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A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Public rituals have always held a vital place in American culture. By far the noisiest and most popular of these to emerge in the nation's early years was Independence Day. After a decade of fitful starts, the Fourth of July eclipsed local and regional patriotic observances to become the premier “American Jubilee.” Celebrating the Fourth provides a history of this holiday and explores its role in shaping a national identity and consciousness in three cities—Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia—during the first fifty years of the American republic. Independence Day celebrations justified, validated, and helped maintain nationalism among people unused to offering political allegiance beyond their own state borders. As the observances became increasingly popular and symbolically important, political partisans competed hotly for the right to control the meaning of the festivals.

"Written in 1977 and 1981, the novellas translated in this volume form a compelling unity and testify to the creativeness and vitality of contemporary Arab fiction." -Choice Abd al-Hakim Qasim (1935-1990), one of modern Egypt's great novelists, began writing short stories while imprisoned for his leftwing politics under the Nasser regime in the 1960s. This period in Qasim's life, along with his subsequent exile in Germany and his opposition to the Camp David Agreement, led him to avoid political commentary in his writing. He focused on people and events in the Egyptian village and the down-to-earth Sufi Islam practiced there. Still, the history of his political beliefs ensured his work would remain controversial, and most was published abroad in Beirut or Baghdad. The power and inventiveness of modern Egyptian writing are manifest in this first English-language translation of two novellas that Qasim published together during his lifetime. Al-Mahdi is the story of Awadallah, an impoverished Coptic umbrella maker forced to convert to Islam by members of the local Muslim brotherhood. Awadallah's conversion, both unwilling and insincere, torments him with guilt, and he soon falls gravely ill. At the same time, subplots explore the philandering mayor's attempt to seduce his maid, and an affectionate homoerotic relationship between two young men in the Brotherhood. Elegantly narrated and visually evocative, Al-Mahdi illuminates everyday religious tensions in a small Egyptian town. Where Al-Mahdi ends with Awadallah's death, Good News from the Afterlife opens virtually at the mouth of the grave--a testament to Qasim's versatility and compositional sense. This fantastical story brilliantly interweaves a young village boy's thoughts and the spiritual, sensual, and sometimes macabre recollections of a dead man newly lowered into his burial place. Memories and experiences mingle with images of the afterlife, as the deceased is judged by the Muslim angels of death and the boy suddenly hears that his grandfather has died. In the end, the boy awakes atop a grave, throwing into question which, if not all, of the story's strange events had been dreamed. "[T]here's more than Mahfouz in modern Egyptian fiction, and it's good to have Qasim's work among us." -Kirkus Reviews

For many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Michigan's native peoples, the Anishnabeg, thrived in the forests and along the shores of the Great Lakes. Theirs were cultures in delicate social balance and in economic harmony with the natural order. Rites of Conquest details the struggles of Native Americans Michigan—the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, and their neighbors—to maintain unique traditions in the wake of contact with Euro-Americans. The French quest for furs, the colonial aggression of the British, and the invasion of native homelands by American settlers is the backdrop for this fascinating saga of their resistance and accommodation to the new social order. Minavavana's victory at Fort Michilimackinac, Pontiac's attempts to expel the British, Pokagon's struggle to maintain a Michigan homeland, and Big Abe Le Blanc's fight for fishing rights are a few of the many episodes recounted in the pages of this book.

Beyond wars and warriors, Rites of Conquest is also about diplomacy and negotiation, mythology and magic, birth and death, and the joys and trials of daily life in the native villages of the Great Lakes region. Today, Michigan's Native American citizens struggle to solve problems that are a legacy of their past, while they attempt to maintain a distinctive place within modern society. In facing this challenge they often turn to the values and traditions that set them apart as the most enduring peoples of the Great Lakes region.

Long buried in the archives of the Dominican studium at Le Saulchoir, the lectorate dissertation of Fr. Niels Krogh Rasmussen, OP, is now made available to a wider English-speaking audience interested in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s contribution to liturgical theology. Originally written in 1966, just after the Second Vatican Council, Rasmussen’s work is a witness to the intense liturgical ferment of those years and expresses an early attempt to appropriate the then-new postconciliar mode of liturgical reflection, bolstered by attentive historical-critical work, in the spirit of Saint Thomas. Treating the saint’s reflection on the Mass rites in the Summa Theologiae, Rasmussen shows how Aquinas, while writing in the disputed question format, nevertheless presents his readers with an expositio Missae, placing him within the tradition of great medieval Mass expositors, from Amalarius of Metz and Florus of Lyon in the ninth century, Saint Albert the Great and Durandus of Mende in the thirteenth century. By isolating this distinctly liturgical content (without, however, completely eschewing its original quaestio format), Rasmussen is able to highlight the distinctiveness of Thomas’s liturgical thought against that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Even if certain insights or expressions of Rasmussen’s may sound dated to the contemporary reader—since this work was composed in that interim period between Inter Oecumenici (1964) and the promulgation of the Missal of Paul VI (1969)—such insights in fact add to the historical value of this dissertation, offering a snapshot of a time when the reform of the liturgy was very much a living process with a terminus yet to be determined. 60 years later, students of Thomism, liturgical theology, and medieval studies can continue to benefit from this work.