A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In the Book of Mormon, the Jewish prophet Lehi says the following after arriving by boat in America in 600 BCE:
Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves (2 Ne. 1:9).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Christians have always shared a fundamental belief in the connection between personal salvation and the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While having faith in and experiencing the atonement of Christ remains a core tenet for Latter-day Saints, some thinkers have in recent decades reconsidered traditional understandings of atonement.
Deidre Nicole Green and Eric D. Huntsman edit a collection that brings together multiple and diverse approaches to thinking about Latter-day Saint views on this foundational area of theology. The essayists draw on and go beyond a wide range of perspectives, classical atonement theories, and contemporary reformulations of atonement theory. The first section focuses on scriptural and historical foundations while the second concentrates on theological explorations. Together, the contributors evaluate what is efficacious and ethical in the Latter-day Saint outlook and offer ways to reconceive those views to provide a robust theological response to contemporary criticisms about atonement.
Contributors: Nicholas J. Frederick, Fiona Givens, Deidre Nicole Green, Sharon J. Harris, J.B. Haws, Eric D. Huntsman, Benjamin Keogh, Ariel Bybee Laughton, Adam S. Miller, Jenny Reeder, T. Benjamin Spackman, and Joseph M. Spencer
Leonard Arrington is considered by many the foremost twentieth-century historian of Mormonism. He played a key role in establishing the Western History Association and the Mormon History Association, and more than a half-century after its publication, his revised doctoral dissertation, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints 1830-1900, remains a standard. But Arrington’s career was not without controversy. Gregory Prince takes an in-depth look at this respected historian and, in telling Arrington’s story, gives readers insight into the workings of the LDS Church in the late twentieth century.
In 1972, during a major reorganization of the LDS Church, Arrington was asked to serve as the official church historian, thereby becoming the first—and thus far the only—professional historian to hold that title. He immediately set out to professionalize the entire Church History Division and open its extensive archives to scholarly researching. While the output of and from that division moved Mormon studies to a new level, the shift of historiography from faith promotion ecclesiastical, to scholarly and professional research and analysis was unacceptable to a handful of powerful senior apostles. In 1980 the History Division was disassembled and moved to Brigham Young University. That led to a shift in the professionalization of the Church History Division and Archives and in Arrington’s career but not to a loss of his broad influence.
This biography is the first to draw upon the remarkable Arrington diaries (over 20,000 pages); it is supplemented by the author’s interviews of more than 100 people who knew or worked with Arrington. The book is of additional significance given continuing battles between the LDS Church and scholars, which frequently gains national attention because of excommunications of prominent intellectuals.
Winner of the Evans Biography Award and the John Whitmer Historical Association's Brim Biography Book Award.
Joseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the LDS Church, including the post of president from 1901 until his death in 1918. Joseph F. Smith laid the theological groundwork for modern Mormonism, especially the emphasis on temple work. This contribution was capped off by his “revelation on the redemption of the dead,” a prophetic glimpse into the afterlife. Taysom’s book traces the roots of this vision, which reach far more deeply into Joseph F. Smith’s life than other scholars have previously identified.
In this first cradle-to-grave biography of Joseph F. Smith, Stephen C. Taysom uses previously unavailable primary source materials to craft a deeply detailed, insightful story of a prominent member of a governing and influential Mormon family. Importantly, Taysom situates Smith within the historical currents of American westward expansion, rapid industrialization, settler colonialism, regional and national politics, changing ideas about family and masculinity, and more. Though some writers tend to view the LDS Church and its leaders through a lens of political and religious separatism, Taysom does the opposite, pushing Joseph F. Smith and the LDS Church closer to the centers of power in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.
Beyond its use for scholars of Swedenborg, the Lexicon is also of great assistance to students and academics of history, philosophy, theology and science, and anyone who encounters texts written in Neo-Latin (the branch of Latin that was in use by learned writers and thinkers from the Renaissance period through to the Enlightenment and beyond). The Lexicon is beautifully and simply designed and easy to navigate. In addition to a preface by editor John Chadwick, this edition also features a new introduction by Jonathan S. Rose containing an important section on the morphology of Swedenborg’s Neo-Latin (as distinct from the morphology of classical Latin); an appreciation of the life of John Chadwick by John Elliott; an appendix with a detailed listing of the various Latin editions of Swedenborg’s theological works; and an appendix on Swedenborg’s use of the Latin Bible of Sebastian Schmidt.
In his short work The Lord, Swedenborg presents an answer to the time-honored question of how Jesus and God are related: he argues that they became in every way one and the same. Throughout his works Swedenborg uses the term “Lord” to refer to Jesus as the embodiment of God. In this work he emphasizes that the traditional trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit should be thought of not as three separate divine Persons that have always coexisted but as three aspects now present within one divine Person—Jesus in his resurrection.
The Lord also touches upon key themes in Swedenborg’s theology: the spiritual reasons why the Lord came to earth; the significance of the death and resurrection of his human form; and the ways in which his coming was foretold in the Old Testament. Throughout the book, Swedenborg provides extensive biblical references to support his arguments. He concludes with a brief chapter describing the New Jerusalem, a reference to both the city described in the book of Revelation and the new spiritual age that is now unfolding.
The Lord is part of the New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (NCE), an ongoing translation series. The NCE series incorporates the latest scholarship and translation standards for a more accurate and accessible rendering of Swedenborg’s works. Traditionally titled The Doctrine of the Lord, this short work is often published together with three other short works—Life, Faith, and Sacred Scripture—under the title The Four Doctrines. The Swedenborg Foundation will publish these four titles together in the forthcoming NCE hardcover annotated volume The Shorter Works of 1763.
Life refers not to the life force that sustains us but to the way we live our lives. This short piece focuses on the concept of regeneration, or spiritual rebirth, as a process of consciously rejecting our own destructive impulses and internalizing love and goodness. It argues that the choices we make and the reasons we make them have everything to do with our salvation. Swedenborg includes a brief overview of the inner sense of the Ten Commandments as a way to understand the nature of the choice between good and evil.
In Faith, Swedenborg rejects the notion that faith can be a choice to believe things that make no rational sense. Instead, he defines faith as an inner recognition of what is actually true. He explores the complex relationship between faith and knowledge, and emphasizes that true faith can occur only in people who love others and treat them well.
Life / Faith is part of the New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (NCE), an ongoing translation series. The NCE series incorporates the latest scholarship and translation standards for a more accurate and accessible rendering of Swedenborg’s works. Traditionally titled The Doctrine of Life and The Doctrine of Faith, these short works are often published together with two others—The Lord and Sacred Scripture—under the title The Four Doctrines. These four titles will be published together in the forthcoming NCE hardcover annotated volume The Shorter Works of 1763.
This volume comprises two short works, originally published separately, which describe the Last Judgment as Swedenborg claims to have witnessed it over the course of many months in 1757. In Last Judgment, first published in 1758, Swedenborg lays out how and why the Last Judgment occurred, explaining that history can be divided into a series of spiritual ages or churches. At the end of each age, evil threatens to overwhelm both the physical and the spiritual worlds, and the Lord restores balance between good and evil with a “Last Judgment.” Thus the 1757 Last Judgment, Swedenborg says, applied only to the souls of people who had lived since the time of Christ, and the reformation of the spiritual world allowed humanity to enter the next age with a new understanding of religion. In the second half of Last Judgment, Swedenborg describes how various types of people were judged, a theme he continues in the 1763 short work Supplements.
The new spiritual age that Swedenborg saw emerging during his lifetime is one of the foundational themes in his theology (a theme he explores more deeply in his later work, Revelation Unveiled, which is a commentary on the book of Revelation). In Supplements, Swedenborg succinctly introduces his understanding of the connection between heaven and earth and of how that connection plays out over the course of human history.
One of Time's women of the century, Helen Keller, reveals her mystical side in this best-selling spiritual autobiography. Writing that her first reading of Emanuel Swedenborg at age fourteen gave her truths that were "to my faculties what light, color and music are to the eye and ear," she explains how Swedenborg's works sustained her throughout her life.
This new edition includes a foreword by Dorothy Herrmann, author of the acclaimed Helen Keller: A Life, and a new chapter, "Epilogue: My Luminous Universe."
With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory.
In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism,Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.
Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.
Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.
Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotten--where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.
This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands--demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life--seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris--based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen."
Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.
Marx, Clark Gable, George W. Bush, Oscar Wilde, and Freud—Goldhill's range here is enormous, and he takes great delight in tracing both follies and fundamental philosophical questions through the centuries and continents to the birthplace of Western civilization as we know it. Underlying his brisk and learned excursions through history and art is the foundational belief, following Cicero, that learning about the classics makes a critical difference to our self-understanding. Whether we are considering the role of religion in contemporary society, our expectations about the boundaries between public and private life, or even how we spend our free time, recognizing the role of the classics is integral to our comprehension of modern life and our place in it.
When Goldhill asks "Who do you think you are?" he presents us with the rarest of opportunities: the chance to let him lead us, firmly but with a wink, back two thousand years to where we are.
The division of human society by race, class, and gender has been addressed by scholars in many of the social sciences. Now historical archaeologists are demonstrating how material culture can be used to examine the processes that have erected boundaries between people.
Drawing on case studies from around the world, the essays in this volume highlight diverse moments in the rise of capitalist civilization both in Western Europe and its colonies. In the first section, the contributors address the dynamics of the racial system that emerged from European colonialism. They show how archaeological remains shed light on the institution of slavery in the American Southeast, on the treatment of Native Americans by Mormon settlers, and on the color line in colonial southern Africa. The next group of articles considers how gender was negotiated in nineteenth-century New York City, in colonial Ecuador, and on Jamaican coffee plantations. A final section focuses on the issue of class division by examining the built environment of eighteenth-century Catalonia and material remains and housing from early industrial Massachusetts.
These essays constitute an archaeology of capitalism and clearly demonstrate the importance of history in shaping cultural consciousness. Arguing that material culture is itself an active agent in the negotiation of social difference, they reveal the ways in which historical archaeologists can contribute to both the definition and dismantling of the lines that divide.
The Editors: James A. Delle is an assistant professor of anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains.
Stephen A. Mrozowski is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and co-author of Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology of the Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Robert Paynter is a professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, author of Models of Spatial Inequality, and co-editor of The Archaeology of Inequality.
The Contributors: Marjorie R. Abel, Mark Bograd, James A. Delle, Terrence W. Epperson, William B. Fawcett, Ross W. Jamieson, David L. Larsen, Walter Robert Lewelling, Patricia Hart Mangan, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Michael S. Nassaney, Thomas C. Patterson, Robert Paynter, Warren Perry, Paul A. Shackel, Theresa A. Singleton, Diana diZerega Wall.
A growing number of archaeologists are applying Geographic Information Science (GIS) technologies to their research problems and questions. Advances in GIS and its use across disciplines allows for collaboration and enables archaeologists to ask ever more sophisticated questions and develop increasingly elaborate models on numerous aspects of past human behavior. Least cost analysis (LCA) is one such avenue of inquiry. While least cost studies are not new to the social sciences in general, LCA is relatively new to archaeology; until now, there has been no systematic exploration of its use within the field.
This edited volume presents a series of case studies illustrating the intersection of archaeology and LCA modeling at the practical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Designed to be a guidebook for archaeologists interested in using LCA in their own research, it presents a wide cross-section of practical examples for both novices and experts. The contributors to the volume showcase the richness and diversity of LCA’s application to archaeological questions, demonstrate that even simple applications can be used to explore sophisticated research questions, and highlight the challenges that come with injecting geospatial technologies into the archaeological research process.
Lithic analysis focused on sedentary societies, especially in places like Mesoamerica, has previously been neglected mostly because of the high frequency of informal tools, but such bias limits the ways in which both lithic production and economic organization are investigated. Bringing the importance of studying such technologies to the fore and emphasizing the vital anthropological questions that lithics can answer, Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies is a valuable resource for scholars and students of lithic technology and sedentary, complex societies.
Contributors: Fumi Arakawa, Mary A. Davis, James Enloe, Dan Healan, Francesca Manclossi, Theodore Marks, Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Jason S. R. Paling, Steve Rosen, John Whittaker
Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed?
To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced.
Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.
A collection of twelve engaging and insightful essays, Lost City, Found Pyramid does far more than argue for the simple debunking of false archaeology. Rather, it brings into focus the value of understanding how and why pseudoarchaeology captures the public imagination. By comprehending pseudoarchaeology’s appeal as a media product, cultural practice, and communication strategy, archaeologists can enhance and enliven how they communicate about real archaeology in the classroom and in the public arena.
The first part of Lost City, Found Pyramid provides numerous case studies. Some examine the work of well-intentioned romantics who project onto actual archaeological data whimsical interpretative frameworks or quixotic “proofs” that confirm legends, such as that of the Lost White City of Honduras, or other alternative claims. Other case studies lay bare how false claims may inadvertently lead to the perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes, economic exploitation, political adventurism, and a misunderstanding of science.
Offering much of interest to scholars and students of archaeology, archaeology buffs, as well as policy-makers involved in the discovery, curation, and care of archaeological sites and relics, Lost City, Found Pyramid provides an invaluable corrective and hopeful strategy for engaging the public’s curiosity with the compelling world of archaeological discovery.
The 400 entries in this volume include all of the Latin inscriptions on stone or metal in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan; they represent the largest, and arguably the most important, collection of Latin inscriptions in the Western Hemisphere. The collection is notable not just for its size but for the fact that almost all the inscriptions were acquired by purchase for their scholarly and educational value to the members of the university community. Because of this, the collection is also an important testimony to a seminal phase in the development of the study of Classics at the University of Michigan. For the first time ever, this project makes the Latin inscriptions of the Kelsey available in one volume and has provided an opportunity to reexamine some texts that have not been edited in over a century. The commentaries for this edition have benefited from a wealth of recent scholarship resulting in some amended readings and reidentification of texts.
Steven L. Tuck is Assistant Professor of Classics at Miami University of Ohio.
The Kelsey Museum Studies series, edited by University of Michigan professors Elaine Gazda, Margaret Cool Root, and John Pedley, is designed to publish unusual material in the Museum's collections, together with reports of current and past archaeological expeditions sponsored by the University of Michigan.
For Latin Inscriptions in Oxford, Reginald H. Adams, a former scholar at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, has translated a selection of Latin inscriptions. Among them, he finds a great many tributes and memorials—to Queen Anne, Cardinal Wolsey, and T. E. Lawrence, but also to Irene Frude, a “most kindly landlady” on Little Clarendon who “provided each day for almost thirty-five years enormous breakfasts.” Some of the inscriptions offer concise commentary—“Without experiment, it is not possible to know anything adequately.” While others are instructive like the Rhodes House’s warning, “Let no one who is smoke-bearing enter here.”
Evocative mementoes of the past, the inscriptions collected by Adams bring insight to the vivid history of Oxford, the city and the university.
Available in print, eBook, and open access versions, this collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.
When Linda Spence asked her aging mother to write her life story, her mother stared at a blank sheet of paper and asked—“How? Where do I begin?” In this practical guide to capturing those memories that have been stored away, Linda Spence provides the questions that are the keys to unlocking the memories that make up a life.
Beyond the vital statistics are the personal stories that tell what it was like, what we did, and why we did it, how we feel about our choices, and what our circumstances were. Through encouraging coaching, shared memories, and open-ended questions, the process of producing a personal history becomes intriguing and engaging.
With Legacy the possibilities expand: a personal record is preserved—with its myths, traditions, joys, pains, gains, and losses; a family opens a potential dialogue that will last for generations; the writer has an opportunity for insight and resolution; the culture of a time and place is noted; the tradition of personal story is revitalized, and our present and future find nourishment and knowledge in the past.
Either as a gift that can act as a shared experience as the memories are recounted or as a personal way to take account of one’s experiences, often long since forgotten, Legacy is indeed a way to get one’s story down.
Parks created a pottery school that attracts students from around the world and developed for himself an international reputation as the creator of powerful, innovative works in clay. Meanwhile, he and his family had to master the skills required of those who choose to live in the back country--growing and hunting their own food, renovating or building from scratch the structures they needed for residences or studios, resolving conflicts with neighbors, inventing their own amusements. The transformation from middle-class urbanity to small-town simplicity is, as Parks reveals, a lurching and sometimes hilarious process, and the achievement of self-sufficiency is similarly fraught with unexpected challenges.
Drawing on original documents, Pike’s copious writings, and interviews with Pike’s descendants, Walter Lee Brown presents a fascinating personal history that also serves as a rich compendium of Arkansas’s antebellum history.
Barbara Jordan spoke for many Texas women when she told a reporter, "I get from the soil and spirit of Texas the feeling that I, as an individual, can accomplish whatever I want to, and that there are no limits, that you can just keep going, just keep soaring. I like that spirit." Indeed, the sense of limitless possibilities has inspired countless Texas women—sometimes in the face of daunting obstacles—to build lives rich in work, family, friends, faith, and community involvement.
In this collection of interviews conducted by PJ Pierce, twenty-five Texas women ranging in age from 53 to 93 share the wisdom they've acquired through living unconventional lives. Responding to the question "What have you found that really matters about life?" they offer keen insights into motherhood, career challenges, being a minority, marriage and widowhood, anger, assertiveness, managing change, persevering, power, speaking out, fashioning success from failure, writing your own job description, loving a younger man, and recognizing opportunities disguised as disaster—to name only a few of their topics. In her introduction, Pierce describes how she came to write the book and how she chose her subjects to represent a cross-section of career paths and ethnic groups and all geographic areas of Texas. A topical index makes it easy to compare several women's views on a given subject.
As a scholar, William Hung was instrumental in opening China’s rich documentary past to modern scrutiny. As an educator, he helped shape one of twentieth-century China’s most remarkable institutions, Yenching University. A member of the buoyant, Western-educated generation that expected to transform China into a modern, liberal nation, he saw his hopes darken as political turmoil, war with Japan, and the Communist takeover led to a different future. yet his influence was widespread; for his students became leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and he continued to teach in the United States through the 1970s.
In 1978, he began recalling his colorful life to Susan Chan Egan in weekly taping sessions. Egan draws on these tapes to let a skillful raconteur tell for himself anecdotes from his life as a religious and academic activist with a flair for the flamboyant. His reminiscences encompass the issues and dilemmas faced by Chinese intellectuals of his period. Among the notables who figured in his life and memories were Hu Shih, H. H. Kung, Henry Winter Luce, John Leighton Stuart, Timothy Lew, and Lu Chihwei.
While retaining the flavor of Hung’s reminiscences, Egan explains the evolution and importance of his scholarly work; captures his blend of Confucianism, mystical Christianity, and iconoclastic thought; and describes his effect on those around him. For it was finally his unyielding integrity and personal kindness as much as his accomplishments that caused him to be revered by colleagues and generations of students.
Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends.
With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.
Leo Strauss on Hegel reconstructs Strauss’s seminar on Hegel, supplemented by passages from an earlier version of the seminar from which only fragments of a transcript remain. Strauss focused his seminar on the lectures collected in The Philosophy of History, which he considered more accessible than Hegel’s written works. In his own lectures on Hegel, Strauss continues his project of demonstrating how modern philosophers related to ancient thought and explores the development and weaknesses of modern political theory. Strauss is especially concerned with the relationship in Hegel between empirical history and his philosophy of history, and he argues for the primacy of religion in Hegel’s understanding of history and society. In addition to a relatively complete transcript, Leo Strauss on Hegel also includes annotations, which bring context and clarity to the text.
Henry Rousso addresses the rise of contemporary history and the relations of present-day societies to their past, especially their legacies of political violence. Focusing on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he shows that for contemporary historians, the recent past has become a problem to be solved. No longer unfolding as a series of traditions to be respected or a set of knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, history today is treated as a constant act of mourning or memory, an attempt to atone. Historians must also negotiate with strife within this field, as older scholars who may have lived through events clash with younger historians who also claim to understand the experiences. Ultimately, The Latest Catastrophe shows how historians, at times against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.
In late 2007 and early 2008, world-renowned historians gathered in Kansas City for a series of public forums on World War I. Each of the five events focused on a particular topic and featured spirited dialogue between its prominent participants.
The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event.
Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria—comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death.
The war’s aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people’s views of politics and the West for the century to come.
On the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the flood of American troops in Europe that would shift the tide of World War I in favor of the Allies, Letters from the Boys brings to life this terrible war as experienced by Wisconsinites writing home.
Technology had transformed the battlefield in alarming ways. Automatic rifles mowed down the young men who went “over the top” to attack enemy trenches; airplanes and improved artillery brought death unseen from miles away; terrifying clouds of poison gas choked and burned the European countryside; the internal combustion engine brought tanks to the battlefield for the first time and revolutionized the way troops deployed.
In the thick of it were young men from Wisconsin who found themselves caught up in geopolitical events half a world away. Professor Carrie A. Meyer combed through three newspapers in Green County, Wisconsin, to collect and synthesize the letters from the boys into a narrative that is both unique and representative, telling the stories of several Green County boys and what they saw, from preparing for war, to life among French families near the front, to the terror of the battlefield. Meyer gracefully removes the veil of obscurity and anonymity hanging over soldiers who participated in a war fought so long ago by great numbers of men, reminding us that armies are made of individuals who strove to do their part and then return to their families.
The Long Shadows is the first book-length work to offer global perspectives on the environmental history of World War II. Based on long-term research, the selected articles represent the best available studies in different fields and countries. With contributions touching on Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, the book has a truly global approach.
While other edited volumes on the environmental history of warfare discuss multiple wars and various time periods, The Long Shadows is devoted exclusively to World War II and its profound and lasting impact on global environments, encompassing polar, temperate and tropical ecological zones. Divided into three main sections, the first offers an introduction to and holistic overview of the War. The second section of the book examines the social and environmental impacts of the conflict, while the third focuses on the history and legacy of resource extraction. A fourth and final section offers conclusions and hypotheses. Numerous themes and topics are explored in these previously unpublished essays, including the new and innovative field of acoustic ecology, the environmental policies of the Third Reich, Japanese imperialism and marine resources, and the control of Typhus fever.
Aimed at researchers and students in the fields of environmental history, military history, and global history, The Long Shadows will also appeal to a general audience interested in the environmental impact of the greatest military conflict in the history of the world.
CONTRIBUTORS
Outi Ampuja
Alla Bolotova
Chris Boyer
Matthew Evenden
Paul Josephson
Simo Laakkonen
Helene Laurent
Carol MacLennan
Gregory Maddox
Ilmo Massa
Evan Mawdsley
Micah Muscolino
William Tsutsui
Richard Tucker
Timo Vuorisalo
Anna-Katharina Wöbse
P.C. Boer considers whether the assessment of Major General Van Oyen that deploying the Allied air forces might prevent Japanese invasion of Java was realistic, and whether reliance on air power limited the capacity of land and naval forces to repel Japan's advances. The generally accepted idea is that the Allies were ineffective in their fight against the Japanese invaders but in fact the Japanese suffered serious losses. Boer's study shows that Dutch strategy grew out of a carefully-devised plan of defense, and that the battle for Java comprised not one (the Battle of the Java Sea) but four major engagements. However, Japanese commanders at various levels consciously took steps that exposed their forces to great risk but succeeded in putting the Allies under great pressure. In the end the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) and the allied forces capitulated on 8 March 1942.
This book is a translation of Het Verlies Van Java: Een kwestie van Air Power. De eindstrijd om Nederlands-Indie van de geallieerde lucht-, zee- en landstrijdkrschten in de periode van 18 februari t/m 7 maart 1942 (Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw BV for the Koninklijke Militaire Academie, 2006).
For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history.
Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.
The first book-length study of Latina/o experiences in World War II over a wide spectrum of identities and ancestries—from Cuban American, Spanish American, and Mexican American segments to the under-studied Afro-Latino experience—Latina/os and World War II probes the controversial aspects of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship in the war, the repercussions of which defined the West during the twentieth century. The editors also offer a revised, more accurate tabulation of the number of Latina/os who served in the war.
Spanning imaginative productions, such as vaudeville and the masculinity of the soldado razo theatrical performances; military segregation and the postwar lives of veterans; Tejanas on the homefront; journalism and youth activism; and other underreported aspects of the wartime experience, the essays collected in this volume showcase rarely seen recollections. Whether living in Florida in a transformed community or deployed far from home (including Mexican Americans who were forced to endure the Bataan Death March), the men and women depicted in this collection yield a multidisciplinary, metacritical inquiry. The result is a study that challenges celebratory accounts and deepens the level of scholarly inquiry into the realm of ideological mobility for a unique cultural crossroads. Taking this complex history beyond the realm of war narratives, Latina/os and World War II situates these chapters within the broader themes of identity and social change that continue to reverberate in postcolonial lives.
In Last Flight from Singapore, Donahue tells his dramatic story, accompanied by photographs he took himself, of the intense and futile battle against the Japanese for control of the gateway to the Malay Peninsula. He continues his story through his convalescence to his return to England, where he once again began patrols over Europe. The manuscript for Last Flight from Singapore was found among his effects after he did not return from a patrol in 1942 and was presumed lost.
Historian Otto Dov Kulka has dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. Until now he has always set to one side his personal experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical, in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology one man constructed around his experiences.
Auschwitz is for the author a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Between 1991 and 2001, Kulka made audio recordings of these memories as they welled up, and in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death he sifts through these fragments, attempting to make sense of them. He describes the Family Camp’s children’s choir in which he and others performed “Ode to Joy” within yards of the crematoria, his final, indelible parting from his mother when the camp was liquidated, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, Kulka says, is an inescapable law).
As the author maps his interior world, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps—both at the time, and long afterward. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past, and our shared history.
The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.
Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.
New research on Holocaust literature continues to unearth unexamined texts from the period of the war itself, which can shed light on Jewish responses to persecution and strategies for survival. The study of Holocaust testimonies continues to grapple with the challenge of language: how to convey through the limits of human language the depths of barbarity to an audience that could never fully understand what they had not personally experienced. Likewise, literary studies continue to incorporate texts that were once considered outside the standard canon of Holocaust literature, such as science fiction and children’s literature.
The tension between local and global perspectives can also be seen quite clearly in what the volume's editors understand by the term “memory studies,” or new approaches to research on museums and memorials. The very specific nature of collective memory on the national level continues to be the site of the contested “politics of memory.” A number of the chapters in this volume engage with the conflict of monuments and memorials, museums’ attempts to resolve provenance issues, questions around the ethics of Holocaust tourism, and the inclusion of new technologies and digital survivors into the memorial landscape.
Noack-Mosse's aim in documenting the horrors of daily life within Theresienstadt was to ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. She also gathered from surviving inmates information about earlier events within the walled fortress, witnessed the defeat and departure of the Nazis, saw the arrival of the International Red Cross and the Soviet Army takeover of the camp and town, assisted in administration of the camp's closure, and aided displaced persons in discovering the fates of their family and friends. After the war ended, and she returned home, Noack-Mosse cross-referenced her data with that of others to provide evidence of Nazi crimes. At least 35,000 people died at Theresienstadt and another 90,000 were sent on to death camps.
M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture.
Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.
Primo Levi opened his memoir Survival in Auschwitz with a call to remember, reflect upon, and teach about the Holocaust—or to face the rejection of subsequent generations. The transmittal of this urgent knowledge between generations was the theme of the eighth Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust, and it is the focus of this volume. The circular formulation—from generation to generation—points backward and forward: where do we locate the roots of the Holocaust, and how do its repercussions manifest themselves? The contributors address these questions from various perspectives—history, cultural studies, psychiatry, literature, and sociology. They also bring to bear the personal aspect of associated issues such as continuity and rupture. What has the generation of the Shoah passed on to its descendants? What have subsequent generations taken from these legacies? Contributions by scholars, some of whom are survivors and children of survivors, remind us that the Holocaust does—and must—remain present from generation to generation.
Several of the essays-such as one on nonarmed "amidah" or resistance and others on the role of gender in the behavior of perpetrators and victims-provide innovative and potentially significant interpretive frameworks for the field of Holocaust studies. Others; for instance, the rounding up of Jews in Italy, Nazi food policy in Eastern Europe, and Nazi anti-Jewish scholarship, emphasize the importance of new sources for reconstructing the historical record. Still others, including essays on the 1964 Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards and on the response of the Catholic Church to the question of German guilt, bring a new depth and sophistication to highly charged, sharply politicized topics. Together these essays will inform the future of the Holocaust in scholarly research and in popular understanding.
A collection of nineteen essays, this book is organized into four sections: the first focuses on how various fields of study can open new perspectives on the Holocaust and sharpen old ones; the second examines culture and politics in Germany before and after 1933; the third addresses the problems associated with the memorialization of those years; and the final section examines the shocking denials of the Holocaust.
A thorough, thoughtful, and insightful introduction clarifies the volume's themes and concisely places them within the larger context of Holocaust scholarship; and an introductory essay by Omer Bartov brings into focus the numerous paradoxes structuring early twenty-first-century retrospective thinking about the significance of the Holocaust as a central theme of the twentieth century.
Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future contains the highlights from the ninth "Lessons and Legacies" conference. The conference, held during the height of the genocide in Darfur, sought to reexamine how the darkness of the Holocaust continues to shadow human existence more than sixty years after World War II left the Third Reich in ruins.
The collection opens with Saul Friedländer’s call for interdisciplinary approaches to Holocaust research. The essays that follow draw on the latest methodologies in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, religion, film, and gender studies, among others. Together both the leading scholars of the Holocaust and the next generation of scholars engage the difficult reality—as raised by editors Petropoulos, Rapaport, and Roth in their introduction—that the legacies of the Holocaust have not proved sufficient in intervening against human-made mass death, let alone preventing or eliminating it.
Lessons and Legacies II focuses on matters unique to Holocaust education. Consisting of selected papers delivered at the second Lessons and Legacies conference in 1992, the volume is organized in three sections: Issues, Resources, and Applications. Taken individually, the essays speak directly to specific concerns surrounding Holocaust education: the growing maturity of the Holocaust as a field of study; the difficult issue of explaining the perpetrators' behavior; the process of decision-making within Jewish communities during the Holocaust; issues of gender and family; the scope and content of survivor literature; and the structure of courses and the implications of being an educator in the field. Taken as a whole, the volume speaks to the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching and scholarship in this important field.
Sharply intelligent, often personal reflections on the global crises of 2020 that are still ongoing
By all accounts, 2020 was the longest year in recent memory, as people in the United States and across the globe careened from one unfolding catastrophe to another. The consequences of this devastating year are sure to impact the planet for decades, if not centuries, to come. This collection considers the question of that long 2020 from the perspective of the lived experience of the year, its long and deep roots in various human and nonhuman pasts, and the transformation of our sense of the future.
The Long 2020 assembles a strikingly interdisciplinary group of scholars and thinkers to address how the many crises of 2020—epidemiological, political, ecological, and social—have unfolded, examining both their origins as well as their ongoing effects. The contributors address questions of time, history, and scale as they have played out, and continue to play out; the relationship between home and environment, with a focus on architecture, breathing, and human–nonhuman relations; and the experience of cultural, political, and social life, deploying cultural and political theory to explore questions of race, gender and sexuality, and democracy.
The global pandemic has still not abated, reflecting the need to rethink our interrelatedness to viruses and other species. In bringing together this diverse group of authors, The Long 2020 offers a variety of perspectives on the impacts of that fraught year, the effects of which continue to permeate daily life.
Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Oregon; Elisabeth Anker, George Washington U; Janelle Baker, Athabasca U, Alberta, Canada; Daniel A. Barber, U of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design; Adia Benton, Northwestern U; Levi R. Bryant, Collin College; Beatriz Colomina, Princeton U; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Cary Gabriel Costello, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Megan Craig, Stony Brook U; Wai Chee Dimock, Harvard U; Paulla Ebron, Stanford U; Nirmala Erevelles, U of Alabama; Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale U; Rosa E. Ficek, U of Puerto Rico at Cayey; Stefanie Fishel, U of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland; Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State U; Jennifer Gabrys, U of Cambridge; David Gissen, Parsons School of Design and the New School, New York; Dehlia Hannah, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; Karen Ho, U of Minnesota; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Frédéric Keck, Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS Paris); Eben Kirksey, Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia; Bernard C. Perley, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Tom Rademacher; Renya Ramirez, U of California, Santa Cruz; Zoe Todd (Métis); Anna Tsing, U of California, Santa Cruz; Sarah E. Vaughn, U of California, Berkeley; Rebecca Wanzo, Washington U; McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, New York City.
Less cynical than Talleyrand, more imaginative than Metternich, as creative as Guizot, Lord Liverpool was one of the great European conservatives of his age. He served as prime minister for the longest continuous term in nineteenth-century Britain and presided over the triumphant years of the Napoleonic War, the strife-torn era of the “Peterloo” massacre, and the founding of the great liberal free-trade revolution in financial and commercial policy that heralded Victorianism.
Norman Gash’s biography is the first modern reassessment of this misunderstood statesman. Gash places Liverpool within the kaleidoscopic parliamentary politics of the time and shows how he governed with the collective strength and unity of the cabinet. By offering parsimonious administration and enlightened economic policy, Liverpool hoped to preserve the old constitution and prevent both Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. Balancing interests and preserving order, Liverpool also contended with the vicissitudes of the still powerful monarchs—the aging and disturbed George III and the capricious and self-indulgent George IV, whose attempted divorce almost toppled the Liverpool administration.
This is not only an account of one of the most professional prime ministers of Great Britain, but also the story of the personal relations that shaped Lord Liverpool and the private life that gave him immense satisfaction. Based on correspondence and Lord Liverpool’s private papers, Gash’s work recasts the history of a turbulent age and its most prominent political figure.
In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism?
To answer this question, Elaine Hadley focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity. These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. Living Liberalism argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, Hadley reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics. A major revisionist account that alters our sense of the trajectory of liberalism, Living Liberalism revises our understanding of the presumption of the liberal subject.
Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies.
Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.
This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern colossus. Roy Porter paints a detailed landscape--from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenelated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed.
London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, great literature, and new religion. From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, London experienced a cruel civil war, raging fires, enlightenment in thought, government, and living, and the struggle and benefits of empire. From the lament that "London was but is no more" to "you, who are to stand a wonder to all Years and ages...a phoenix," London became an elegant, eye-catching, metropolitan hub. It was a mosaic, Porter shows, that represented the shared values of a people--both high and low born--at work and play.
London was and is a wonder city, a marvel. Not since ancient times has there been such a city--not eternal, but vibrant, living, full of a free people ever evolving. In this transcendent book, Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with brio and wit.
This book presents more than a hundred images of Greater London from before 1800, all from the Gough Collection of the Bodleian Library. We see prints of London before and after the Great Fire, images of the 1780 tornado, panoramas of the Thames, depictions of the building and destruction of landmark bridges, and much more. Making brilliant use of the most extensive collection of London images amassed by any private collector of the period, the book will be essential to anyone delving into the history of the city.
After years of hearing about Scotland as a place deeply interwoven with the story of her family, Madeleine Bunting was driven to see for herself this place so symbolic and full of history. Most people travel in search of the unfamiliar, to leave behind the comfort of what’s known to explore some suitably far-flung corner of the globe. From the first pages, it’s clear that Madeleine Bunting’s Love of Country marks a different kind of journey—one where all paths lead to a closer understanding of home, but a home bigger than Bunting’s corner of Britain, the drizzly, busy streets of London with their scream of sirens and high-rise developments crowding the sky. Over six years, Bunting returned again and again to the Hebrides, fascinated by the question of what it means to belong there, a question that on these islands has been fraught with tenacious resistance and sometimes tragedy. With great sensitivity, she takes readers through the Hebrides’ history of dispossession and displacement, a history that can be understand only in the context of Britain’s imperial past, and she shows how the Hebrides have been repeatedly used to define and imagine Britain. In recent years, the relationship between Britain and Scotland has been subject to its most testing scrutiny, and Bunting’s travels became a way to reflect on what might be lost and what new possibilities might lie ahead.
For all who have wondered how it might feel to stand face-out at the edge of home, Love of Country is a revelatory journey through one of the world’s most remote, beautiful landscapes that encourages us to think of the many identities we wear as we walk our paths, and how it is possible to belong to many places while at the same time not wholly belonging to any.
The volume comprises more than three hundred letters written by Ormonde to her husband and family, agents and servants, and friends and clients. Spanning six decades, these letters are meticulously transcribed, edited, and annotated, and the volume includes a substantial scholarly introduction, family trees, a glossary, and other resources.
This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir. In her works, Jeanne d’Albret asserts her own position as legal sovereign of Béarn and Navarre and situates herself at the nexus of overlapping political, religious, and familial tensions.
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.
Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street—victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these “Rousseaus of the gutter” desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them.
While censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the visible publishing industry within the limits of official orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive, the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and publishers’ records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the fascinating story of that forgotten underworld.
The activities of the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing history that will inform and delight the general reader.
Sylvia Neely provides both the first scholarly study of Lafayette’s life after the French Revolution and a detailed analysis of French politics during the early Restoration.
Lafayette, advocating a liberalism based on the American example, used both legal and illegal means to overturn a conservative government. The personification of liberalism for many of his contemporaries, he and his friends Benjamin Constant, Voyer d’Argenson, and Charles Goyet saw themselves as fighters in an international struggle that set liberalism against the forces of reaction and obscurantism. Although he ultimately failed, Lafayette was convinced that the liberal ideals derived from the Enlightenment and from his personal mentor, George Washington, would prevail.
Neely makes Lafayette’s actions clear by considering seriously the principles that guided his life and by describing the political climate of the early nineteenth century. She discloses previously overlooked features of the revolutions of the 1820s which account for the divisions among the revolutionary groups. She also examines relationships between Lafayette and the prominent writers and thinkers of the period, among them Augustin Thierry, Jeremy Bentham, Lady Morgan, and Frances Wright.
In 1960, renowned Nevada writer Robert Laxalt moved himself and his family to a small Basque village in the French Pyrenees. The son of Basque emigrants, Laxalt wanted to learn as much as he could about the ancient and mysterious people from which he was descended and about the country from which his parents came. Thanks to his Basque surname and a wide network of family connections, Laxalt was able to penetrate the traditional reserve of the Basques in a way that outsiders rarely can. In the process, he gained rare insight into the nature of the Basques and the isolated, beautiful mountain world where they have lived for uncounted centuries. Based on Laxalt’s personal journals of this and a later sojourn in 1965, The Land of My Fathers is a moving record of a people and their homeland. Through Laxalt’s perceptive eyes and his wife Joyce’s photographs, we observe the Basques’ market days and festivals, join their dove hunts and harvests, share their humor and history, their deep sense of nationalism, their abiding pride in their culture and their homes, and discover the profound sources of the Basques’ strength and their endurance as a people. Photography by Joyce Laxalt.
Provence through the eyes of its writers—those who wrote of it in Provençal or French and also those visitors who were moved by its beauty—that is the inspiration behind A Literary Guide to Provence. In this compact travel guide, Marseilles native Daniel Vitaglione presents a literary panorama of the region of southern France from the Avignon of Mistral to Colette’s St. Tropez.
Including such sites as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, A Literary Guide to Provence presents a thousand years of history entwined with maps and photos that provide readers on tour with a sense of the historical import of this most beautiful of regions even as they experience it firsthand.
Both authors of Provençal ancestry and those who came to love and live in Provence are featured in this comprehensive and enchanting picture of the garden place of France. The Riviera enticed Virginia Woolf. Toulon inspired two novels by Georges Sand. Robert Louis Stevenson resided in Hyères, as did Edith Wharton. Le Lavandou was Willa Cather’s favorite place. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Raphael and Juan-les-Pins, where he wrote Tender is the Night.
This illustrated guide follows in these writers’ footsteps, and the practical information on hotels and restaurants (phones, web sites, email, etc.) make it the ideal traveling companion for armchair tourists and those who cannot resist seeing Provence for themselves.
"Surprisingly fresh and intense. . . . A retrospective travelogue of the Left Bank in the days when it was the setting for almost all French intellectual activity. . . . Absorbing."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker
"As an introduction to a period in French history already legendary, The Left Bank is superb."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"An intellectual history. A history of the interaction between politics and letters. And a rumination on the limitless credulity of intellectuals."—Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman
Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.
Through readings of key intellectuals ranging from Herder and Schelling to Wagner and Nietzsche, Williamson highlights three crucial factors in the emergence of the German engagement with myth: the tradition of Philhellenist neohumanism, a critique of contemporary aesthetic and public life as dominated by private interests, and a rejection of the Bible by many Protestant scholars as the product of a foreign, "Oriental" culture. According to Williamson, the discourse on myth in Germany remained bound up with problems of Protestant theology and confessional conflict through the nineteenth century and beyond.
A compelling adventure in intellectual history, this study uncovers the foundations of Germany's fascination with myth and its enduring cultural legacy.
A political biography of a leading German liberal, this book carefully examines the life of Ludwig Bamberger from his university days in the 1840s until his death in 1899. Not only does it deal exhaustively with his career, it unfolds the major issues disputed in Germany during the latter half of the nineteenth century.: socialism, financial and political unification, parliamentarism, protectionism, and colonialism. Bamberger's career offers a vehicle to explore the political and social evolution of Germany, and his varied life illuminates the strength and weaknesses of German liberalism as it confronted and ultimately failed to overcome its competitors.
"From exhaustive research [Trevor-Roper] has put together a carefully documented, irrefutable, and unforgettable reconstruction of the last days in April, 1945."—New Republic
"A book sound in its scholarship, brilliant in its presentation, a delight for historians and laymen alike."—A. J. P. Taylor, New Statesman
Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research
The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless explanations since the 1930s. According to Johann Chapoutot, we need to understand better how the Nazis explained it themselves. We need a clearer view, in particular, of how they were steeped in and spread the idea that history gave them no choice: it was either kill or die.
Chapoutot, one of France’s leading historians, spent years immersing himself in the texts and images that reflected and shaped the mental world of Nazi ideologues, and that the Nazis disseminated to the German public. The party had no official ur-text of ideology, values, and history. But a clear narrative emerges from the myriad works of intellectuals, apparatchiks, journalists, and movie-makers that Chapoutot explores.
The story went like this: In the ancient world, the Nordic-German race lived in harmony with the laws of nature. But since Late Antiquity, corrupt foreign norms and values—Jewish values in particular—had alienated Germany from itself and from all that was natural. The time had come, under the Nazis, to return to the fundamental law of blood. Germany must fight, conquer, and procreate, or perish. History did not concern itself with right and wrong, only brute necessity. A remarkable work of scholarship and insight, The Law of Blood recreates the chilling ideas and outlook that would cost millions their lives.
On January 30, 1933, hearing about the celebrations for Hitler’s assumption of power, Erich Ebermayer remarked bitterly in his diary, “We are the losers, definitely the losers.” Learning of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which made Jews non-citizens, he raged, “hate is sown a million-fold.” Yet in March 1938, he wept for joy at the Anschluss with Austria: “Not to want it just because it has been achieved by Hitler would be folly.”
In a masterful work, Peter Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. The goal was to create a new national and racial self-consciousness among Germans. For Germany to live, others—especially Jews—had to die. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life. Fritzsche examines the efforts of Germans to adjust to new racial identities, to believe in the necessity of war, to accept the dynamic of unconditional destruction—in short, to become Nazis.
Powerful and provocative, Life and Death in the Third Reich is a chilling portrait of how ideology takes hold.
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