Results by title

Votes for Delaware Women is the first book-length study of the woman suffrage struggle in Delaware, placing it within the rich historical scholarship of the national story. It looks especially at why, despite decades of suffrage organizing and an epic struggle in Dover, in the spring of 1920, the legislature refused to make Delaware the final state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. The book traces how, starting in the 1890s, white and African American women organized and advocated for "votes for women," first by revising the state constitution and then through a federal amendment. Within the state's two major suffrage organizations, the Delaware Equal Suffrage Association (DESA), an affiliate of the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the Delaware branch of the National Woman's Party (NWP), divisions over strategy and tactics widened into fissures, especially during the Great War, making it difficult to unite in a common endeavor. Delaware was unusual as a border state that was segregated but did not disfranchise African Americans. In the end, the book argues, a combination of racial and class issues doomed the ratification effort.

A fascinating exploration of pagan Anglo-Saxon culture-a world caught on the boundary between competing ideologies and contrasting social systems.

Contributors: James Campbell, Martin Carver, Robert Payson Creed, Roberta Frank, Michael N. Geselowitz, Gloria Polizzotti Greis, Henrik M. Jansen, Simon Keynes, Edward Schoenfeld, Jana Schulman, Alan M. Stahl, Wesley M. Stevens, and Else Roesdahl.Medieval Cultures Series, volume 5

In the harsh winter of 1779, as the leader of a flotilla of settlers, John Donelson loaded his family and thirty slaves into a forty-foot flatboat at the present site of Kingsport, Tennessee. Their journey into the wilderness led to the founding of a settlement now known as Nashville—over one thousand river miles away. In the fall of 2016, photographer John Guider retraced the Donelson party’s journey in his hand-built 14½' motorless rowing sailboat while making a visual documentation of the river as it currently exists 240 years later.

This photo book contains more than 120 striking images from the course of the journey, allowing the reader to see how much has changed and how much has remained untouched in the two and a half centuries since Donelson first took to the water. Equally significant, the essays include long-ignored contemporary histories of both the Cherokee whom Donelson encountered and the slaves he brought with him, some of whom did not survive the journey.

Guider, a professional photographer, has created images of every point in the thousand-mile trip from a platform just a few feet above the waterline of three of Tennessee’s most notable rivers.

In the first half of the 20th century, the reputation of American Catholics was not so good. Didn't the novelist Flannery O'Connor write that their main concern was to “install central heating in holy places”? This book reveals a little-known page in the intellectual history of American Catholicism, and shows another face of transatlantic relations. “It is in the order of spirit and culture that the Atlantic community assumes its most fundamental historical importance”, as Jacques Maritain noted. Before many European intellectuals found themselves in exile in New York between 1940 and 1945, and long before the influence of “French Theory” in the United States, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, Charles De Koninck and Yves Simon taught in North America between the wars and founded institutes in Toronto, Notre Dame, Laval, Princeton, destined to play a decisive role in the intellectual mutations of North American Catholicism and beyond. To trace the history of these philosophers, Florian Michel had access to archives in France, Italy, the USA and Canada.

Vulgar Genres examines gay pornographic writing, showing how literary fiction was both informed by pornography and amounts to a commentary on the genre’s relation to queer male erotic life.

Long fixated on visual forms, the field of porn studies is overdue for a book-length study of gay pornographic writing. Steven Ruszczycky delivers with an impressively researched work on the ways gay pornographic writing emerged as a distinct genre in the 1960s and went on to shape queer male subjectivity well into the new millennium.

​Ranging over four decades, Ruszczycky draws on a large archive of pulp novels and short fiction, lifestyle magazines and journals, reviews, editorial statements, and correspondence. He puts these materials in conversation with works by a number of contemporary writers, including William Carney, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delany, John Rechy, and Matthew Stadler. While focused on the years 1966 to 2005, Vulgar Genres reveals that the history of gay pornographic writing during this period informs much of what has happened online over the past twenty years, from cruising to the production of digital pornographic texts. The result is a milestone in porn studies and an important contribution to the history of gay life.

Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education.
 
For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet?
 
In Vulgar Marxism, Edward Baring seeks an answer by delving into debates over Marxism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He shows that this common phrase wasn’t aimed primarily at popular understandings of Marx. Rather, it was used to attack intellectuals for failing to teach Marx’s theory to the working masses correctly. His history of “vulgar Marxism” homes in on the project of mass worker education at a time when the project was both widely pursued and fiercely contested.
 
Worker education offered a mechanism through which Marxist theory was meant to promote large-scale social and political change, and it drew on a massive infrastructure of schools, publishing houses, and educational bureaus that stretched across Europe and reached millions. By centering this project, Baring radically recasts the history of Marxism from the Second International to World War II. He challenges classic oppositions between “economistic” and “cultural” versions of Marxism; rereads many of the most significant Marxist theorists of the time, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci; and offers new resources for understanding how Marxist ideas transformed as they traveled around Europe and then spread throughout the world.