted and integrated Greek culture into its mythic history, artistic expressions, and religion. Takács's discussion of the Bona Dea Festival of 62 BCE and of the Bacchantes, female worshippers of the god Bacchus or Dionysus, reveals how women could also jeopardize Rome's existence by stepping out of their assigned roles. Takács's examination of the provincial female flaminate and the Matres/Matronae demonstrates how women served to bind imperial Rome and its provinces into a cohesive society.

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cover of Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction

Veteran Americans

Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction

Benjamin Cooper

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

“I may dare to speak, and I intend to speak and write what I think,” wrote a New York volunteer serving in the Mexican War in 1848. Such sentiments of resistance and confrontation run throughout the literature produced by veteran Americans in the nineteenth century—from prisoner-of-war narratives and memoirs to periodicals, adventure pamphlets, and novels. Military men and women were active participants in early American print culture, yet they struggled against civilian prejudice about their character, against shifting collective memories that removed military experience from the nation's self-definition, and against a variety of headwinds in the uneven development of antebellum print culture.

In this new literary history of early American veterans, Benjamin Cooper reveals how soldiers and sailors from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War demanded, through their writing, that their value as American citizens and authors be recognized. Relying on an archive of largely understudied veteran authors, Cooper situates their perspective against a civilian monopoly in defining American citizenship and literature that endures to this day.

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cover of Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War

John A. Wood

Ohio University Press, 2016

In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators.

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.

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cover of Veterans Stadium: Field Of Memories

Veterans Stadium

Field Of Memories

Rich Westcott

Temple University Press, 2005

Veterans Stadium was the outdoor sports and concert capital of Philadelphia from 1971 until its televised demolition in 2004. At its best, "The Vet" spawned two of the greatest moments in the city's sports history—Tug McGraw's 1980 strikeout of Willie Wilson to win the World Series and the Eagles thrashing of the Dallas Cowboys to clinch their first Super Bowl bid. At its worst, it saw fans pelt Santa Claus with snowballs and the opening of an in-stadium branch of Philadelphia municipal court to deal with rowdy Eagles fans.

Part of a look-alike generation of all-purpose stadiums erected around the country, the Vet took on its own personality over the years. For all its deficiencies, it left fans loving it in the way they loved their own families—warts and all. Almost 100 photographs and Rich Westcott's yarns make Veterans Stadium the one book that will help Philadelphians—and Philadelphia visitors—remember thirty years of their history.
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cover of Veto Power: Institutional Design in the European Union

Veto Power

Institutional Design in the European Union

Jonathan B. Slapin

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"This is a terrific book. The questions that Slapin asks about intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) in the European Union are extraordinarily important and ambitious, with implications for the EU and for international cooperation more generally. Furthermore, Slapin's theorizing of his core questions is rigorous, lucid, and accessible to scholarly readers without extensive formal modeling background . . . This book is a solid, serious contribution to the literature on EU studies."
---Mark Pollack, Temple University

"An excellent example of the growing literature that brings modern political science to bear on the politics of the European Union."
---Michael Laver, New York University

Veto rights can be a meaningful source of power only when leaving an organization is extremely unlikely. For example, small European states have periodically wielded their veto privileges to override the preferences of their larger, more economically and militarily powerful neighbors when negotiating European Union treaties, which require the unanimous consent of all EU members.

Jonathan B. Slapin traces the historical development of the veto privilege in the EU and how a veto---or veto threat---has been employed in treaty negotiations of the past two decades. As he explains, the importance of veto power in treaty negotiations is one of the features that distinguishes the EU from other international organizations in which exit and expulsion threats play a greater role. At the same time, the prominence of veto power means that bargaining in the EU looks more like bargaining in a federal system. Slapin's findings have significant ramifications for the study of international negotiations, the design of international organizations, and European integration.

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cover of Vibrant Mosaic: A Deaf Sociologist Explores Issues Impacting Deaf and Hard of Hearing People

Vibrant Mosaic

A Deaf Sociologist Explores Issues Impacting Deaf and Hard of Hearing People

John B. Christiansen

Gallaudet University Press, 2025

In Vibrant Mosaic, John B. Christiansen examines a variety of topics that are relevant to deaf and hard of hearing people through the lens of a deaf sociologist. The book explores the arts and sports, the intersections of various cultures within Deaf communities, work and rehabilitation, advocacy, telecommunications and technology, and the Deaf President Now protest. Written in a conversational tone, each chapter is thoughtfully framed by a narrative vignette, illustrating the lived experiences of individuals and serving as a gateway to a broader discussion. Christiansen invites readers to engage with the rich history and contributions of deaf and hard of hearing people and shows how they have shaped their communities and transformed broader societal structures. Vibrant Mosaic is a celebration of a dynamic, multifaceted mosaic and its enduring impact on the human experience.
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cover of Vicarious Thrills: A Championship Season of High School Basketball

Vicarious Thrills

A Championship Season of High School Basketball

Paul E. Bates

Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

This engaging book chronicles the Carbondale Terriers’ 1993–94 season, a season in which the team progressed all the way to the state high school basketball championship game before ending the season with a one-point loss.

Although arranged chronologically, the book is much more than a team diary. Paul E. Bates, whose son was one of the team’s starting guards, brings his sensitivity and expertise as an educational psychologist to bear on team sports in general and on how they define and are defined by the players and coaches that make up the teams and by the communities in which they thrive.

Bates frames the team’s experience by sharing his own personal love of basketball, beginning with his childhood years in Decatur, Illinois, when Stephen Decatur High School was a perennial Illinois high school powerhouse. Through his exploration of the sport and his involvement and interest in it, Bates creates a book that serves both as a rousing tale of youthful achievement and as a history of high school basketball in the state of Illinois.

Throughout his account, Bates repeatedly emphasizes his belief that extraordinary accomplishment is no accident but rather the result of years of preparation, dedication, and hard work. Most of the key performers on the 1993–94 Terriers, for example, had played together on a grade school all-star team that was undefeated. Then, in junior high, this group went on to win numerous championships, and in high school their remarkable success continued, even though their accomplishments were humbled by season-ending losses.

But Vicarious Thrills leads the reader through a very personal account of both the ups and downs of championship basketball. Triumph does not occur without defeat, and it is through defeat that the team members, as well as their families and other supporters, learn many important lessons. As significant as the individual and team accomplishments are in making up this story, the 1993–94 basketball season is more importantly a beginning rather than the defining moment in the lives of these young men.

As an inspiration and motivation to young people, and as a spark to memories of childhood aspirations for older readers, this book is a pleasure to read for individuals of all ages.

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cover of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Vice Patrol

Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Anna Lvovsky

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.
 
In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.
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cover of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Vice Patrol

Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Anna Lvovsky

University of Chicago Press, 2021

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

In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.
 
In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.
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cover of Vicente Ximenes, LBJ's Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric

Vicente Ximenes, LBJ's Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric

Michelle Hall Kells, with a foreword by Juan C. Guerra

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Beginning as a grassroots organizer in the 1950s, Vicente Ximenes was at the forefront of the movement for Mexican American civil rights through three presidential administrations, joining Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and later emerging as one of the highest-ranking appointees in Johnson’s administration. Ximenes succeeded largely because he could adapt his rhetoric for different audiences in his speeches and writings. Michelle Hall Kells elucidates Ximenes’s achievements through a rhetorical history of his career as an activist.
 
Kells draws on Ximenes’s extensive archive of speeches, reports, articles, and oral interviews to present the activist’s rhetorical history. After a discussion of Ximenes’s early life, the author focuses on his career as an activist, examining Ximenes’s leadership in several key civil rights events, including the historic 1967 White House Cabinet Committee Hearings on Mexican American Affairs. Also highlighted is his role in advancing Mexican Americans and Latinos from social marginalization to greater representation in national politics.
 
This book shows us a remarkable man who dedicated the majority of his life to public service, using rhetoric to mobilize activists for change to secure civil rights advances for his fellow Mexican Americans.
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cover of Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender

Vichy and the Eternal Feminine

A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender

Francine Muel-Dreyfus

Duke University Press, 2001

In this nuanced history of occupied France, Francine Muel-Dreyfus presents a powerful examination of the political and social construction of gender under the Vichy regime. Arguing that the regime used symbolic violence to reshape a liberal culture once based on individual rights into one of deference to hierarchical authority, Muel-Dreyfus shows how Vichy invoked theories of “natural” gender inequality and “eternal” opposition between the masculine and the feminine to justify women’s legal and social subordination, and how these ideologies were incorporated into the French woman’s sense of self.
Drawing on an extensive body of legislative, religious, educational, medical, and literary texts, Muel-Dreyfus examines how the Vichy regime brutally resurrected the gender politics that had been rejected during France’s social struggles in the 1930s. Strikingly, she reveals how this resurrection in turn fed into racial politics: childless women, for instance, and those who had abortions were construed—like Jews—as threats to France’s racial “purity.” With its atendant patterns of social inclusion and exclusion that were deeply rooted in the political and cultural history of the Third Republic, Muel-Dreyfus claims, a pervasive range of gendered metaphors helped to structure the very laws and policies of the Vichy regime.
The French language edition of this book was published in 1996 to wide acclaim. Contributing to theories about the role of gender in political philosophy, to the cultural anthropology of symbolic representation, and to our understanding of the history of fascism, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine will appeal to French, European, and twentieth-century historians; students and scholars of gender and racial studies; political scientists; and anthropologists.


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cover of Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature

Vicious Infants

Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature

Laura Soderberg

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

Childhood as scholars often recognize it—innocent, vulnerable, and above all, precious—is anchored in the cultural imagination of the early nineteenth-century United States, when an attitude of child worship drove sentimental politics and literature. But, not all childhoods were defined by love, education, and nurture. Singled out by nineteenth-century legal and medical establishments, children already marginalized by slavery, ethnicity, and poverty were increasingly branded as incorrigible, delinquent, and antisocial.

Vicious Infants offers a counterhistory of literary childhood as both perceived social threat and site of resistance, revealing that many children were not only cut off from family and society, they were also preemptively excluded from the rewards of citizenship and adulthood. Turning to prison documents, medical journals, overlooked periodical fiction, and literary works from William Apess, Harriet Wilson, Herman Melville, Susan Paul, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Laura Soderberg recovers alternate narratives of childhood and provides an important window into the cultural links between race, reproduction, and childhood in the antebellum period.
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cover of Vicksburg Besieged

Vicksburg Besieged

Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

A detailed analysis of the end of the Vicksburg Campaign and the forty-day siege
 
Vicksburg, Mississippi, held strong through a bitter, hard-fought, months-long Civil War campaign, but General Ulysses S. Grant’s forty-day siege ended the stalemate and, on July 4, 1863, destroyed Confederate control of the Mississippi River. In the first anthology to examine the Vicksburg Campaign’s final phase, nine prominent historians and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of previously unexamined aspects of the historic siege.

Ranging in scope from military to social history, the contributors’ invitingly written essays examine the role of Grant’s staff, the critical contributions of African American troops to the Union Army of the Tennessee, both sides’ use of sharpshooters and soldiers’ opinions about them, unusual nighttime activities between the Union siege lines and Confederate defensive positions, the use of West Point siege theory and the ingenuity of Midwestern soldiers in mining tunnels under the city’s defenses, the horrific experiences of civilians trapped in Vicksburg, the Louisiana soldier's defense of Jackson amid the strains of piano music, and the effect of the campaign on Confederate soldiers from the Trans-Mississippi region.

The contributors explore how the Confederate Army of Mississippi and residents of Vicksburg faced food and supply shortages as well as constant danger from Union cannons and sharpshooters. Rebel troops under the leadership of General John C. Pemberton sought to stave off the Union soldiers, and though their morale plummeted, the besieged soldiers held their ground until starvation set in. Their surrender meant that Grant’s forces succeeded in splitting in half the Confederate States of America.

Editors Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, along with their contributors—Andrew S. Bledsoe, John J. Gaines, Martin J. Hershock, Richard H. Holloway, Justin S. Solonick, Scott L. Stabler, and Jonathan M. Steplyk—give a rare glimpse into the often overlooked operations at the end of the most important campaign of the Civil War.
 
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cover of Victim of History: Cardinal Mindszenty, a biography

Victim of History

Cardinal Mindszenty, a biography

Margit Balogh

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

“Victim of history,” “a martyr from behind the Iron Curtain,” “the Hungarian Gandhi” – these are just some of the epithets which people used to describe Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, who was the last Hungarian prelate to use the title of prince primate. Today, Mindszenty has been forgotten in most countries except for Hungary, but when he died in 1975, he was known all over the world as a symbol of the struggle of the Catholic Church against communism. Cardinal Mindszenty held the post of archbishop of Esztergom from 1945 until 1974, but during this period of almost three decades he served barely four years in office. The political police arrested him on December 26, 1948, and the Budapest People’s Court subsequently sentenced him to life imprisonment. Based on the Stalinist practice of show trials, one of the accusations against Mindszenty, referring to his legitimist leanings, was his alleged attempt to re-establish Habsburg rule in Hungary. He regained freedom during the 1956 revolution but only for a few days. He was granted refuge by the US Embassy in Budapest between November 4, 1956 –September 28, 1971. In the fifteen years he spent at the American embassy enormous changes took place in the world while his personality remained frozen into the past. When in 1971 Pope Paul VI received the Hungarian foreign minister, he called Mindszenty “the victim of history”. His last years were spent free at last, but far away from his homeland. In Hungary, the Catholic believers eagerly await his beatification.
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cover of Victims and Warriors: Violence, History, and Memory in Amazonia

Victims and Warriors

Violence, History, and Memory in Amazonia

Casey High

University of Illinois Press, 2015

In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as ""wild Amazonian Indians"" in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region.

Victims and Warriors examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. Casey High explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. High shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.

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cover of Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002

Victims of the Chilean Miracle

Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002

Peter Winn, ed.

Duke University Press, 2004

Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policies—encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and society—produced an economic boom that some have hailed as a “miracle” to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment.

Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.

Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn

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cover of Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

Robert W. Cherny

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.
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cover of Victoria County History of Cumbria: Kirkoswald and Renwick

Victoria County History of Cumbria

Kirkoswald and Renwick

Richard Brockington and with Sarah Rose

University of London Press, 2019

Kirkoswald and Renwick is the first parish history to be produced by the Cumbria County History Trust in collaboration with Lancaster University for the Victoria County History of Cumbria. Covering 30 square miles of agricultural land and moorland, the modern civil parish of Kirkoswald lies between the river Eden and the Pennine heights, on the western edge of the North Pennine Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Kirkoswald township, anciently a market and small industrial centre, lies nine miles north east of Penrith. Until 1566 Kirkoswald Castle was the principal seat of the powerful Barons Dacre of the North whose massive landholdings extended over six counties. In 1523 Lord Thomas Dacre translated St Oswald’s church, a pre-conquest foundation for which the village is named, to collegiate status, and after the Reformation the college became a gentleman's residence, acquired in 1611 by the Fetherstonhaugh family whose home it still is after 400 years and 11 generations of descent. The economy, largely dependent on agriculture, benefited for 600 years from Kirkoswald's role as a market and business centre, with some manufacturing (textiles, paper and timber) powered by the waters of the Raven Beck. From 1631 to about 1850 there was coal mining on the Pennine Edge (with associated lime-burning). In the 21st century the parish remains an unspoilt and beautiful corner of England, home to some 30 farms specialising in animal husbandry, and many retired people and commuters to Penrith and Carlisle. 
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cover of Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century

Victorian Afterlife

Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century

John Kucich

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A foundational look at contemporary uses of the Victorian and the presence of the past in postmodern culture.

Celebrated films by Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee; best-selling novels by A. S. Byatt and William Gibson; revivals of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and nostalgic photography; computer graphics and cyberpunk performances: contemporary culture, high and low, has fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Major critical thinkers have found in the period the origins of contemporary consumerism, sexual science, gay culture, and feminism. And postmodern theory, which once drove a wedge between contemporary interpretation and its historical objects, has lately displayed a new self-consciousness about its own appropriations of the past. This diverse collection of essays begins a long-overdue discussion of how postmodernism understands the Victorian as its historical predecessor.

Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Brown U; Ian Baucom, Duke U; Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt U; Mary A. Favret, Indiana U; Simon Gikandi, U of Michigan; Jennifer Green-Lewis, George Washington U; Kali Israel, U of Michigan; Laurie Langbauer, U of North Carolina; Susan Lurie, Rice U; John McGowan, U of North Carolina; Judith Roof, Indiana U; Hilary M. Schor, USC; Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College; and Shelton Waldrep, U of Southern Maine.
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cover of Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer

Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer

John Paul M. Kanwit

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer by John Paul M. Kanwit examines the development of specialized art commentary in a period when art education became a national concern in Britain. The explosion of Victorian visual culture—evident in the rapid expansion of galleries and museums, the technological innovations of which photography is only the most famous, the public debates over household design, and the high profile granted to such developments as the Aesthetic Movement—provided art critics unprecedented social power. Scholarship to date, however, has often been restricted to a narrow collection of male writers on art: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde.
 
By including then-influential but now lesser-known critics such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Emilia Dilke, and by focusing on critical debates rather than celebrated figures, Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer refines our conception of when and how art criticism became a professional discipline in Britain. Jameson and Eastlake began to professionalize art criticism well before the 1860s, that is, before the date commonly ascribed to the professionalization of the discipline. Moreover, in concentrating on historical facts rather than legends about art, these women critics represent an alternative approach that developed the modern conception of art history. In a parallel development, the novelists under consideration—George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell—read a wide range of Victorian art critics and used their lessons in key moments of spectatorship.
 
This more inclusive view of Victorian art criticism provides key insights into Victorian literary and aesthetic culture. The women critics discussed in this book helped to fashion art criticism as itself a literary genre, something almost wholly ascribed to famous male critics.
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cover of Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott

Victorian Domesticity

Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott

Charles Strickland

University of Alabama Press, 1985

The subject of Victorian Domesticity is family life in America. The life and works of Louisa May Alcott served as the vehicle for exploring and analyzing this subject. Although Alcott was deeply influenced by popular currents of sentimentality, her own experience exposed her to the confusions and contradictions generated when sentiment confronted the reality of life in 19th-century America.

In the first chapter Strickland outlines the ways in which sentimentality colored the perception of 19th-century Americans about such issues as courtship, marriage, the relationship between the sexes, generational relationships, and the relationship between the nuclear family and the community outside the family. Chapters two and three trace Alcott’s childhood and adolescent experiences, exploring the tensions that developed between Louisa and her father, and detailing the ways in which she carried the double burden of being both poor and female as she sought her identity as a writer.

The following six chapters treat the varieties of family life that appear in Alcott’s stories, the impact of feminism on her life, and her emphasis on the importance of child nurture. In the final two chapters the author treats the relationships that Alcott perceived between the family and the world around it and assesses the legacy of the Victorian family idea.


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cover of Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain

Victorian Freaks

The Social Context of Freakery in Britain

Marlene Tromp

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, “missing links,” and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of “consolidation” for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of “freakery” and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”; Daniel Lambert, “King of the Fat Men”; Julia Pastrana, “The Bear Woman”; and Laloo “The Marvellous Indian Boy” and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.


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cover of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural

Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide

Women Writers and the Supernatural

Vanessa D. Dickerson

University of Missouri Press, 1996

During the nineteenth century, British society was making rapid advancements in science and technology. While the men became materially productive, women were expected to be the fulcrums of society's changes. As one means of adjusting to these changes, many women focused on supernaturalism and spirituality.

In Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, Vanessa D. Dickerson analyzes women's spirituality in a materialistic age by examining the supernatural fiction of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot and provides interpretive readings of familiar texts like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Other works by lesser-known authors are also examined.

Technological advances eliminated many of the jobs women were accustomed to doing. This left women looking for their place in society. A sense of "in-betweenness" developed in these women who were now expected to attend not only to the physical but also to the moral and spiritual needs of the family. As an answer to this "in-betweenness" some channeled their power toward the art of writing. Because people in the mid-1800s were so thoroughly engaged in scientific thought and advancements, supernatural folklore and spirituality were disreputable ideas for anyone, especially women, to explore. Ghosts and spirits were tied to old-wives' tales, superstitions, and legends. However, by focusing on these concepts and using fiction as an outlet, women were able to make great strides in being seen and heard. The art of writing functioned as an exploration of their spiritualism in which women discovered expression, freedom, and power.

This perceptive, well-written book will add a new dimension to our understanding of women's supernatural writings of the Victorian era. Scholars of Victorian literature, women's studies, and popular culture will benefit from its insights.

[more]
cover of Victorian Jamaica

Victorian Jamaica

Timothy Barringer and Wayne Modest, editors

Duke University Press, 2018

Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black Jamaicans and colonial institutions; contextualize race within ritual and performance; and outline how material and visual culture helped shape the complex politics of colonial society. By narrating Victorian history from a Caribbean perspective, this richly illustrated volume—featuring 270 full-color images—offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Jamaica that expands our understanding of the wider history of the British Empire and Atlantic world during this period.

Contributors. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tim Barringer, Anthony Bogues, David Boxer, Patrick Bryan, Steeve O. Buckridge, Julian Cresser, John M. Cross, Petrina Dacres, Belinda Edmondson, Nadia Ellis, Gillian Forrester, Catherine Hall, Gad Heuman, Rivke Jaffe, O'Neil Lawrence, Erica Moiah James, Jan Marsh, Wayne Modest, Daniel T. Neely, Mark Nesbitt, Diana Paton, Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, Veerle Poupeye, Jennifer Raab, James Robertson, Shani Roper, Faith Smith, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Dianne M. Stewart, Krista A. Thompson
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cover of Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-67

Victorian People

A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-67

Asa Briggs

University of Chicago Press, 1975

This text looks at the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From "John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War", and "Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work" to "Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools" and "Benjanmin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark", Asa Briggs provides an assessment of Victorian achievements; and in doing so conjures up an enviable picture of the progress and independence of the last century.

"For expounding this theme, this interaction of event and personality, Mr. Briggs is abundantly and happily endowed. He is always readable, often amusing, never facetious. He is widely read and widely interested. He has a sound historic judgment, and an unfailing sense for what is significant in the historic sequence and what is merely topical. . . . Above all, he is in sympathy with the age of which he is writing."—Times Literary Supplement
[more]
cover of Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences

Victorian Popularizers of Science

Designing Nature for New Audiences

Bernard Lightman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.
[more]
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Victorian Relativity

Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery

Christopher Herbert

University of Chicago Press, 2001

One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang in its essentials from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein; another is that scientific relativity is unconnected to ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativisms. Victorian Relativity challenges these assumptions, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle "the negation of the absolute" and set itself under the militant banner of "relativity."

Christopher Herbert shows that the idea of relativity produced revolutionary changes in one field after another in the nineteenth century. Surveying a long line of thinkers including Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, W. K. Clifford, W. S. Jevons, Karl Pearson, James Frazer, and Einstein himself, Victorian Relativity argues that the early relativity movement was bound closely to motives of political and cultural reform and, in particular, to radical critiques of the ideology of authoritarianism. Recuperating relativity from those who treat it as synonymous with nihilism, Herbert portrays it as the basis of some of our crucial intellectual and ethical traditions.
[more]
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Victorian Sacrifice

Ilana M. Blumberg

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, Ilana Blumberg offers a major reconsideration of the central Victorian ethic of self-sacrifice, suggesting that much of what we have taken to be the moral psychology of Victorian fiction may be understood in terms of the dramatic confrontation between Christian theology and the world of modern economic theory. As Victorian writers Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward strove to forge a practicable ethics that would reconcile the influences of an evangelical Christianity and its emphasis on selfless charity with the forces of laissez-faire capitalism and its emphasis on individual profit, they moved away from the cherished ideal of painful, solitary self-sacrifice in service of another’s good. Instead, Blumberg suggests, major novelists sought an ethical realism characterized by the belief that virtuous action could serve the collective benefit of the parties involved. At a mid-century moment of economic optimism, novelists transformed the ethical landscape by imagining what the sociologist Herbert Spencer would later call a “measured egoism,” an ethically responsible self-concern which might foster communal solidarity and material abundance.
 
Bringing the recent literary turns to ethics and to economics into mutual conversation, Blumberg offers us a new lens on a matter as pressing today as 150 years ago: the search for an ethics adequate to the hopes and fears of a new economy.
[more]
cover of Victorian Science in Context

Victorian Science in Context

Edited by Bernard Lightman

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Victorians were fascinated by the flood of strange new worlds that science was opening to them. Exotic plants and animals poured into London from all corners of the Empire, while revolutionary theories such as the radical idea that humans might be descended from apes drew crowds to heated debates. Men and women of all social classes avidly collected scientific specimens for display in their homes and devoured literature about science and its practitioners.

Victorian Science in Context captures the essence of this fascination, charting the many ways in which science influenced and was influenced by the larger Victorian culture. Contributions from leading scholars in history, literature, and the history of science explore questions such as: What did science mean to the Victorians? For whom was Victorian science written? What ideological messages did it convey? The contributors show how practical concerns interacted with contextual issues to mold Victorian science—which in turn shaped much of the relationship between modern science and culture.
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cover of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity

Victorian Scientific Naturalism

Community, Identity, Continuity

Edited by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of The Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. These scientific naturalists—led by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians such as William Kingdon Clifford, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall—sought to persuade both the state and the public that scientists, not theologians, should be granted cultural authority, since their expertise gave them special insight into society, politics, and even ethics.
           
In Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman bring together new essays by leading historians of science and literary critics that recall these scientific naturalists, in light of recent scholarship that has tended to sideline them, and that reevaluate their place in the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging in topic from daring climbing expeditions in the Alps to the maintenance of aristocratic protocols of conduct at Kew Gardens, these essays offer a series of new perspectives on Victorian scientific naturalism—as well as its subsequent incarnations in the early twentieth century—that together provide an innovative understanding of the movement centering on the issues of community, identity, and continuity.
[more]
cover of Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Victorian Sensation

The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

James A. Secord

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began.

In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print.

Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted.
 
Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society
[more]
cover of Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Edited by Richard Dellamora

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today.

One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects.

This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies.

Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.
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cover of Victorian Things

Victorian Things

Asa Briggs

University of Chicago Press, 1989

"No Victorianist, however well read, could fail to learn something from this book. It is a veritable plum pudding, bursting with interesting information and experience."—Christopher A. Kent, Victorian Periodicals Review
[more]
cover of Victorian Toronto, 1850 to 1900: Pattern and Process of Growth

Victorian Toronto, 1850 to 1900

Pattern and Process of Growth

Peter G. Goheen

University of Chicago Press, 1970

[more]
cover of Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842–1907

Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842–1907

Susan Shoenbauer Thurin

Ohio University Press, 1999

Three men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842–1907. Their range of perspectives, their acquaintance with one another and their similar scope of travel to Hong Kong, the treaty ports, and Sichuan lend intensity to their picture of China and the Western presence there.

What the travelers record reveals is a continuity in the response of the West and China to each other. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin’s study of these writings presents a rich tapestry of impressions, biases, and cultural perspectives that inform our own understanding of the Victorians and their views of the world outside their own.

The strange mix of opium and missionaries, the aura of fabled “Cathay” and its valuable trade items, the attraction and repulsion of the exotic otherness the travelers experience, reflect the political, religious, and racial views of their era, and explain the allure of the Orient that, in part, characterized their age. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 is a remarkable look into the cultural past.

[more]
cover of Victorine du Pont: The Force behind the Family

Victorine du Pont

The Force behind the Family

Leonard C. Spitale

University of Delaware Press, 2023

Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pont saga in America. As she recovered from personal tragedy, she became first tutor of her siblings and relations. This biography makes the case that Victorine has had the broadest—and most enduring—influence within the entire du Pont family of any family member. The intellectual heir of her venerable grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, although Victorine grew up in an age where women's opportunities were limited, her pioneering efforts in education, medicine, and religion transformed an entire millworkers’ community.
               
 
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Victors’ Justice

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial

Richard H. Minear

University of Michigan Press, 2001

In the aftermath of the war in the Pacific, the victorious Allies brought to trial Tojo Hideki and twenty-seven other Japanese leaders for “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity.” After two and one-half years, the twenty-five surviving defendants were found guilty of most of the charges. Richard Minear’s comprehensive account, the first in English when it appeared in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, reviews the background, proceedings, and verdict of the trial from its Charter and simultaneous Nuremberg “precedent” to its later effects. Minear challenges the world view behind the trial; links it to U.S. policy, particularly in Vietnam; and sharpens the argument on Nuremberg and the feasibility of war crimes trials. In the twenty-first century, as the United Nations undertakes war crimes proceedings in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the issues raised here thirty years ago loom larger than ever.  
[more]
cover of Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America

Victory Deferred

How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America

John-Manuel Andriote

University of Chicago Press, 1999

There is no question that AIDS has been, and continues to be, one of the most destructive diseases of the century, taking thousands of lives, devastating communities, and exposing prejudice and bigotry. But AIDS has also been a disease of transformation—it has fueled the national gay civil rights movement, altered medical research and federal drug testing, shaken up both federal and local politics, and inspired a vast cultural outpouring. Victory Deferred, the most comprehensive account of the epidemic in more than ten years, is the history of both the destruction and transformation wrought by AIDS.

John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation's most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural
responses to the disease, Victory Deferred artfully blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.

Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.

Victory Deferred draws on hundreds of original interviews, including first-hand accounts from: Virginia Apuzzo, Reverend Carl Bean, Marcus Conant, M.D., John D'Emilio, Anthony Fauci, M.D, Fenton Johnson, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., Armistead Maupin, Walt Odets, Torie Osborn, Eric Rofes, Urvashi Vaid, Timothy Westmoreland, and Reggie Williams.

"[Victory Deferred] is a richly textured account of the rise of the AIDS sector, that though detailed and comprehensive, reads quickly. The thematic organization of the book works especially well. The clear chronology of the events reveals how competing models of service delivery, treatment activism and private-public cooperation were subsumed into a national AIDS movement. The book should prove excellent for teaching or recreational reading."—Jose Gabilondo, Washington Post

"[A] fine history of the epidemic. . . . Andriote shines with chapters on less-covered but no less important subjects, including the multibillion-dollar 'AIDS industry' and private fund-raising groups. He brings together in one place many facts and figures heretofore unsynthesized."—Joe R. Neel, Boston Globe

"While many books have explored aspects of the impact of AIDS, Victory Deferred is among the most comprehensive. Andriote's adroit integration of the personal and the historical results is an illustrative, analytical account of the disease and its impact on the gay civil-rights movement. His depiction of the poignant struggles, heroic responses and resultant social and political gains emanating from AIDS is a perceptive document for our time—relevant to all readers, regardless of their sexual orientation."—John R. Killacky, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[A] well-researched and nuanced portrait of the many lives on which this grave disease has wrought both destruction and transformation."—Publishers Weekly

"Andriote combines broad strokes and telling details in this engaging history of the complicated war against both disease and bigotry."—Library Journal
[more]
cover of Victory on Two Fronts: The Cleveland Indians and Baseball through the World War II Era

Victory on Two Fronts

The Cleveland Indians and Baseball through the World War II Era

Scott H. Longert

Ohio University Press, 2022

Beginning with the Cleveland Indians’ hard luck during World War II, this thrilling history follows the team through its historic role in racial integration and its legendary postwar comeback. Rich with player photographs and stories, this book is sure to excite American history buffs and baseball fans alike. In early 1942, baseball team owners across the country scrambled to assemble makeshift rosters from the remaining ballplayers who had not left the sport for the armed forces. The Cleveland Indians suffered a tremendous loss when star pitcher Bob Feller became the first Major Leaguer to enlist, taking his twenty-plus wins per year with him. To make matters worse, the Indians’ new player-manager, Lou Boudreau, had no coaching or managing experience. The resulting team was mediocre, and players struggled to keep up morale. Feller’s return in late 1945 sparked a spectacular comeback. A year later Bill Veeck bought the franchise and, over the next two years, signed the first American League players to break the color barrier: Larry Doby and Satchel Paige. The 1948 season ended with the Indians and Boston Red Sox tied, resulting in the American League’s first playoff game. Thanks in part to rookie Gene Bearden’s outstanding pitching, the Indians went on to beat the National League’s Boston Braves for their second World Series title.
[more]
cover of Victory without Violence: The First Ten Years of the St. Louis Committee of Racial Equality (CORE), 1947-1957

Victory without Violence

The First Ten Years of the St. Louis Committee of Racial Equality (CORE), 1947-1957

Mary Kimbrough & Margaret W. Dagen

University of Missouri Press, 2000

Winner, Missouri Conference on History Book Award, 2001

Victory without Violence is the story of a small, integrated group of St. Louisans who carried out sustained campaigns from 1947 to 1957 that were among the earliest in the nation to end racial segregation in public accommodations. Guided by Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action, the St. Louis Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) conducted negotiations, demonstrations, and sit-ins to secure full rights for the African American residents of St. Louis.

The book opens with an overview of post-World War II racial injustice in the United States and in St. Louis. After recounting the genesis of St. Louis CORE, the writers vividly relate activities at lunch counters, cafeterias, and restaurants, demonstrating CORE's remarkable success in winning over initially hostile owners, manager, and service employees. A detailed review of its sixteen-month campaign at a major St. Louis department store, Stix, Baer & Fuller, illustrates the groups' patient persistence. Kimbrough and Dagen show after the passage of a public accommodations ordinance in 1961, CORE's goal of equal access was realized throughout the city of St. Louis.

On the scene reports drawn from CORE newsletters (1951-1955) and reminiscences by members appear throughout the text. In a closing chapter, the authors trace the lasting effects of the CORE experience on the lives of its members. Victory without Violence casts light on a previously obscured decade in St. Louis civil rights history.

[more]
cover of Victura: The Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea

Victura

The Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea

James W. Graham

University Press of New England, 2015

To truly understand the dynamics and magic of the Kennedy family, one must understand their passion for sailing and the sea. Many families sail together, but the Kennedys’ relationship with Victura, the 25-foot sloop purchased in 1932, stands apart. Throughout their brief lives, Joe Jr., Jack, and Bobby spent many hours racing Victura. Lack of effort in a race by one of his sons could infuriate Joseph P. Kennedy, and Joe Jr. and Jack ranked among the best collegiate sailors in New England. Likewise, Eunice emerged as a gifted sailor and fierce competitor, the equal of any of her brothers. The Kennedys believed that Jack’s experience sailing Victura helped him survive the sinking of his PT boat during World War II. In the 1950s, glossy Life magazine photos of Jack and Jackie on Victura’s bow helped define the winning Kennedy brand. Jack doodled sketches of Victura during Oval Office meetings, and it’s probable that his love of seafaring played a role in his 1961 decision to put a man on the moon, an enterprise he referred to as “spacefaring.” Ted loved Victura as much as any of his siblings did and, with his own children and the children of his lost brothers as crew, he sailed into his old age: past the shoals of an ebbing career, and into his eventual role as the “Lion of the Senate.” In Victura, James W. Graham charts the progress of America’s signature twentieth-century family dynasty in a narrative both stunningly original and deeply gripping. This true tale of one small sailboat is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great story of the Kennedys.
[more]
cover of Vida Zoo-cial: The Buenos Aires Zoo and the Making of Argentine Society, 1875–1924

Vida Zoo-cial

The Buenos Aires Zoo and the Making of Argentine Society, 1875–1924

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr

Vanderbilt University Press, 2025

Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association, Nineteenth-Century Section, 2026

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth‑century Buenos Aires, elites attempted to tackle growing poverty and social problems with a suite of social, educational, and medical reforms, hoping to make the city and larger nation more “modern” and “progressive” on the world stage. Known as the “social question,” this turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the future of the city and nation was undergirded by a larger set of social Darwinist beliefs about the biological and racial inferiority of immigrants and the working class, linking them to higher susceptibility to alcoholism, sexual deviancy, insanity, and disease.

In Vida Zoo-cial, Ashley Elizabeth Kerr argues that the Buenos Aires Zoo and its many animal species were an important tool in attempts to remake Argentinian society. Elites used the zoo’s physical spaces, programming, and visual and literary representations of its animals to try to educate and “improve” the masses, especially immigrants and the poor, but stopped short of supporting more radical social transformations. Drawing upon extensive archival research from the zoo’s archive, including correspondence, municipal reports, receipts, and employment records, as well as a range of literary and popular culture sources, Kerr records these efforts, which included enlisting lionesses as object lessons in proper motherhood and elephants as model immigrants. Although some projects were successful, Kerr also documents the many ways others went awry when the zoo's animals and the humans who came to see them failed to cooperate.

Vida Zoo-cial is not only a story about how the poor and working class resisted elite efforts for social reform founded upon racialized beliefs and pseudoscience, but also one that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between humans and non‑humans.

[more]
cover of Vidding: A History

Vidding

A History

Francesca Coppa

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work.

Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.

 
[more]
cover of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty

Science, Liberalism, and Private Life

Deborah R. Coen

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

[more]
cover of Viet Nam Expose: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society

Viet Nam Expose

French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society

Gisele Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2002

A collection of essays written on twentieth-century Vietnamese society, Viêt Nam Exposé is one of only a handful of books written by French scholars for an English-speaking audience. The volume is multidisciplinary and represents a new trend in Vietnamese studies that addresses issues beyond politics, wars, and violence, exploring the complexity of more subtle power relationships in Vietnamese society.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, "Vietnamese Society in the Early Twentieth Century," takes a micro approach to the study of Vietnamese society on the eve of the irreversible social transformation that occurred as the colonial infrastructure took root in Indochina. Part II, "Vietnamese Intellectuals: Contesting Colonial Power," contains biographical accounts of Vietnamese intellectuals who tried to reform their society under colonial domination. Part III, "Post-Colonial Vietnam: From Welfare State to Market-Oriented Economy," traces Vietnam's search for a viable economic model while maintaining itself as a socialist state.
The book speaks to diverse themes, including the nature of village life, the development of health care during the colonial era, the status of women, the role of Vietnamese intellectuals in the anticolonial struggle, the building of a socialist state, contemporary rural migration, labor relations, and Vietnam in an age of globalization.
Gisele Bousquet is Research Associate at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Pierre Brocheux is Maître de Conference of History, Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII.
[more]
cover of Viet Nam: Borderless Histories

Viet Nam

Borderless Histories

Edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Moving beyond past histories of Viet Nam that have focused on nationalist struggle, this volume brings together work by scholars who are re-examining centuries of Vietnamese history.  Crossing borders and exploring ambiguities, the essays in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories draw on international archives and bring a range of inventive analytical approaches to the global, regional, national, and local narratives of Vietnamese history. Among the topics explored are the extraordinary diversity between north and south, lowland and highland, Viet and minority, and between colonial, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and dynastic influences. The result is an exciting new approach to Southeast Asia's past that uncovers the complex and rich history of Viet Nam.


“A wonderful introduction to the exciting work that a new generation of scholars is engaging in.”—Liam C. Kelley, International Journal of Asian Studies
[more]
cover of Viet Nam: Tradition and Change

Viet Nam

Tradition and Change

H?u Ng?c

Ohio University Press, 2016

During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.

With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.

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cover of Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973)

Vietnam Zippos

American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973)

Edited by Sherry Buchanan

University of Chicago Press, 2007

We are the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful
—from an engraving on a Vietnam-era Zippo lighter
 
In 1965, journalist Morley Safer followed the United States Marines on a search and destroy mission into Cam Ne. When the Marines he accompanied reached the village, they ordered the civilians there to evacuate their homes—grass huts whose thatched roofs they set ablaze with Zippo lighters. Safer’s report on the event soon aired on CBS and was among the first to paint a harrowing portrait of the War in Vietnam. LBJ responded to the segment furiously, accusing Safer of having “shat on the American flag.” For the first time since World War II, American boys in uniform had been portrayed as murderers instead of liberators. Our perception of the war—and the Zippo lighter—would never be the same.

But as this stunning book attests, the Zippo was far more than an instrument of death and destruction. For the American soldiers who wielded them, they were a vital form of social protest as well. Vietnam Zippos showcases the engravings made by U.S. soldiers on their lighters during the height of the conflict, from 1965 to 1973. In a real-life version of the psychedelic war portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Sherry Buchanan tells the fascinating story of how the humble Zippo became a talisman and companion for American GIs during their tours of duty. Through a dazzling array of images, we see how Zippo lighters were used during the war, and we discover how they served as a canvas for both personal and political expression during the Age of Aquarius, engraved with etchings of peace signs and marijuana leaves and slogans steeped in all the rock lyrics, sound bites, combat slang, and antiwar mottos of the time.

Death from Above. Napalm Sticks to Kids. I Love You Mom, From a Lonely Paratrooper. The engravings gathered in this copiously illustrated volume are at once searing, caustic, and moving, running the full emotional spectrum with both sardonic reflections—I Love the Fucking Army and the Army Loves Fucking Me—and poignant maxims—When the Power of Love Overcomes the Love of Power, the World Will Know Peace. Part pop art and part military artifact, they collectively capture the large moods of the sixties and the darkest days of Vietnam—all through the world of the tiny Zippo.
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