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This superb documentary collection illuminates the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in seventeenth-century New England. The cases examined begin in 1638, extend to the Salem outbreak in 1692, and document for the first time the extensive Stamford-Fairfield, Connecticut, witch-hunt of 1692–1693. Here one encounters witch-hunts through the eyes of those who participated in them: the accusers, the victims, the judges. The original texts tell in vivid detail a multi-dimensional story that conveys not only the process of witch-hunting but also the complexity of culture and society in early America. The documents capture deep-rooted attitudes and expectations and reveal the tensions, anger, envy, and misfortune that underlay communal life and family relationships within New England’s small towns and villages.

Primary sources include court depositions as well as excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Each section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to important secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses a wide range of important issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.

Witches, Ghosts, and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians by the renowned West Virginia folklorist and former West Virginia University English professor Patrick W. Gainer not only highlights stories that both amuse and raise goosebumps, but also begins with a description of the people and culture of the state. Based on material Gainer collected from over fifty years of field research in West Virginia and the region, Witches, Ghosts, and Signs presents the rich heritage of the southern Appalachians in a way that has never been equaled. Strange and supernatural tales of ghosts, witches, hauntings, disappearances, and unexplained murders that have been passed down from generation to generation from as far back as the earliest settlers in the region are included in this collection that will send chills down the spine.

Muriel Painter's account of Yaqui beliefs and ceremonies is based on her firsthand observations over the course of four decades. By the time Painter died in 1974, she was as familiar with Yaqui culture as on outsider could be and left behind the manuscript from which this volume arose. It was reviewed before the original publication in 1986 by a Yaqui committee and edited for publication by Edward Spicer.

With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India—individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane.

Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Gayatri Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships among local and global, sexual and moral, economies.

This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in the study of gender and sexuality.

Two generations of Alabamians will welcome the reappearance of this classic: those who loved it when it was published to national acclaim in 1948 and who have missed it during the many years it has been out of print, and those who have enjoyed Viola Goode Liddell’s follow-up success, A Place of Springs, and eagerly seek more from her pen.

When Kent Meyers was sixteen years old, his father died of a stroke. There was corn to plant, cattle to feed, and a farm to maintain. Here, in a fresh and vibrant voice, Meyers recounts the wake of his father’s death and reflects on families, farms, and rural life in the Midwest.

Meyers tells the story of growing up on the farm, from the joys of playing in the hayloft as a boy to the steady pattern of chores. He describes the power of winter prairie winds, the excitement of building a fort in the woods, and the self-respect that comes from canning 120 quarts of tomatoes grown on your own land.

Meyers’s father is the central figure around whom these memories revolve. After his father’s death, Meyers fills his shoes out of necessity and respect. In doing so, he discovers that his father was a great teacher and that he himself is no longer a boy but a man. Perhaps the most moving passages of The Witness of Combines acknowledge the simultaneous sadness and pride of growing up in response to death. Meyers recalls planting and harvesting the last crop, selling the family farm, and other emotional moments in a testament to his father, the family bond, and the value of hard work.

In Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace, Mary Brennan examines conservative women's anti-communist activism in the years immediately after World War II.

Brennan details the actions and experiences of prominent anti-communists Jean Kerr McCarthy, Margaret Chase Smith, Freda Utley, Doloris Thauwald Bridges, Elizabeth Churchill Brown, and Phyllis Stewart Schlafly. She describes the Cold War context in which these women functioned and the ways in which women saw communism as a very real danger to domestic security and American families. Millions of women, Brennan notes, expanded their notions of household responsibilities to include the crusade against communism. From writing letters and hosting teas to publishing books and running for political office, they campaigned against communism and, incidentally, discovered the power they had to effect change through activism.

Brennan reveals how the willingness of these deeply conservative women to leave the domestic sphere and engage publicly in politics evinces the depth of America's postwar fear of communism. She further argues that these conservative, anti-communist women pushed the boundaries of traditional gender roles and challenged assumptions about women as political players by entering political life to publicly promote their ideals.Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace offers a fascinating analysis of gender and politics at a critical point in American history. Brennan's work will instigate discussions among historians, political scientists, and scholars of women's studies.

The Boundary Waters region of Minnesota and Ontario is a vast wilderness of quiet beauty, visited and loved by many, but home to only a rugged few. In 1928, Justine Kerfoot arrived, a Northwestern University graduate student headed for medical school until her family lost both their Illinois homes in the stock market crash. Thrust into year-round life at her mother's fledgling summer resort, Justine was confronted with learning survival in the frigid north woods, a challenge she met with extraordinary verve and recounts with great candor and humor in this remarkable book. As she relates her lessons from the Canadian Indians across the lake-how to paddle a canoe, hunt moose, drive a dog team, and stay warm at minus 40 degrees-Kerfoot gives us a rich sense of the world of the Indians and fur trappers. Telling the story of settlement in this rough resort area fifty miles from a town, she describes the effects of depression and forest fires and the struggles for modernization in the wild. Kerfoot has paddled all the lakes and streams in this border country, and she knows them well. Her lyrical descriptions of wildlife and seasonal environments express the deep reverence for nature that has become her way of life. In a final chapter, she reflects on the impact of restricted wilderness status on the region-called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness since 1978-and on her own convictions about people living in the wild.

This anthology contains nine stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) that dramatize the dilemmas and strategies of the first generation of American women writers to see themselves as artists. As the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and the intimate friend of Henry James, Woolson was acutely conscious of her situation as a woman writer. Her stories offer answers to her own urgent questions: "Why do literary women break down so?" At the same time, they demonstrate that women's struggles with patriarchal culture and with their own womanhood could be a source of distunctive female art.
Woolson's early stories are witty and incisive critiques of those conventions of literary Romanticism that encode women's marginality. Set in the wilderness that surrounded the Great Lakes, these stories revise male literary texts to clear a space where women's voices can be heard.
In a group of stories set in the post-Civil War south, women artists are shown as exiles both away from their homes and from themselves. One superb tale, "Felipa," pairs a repressed woman artist with a wild child who rejects both patriarchal religion and approved heterosexual behavior. Woolson here explores the possibility of a collaboration between female wildness and female form of control.
Stories written during Woolson's years in Europe confront woman artists with successful male writers and critics who resemble Henry James. These carefully crafted stories reflect James's mixed impact on women artists: as a model literary realist and as a subtle denigrator of women's talent.
Joan Weimar's introduction uses unpublished letters to reconstruct and interpret Wool's life and her probable suicide. It places Woolson in the male and female literary traditions of her time and offers extended analysis of the stories.

Fascinated by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, Tanya Merchant ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas.
 
Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, Merchant challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, she notes, Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Merchant's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, Merchant ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.
 
Important and revelatory, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan looks into music's part in constructing gendered national identity and the complicated role of femininity in a former Soviet republic's national project.
 

     This classic study of Black
        Carib culture and its preservation through ancestral rituals organized
        by older women now includes a foreword by Constance R. Sutton and an afterword
        by the author.
      "One of the outstanding
        studies of this genre. . . . Refreshingly, the book has good photographs,
        as well as strong endnotes and bibliography, and very useful tables, figures,
        maps, and index." -- Choice
      "An outstanding contribution
        to the literature on female-centered bilateral kinship and residence."
       
        -- Grant D. Jones, American Ethnologist
      "A richly detailed account
        of a contemporary culture in which older women are important, valued,
        and self-respecting."
        -- Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
      "A combination of competent
        research, interwoven themes, and an easily readable, sometimes beautifully
        evocative, prose style." -- Heather Strange, The Gerontologist

 

Get to know the women of Jeme, a Christian enclave in Egypt that existed from 600 to 800 C.E.Using texts documenting the women's activities, the physical remains of their possessions, and the writings of the local religious leaders, T. G. Wilfong traces the lives and careers of individual women and, through them, arrives at an understanding of the reality of women's lives in this place and time.
Contrary to the submissive, demure ideals for women proposed by the religious writers of Christian Egypt, the evidence from Jeme points to a more complex, dynamic situation. Women were active in the home, but some also played important and visible parts in the religious and economic life of their community. A bishop's attempts to monitor the behavior of the women in his district, the intricate inheritance dispute between an aunt and her niece, one woman's pious donations of murals to a church, three women's agonized decisions to give up their children to the local monastery, and the transactions of a family of women moneylenders--all these episodes paint a vivid picture of life in a Coptic town.
Although the remains of Jeme have long been known to scholars, little synthetic work has been done on this rich source for social history in Egypt before and after the Muslim conquests. The Women of Jeme is the first book-length study of the evidence. It will be of interest to Egyptologists and papyrologists, as well as to scholars of Coptic studies, early Christianity, social history and women's studies. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and the author has taken care to make it accessible to anyone with an interest in the ancient world.
T. G. Wilfong is Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Assistant Curator for Greco-Roman Egypt, University of Michigan.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precise ricordanze (household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and celebrated. A wealth of other sources are tapped—including city statutes, private letters, philosophical works on marriage, paintings—to determine the social status of women. Klapisch-Zuber reveals how women, in their roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers, were largely subject to a family system that needed them but valued them little.

The Dumville family settled in central Illinois during an era of division and dramatic change. Arguments over slavery raged. Railroads and circuit-riding preachers brought the wider world to the prairie. Irish and German immigrants flooded towns and churches. Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz draw from an extraordinary archive at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to reveal how Ann Dumville and her daughters Jemima, Hephzibah, and Elizabeth lived these times. The letters tell the story of Ann, expelled from her Methodist church for her unshakable abolitionist beliefs; the serious and religious Jemima, a schoolteacher who started each school day with prayer; Elizabeth, enduring hard work as a farmer's wife, far away from the others; and Hephzibah, observing human folly and her own marriage prospects with the same wicked wit. Though separated by circumstances, the Dumvilles deeply engaged one another with their differing views on Methodism, politics, education, technological innovation, and relationships with employers. At the same time, the letters offer a rarely seen look at antebellum working women confronting privation, scarce opportunities, and the horrors of civil war with unwavering courage and faith.

A diverse group of writers and scholars follow the lead of noted folklorist Barre Toelken and consider, from the inside, the ways in which varied cultures in the American West understand and express their relations to the world around them. As Barre Toelken puts it in The Dynamics of Folklore, "'Worldview' refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it." In Worldviews and the American West, seventeen notable authors and scholars, employing diverse approaches and styles, apply Toelken's ideas about worldview to the American West. While the contributors represent a range of voices, methods, and visions, they are integrated through their focus on the theme of worldview in one region. Worldviews and the American West includes essays by Margaret K. Brady, Hal Cannon, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, James S. Griffith, Barry Lopez, Robert McCarl, Elliott Oring, Twilo Scofield, Steve Siporin, Kim Stafford, C. W. Sullivan III, Jeannie B. Thomas, George Venn, George B. Wasson, and William A. Wilson. Each of the authors in this collection attempts to get inside one or more of the worldviews of the many cultures that have come to share and interpret the American West. The result is a lively mix of styles and voices as the authors' own worldviews interact with the multiple perspectives of the diverse peoples (and, in Barry Lopez's "The Language of Animals," other species) of the West. This diversity matches the geography of the region they all call home and gives varied life and meaning to its physical and cultural landscape.

Ninety years ago, Knud Rasmussen’s popular account of his scientific expeditions through Greenland and North America introduced readers to the culture and history of arctic Natives. In the intervening century, a robust field of ethnographic research has grown around the Inuit and Yupiit of North America—but, until now, English-language readers have had little access to the broad corpus of work on Greenlandic natives.
Worldviews of the Greenlanders draws upon extensive Danish and Greenlandic research on Inuit arctic peoples—as well as Birgitte Sonne’s own decades of scholarship and fieldwork—to present in rich detail the key symbols and traditional beliefs of Greenlandic Natives, as well as the changes brought about by contact with colonial traders and Christian missionaries. It includes critical updates to our knowledge of the Greenlanders’ pre-colonial world and their ideas on space, time, and other worldly beings. This expansive work will be a touchstone of Arctic Native studies for academics who wish to expand their knowledge past the boundaries of North America.

Argentinian scholar and writer Enrique Anderson-Imbert is familiar to many North American students for his La Literatura de América Latina I and II, which are widely used in college Spanish courses. But Anderson-Imbert is also a noted creative writer, whose use of "magical realism" helped pave the way for such writers as Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, and Ocampo. In this anthology, Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón have chosen stories from the period 1965 to 1985 to introduce English-speaking readers to the creative work of Enrique Anderson-Imbert. Representative stories from the collections The Cheshire Cat, The Swindler Retires, Madness Plays at Chess, Klein's Bottle, Two Women and One Julián, and The Size of the Witches illustrate Anderson-Imbert's unique style and world view. Many are "short short" stories, which Anderson-Imbert calls casos (instances). The range of subjects and points of view varies widely, challenging such "realities" as time and space, right and wrong, science and religion. In a prologue, Anderson-Imbert tells an imaginary reader, "Each one of my stories is a closed entity, brief because it has caught a single spasm of life in a single leap of fantasy. Only a reading of all my stories will reveal my world-view." The reader asks, "And are you sure that it is worth the trouble?" Anderson-Imbert replies, "No." The unexpected, ironic ending is one of the great pleasures of reading Enrique Anderson-Imbert.

Systemic racism and sexism caused one of South Africa’s most important writers to disappear from public consciousness. Is it possible to justly restore her historical presence? Regina Gelana Twala, a Black South African woman who died in 1968 in Swaziland (now Eswatini), was an extraordinarily prolific writer of books, columns, articles, and letters. Yet today Twala’s name is largely unknown. Her literary achievements are forgotten. Her books are unpublished. Her letters languish in the dusty study of a deceased South African academic. Her articles are buried in discontinued publications. Joel Cabrita argues that Twala’s posthumous obscurity has not developed accidentally as she exposes the ways prejudices around race and gender blocked Black African women like Twala from establishing themselves as successful writers. Drawing upon Twala’s family papers, interviews, newspapers, and archival records from Pretoria, Uppsala, and Los Angeles, Cabrita argues that an entire cast of characters—censorious editors, territorial White academics, apartheid officials, and male African politicians whose politics were at odds with her own—conspired to erase Twala’s legacy. Through her unique documentary output, Twala marked herself as a radical voice on issues of gender, race, and class. The literary gatekeepers of the racist and sexist society of twentieth-century southern Africa clamped down by literally writing her out of the region’s history. Written Out also scrutinizes the troubled racial politics of African history as a discipline that has been historically dominated by White academics, a situation that many people within the field are now examining critically. Inspired by this recent movement, Cabrita interrogates what it means for her—a White historian based in the Northern Hemisphere—to tell the story of a Black African woman. Far from a laudable “recovery” of an important lost figure, Cabrita acknowledges that her biography inevitably reproduces old dynamics of White scholarly privilege and dominance. Cabrita’s narration of Twala’s career resurrects it but also reminds us that Twala, tragically, is still not the author of her own life story.