A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Connecting Alaskans tells the unique history of providing radio, television, phone, and Internet services to more than six hundred thousand square miles. It is a history of a place where military needs often trumped civilian ones, where ham radios offered better connections than telephone lines, and where television shows aired an entire day later than in the rest of the country.
Heather E. Hudson covers more than a century of successes while clearly explaining the connection problems still faced by remote communities today. Her comprehensive history is perfect for anyone interested in telecommunications technology and history, and she provides an important template for policy makers, rural communities, and developing countries struggling to develop their own twenty-first-century infrastructure.
Cyberspaces of Everyday Life provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the production of social space. Mark Nunes draws on the spatial analysis work of Henri Lefebvre to make sense of cyberspace as a social product. Looking at online education, he explores the ways in which the Internet restructures the university. Nunes also examines social uses of the World Wide Web and illustrates the ways online communication alters the relation between the global and the local. He also applies Deleuzian theory to emphasize computer-mediated communications’ performative elements of spatial production.
Addressing the social and cultural implications of spam and anti-spam legislation, as well as how the burst Internet stock bubble and the Patriot Act have affected the relationship between networked spaces and daily living, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life sheds new light on the question of virtual space and its role in the offline world.
Mark Nunes is associate professor and chair of the English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts Department at Southern Polytechnic State University.
Drawing on extensive research in corporate and government archives, Winseck and Pike illuminate the actions of companies and cartels during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, in many different parts of the globe, including Africa, Asia, and Central and South America as well as Europe and North America. The complex history they relate shows how cable companies exploited or transcended national policies in the creation of the global cable network, how private corporations and government agencies interacted, and how individual reformers fought to eliminate cartels and harmonize the regulation of world communications. In Communication and Empire, the multinational conglomerates, regulations, and the politics of imperialism and anti-imperialism as well as the cries for reform of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth emerge as the obvious forerunners of today’s global media.
Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
From computer networks to grocery store checkout scanners, it is easier and easier for governments, employers, advertisers, and individuals to gather detailed and sophisticated information about each of us. In this important new collection, the authors question the impact of these new technologies of surveillance on our privacy and our culture.
Although surveillance-literally some people "watching over" others-is as old as social relationships themselves, with the advent of the computer age this phenomenon has acquired new and distinctive meanings. Technological advances have made it possible for surveillance to become increasingly global and integrated-both commercial and government-related personal data flows more frequently across national boundaries, and the flow between private and public sectors has increased as well.
Addressing issues of the global integration of surveillance, social control, new information technologies, privacy violation and protection, and workplace surveillance, the contributors to Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy grapple with the ramifications of these concerns for society today. Timely and provocative, this collection will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with resistance to social control and incursions into privacy.
Contributors: Jonathan P. Allen, Colin J. Bennett, Simon G. Davies, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., Calvin C. Gotlieb, Rob Kling, Gary T. Marx, Abbe Mowshowitz, Judith A. Perrolle, Mark Poster, Priscilla M. Regan, James B. Rule.
David Lyon is professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada. His previous books include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 1994). Elia Zureik is also professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, and coedited (with Dianne Hartling) The Social Context of the New Information and Communication Technologies (1987).
A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk
Although computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male. Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment.
Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself.
Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people.
Votolato explores the ways that our love-hate relationship with the car has been intimately connected with car design. He tells the story of the rise of the private passenger car and all the psychological, social, and economic functions it has come to serve beyond mere transportation. Introducing readers to the automotive design process, he traces the lifecycle of the car from the drawing board to the scrapyard, offering insights from key figures in the industry, as well as a careful evaluation of the car’s enormous environmental impact. At the same time, he looks at the many cultures tied into the automobile, from drag racing and customizing to the luxury coachcraft of the classic era. Along the way, he takes us for a ride in some of the most famous cars ever to have had their tires inflated, from the Model T to the Tesla. The result is a top-down, thrilling burn through the history of one of our most beloved—and lamented—inventions.
Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.
No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them. In a new preface, Vaughan reveals the ramifications for this book and for her when a similar decision-making process brought down NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
California’s Calaveras County—made famous by Mark Twain and his celebrated Jumping Frog—is the focus of this comprehensive study of Mother Lode mining. Most histories of the California Mother Lode have focused on the mines around the American and Yuba Rivers. However, the “Southern Mines”—those centered around Calaveras County in the central Sierra—were also important in the development of California’s mineral wealth. Calaveras Gold offers a detailed and meticulously researched history of mining and its economic impact in this region from the first discoveries in the 1840s until the present. Mining in Calaveras County covered the full spectrum of technology from the earliest placer efforts through drift and hydraulic mining to advanced hard-rock industrial mining. Subsidiary industries such as agriculture, transportation, lumbering, and water supply, as well as a complex social and political structure, developed around the mines. The authors examine the roles of race, gender, and class in this frontier society; the generation and distribution of capital; and the impact of the mines on the development of political and cultural institutions. They also look at the impact of mining on the Native American population, the realities of day-to-day life in the mining camps, the development of agriculture and commerce, the occurrence of crime and violence, and the cosmopolitan nature of the population. Calaveras County mining continued well into the twentieth century, and the authors examine the ways that mining practices changed as the ores were depleted and how the communities evolved from mining camps into permanent towns with new economic foundations and directions. Mining is no longer the basis of Calaveras’s economy, but memories of the great days of the Mother Lode still attract tourists who bring a new form of wealth to the region.
An extensively documented chronicle of the rise and fall of individual mines, companies, and regions, Copper for America will prove an essential resource for economic and business historians, historians of technology and mining, and western historians.
The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.
In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.
Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, his second declaration, after socialism, was that Cuba would become a leader in international science. In biotechnology he would be proven right and, today, Cuba counts a meningitis B vaccine and cutting-edge cancer therapies to its name. But how did this politically and geographically isolated country make such impressive advances? Drawing on a unique ethnography, and blending the insights of anthropology, sociology, and geography, The Cuban Cure shows how Cuba came to compete with U. S. pharmaceutical giants—despite a trade embargo and crippling national debt.
In uncovering what is distinct about Cuban biomedical science, S. M. Reid-Henry examines the forms of resistance that biotechnology research in Cuba presents to the globalization of western models of scientific culture and practice. He illustrates the epistemic, social, and ideological clashes that take place when two cultures of research meet, and how such interactions develop as political and economic circumstances change. Through a novel argument about the intersection of socioeconomic systems and the nature of innovation, The Cuban Cure presents an illuminating study of politics and science in the context of globalization.
Developments in biotechnology, such as cloning and the decoding of the human genome, are generating questions and choices that traditionally have fallen within the realm of religion and philosophy: the definition of human life, human vs. divine control of nature, the relationship between human and non-human life, and the intentional manipulation of the mechanisms of life and death.
In Claiming Power over Life, eight contributors challenge policymakers to recognize the value of religious views on biotechnology and discuss how best to integrate the wisdom of the Christian and Jewish traditions into public policy debates. Arguing that civic discourse on the subject has been impoverished by an inability to accommodate religious insights productively, they identify the ways in which religious thought can contribute to policymaking. Likewise, the authors challenge religious leaders and scholars to learn about biotechnology, address the central issues it raises, and participate constructively in the moral debates it engenders.
The book will be of value to policymakers, religious leaders, ethicists, and all those interested in issues surrounding the intersection of religion and biotechnology policy.
Finalist, Northern California Book Awards General Non-Fiction
Look. Smell. Taste. Judge. Crush is the 200-year story of the heady dream that wines as good as the greatest of France could be made in California. A dream dashed four times in merciless succession until it was ultimately realized in a stunning blind tasting in Paris. In that tasting, in the year of America's bicentennial, California wines took their place as the leading wines of the world.
For the first time, Briscoe tells the complete and dramatic story of the ascendancy of California wine in vivid detail. He also profiles the larger story of California itself by looking at it from an entirely innovative perspective, the state seen through its singular wine history.
With dramatic flair and verve, Briscoe not only recounts the history of wine and winemaking in California, he encompasses a multidimensional approach that takes into account an array of social, political, cultural, legal, and winemaking sources. Elements of this history have plot lines that seem scripted by a Sophocles, or Shakespeare. It is a fusion of wine, personal histories, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects.
Crush is the story of how wine from California finally gained its global due. Briscoe recounts wine’s often fickle affair with California, now several centuries old, from the first harvest and vintage, through the four overwhelming catastrophes, to its amazing triumph in Paris.
Considering a range of Western and Middle Eastern archival material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ali Behdad offers a rich account of how photography transformed Europe’s distinctly Orientalist vision into what seemed objective fact, a transformation that proved central to the project of European colonialism. At the same time, Orientalism was useful for photographers from both regions, as it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame exotic Middle Eastern cultures for Western audiences. Behdad also shows how Middle Eastern audiences embraced photography as a way to foreground status and patriarchal values while also exoticizing other social classes.
An important examination of previously overlooked European and Middle Eastern photographers and studios, Camera Orientalis demonstrates that, far from being a one-sided European development, Orientalist photography was the product of rich cultural contact between the East and the West.
The Climb from Salt Lick is the remarkable memoir of an outsider coming into adulthood. It is the story of a unique place and its people from the perspective of a woman who documents its burdens and its beauty, using words and pictures to tell the rich stories of those around her.
In the early twentieth century, the Boston-based United Fruit Company controlled the production, distribution, and marketing of bananas, the most widely consumed fresh fruit in North America. So great was the company’s power that it challenged the sovereignty of the Latin American and Caribbean countries in which it operated, giving rise to the notion of company-dominated “banana republics.”
In A Camera in the Garden of Eden, Kevin Coleman argues that the “banana republic” was an imperial constellation of images and practices that was checked and contested by ordinary Central Americans. Drawing on a trove of images from four enormous visual archives and a wealth of internal company memos, literary works, immigration records, and declassified US government telegrams, Coleman explores how banana plantation workers, women, and peasants used photography to forge new ways of being while also visually asserting their rights as citizens. He tells a dramatic story of the founding of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one of its main divisional offices, the rise of the company now known as Chiquita, and a sixty-nine day strike in which banana workers declared their independence from neocolonial domination. In telling this story, Coleman develops a new set of conceptual tools and methods for using images to open up fresh understandings of the past, offering a model that is applicable far beyond this pathfinding study.
Polaroid was often dismissed as a toy, but Buse takes it seriously, showing how it encouraged photographic play as well as new forms of artistic practice. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of the Polaroid Corporation, Buse reveals Polaroid as photography at its most intimate, where the photographer, photograph, and subject sit in close proximity in both time and space—making Polaroid not only the perfect party camera but also the tool for frankly salacious pictures taking.
Along the way, Buse tells the story of the Polaroid Corporation and its ultimately doomed hard-copy wager against the rising tide of digital imaging technology. He explores the continuities and the differences between Polaroid and digital, reflecting on what Polaroid can tell us about how we snap photos today. Richly illustrated, The Camera Does the Rest will delight historians, art critics, analog fanatics, photographers, and all those who miss the thrill of waiting to see what develops.
Around the time Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre perfected his method for fixing images on polished metal plates in 1839, Harvard was emerging as a modern research institution. Accordingly, the college began amassing vast collections for teaching and research. Among these collections in the university's libraries, museums, archives, and academic departments are some of the earliest photographic documents of American life: daguerreotypes.
A Curious and Ingenious Art brings together a representative sampling of Harvard's internationally significant but relatively unknown collection of daguerreotypes. Many of these images were made for, by, and of members of the university's community and have been in its holdings for more than 150 years. The collection includes the work of some of America's pioneering daguerreotypists, such as Mathew Brady, Southworth and Hawes, and John Adams Whipple. Most notably, the Harvard collection preserved for posterity such faces of the era as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, James McNeill Whistler, Dorothea Dix, Jenny Lind, and even Tom Thumb.
The university also seized upon photography as a tool of scientific research, stunningly exemplified in one of the first detailed daguerreotypes of the moon taken in 1851 as well as in images capturing the emergence of modern anesthesia. An unfortunate misuse of photography is recalled in the now famous slave daguerreotypes commissioned by natural historian Louis Agassiz, who believed in the theory of separate human species.
The Harvard collection represents the early history of photography and its social meaning. The accompanying essays explore the personal, telling histories behind the images, stories that unveil the reflections of individuals who searched for purpose and promise in the new medium.
Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church’s favorite photographers, Johnson (1857–1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism’s most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his “spicy pictures of girls.” Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation’s mainstream after the scandal of polygamy.
Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.
Coloring the Universe uses accessible language to describe how these giant telescopes work, what scientists learn with them, and how they are used to make color images. It talks about how otherwise un-seeable rays, such as radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays, are turned into recognizable colors. And it is filled with fantastic images taken in far-away pockets of the universe. Informative and beautiful, Coloring the Universe will give space fans of all levels an insider’s look at how scientists bring deep space into brilliant focus.
The essays in this volume introduce us to the visual conventions of the Hollywood style, explaining how these first arose and how they have subsequently been challenged by alternative aesthetics. In order to frame this fascinating history, the contributors employ a series of questions about technology (how did new technology shape cinematography?), authorship (can a cinematographer develop styles and themes over the course of a career?), and classicism (how should cinematographers use new technology in light of past practice?). Taking us from the hand-cranked cameras of the silent era to the digital devices used today, the collection of original essays explores how the art of cinematography has been influenced not only by technological advances, but also by trends in the movie industry, from the rise of big-budget blockbusters to the spread of indie films.
The book also reveals the people behind the camera, profiling numerous acclaimed cinematographers from James Wong Howe to Roger Deakins. Lavishly illustrated with over 50 indelible images from landmark films, Cinematography offers a provocative behind-the-scenes look at the profession and a stirring celebration of the art form. Anyone who reads this history will come away with a fresh eye for what appears on the screen because of what happens behind it.
Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.
The original foreign film—its sights and sounds—is available to all, but the viewer is utterly dependent on a translator and an untold number of technicians who produce the graphic text or disconnected speech through which we must approach the foreign film. A bad translation can ruin a film’s beauty, muddy its plot, and turn any joke sour.
In this wide-ranging work, Abé Mark Nornes examines the relationships between moving-image media and translation and contends that film was a globalized medium from its beginning and that its transnational traffic has been greatly influenced by interpreters. He discusses the translation of film theory, interpretation at festivals and for coproductions, silent era practice, “ talkies,” subtitling, and dubbing.
Nornes—who has written subtitles for Japanese cinema—looks at the ways misprision of theory translations produced stylistic change, how silent era lecturers contributed to the construction of national cinemas, how subtitlers can learn from anime fans, and how ultimately interpreters can be, in his terms, “traders or traitors.”
Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor of Asian languages and cultures and film and video studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Japanese Documentary Film (Minnesota, 2003) and Forest of Pressure (Minnesota, 2007).
In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, Wendy A. Woloson takes seriously the history of objects that are often cynically-made and easy to dismiss: things not made to last; things we don't really need; things we often don't even really want. Woloson does not mock these ordinary, everyday possessions but seeks to understand them as a way to understand aspects of ourselves, socially, culturally, and economically: Why do we—as individuals and as a culture—possess these things? Where do they come from? Why do we want them? And what is the true cost of owning them?
Woloson tells the history of crap from the late eighteenth century up through today, exploring its many categories: gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, giftware, variety store merchandise. As Woloson shows, not all crap is crappy in the same way—bric-a-brac is crappy in a different way from, say, advertising giveaways, which are differently crappy from commemorative plates. Taking on the full brilliant and depressing array of crappy material goods, the book explores the overlooked corners of the American market and mindset, revealing the complexity of our relationship with commodity culture over time.
By studying crap rather than finely made material objects, Woloson shows us a new way to truly understand ourselves, our national character, and our collective psyche. For all its problems, and despite its disposability, our crap is us.
Many crafts are treated as separate, but are actually practiced concurrently and in close proximity to each other, facilitating crucial interaction. There is a need for a balanced evaluation of the roles of producer and consumer in craft production, and the importance of properly contextualized workshop excavations and the definition of the entire sequence of operation in documenting craft production both as a social and material process.
Craft Production in Complex Societies redresses the skewed conception and approach to craft production that have been shaped by studies focused on separate, single medium crafts, finished products, and the consumer. It presents case studies and regional syntheses from diverse geographical areas, time periods, and sociopolitical complexities that break important new ground in the anthropological study of the creative role and social identity of the producer and multi-craft production. It is expected to serve as a key reference in craft studies for many years to come.
Textile artist and instructor Betty Fikes Pillsbury has won hundreds of awards for her homages to the elegance of Victorian crazy quilting. Grounded in traditional methods but crafted with elements of whimsy, each piece stands on its own as a work of art. In this definitive guide, Pillsbury shares her methods for piecing, embroidering, and embellishing. Her instructions equip readers at any level of quilting skill to use those techniques to express their own visions.
Encouraging her readers to see functional and artistic possibilities beyond quilts (wall hangings, purses, and pillowcases are just some of the options), Pillsbury shows them how to make each work by hand, the slow cloth way. An inspiring primer for beginning and experienced quilters alike, this meticulously illustrated how-to book is far more expansive than previous guides. Pillsbury—a master of the form—shows us why crazy quilting belongs firmly in the twenty-first century.
Essential and in-depth The Complete Vegetarian is an invaluable guide for health professionals and the growing number of people who have adopted or want to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.
Not so long ago, perhaps even just at the turn of this century, it was easy to lament the lack of sophisticated food in New Jersey. Oh sure, a few restaurants always sparkled, but, for the most part, New Jerseyans looked across at the bright lights of the big city, wistfully yearning for a table in glamorous Manhattan. Now, however, the most sought- after tables are right here and we have the best seats in the house, made even sweeter perhaps because they're our own little secret. We can dine frequently and dine well, with a smug sense that if only New Yorkers knew, they'd be looking across the river wishing they were us.
In Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey, Teresa Politano profiles Craig Shelton, the chef who crystallized New Jersey's place in culinary history with his legendary Ryland Inn, along with other chefs, telling their personal stories of both creativity and survival. Some of these men and women rose from humble or difficult childhoods to fame in the food world. Others were not only talented but lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Their stories are arranged into three categories: legends, stars, and chefs to watch, and then topped off with a sweet surprise finish. Politano includes photographs, cooking secrets, and some of their sought-after signature recipes that are sophisticated but manageable for the skilled home chef.
This fascinating culinarian is John Dabney (1821–1900), who was born a slave, but later built an enterprising catering business. Dabney is just one of 175 influential cooks and restaurateurs profiled by David S. Shields in The Culinarians, a beautifully produced encyclopedic history of the rise of professional cooking in America from the early republic to Prohibition.
Shields’s concise biographies include the legendary Julien, founder in 1793 of America’s first restaurant, Boston’s Restorator; and Louis Diat and Oscar of the Waldorf, the men most responsible for keeping the ideal of fine dining alive between the World Wars. Though many of the gastronomic pioneers gathered here are less well known, their diverse influence on American dining should not be overlooked—plus, their stories are truly entertaining. We meet an African American oyster dealer who became the Congressional caterer, and, thus, a powerful broker of political patronage; a French chef who was a culinary savant of vegetables and drove the rise of California cuisine in the 1870s; and a rotund Philadelphia confectioner who prevailed in a culinary contest with a rival in New York by staging what many believed to be the greatest American meal of the nineteenth century. He later grew wealthy selling ice cream to the masses. Shields also introduces us to a French chef who brought haute cuisine to wealthy prospectors and a black restaurateur who hosted a reconciliation dinner for black and white citizens at the close of the Civil War in Charleston.
Altogether, Culinarians is a delightful compendium of charcuterie-makers, pastry-pipers, caterers, railroad chefs, and cooking school matrons—not to mention drunks, temperance converts, and gangsters—who all had a hand in creating the first age of American fine dining and its legacy of conviviality and innovation that continues today.
The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.
The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.
Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.
The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.
Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style by Helen Walker Linsenmeyer presents a collection of family recipes created prior to 1900 and perfected from generation to generation, mirroring the delicious and distinctive kind of cookery produced by the mix of people who settled the Illinois Country during this period. Some recipes reflect a certain New England or Southern influence, while others echo a European heritage. All hark back to a simpler style of living, when cooking was plain yet flavorful.
The recipes specify the use of natural ingredients (including butter, lard, and suet) rather than synthetic or ready-mixed foods, which were unavailable in the 1800s. Cooking at the time was pure and unadulterated, and portions were large. Strength-giving food was essential to health and endurance; thus fare was pure, hearty, flavorful, and wholesome.
The many treasures of Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style include
• basic recipes for mead, originally served to the militiamen of Jackson County; sumac lemonade, made the Indian way; root beer, as it was originally made;
• soups of many kinds—from wholesome vegetable to savory sorrel leaf, enjoyed by the Kaskaskia French;
• old-fashioned fried beefsteak, classic American pot roast and gravy, as well as secret marinades to tenderize the tougher but more flavorful cuts of meat;
• methods for preparing and cooking rabbit, squirrel, wild turkey, venison, pheasant, rattlesnake, raccoon, buffalo, and fish;
• over one hundred recipes for wheat breads, sweet breads, corn breads, and pancakes;
• an array of delectable desserts and confections, including puddings, ice cream, taffy, and feathery-light cakes and pies;
• sections on the uses of herbs, spices, roots, and weeds; instructions for making sausage, jerky, and smoked fish and for drying one’s own fruits and vegetables; and household hints on everything from making lye soap to cooking for the sick.
And there are extra-special nuggets, too, for Mrs. Linsenmeyer laces her cookbook with interesting biographical notes on a number of the settlers and the origin of many of the foods they used. There is also a wealth of historical information on lifestyles and cooking before 1900, plus helpful tips on the use of old-fashioned cooking utensils.
A working cookbook complete in its coverage of every area of food preparation, Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style will be used and treasured as much today as its recipes were by families of an earlier century. The recipes are not gourmet, but they are certain to please today’s cooks, especially those interested in using local ingredients and getting back to a more natural way of cooking and eating.
People from around the world have found a home in Texas, bringing with them a multiethnic feast replete with dishes that originated in Mexico, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In these pages you'll discover a magical place called Cuisine, Texas, where you can find all these favorite family recipes in one handy source.
Noted food writer Joanne Smith spent several years gathering the traditional recipes of every major ethnic group in Texas. As a result, Cuisine, Texas is a virtual encyclopedia of Texas cooking, with more than 375 recipes drawn from Native American, Spanish, Japanese, French, Cajun, Mexican, Tex-Mex, Anglo-American, African American, Thai, Czech, Swiss, Dutch, Jewish, Greek, German, Polish, Italian, British, Lebanese, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, and Scandinavian cooking.
The recipes cover the full range of foods, from appetizers to entrees, salads, vegetables, breads, and desserts, and all have clear, simple-to-follow instructions. Interspersed among them are engaging discussions of the different ethnic cuisines, flavored with delightful stories of some of the cooks who created or perfected the recipes. And to make your cooking even easier, Joanne Smith includes information on how to readily find imported and specialized ingredients and a word about health-conscious substitutions.
Cuisine, Texas, may not exist on the map, but it can be found everywhere that people enjoy good food and the fellowship that goes with it. Let this book be your one-stop source for all the tastes of Texas.
Just remembering the crispy fried chicken and luscious peach cobblers a grandmother or aunt used to make can set your mouth watering. And since remembering is no substitute for eating, cooks across the country have turned to Cooking Texas Style to find recipes for the comfort foods we love best. Thirty years after its first publication, popular acclaim has made this collection of favorite family recipes the standard source for traditional Texas cooking.
Here are over three hundred tasty recipes from the kitchens of Candy Wagner and Sandra Marquez. You’ll find classic Texas dishes such as chicken-fried steak, barbecue, chili, guacamole, and cornbread hot with jalapeños, as well as novel, exciting ways to prepare old favorites such as Tortilla Soup, Fajitas, and Chicken and Dumplings. Organized for easy reference, all the recipes are clearly explained, simple to prepare, and simply delicious. Cooking Texas Style is an invaluable addition to the kitchen bookshelf of anyone interested in cooking—and eating—Texas style.
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s cafe guides showcase popular regional diner traditions. In her companion book Cafe Indiana she introduces travelers to the state’s top mom-and-pop restaurants. Now, Cafe Indiana Cookbook allows you to whip up local cafe classics yourself. Breakfast dishes range from Swiss Mennonite eier datch (egg pancakes) to biscuits and gravy; entree highlights include chicken with noodles (or with dumplings) and the iconic Hoosier breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. For dessert, try such Indiana favorites as apple dapple cake or rhubarb, coconut cream, or sugar cream pie . All 130 recipes have been kitchen-tested by Jolene Ketzenberger, food writer for the Indianapolis Star.
Cafe Indiana Cookbook reveals the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure, and documents old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape—like southern Indiana’s fried brain sandwiches.
Finalist, Cookbook, Midwest Book Awards
Stuttgen tracked down Wisconsin's best small town cafes, from Boscobel to Sturgeon Bay, chatted with owners and customers, took notes, and recorded the history, anecdotes, and recipes behind the food. Tested and fine-tuned by Wisconsin food writer and former chef Terese Allen, these favorite recipes will bring an authentic slice of Wisconsin into your home kitchen.
Whether you're hungry for down-home barbecue and Tex-Mex, or you want to try more exotic dishes such as Paella Valenciana and Thai Pesto, Texas Highways has long been a trusted source for delicious recipes that reflect wide-ranging Lone Star tastes. The state's official travel magazine published its first Texas Highways Cookbook, which has sold 20,000 copies, in 1986. Responding to the public's demand for a new collection of the magazine's recipes, the editors are pleased to bring you Cooking with Texas Highways, a compilation of more than 250 recipes that are as richly diverse and flavorful as Texas itself.
Cooking with Texas Highways samples all the major ethnic cuisines of the state with recipes from home cooks, well-known chefs, and popular restaurants. It offers a varied and intriguing selection of snacks and beverages, breads, soups and salads, main dishes, vegetables and sides, sauces and spreads, desserts, and more. A special feature of this cookbook is a chapter on Dutch-oven cooking, which covers all the basics for cooking outdoors with live coals, including seventeen mouth-watering recipes. In addition, you'll find dozens of the lovely color photographs that have long made Texas Highways such a feast for the eyes, along with tips on cooking techniques and sources for ingredients and stories about some of the folks who created the recipes. If you want to sample all the tastes of Texas, there's no better place to start than Cooking with Texas Highways.
Many people’s idea of cooking with southwestern plants begins and ends with prickly pear jelly. With this update to the classic Tumbleweed Gourmet, master cook Carolyn Niethammer opens a window on the incredible bounty of the southwestern deserts and offers recipes to help you bring these plants to your table. Included here are sections featuring each of twenty-three different desert plants. The chapters include basic information, harvesting techniques, and general characteristics. But the real treat comes in the form of some 150 recipes collected or developed by the author herself. Ranging from every-day to gourmet, from simple to complex, these recipes offer something for cooks of all skill levels. Some of the recipes also include stories about their origin and readers are encouraged to tinker with the ingredients and enjoy desert foods as part of their regular diet.
Featuring Paul Mirocha’s finely drawn illustrations of the various southwestern plants discussed, this volume will serve as an indispensible guide from harvest to table. Whether you’re looking for more ways to prepare local foods, ideas for sustainable harvesting, or just want to expand your palette to take in some out-of-the-ordinary flavors, Cooking the Wild Southwest is sure to delight.
No chuck wagon feed is complete without its basic ingredients of beans, beef, hot biscuits, apple pie, and lots of coffee. Beth McElfresh shows you how to host the all–time chuck wagon feed with easy–to–follow recipes.
Included are original recipes for boiled apple dumplings, lima beans baked with steak, and general, everyday useful tips, all from the renowned Western cook, Hi Pockets. She describes various health remedies learned from the old–timers on the range, that are as useful today as they were then.
Also included are recipes showing you how to create actual hand lotion and soaps like those used in the rugged west; wines, tea, punch, even candy and ice cream are included.
The Western encounter with a wider variety of Chinese cuisine dates from the first half of the 20th century, when Chinese food spread to the West with emigrant communities. The author shows how Chinese cooking has come to be regarded by some as among the world’s most sophisticated cuisines, and yet is harshly criticized by others, for example on the grounds that its preparation involves cruelty to animals.
Roberts discusses the extent to which Chinese food, as a facet of Chinese culture overseas, has remained differentiated, and questions whether its ethnic identity is dissolving.
Written in a lively style, the book will appeal to food historians and specialists in Chinese culture, as well as to readers interested in Chinese cuisine.
In The Culinary Crescent: A History of Middle Eastern Cuisine, Peter Heine combines years of scholarship with a personal passion: his knowledge of the cookery traditions of the Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal courts is matched only by his love for the tastes and smells produced by the contemporary cooking of these areas today. In addition to offering a fascinating history, Heine presents more than one hundred recipes—from the modest to the extravagant—with dishes ranging from those created by the “celebrity chefs” of the bygone Mughal era, up to gastronomically complex presentations of modern times.
Beautifully produced, designed for both reading and cooking, and lavishly illustrated in color throughout, The Culinary Crescent is sure to provide a delectable window in the history of food in the Middle East.
Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla traces the evolution of ice cream from a rarity to an everyday indulgence. It covers the genesis of ice cream in America, the invention of the hand-cranked ice cream freezer, the natural ice industry, the beginnings of wholesale ice cream manufacturing, and the origins of the ice cream soda, sundae, cone, sandwich, and bar. It also recounts the histories of many brands, including Dairy Queen, Good Humor, Eskimo Pie, Ben and Jerry's, Baskin-Robbins, and Haagen-Dazs. This history of ice cream reflects and reveals changes in social customs, diet and nutrition, class distinctions, leisure activities, and everyday life.
Although it didn’t receive its Western scientific name, Theobroma cacao—“food of the gods”—until the eighteenth century, the cacao tree has been at the center of Mesoamerican mythology for thousands of years. Not only did this “chocolate tree” produce the actual seeds from which chocolate was extracted but it was also symbolically endowed with cosmic powers that enabled a dialogue between humans and their gods. From the pre-Columbian images included in this sumptuous book, we are able to see for ourselves the importance of chocolate to the Maya, Aztecs, Olmecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs who grew, produced, traded, and fought over the prized substance.
Through archaeological and other ethnohistoric research, the authors of this fascinating book document the significance of chocolate—to gods, kings, and everyday people—over several millennia. The illustrations allow us to envision the many ancient uses of this magical elixir: in divination ceremonies, in human sacrifices, and even in ball games. And as mythological connections between cacao trees, primordial rainforests, and biodiversity are unveiled, our own quest for ecological balance is reignited. In demonstrating the extraordinary value of chocolate in Mesoamerica, the authors provide new reasons—if any are needed—to celebrate this wondrous concoction.
"This is a splendid collection of cowcamp cook tales and 112 authentic old-time dutch oven recipes." —Books of the Southwest
"It is a delightful combination of yarns, history, nostalgia, and solid information—all ingeniously brewed up and spiced by a lady who knows what she is about." —Journal of Arizona History
"We haven't had a book that was so much fun to read in a long time." —Journal of the West
"If you want a good change in your eating, this is the book for you." —True West
As an ethnographer analyzing his own culture, author Jay Ruby uses a unique ethnographic method known as “studying sideways.” He combines the exploration of self and others with the theoretical framework of anthropology to provide deep insight into the counterculture of late 1950s and early 1960s America. He shares his connection to Positano, where he lived and worked from 1957 to 1959 and again in 1963, and reflects on Positano in the context of US counterculture and the greater role of countercultures in society.
This intimate and significant work will be of interest to anthropologists as well as scholars and the general reader interested in California history, Beat culture, and countercultural movements.
Over plates of chicken and noodles, fried bologna sandwiches, and sugar cream pie, folks are crafting community at the Main Street eatery. In Cafe Indiana, Hoosiers and out-of-staters alike are invited to pull out a chair and sit a spell.
Featuring 133 cafes, with another 101 Next Best Bets alternatives, Cafe Wisconsin is every hungry traveler’s guide to real mashed potatoes, melt-in-your-mouth hot beef, from-scratch baked goods, and colorful coffee klatches. At the counter of aptly named cafes like the Coffee Cup, Main Street, and Chatterbox, you’ll laugh with owners, shake dice with customers, and find the authentic taste and flavor of Wisconsin.
Come on. Let’s go out to eat!
From Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to the Jolly Green Giant and Ronald McDonald, corporate icons sell billions of dollars’ worth of products. But only one of them was ever a real person—Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. From a 1930s roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, Harland Sanders launched a fried chicken business that now circles the globe, serving “finger lickin’ good” chicken to more than twelve million people every day. But to get there, he had to give up control of his company and even his own image, becoming a mere symbol to people today who don’t know that Colonel Sanders was a very real human being. This book tells his story—the story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who personified the American Dream.
Acclaimed cultural historian Josh Ozersky defines the American Dream as being able to transcend your roots and create yourself as you see fit. Harland Sanders did exactly that. Forced at age ten to go to work to help support his widowed mother and sisters, he failed at job after job until he went into business for himself as a gas station/café/motel owner and finally achieved a comfortable, middle-class life. But then the interstate bypassed his business and, at sixty-five, Sanders went broke again. Packing his car with a pressure cooker and his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, he began peddling the recipe for “Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken” to small-town diners in exchange for a nickel for each chicken they sold. Ozersky traces the rise of Kentucky Fried Chicken from this unlikely beginning, telling the dramatic story of Sanders’ self-transformation into “The Colonel,” his truculent relationship with KFC management as their often-disregarded goodwill ambassador, and his equally turbulent afterlife as the world’s most recognizable commercial icon.
The essays in Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea fill gaps in the existing food studies by revealing and contextualizing the hidden, local histories of Chinese and Japanese restaurants in the United States.
The writer of these essays show how the taste and presentation of Chinese and Japanese dishes have evolved in sweat and hardship over generations of immigrants who became restaurant owners, chefs, and laborers in the small towns and large cities of America. These vivid, detailed, and sometimes emotional portrayals reveal the survival strategies deployed in Asian restaurant kitchens over the past 150 years and the impact these restaurants have had on the culture, politics, and foodways of the United States.
Some of these authors are family members of restaurant owners or chefs, writing with a passion and richness that can only come from personal investment, while others are academic writers who have painstakingly mined decades of archival data to reconstruct the past. Still others offer a fresh look at the amazing continuity and domination of the “evil Chinaman” stereotype in the “foreign” world of American Chinatown restaurants. The essays include insights from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, economics, phenomenology, journalism, food studies, and film and literary criticism.
Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea not only complements the existing scholarship and exposes the work that still needs to be done in this field, but also underscores the unique and innovative approaches that can be taken in the field of American food studies.
Learn how to mix a Bullshot, the Detroit-born cocktail containing Campbell’s Beef Broth—Marilyn Monroe famously called the drink “a horrible thing to do to vodka.” Or try out the authors’ Whiskey Sour recipe honoring the true story of Valentine Goesaert, a Dearborn woman who challenged the constitutionality of a Michigan law prohibiting female bartenders and in 1948 took her case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether you’re a fan of whiskey, gin, or vodka—of the latest cocktail trends or all-time classic drinks—there’s something in this book for all tastes. What’s constant is that each drink showcases a uniquely Michigan twist, making this book perfect for anyone who loves the state, its history and culture, or simply the delicious, delightful, and distinctive cocktails it has inspired.
Public consciousness of the threat of nuclear war is rising steadily. Responses to the nuclear dilemma are conflicting and often confusing. Never have we been more in need of information and perspective, for if we wish to avoid war we must understand it.
Michael Howard offers an analysis of our present predicament by discussing those issues that cause war and make peace. His book includes an examination of nuclear strategy today, views of the past about the conduct of international relations, ethics, modes of defense, and studies of military thinkers and leaders. The Causes of Wars illuminates the interrelationship between men and ideas, between war and other social forces, and between our present situation and its roots in the past.
As the costs of a preemptive foreign policy in Iraq have become clear, strategies such as containment and deterrence have been gaining currency among policy makers. This comprehensive book offers an agenda for the contemporary practice of deterrence—especially as it applies to nuclear weapons—in an increasingly heterogeneous global and political setting.
Moving beyond the precepts of traditional deterrence theory, this groundbreaking volume offers insights for the use of deterrence in the modern world, where policy makers may encounter irrational actors, failed states, religious zeal, ambiguous power relationships, and other situations where the traditional rules of statecraft do not apply. A distinguished group of contributors here examines issues such as deterrence among the Great Powers; the problems of regional and nonstate actors; and actors armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Complex Deterrence will be a valuable resource for anyone facing the considerable challenge of fostering security and peace in the twenty-first century.
On the one hand, nation-states as well as their affiliated hacking groups like cyber warriors employ hacking as offensive and defensive tools in connection to the cyber activity or inactivity of other nation-states, such as the role of Russian Trolls disseminating disinformation on social media during the US 2016 presidential election. This is regarded as a horizontal flow of political disruption. Sometimes, nation-states, like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, use hacking and surveillance tactics as a vertical flow (top-bottom) form of online political disruption by targeting their own citizens due to their oppositional or activists’ political views. On the other hand, regular hackers who are often politically independent practice a form of bottom-top political disruption to address issues related to the internal politics of their respective nation-states such as the case of a number of Iraqi, Saudi, and Algerian hackers. In some cases, other hackers target ordinary citizens to express opposition to their political or ideological views which is regarded as a horizontal form of online political disruption. This book is the first of its kind to shine a light on many ways that governments and hackers are perpetrating cyber attacks in the Middle East and beyond, and to show the ripple effect of these attacks.
Here Mark McGovern turns back the clock to the late 1980s and early ‘90s—the ‘endgame’ of the Troubles and a period defined by a rash of state-sanctioned paramilitary killings. Drawing on previously unpublished evidence, and original testimony of victims’ families and eyewitnesses, McGovern examines several dozen killings of republicans and their families and communities that took place in the Mid-Ulster area. Placing these accounts within a wider critical analysis of the nature of British counterinsurgency and the state use of agents and informers, McGovern paints a damning picture of covert, deniable, and unlawful violence.
A critical look at how China’s growing strategic arsenal could impact a rapidly changing world order
China’s strategic capabilities and doctrine have historically differed from the United States’ and Russia’s. China has continued to modernize and expand its arsenal despite its policy of no first use, while the United States and Russia have decreased deployed weapons stocks.
This volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to provide a fresh assessment of China's strategic military capabilities, doctrines, and political perceptions in light of rapidly advancing technologies, an expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal, and an increased great-power competition with the United States.
Analyzing China's strategic arsenal is critical for a deeper understanding of China’s relations with both its neighbors and the world. Without a doubt, China’s arsenal is growing in size and sophistication, but key uncertainties also lie ahead. Will China’s new capabilities and confidence lead it to be more assertive and take more risks? Will China’s nuclear traditions change as the strategic balance improves? Will China’s approach to military competition be guided by a notion of strategic stability or not? Will there be a strategic arms race with the United States? China's Strategic Arsenal provides a current understanding of these issues as we strive for a stable strategic future with China.
Ralph Kirshner has provided a richly illustrated forum to enable the West Point class of 1861 to write its own autobiography. Through letters, journals, and published accounts, George Armstrong Custer, Adelbert Ames, and their classmates tell in their own words of their Civil War battles and of their varied careers after the war.
Two classes graduated from West Point in 1861 because of Lincoln's need of lieutenants: forty-five cadets in Ames's class in May and thirty-four in Custer's class in June. The cadets range from Henry Algernon du Pont, first in the class of May, whose ancestral home is now Winterthur Garden, to Custer, last in the class of June. “Only thirty-four graduated,” remarked Custer, “and of these thirty-three graduated above me.” West Point's mathematics professor and librarian Oliver Otis Howard, after whom Howard University is named, is also portrayed.
Other famous names from the class of 1861 are John Pelham, Emory Upton, Thomas L. Rosser, John Herbert Kelly (the youngest general in the Confederacy when appointed), Patrick O'Rorke (head of the class of June), Alonzo Cushing, Peter Hains, Edmund Kirby, John Adair (the only deserter in the class), and Judson Kilpatrick (great-grandfather of Gloria Vanderbilt). They describe West Point before the Civil War, the war years, including the Vicksburg campaign and the battle of Gettysburg, the courage and character of classmates, and the ending of the war.
Kirshner also highlights postwar lives, including Custer at Little Bighorn; Custer's rebel friend Rosser; John Whitney Barlow, who explored Yellowstone; du Pont, senator and author; Kilpatrick, playwright and diplomat; Orville E. Babcock, Grant's secretary until his indictment in the "Whiskey Ring"; Pierce M. B. Young, a Confederate general who became a diplomat; Hains, the only member of the class to serve on active duty in World War I; and Upton, "the class genius."
The Class of 1861, which features eighty-three photographs, includes a foreword by George Plimpton, editor of theParis Review and great-grandson of General Adelbert Ames.
The most recognized military device of ancient times and the source of continued fascination and popular appeal, the catapult represented a major shift in the conduct of warfare. The catapult which literally means a device to “hurl [an object] across” was originally a sort of crossbow invented at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. in Syrakuse. Bows soon grew to the length of a modern bus, and in due course a completely new and better power source was invented. Instead of compound bows made of stretched sinew and compressed horn, the energy used to launch an object was stored in twisted ropes made of animal sinews: the torsion catapult had arrived. The torsion catapult quickly became the chief weapon of ancient arsenals and gave armies for the first time a weapon that could strike enemies at a distance with devastating effect, including shooting to and from ships, battering fortifications, and sending projectiles over walls. Catapults of all sizes became part of the regular equipment of the Roman army, and were used for centuries across the length and breadth of the empire to seize territory, and to defend it.
In The Catapult: A History, an authority on this device, historian Tracey Rihll, uses ancient literary sources and the latest archaeological findings to tell the story of this first machine of war. Dispelling any notion that the catapult was precision engineered in the modern sense, the author explains how a robust formulaic design allowed a variety of machines and missiles to be used for particular battlefield conditions or military tasks. Also included are details of the author’s intriguing discovery that there were little personal catapults that were used like rifles. Although the catapult was displaced by the introduction of gunpowder and cannon, this device marks the beginning of mechanized warfare, the hallmark of modern fighting. Complete with line drawings and photographs, The Catapult is a major contribution to the history of technology and conflict.
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