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Winterthur Portfolio, volume 54 number 4 (Winter 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 1 (Spring 2021)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 1 (Spring 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 55 issue 1 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
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front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2021)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 55 issue 23 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 4 (Winter 2021)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 55 number 4 (Winter 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 55 issue 4 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 1 (Spring 2022)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 56 issue 1 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2022)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 56 issue 23 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 4 (Winter 2022)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 56 number 4 (Winter 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 56 issue 4 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 57 number 1 (Spring 2023)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 57 number 1 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 57 issue 1 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Winterthur Portfolio, volume 57 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2023)
Winterthur Portfolio, volume 57 number 23 (Summer/Autumn 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 57 issue 23 of Winterthur Portfolio. Winterthur Portfolio fosters knowledge of the North American past by publishing articles on material culture and the historical contexts within which artifacts developed. The journal presents interdisciplinary scholarship that critically engages art history, history, geography, ethnology, archaeology, anthropology, craft, design, and literature. It publishes articles that are analytical and synthetic rather than descriptive, and it encourages submissions by scholars underrepresented in material culture studies.
[more]

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We Europeans?
Media, Representations, Identities
William Uricchio
Intellect Books, 2009
We Europeans? explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault lines and fissures of the shifting ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations, and languages that make up contemporary Europe. Addressing topics such as film, television, public monuments, and the press, an international group of contributors reveal how European identity is shaped as the continent administratively consolidates. In essays that explore cultural homogenization, longed-for identities, and the fears surrounding transnational media, this volume uncovers the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform the European present.
 
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The World Wide Web of Work
A History in the Making
Marcel van der Linden
University College London, 2023
A groundbreaking exploration of the core ideas and concepts of global labor history.

Global labor history is one of the fastest-growing fields of study worldwide today. This volume assembles a group of contributors from around the world to discuss the core concepts “capitalism” and “workers,” and to refine notions such as “coerced labor,” “household strategies,” and “labor markets.” It explores in new ways the connections between laborers in different parts of the world, arguing that both globalization and modern labor management originated in agriculture in the Global South and were only later introduced in Northern industrial settings. It reveals that nineteenth-century chattel slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced labor, and it reconstructs the twentieth-century attempts of the International Labor Organisation to regulate work standards internationally. The book also pays attention to the relational inequality through which workers in wealthy countries benefit from the exploitation of those in poor countries. The final part addresses workers’ resistance and acquiescence: why collective actions often have unanticipated consequences, why and how workers sometimes organize massive flights from exploitation and oppression, and why proletarian revolutions took place in pre-industrial or industrializing countries but never in fully developed capitalist societies.
 
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With the Hand
A Cultural History of Masturbation
Mels van Driel
Reaktion Books, 2012

People call it everything from “walking your dog” to “scratching your bean.” Women usually do it at home. Men, it sometimes seems, do it everywhere. Some people think it’s healthy; others think it is a sin that will send you straight to hell. But while many people declare that everyone’s doing it, no one actually talks about it—outside the pages of Cosmo, masturbation is among the most taboo of topics, not suitable for polite society or public conversation.

Mels van Driel boldly breaks this silence in order to help the world overcome its diffidence toward solo sex in With the Hand. Consulting everyone from doctors and sexologists to feminists and chauvinists, van Driel explains what masturbation actually is and describes the latest discoveries and developments on the subject. He also looks to theologians, historians, and philosophers to understand perceptions of masturbation across cultures and religions throughout history. Covering a great number of topics, including age, location, and frequency, as well as the effects of circumcision and the ability to have multiple orgasms, With the Hand also explores masturbation in art, literature, poetry, and music.
 
Addressing the physical, mythical, and mythological, this often humorous and always informative book clears up the confusion surrounding this universal, and universally unmentionable, topic.
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The Work of Authorship
Edited by Mireille van Eechoud
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
Technological and economic concerns have long been the drivers of debate about copyright. But diverse disciplines in the humanities - including literary studies, aesthetics, film studies, and the philosophy of art - have a great deal to offer if we wish to establish a more nuanced and useful conception of copyright and authorship. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the challenges inherent in translating aesthetics and creativity studies to concepts of copyright, especially as longstanding approaches are troubled by the rise of the digital.
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Willa Cather - American Writers 36
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Dorothy Van Ghent
University of Minnesota Press, 1964

Willa Cather - American Writers 36 was first published in 1964. 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.

[more]

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Woodcuts as Reading Guides
How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500-1550)
Andrea van Leerdam
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries saw the rise of a lively market for practical and instructive books that targeted non-specialist readers. This study shows how woodcuts in vernacular books on medicine and astrology fulfilled important rhetorical functions in knowledge communication. These images guided readers’ perceptions of the organisation, visualisation, and reliability of knowledge. Andrea van Leerdam uncovers the assumptions and intentions of book producers to which images testify, and shows how actual readers engaged with these illustrated books. Drawing on insights from the field of information design studies, she scrutinises the books’ material characteristics, including their lay-outs and traces of use, to shed light on the habits and interests of early modern readers. She situates these works in a culture where medicine and astrology were closely interwoven in daily life and where both book producers and readers were exploring the potential of images.
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Warship 3
Frigate HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

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Warship 4
Frigate USS Clark
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 6
Warship 6
Destroyer HMCS Haida
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Wine
Wine
A Cultural History
John Varriano
Reaktion Books, 2011

For oenophiles, casual wine-drinkers, and aesthetes alike, an informative and entertaining history sure to delight even the most sensitive palates.

From celebrations of Bacchus in ancient Rome to the Last Supper and casual dinner parties, wine has long been a key component of festivities, ceremonies, and celebrations. Made by almost every civilization throughout history, in every part of the world, wine has been used in religious ceremonies, inspired artists and writers, been employed as a healing medicine, and, most often, sipped as a way to relax with a gathering of friends. Yet, like all other forms of alcohol, wine has also had its critics, who condemn it for the drunkenness and bad behavior that arise with its overconsumption. Wine can render you tongue-tied or philosophical; it can heal wounds or damage health; it can bring society together or rend it. In this fascinating cultural history of wine, John Varriano takes us on a tour of wine’s lively story, revealing the polarizing effect wine has had on society and culture through the ages.
 
From its origins in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the expanding contemporary industries in Australia, New Zealand, and America, Varriano examines how wine is made and how it has been used in rituals, revelries, and remedies throughout history. In addition, he investigates the history of wine’s transformative effects on body and soul in art, literature, and science from the mosaics of ancient Rome to the poetry of Dickinson and Neruda and the paintings of Caravaggio and Manet.
 
A spirited exploration, this book will delight lovers of sauvignon blanc or pinot noir, as well as those who are interested in the rich history of human creativity and consumption.

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front cover of Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages
Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages
Balancing the Humours
Theresa Vaughan
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
What can anthropological and folkloristic approaches to food, gender, and medicine tell us about these topics in the Middle Ages beyond the textual evidence itself? Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours uses these approaches to look at the textual traditions of dietary recommendations for women’s health, placed within the context of the larger cultural concerns of gender roles and Church teachings about women. Women are expected to be nurturers, healers, and the primary locus of food provisioning for families, especially women of the lower social classes, typically overlooked in the written record. This work illuminates what we can know about women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages, and examines how the written medical tradition interacts with folk medicine and other cultural factors in both understanding women’s bodies and their roles as healers and food providers.
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Working Together for Change
Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design, Volume 5
Edited by Lisa M. Vaughn, Sara Neyer, and Kathie Maynard
University of Cincinnati Press, 2023

Strategies for engaging key stakeholders—evaluators, researchers, and designers—to discuss frameworks for promoting collaborative change.

Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design (CCRED) is a framework and collection of participatory practices that engage people and the systems around them to drive community outcomes. This framework emerged out of the recognition that deep participation (or engagement) is frequently missing in collaborative impact approaches. When collaborative change is implemented effectively, community members are viewed as valuable owners and experts instead of being seen as disinterested or unqualified partners.

CCRED is a social action process with dual goals of collective empowerment and the deepening of social knowledge. Executed successfully, CCRED has the potential to increase the rigor, reach, and relevance of research, evaluation, and design translated to meaningful action. Written in an easily accessible, narrative style, Working Together for Change, the fourth volume in the Interdisciplinary Community Engaged Research for Health series edited by Farrah Jacquez and Lela Svedin brings together evaluators, researchers, and designers to describe collaborative change by describing their own work in the space.

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Wind Energy Modeling and Simulation
Atmosphere and plant, Volume 1
Paul Veers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
In order to optimise the yield of wind power from existing and future wind plants, the entire breadth of the system of a plant, from the wind field to the turbine components, needs to be modelled in the design process. The modelling and simulation approaches used in each subsystem as well as the system-wide solution methods to optimize across subsystem boundaries are described in this reference. Chapters are written by technical experts in each field, describing the current state of the art in modelling and simulation for wind plant design. This comprehensive, two-volume research reference will provide long-lasting insight into the methods that will need to be developed for the technology to advance into its next generation.
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front cover of Wind Energy Modeling and Simulation
Wind Energy Modeling and Simulation
Turbine and system, Volume 2
Paul Veers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
In order to optimise the yield of wind power from existing and future wind plants, the entire breadth of the system of a plant, from the wind field to the turbine components, needs to be modelled in the design process. The modelling and simulation approaches used in each subsystem as well as the system-wide solution methods to optimize across subsystem boundaries are described in this reference. Chapters are written by technical experts in each field, describing the current state of the art in modelling and simulation for wind plant design. This comprehensive, two-volume research reference will provide long-lasting insight into the methods that will need to be developed for the technology to advance into its next generation.
[more]

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Wind Power Modelling
Power plants and grid integration, Volume 3
Paul Veers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Wind Power Modelling: Power plants and grid integration is the third book in a comprehensive three-volume set on wind farm power modelling; the key to efficient wind plant design and wind power growth. The set covers every aspect - from wind flow over turbine component design to grid integration. With chapters from eminent international experts, the set is written for researchers in academia and industry involved with all facets of wind power modelling. Covering generation, storage technologies and grid models, this volume will be of particular interest to practitioners in the utilities sector.
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front cover of Wearable Technologies and Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Healthcare
Wearable Technologies and Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Healthcare
Fernando José Velez
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
Continuous advances in wearables, sensors and smart Wireless Body Area Network technologies have precipitated the development of new applications for on-, in- and body-to-body wearable communications for healthcare and sport monitoring. Progress in this cross-disciplinary field is further influenced by developments in radio communication, protocols, synchronization aspects, energy harvesting and storage solutions, and efficient processing techniques for smart antennas.
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Wasatch Winter Trails
John Veranth
University of Utah Press, 1991

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William Whewell
Victorian Polymath
Lukas M. Verburgt
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Among his many gifts to science was his role as cofounder and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and his wordsmithing; he coined the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, and electrode. While he was himself an opponent of evolution through natural selection, Whewell’s most famous works, including his Bridgewater Treatise (1833) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), played a formative role in Charles Darwin’s creation of the theory of evolution. William Whewell: Victorian Polymath reexamines the whole of Whewell’s oeuvre, as well as the wide range and internal unity of his many polymathic endeavors, placing him within the early Victorian intellectual landscape and highlighting his exchanges with other important figures of the period, such as John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Robert Peel. Bringing together a group of eminent and emergent scholars, the volume explores all major aspects of Whewell’s reform project and its legacy, both in the sciences and the humanities, in the Victorian era and beyond.   
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With a Critical Eye
An Intellectual and His Times
Arthur J. Vidich
University of Tennessee Press, 2009
Internationally renowned sociologist, Arthur J. Vidich (1922-2006), was an active researcher and teacher whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. With a Critical Eye: An Intellectual and His Times recounts Vidich’s career in the wider cultural context of his life and work. Providing a window into post-World War II intellectual life, the richness of the autobiography lies not only in Vidich’s perspectives on the academic world, but also in his personal and sociological observations about the world around him.

Best known for his book, Small Town in Mass Society (co-authored with Joseph Bensman, 1958), Vidich taught for more than forty years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He published eighteen books, co-edited a book series with Robert Jackall, and was the founding editor of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
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front cover of What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (CW28)
What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (CW28)
Eric Voegelin & Edited & Intro by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella
University of Missouri Press

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The Word of God
Essays on Mormon Scripture
Dan Vogel
Signature Books, 1990

Editor’s Introduction
by Dan Vogel

[p.vii]Belief in continuing revelation and an open canon of scripture distinguishes Mormonism from mainstream Christianity. That the church founded by Joseph Smith would proceed on grounds of continuing revelation was established at the outset. The day the church was organized, 6 April 1830, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation commanding the church to “give heed unto all his words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them,… for his words ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith” (LDS D&C 21:4-5; RLDS D&C 19:2). Another revelation declared that the Lord had “given him the keys of the mysteries, and the revelations which are sealed” (LDS D&C 28:7; RLDS D&C 27:12). The principle of continuing revelation insured a gradual unfolding and canonization of various doctrines.

In addition to the Bible, the official canon of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints includes the Book of Mormon (first published in Palymra, New York, in 1830), the Doctrine and Covenants (issued in 1833 as A Book of Commandments [incomplete] and in 1835 in Kirtland, Ohio), and the Pearl of Great Price (first published in England in 1851 and republished with changes in Salt Lake City in 1880). This latter volume of scripture contains selections from Joseph Smith’s writings including the Book of Moses (extracted from Smith’s “inspired version” or “translation” of the Bible) and the Book of Abraham (taken from Smith’s interpretation of an ancient Egyptian papyrus). The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Independence, [p.viii] Missouri, the second largest institution tracing its origins to Joseph Smith, publishes its own editions of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants, as well as Smith’s revision of the Bible, but has not canonized the Book of Abraham.

All but one of the following fifteen essays chosen for inclusion in The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture were written by Mormons from either the LDS or RLDS tradition. (The exception is Susan Curtis.) However, rather than being guided by institutional imperatives, each author has attempted to understand Mormon scripture on its own terms. Additionally, each essay wrestles with the problem of the human and the divine in scripture.

Because one’s belief about revelation affects how one approaches scripture, debate about scriptural interpretation often centers on the nature of revelation. The written “word of God” does not come to us direct but rather through human intermediaries. In the words of J. R. Dummelow, writing in A Commentary on The Holy Bible (New York) in 1908, “It is as sunlight through a painted window—the light must come to us coloured by the medium… It is foolish to ignore the existence of the human medium through which the light has come” (p. cxxxv). Book of Mormon prophets, for instance, repeatedly express anxiety over human limitations to convey in language their spiritual teachings. Nephi prays that “the words which I have written in weakness will be made strong” (LDS 2 Ne. 33:4; RLDS 2 Ne. 15:5), and Moroni writes, “if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God” (Title Page); A position which does not account for the human in revelation will undoubtedly produce disillusionment or distortion.

To consider the human aspects of prophets, revelation, or scripture does not detract from religion, as some traditionalists fear. On the contrary, what cultural and environmental studies challenge are simplistic assumptions about the nature of revelation. Again, Dummelow notes, “Because of our false theory of Verbal Inspiration we are puzzled when the divine is mingled with the human. We must learn that the divine is mingled with the human” (ibid.). We must seek a definition of revelation which accounts for the spectrum of characteristics we encounter in scripture.

Even when we acknowledge the human in revelation and scripture, what exactly is its role and influence? These are not easy [p.ix] questions to answer. But the more precise our identification of human influence on scripture, the more refined our definition of revelation will become. It is hoped that this collection of essays will contribute to that process of understanding.

An awareness of revelation and scripture is an ongoing process and there are differing positions. Readers should therefore understand that neither the authors nor the editor necessarily agree with the views and conclusions reached in all of the essays that follow.

Appreciation is extended to the following authors and publications for permission to reproduce, sometimes in a different format and/or under a different title, many of the essays appearing here: to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for essays by Kevin L. Barney, Lester E. Bush, A. Bruce Lindgren, William D. Russell, and George D. Smith; to Sunstone for essays by Anthony A. Hutchinson, Melodie Moench Charles, and Mark D. Thomas; to the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal for essays by Susan Curtis and James E. Lancaster; to Courage for the essay by Richard P. Howard; and to University Bulletin (RLDS) for the essay by Geoffrey F. Spencer. Three of the essays—”Joseph Smith’s Scriptural Cosmology,” by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe; and “Reducing Dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study” and “Making the Scriptures ‘Indeed One in Our Hands,'” both by Edward H. Ashment—are published here for the first time.

Throughout the essays standardized parenthetical scriptural references are provided for the most recent editions published by both the LDS and RLDS churches. Thus LDS D&C 76:1 refers to the most recent edition of the Doctrine and Covenants published by the LDS church, section 76, verse 1. RLDS 1 Ne. 2:4 refers to the Book of First Nephi, chapter 2, verse 4, in the most recent edition of the Book of Mormon published by the RLDS church. JST means the Joseph Smith translation of the King James Bible published by the RLDS church; Moses to the Book of Moses and Abr. to the Book of Abraham as found in current editions of the Pearl of Great Price (PGP) published by the LDS church.[p.1]

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The World Machine
Paolo Volponi
Seagull Books, 2024
A vivid and unforgettable novelistic portrait of rural Italy, exploring the nature of reality and the human condition.
 
A small-time farmer living in central Italy in the 1960s is the keeper of a great truth: that people are machines built by other beings who are machines themselves. Our true destiny is to build ever better machines so that society can become a techno-utopia in which friendship can be established among all people on earth. These ideas bring him into conflict with everyone, especially his wife, against whom he is accused of ill-treatment. His quest takes him to Rome, where he presents his truth, hoping it will bring him worldwide recognition. Behind his poetical reveries and unfathomable scientific notions lies the disturbing fragility of a lone, paranoid, and deluded man in conflict with everyone, including himself.
 
Paolo Volponi’s unique novel The World Machine examines the relationship between rural life and the modern city, as well as the subversive idealism of a society still firmly anchored in the past, dominated by the Church, and unable to grasp the need for change.
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West-Eastern Divan
Complete, annotated new translation (bilingual edition)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gingko, 2019
In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic traditions, and was immediately inspired to create his own West-Eastern Divan as a lyrical conversation between the poetry and history of his native Germany and that of Persia. The resulting collection engages with the idea of the other and unearths lyrical connections between cultures.
 
The West-Eastern Divan is one of the world’s great works of literature, an inspired masterpiece, and a poetic linking of European and Persian traditions. This new bilingual edition expertly presents the wit, intelligence, humor, and technical mastery of the poetry in Goethe’s Divan. In order to preserve the work’s original power, Eric Ormsby has created this translation in clear contemporary prose rather than in rhymed verse, which tends to obscure the works sharpness. This edition is also accompanied by explanatory notes of the verse in German and in English and a translation of Goethe’s own commentary, the “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” This edition not only bring this classic collection to English-language readers, but also, at a time of renewed Western unease about the other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.
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We've Been Here All Along
Wisconsin's Early Gay History
R. Richard Wagner
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
The first of two groundbreaking volumes on gay history in Wisconsin, We’ve Been Here All Along provides an illuminating and nuanced picture of Wisconsin’s gay history from the reporting on the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 to the landmark Stonewall Riots of 1969. Throughout these decades, gay Wisconsinites developed identities, created support networks, and found ways to thrive in their communities despite various forms of suppression—from the anti-vice crusades of the early twentieth century to the post-war labeling of homosexuality as an illness to the Lavender Scare of the 1950s.

In We’ve Been Here All Along, R. Richard Wagner draws on historical research and materials from his own extensive archive to uncover previously hidden stories of gay Wisconsinites. This book honors their legacy and confirms that they have been foundational to the development and evolution of the state since its earliest days
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Writing on the Soil
Land and Landscape in Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa
Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Across contiguous nation-states in Eastern Africa, the geographic proximity disguises an ideological complexity. Land has meant something fundamental in the sociocultural history of each country. Those concerns, however, have manifested into varied political events, and the range of struggles over land has spawned a multiplicity of literary interventions. While Kenya and Uganda were both British colonies, Kenya's experience of settler land alienation made for a much more violent response against efforts at political independence. Uganda's relatively calm unyoking from the colonial burden, however, led to a tumultuous post-independence. Tanzania, too, like Kenya and Uganda, resisted British colonial administration—after Germany's defeat in World War 1.

In Writing on the Soil, author Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiriargues that representations of land and landscape perform significant metaphorical labor in African literatures, and this argument evolves across several geographical spaces. Each chapter's analysis is grounded in a particular locale: western Kenya, colonial Tanganyika, post-independence Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Anam Ka'alakol (Lake Turkana), Kampala, and Kitgum in Northern Uganda. Moreover, each section contributes to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic choices that authors make when deploying tropes revolving around land, landscape, and the environment. Mũchiri disentangles the numerous connections between geography and geopolitical space on the one hand, and ideology and cultural analysis on the other. This book embodies a multi-layered argument in the sphere of African critical scholarship, while adding to the growing field of African land rights scholarship—an approach that foregrounds the close reading of Africa’s literary canon.

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World Film Locations
Vancouver
Edited by Rachel Walls
Intellect Books, 2013
Vancouver, the fourth largest film and television production center in North America, has hosted Hollywood filmmakers from Robert Altman and Dennis Hopper to Jason Reitman and Brad Bird, and is home to independent talent such as Bruce Sweeney and Mina Shum. World Film Locations: Vancouver offers insight into how so-called “runaway” productions from Hollywood use Vancouver as a stand-in for other locations and it highlights the work of Canadian filmmakers who deserve more attention. Thirty-eight analyses of different film scenes reveal the cinematic city in its myriad forms, while spotlight essays provide insight into the creativity and contradictions of Vancouver’s film industry throughout the ages. The volume presents Vancouver’s rich diversity and complexity, where magnificent marine and mountain views are both showcased and masked, downtown landmarks provide the backdrop for thrilling sequences, and lesser-known neighborhoods frame intriguing characters and plotlines. This book offers new perspectives on the relationship between the movies and the metropolis.

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Ware's Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase
J. Redding Ware
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013
Acutely aware of the changes affecting English at the end of the Victorian era, writer and journalist J. Redding Ware set out to record words and turns of phrase from all walks of life, from the curses in common use by sailors to the rhyming slang of the street and the jargon of the theater dandies. In doing so, he extended the lifespan of words like “air-hole,” “lally-gagging,” and “bow-wow mutton.”

First published in 1909 and reproduced here with a new introduction by Oxford English Dictionary editor John Simpson, Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase reflects the rich history of unofficial English. Many of the expressions are obsolete; one is not likely to have the misfortune of encountering a “parlour jumper.” Order a “shant of bivvy” at the pub and you’ll be met with a blank stare. But some of the entries reveal the origins of expressions still in use today, such as calling someone a “bad egg” to indicate that they are dishonest or of ill-repute. While showing the significant influence of American English on Victorian slang, the Dictionary also demonstrates how impressively innovative its speakers were.

A treasure trove of everyday language of the nineteenth century, this book has much to offer in terms of insight into the intriguing history of English and will be of interest to anyone with a passion for words.
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William Warner's Syrinx
or, A Sevenfold History
William Warner, edited with introduction and notes by Wallace A. Bacon
Northwestern University Press, 1950
William Warner’s Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History, may be the first English novel. Unlike others of the time, though, Warner wrote a realistic novel whose ancestors include the adventure stories of Alexandrine romance, and focus not on the tales of an aristocratic class but on the lives of middle-class individuals. Wallace A. Bacon’s critical edition brings Warner’s important novel—with its young protagonists being dragged through many adventures, tried and tested by Fortune, with their tales being brought to a close by auspicious gods—to life, preserving it and introducing it to new generations of readers. Bacon’s critical apparatus, including an extensive introduction, provides significant context for Warner’s work, assessing its key role in the history of the novel and in the history of early modern literature.
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William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions
By James G. Watson
University of Texas Press, 1989

Besides the groundbreaking novels and stories that brought him fame, William Faulkner throughout his life wrote letters—to his publisher, his lovers, his family, and his friends. In this first major study of epistolarity in Faulkner's work, James G. Watson examines Faulkner's personal correspondence as a unique second canon of writing, separate from his literary canon with its many fictional letters but developing along parallel lines. By describing the similarity of forms and conventions in Faulkner's personal and fictional correspondence, Watson clearly demonstrates that Faulkner's personal experience as a writer of letters significantly shaped his imaginative work early and late.

Letters are always about themselves; they re-create a world between the sender and the receiver. In this illuminating study, Faulkner's personal letters are treated as a form of reflexive writing: first-person narratives in which Sender self-consciously portrays Self to a specific Receiver, likewise portrayed in the letter-text. This duality of actual experience and imaginative re-creation measures the personal distances between the life of the writer and the written self-image. It reveals that letters are at once fragments of autobiography and fictions of self.

Such "laws of letters" apply equally to the letters that appear throughout Faulkner's novels and stories. The twenty-one letters and telegrams in The Sound and the Fury, for example, portray character, propel plot, and convey important themes of failed communication and broken identity. From Soldiers' Pay to his last work, Faulkner's carefully lettered canon of fiction is dramatic evidence of his understanding of epistolarity and of the extent to which he adapted letters, including some of his own, to shape his fictional world.

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William Faulkner
Self-Presentation and Performance
By James G. Watson
University of Texas Press, 2000

In his life and writings, William Faulkner continually created and "performed" selves. Even in letters, he often played a part—gentleman dandy, soldier, farmer—while in his fictions these and other personae are counterpoised against one another to create a world of controlled chaos, made in Faulkner's own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self.

In this groundbreaking book, James Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the complicated ways in which Faulkner put himself forth as the artist he felt himself to be through written performances and displays based on the life he actually lived and the ones he imagined living. The topics Watson treats include the overtly performative aspects of The Sound and the Fury, self-presentation and performance in private records of Faulkner's life, the ways in which his complicated marriage and his relationships to male mentors underlie his fictions' recurring motifs of marriages and fatherhood, Faulkner's readings of Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau and the problematics of authorial sovereignty, his artist-as-God creation of a fictional cosmos, and the epistolary relationships with women that lie in the correspondence behind Requiem for a Nun.

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What Saves Us
Bruce Weigl
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Winner, 2006 Lannan Foundation Award for Poetry

In these wrenching, elegant poems, Bruce Weigl writes out of uncompromising memory and vision. His subject is both the transport and anguish of being open to the lived and living moment. From bars and bedrooms, in Ohio and Nicaragua and Vietnam, his voice rises through the noise of history and habit to reach us with impeccable grace and remarkable invention.
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What's Next?
Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art
Linda Weintraub
Intellect Books, 2019
By paying tribute to matter, materiality, and materialization, the examples of contemporary art assembled in What’s Next? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art challenge the social, cultural, and ethical norms that prevailed in the twentieth century. This significant frontier of contemporary culture is identified as ‘Eco Materialism’ because it affirms the emergent philosophy of Neo Materialism and attends to the pragmatic urgency of environmentalism. 
 
In this highly original book, Linda Weintraub surveys the work of forty international artists who present materiality as a strategy to convert society’s environmental neglect into responsible stewardship. These bold art initiatives, enriched by their associations with philosophy, ecology, and cultural critique, bear the hallmark of a significant new art movement. This accessible text, augmented with visuals, charts, and questionnaires, invites students and a wider readership to engage in this timely arena of contemporary art.
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Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States
A Comparative Overview of Textual Development and Advocacy
Lynn Welchman
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Muslim family law—and its principles regarding marriage, divorce, personal maintenance, paternity, and child custody—is the one of the most widely applied family law systems in existence today.  A number of states have recently codified Muslim family law for the first time or have issued significant amendments or new laws, spurred in many cases by interventions from women’s rights groups and other advocacy organizations.  Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States combines an examination of women’s rights under Muslim family law in Arab states across the Middle East with discussions of the public debates surrounding the issues that have been raised during these processes of codification and amendment. 
 
Drawing on original legal texts and explanatory statements as well as extensive state-based secondary literature, Welchman places these discussions in a contemporary global context that internationalizes the domestic and regional particularities of Muslim family law.  Accompanied by a full bibliography and an appendix providing translated extracts of the laws under examination Women and Muslim Family Law considers laws from the Gulf States to North Africa in order to illustrate the legal, social, and political dynamics of the current debates.
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William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
Richard Wendorf
University of Minnesota Press, 1981

William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry was first published in 1981. 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.

William Collins (1721–1759) is one of several eighteenth-century poets who have received more attention for what they are said to have anticipated—the full-blooded Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge—than for what they have achieved. Collins's career as a poet was brief, but the handful of major poems that he wrote in the mid -1740s has stirred interest among critics intrigued by the complexity and obscurity of his work and by the illness and possible madness that prematurely ended his life. Combining historical scholarship with close readings of all Collins's poems, Richard Wendorf provides the most comprehensive and detailed study to be devoted to the work of this enigmatic figure and to the forces that shaped his literary career. In doing so, he places Collins within an eighteenth-century poetic context and shows that his gift for myth-making makes him a vital link between the mythic poetry of Shakespeare and Spenser and that of the Romantics.

Wendorf's opening and closing chapters examine the relationship between Collins's life and his work, providing an authoritative discussion of his supposed madness and of the myths of insanity that clouded his reputation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wendorf argues that Collins's madness is problematical at best, and that much recent criticism is a distortion of his major work, which explores the transcendent powers of the irrational forces within us but is not necessarily the product of madness itself. The book's central chapters trace Collins's development as a poet and offer fresh approaches to his major odes. In these mature poems he turned from his early interest in Augustan poetry to very different sources of inspiration and came to reject the ordered and unified natural world of Pope and Thompson.

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Wind Turbine System Design
Nacelles, drivetrains and verification, Volume 1
Jan Wenske
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Wind energy is a pillar of the strategy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and stave off catastrophic climate change, but the market is under tremendous pressure to reduce costs. This results in the need for optimising any new wind turbine to maximise the return on investment and keep the technology profitable and the sector thriving. Optimisation involves selecting the best component out of many, and then optimising the system as a whole. Key components are the nacelles and drive trains, and the verification of their work as a system.
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Wind Turbine System Design
Electrical systems, grid integration, control and monitoring, Volume 2
Jan Wenske
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
Wind energy is a pillar of the strategy for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and staving off catastrophic climate change, but the market is under tremendous pressure to reduce costs. This results in the need for optimising any new wind turbine to maximise the return on investment and keep the technology profitable and the sector thriving. Optimisation involves selecting the best component out of many, and then optimising the system as a whole.
[more]

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Writing in Time
Emily Dickinson's Master Hours
Marta L. Werner
Amherst College Press, 2021
Winner of the 2023 Richard J. Finneran Award for the best book about editorial theory or practice.

For more than half a century, the story of Emily Dickinson’s “Master” documents has been the largely biographical tale of three letters to an unidentified individual. Writing in Time seeks to tell a different story—the story of the documents themselves. Rather than presenting the “Master” documents as quarantined from Dickinson’s larger scene of textual production, Marta Werner’s innovative new edition proposes reading them next to Dickinson’s other major textual experiment in the years between ca. 1858–1861: the Fascicles. In both, Dickinson can be seen testing the limits of address and genre in order to escape bibliographical determination and the very coordinates of “mastery” itself. A major event in Dickinson scholarship, Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours proposes new constellations of Dickinson’s work as well as exciting new methodologies for textual scholarship as an act of “intimate editorial investigation.”
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"What the Railroad Will Bring Us"
The Legacy of the Transcontinental Railroad Corporations
Richard White
Utah State University Press, 2020
In volume 25 of the Arrington Lecture Series, Richard White discusses the transcontinental railroad’s impact on Utah’s environment, culture, and political atmosphere. In the 150 years since the completion of the Pacific Railroad, there have been lasting implications across the West, including for the early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints settlers.
 
The Arrington Lecture series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series through the Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections and Archives department.
 
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When Evensong and Morrowsong Accord
Three Essays on the Proverb
Bartlett Jere Whiting
Harvard University Press

Bartlett Jere Whiting, a pioneer and acknowledged master of the lexicography of proverbs, also wrote three seminal articles on general and theoretical aspects of paremiology, the study of proverbs and related speech forms: “The Origin of the Proverb,” “The Nature of the Proverb,” and “The Study of Proverbs.” On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, friends, students, and colleagues from the Harvard English Department, Whiting’s academic home for nearly fifty years, offer these essential readings to a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts of “the wisdom of many, the wit of one.”

Whiting’s essays are accompanied by an annotated bibliography of his works on the proverb by the best-known contemporary student of the subject, Wolfgang Mieder; and introductory essays by Joseph Harris and Wolfgang Mieder and by Susan E. Deskis place Whiting in the history of international proverb study.

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WEST VIRGINIA AND THE CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY
John A. Williams
West Virginia University Press, 2003

The first period of the twentieth century - that stretch of years beginning in the 1870s and ending with the United States' entry into World War I - is known as the Gilded Age. This was the era of the "Robber Barons" and the origin of modern America. These were the years in which developments in coal, steam, oil, and gas forged our national infrastructure. West Virginia and the Captains of Industry show how the excesses of the Gilded Age and the latitude our government accorded industrialists of the time created an impact on the fragile economy of our new state that accounts for much of the political and economic landscape of modern West Virginia. Gracefully written and thoroughly researched, West Virginia and the Captains of Industry has become a classic work of West Virginia history since its first publication by the West Virginia University Press in 1975. Anyone interested in the history of our state must read this revised edition; then again, so must anyone interested in the future of West Virginia.

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THE WAYS WE TOUCH
POEMS
Miller Williams
University of Illinois Press, 1997
      Includes
        "Of History and Hope,"
        the 1997 Presidential Inaugural Poem
      When Miller Williams
        read his Inaugural Poem, "Of History and Hope," to a world-wide
        audience in January, his proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame"
        lasted far less--somewhere between three and four minutes. That was long
        enough to make a big impact on many. Said poet Paul Zimmer, one of the
        millions in his viewing audience, "I came up out of my Lazy-Boy and
        cheered loudly!"
      Williams is an
        American original whose poems have been praised for both the elegance
        of their style and the simplicity of their language, for their wonderful
        humor and genuine passion. The works in his newest collection, The
        Ways We Touch, may be nostalgic or challenging, humorous or full of
        moral fortitude; always Williams speaks with the kind of insight that
        rises from wisdom and experience.
      Praise for Williams's
        earlier work:
      "Miller
        Williams is one of those writers whose books drag me snorkeling happily
        along. Happy as a pig among truffles, I hurry to the next treasure."
        -- William Stafford
      "Most contemporary
        poets might well go to him for lessons in the art of speaking plainly
        in disciplined lines alive with emotional energy." -- X. J. Kennedy
      "Better
        than almost anything else being published." -- Donald Justice
 
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Weather, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya
Fiona Clare Williamson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections Series
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Women in the History of Science
A Sourcebook
Edited by Hannah Wills, Sadie Harrison, Erika Lynn Jones, Rebecca Martin, Farrah Lawrence-Mackey
University College London, 2023
A rich collection of primary sources on women in the history of science.

Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women’s involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Including texts, images, and objects, the primary sources are each accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research. Arranged by time period, from 1200 BCE to the twenty-first century, and covering twelve inclusive and far-reaching themes, this book is an invaluable companion to students and lecturers alike in exploring women’s history in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, medicine, and culture.
 
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The Works of James Wilson
James Wilson
Harvard University Press

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The Works of James Wilson
James Wilson
Harvard University Press

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What's True in Mormon Folklore?
The Contribution of Folklore to Mormon Studies
William Wilson
Utah State University Press, 2008
13th volume in the Leonard J. Arrington Lecture Series
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Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
William Wilson
University of Alabama Press, 2002
In a 1978 New York Times book review, Kenneth Baker described Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka as: "...the most powerful New American fiction I have encountered in years. A demanding, exhilarating work." Nearly 25 years later, FC2 is proud to reissue this classic collection of short fiction by William S. Wilson that seems even more relevant today. It touches on controversies over the role of science in our lives and deals with cosmetic surgery and the medical uses of human embryos, heart transplants, and regenerated genitalia. And that's only the beginning. The story "Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka," implies that Kafka responded in his fiction to questions that no longer need to be asked in fiction. The epistolary story, "Conveyance: The Story I Wouldn't Want Bill Wilson to Read," is an intimate letter from a woman who had wanted to write fiction and who now challenges Wilson's reaction to her report of a tragedy. "Interim" chronicles the imaginary reforestation of Scotland and "Anthropology" turns on the actual moment in Structuralism when Claude Levi-Strauss relocates the ear to the back of the head in order to interpret a myth. Written with cool precision and a subtle touch, these meditations and metafictions will continue to reverberate for decades to come.
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Written for the Drawer
Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness
Brett Winestock
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
Russian-Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin (1926–82), a doctor by trade, wrote primarily “for the drawer,” fearing professional consequences if he were to publish his fiction. Despite Tsypkin’s almost complete lack of readership during his lifetime, his work has received international posthumous recognition, with Susan Sontag calling his work “among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction.” 

Tsypkin’s autobiographical writing explored the impossibility of being both a Russian writer and a Soviet Jew, employing both indirection and referentiality. In the first full-length book on his work, Brett Winestock considers Tsypkin’s fiction as part of a transnational literary response to the horrors of the twentieth century, a reception that helps explain his much-belated international readership. Through close readings of Tsypkin’s work in the context of late-Soviet cultural worlds, Winestock makes an important contribution to studies of Jewish Soviet writing and identity. 
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Working for Peace and Justice
Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual
Lawrence S. Wittner
University of Tennessee Press, 2013

A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement.
    In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz.
    A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history.

Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb. Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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Waldo Gifford Leland and the Origins of the American Archival Profession
Peter J. Wosh
Society of American Archivists, 2011
The professional accomplishments of Waldo Gifford Leland (1879-1966) are legendary: historian, surveyor of archival repositories in America and in France, father of the American Historical Association's Conference of Archivists, archival theorist, J. Franklin Jameson's key lieutenant in the battle for the establishment of the National Archives, second president of the Society of American Archivists, and long time head of the American Council of Learned Societies. This splendid classic brings together Leland's most significant writings concerning archives and archival methods, concentrating on the period from 1908 to 1920, when Leland was most involved in helping to create the American archives profession.
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What Is Time?
An Enquiry
Truls Wyller
Reaktion Books, 2020
We refer to time constantly, and we compulsively measure its passing—but do we know what it actually is? In What Is Time?, Truls Wyller enquires into time’s complex nature, juxtaposing the latest scientific theories with our personal experience of chronology. The book examines the notion of time in physics, history, religion, anthropology, philosophy, and literature, and Wyller concludes by proposing his own theory of time: that the temporal character of any series of events is essentially practical and derived from human life. Written from a philosophical perspective, What Is Time? gives an accessible, rounded portrait of the nature of time, and it is essential reading for those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the motion of our everyday existence.
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Wisconsin, My Home
The Story of Thurine Oleson as Told to Her Daughter
Erna Oleson Xan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1975
Wisconsin My Home is the story of Thurine Oleson, born in Wisconsin in 1866 to parents who had emigrated from Telemarken, Norway. This much-loved book was first published in 1950 when Thurine was a spry octogenarian. In it she not only vividly recalls the pioneer life of her childhood in a Norwegian American settlement but also tells her parents’ stories of their life in Norway and their reasons for emigration. This new edition restores the twenty-nine photographs that appeared in the original 1950 hardcover edition and includes an introduction by emigration historian Odd Lovell.
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Wild Boar
Dorothy Yamamoto
Reaktion Books, 2017
Ancestors of domestic pigs, wild boars are tough, resourceful omnivores that have presented humans since prehistoric times with a tricky situation: they make for a delicious food source, but they are formidable animals with long tusks that can inflict serious harm. Wild Boar traces the interaction of humans and boars in fascinating detail, showing how our relationship has evolved over time and how it can be seen today as fundamentally representative of the questions at the heart of ecological preservation and restoration.
          
Dorothy Yamamoto takes us from the dense streets of Tokyo to the Forest of Dean in England to show how wild boars have survived in a variety of settings. She also explores the ways that they have figured in our imaginations, whether as the iconic Calydonian Boar from Ancient Greece, the White Boar of Richard III, or any of the other forms it has taken in mythology and lore. As she shows, the boar has been an especially prominent figure in hunting culture, and as such it has often been construed as a larger-than-life monster that only the most heroic of us can take down, a misperception that has threatened the boar’s survival in many parts of the world. With an illuminating combination of natural with cultural history, this book paints a vibrant portrait of a unique and often misunderstood animal. 
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Who Is Antiracist?
Beliefs, Motivations, and Politics
George Yancey and Hayoung Oh
Temple University Press, 2025

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What Women Want
The Ideas of the Movement
Gayle Graham Yates
Harvard University Press

The women’s movement is perhaps the most baffling of the recent social reforms to sweep the United States. It is composed of numerous distinct groups, each with specific interests and goals, each with individual leaders and literature. What are the philosophies behind these groups? Who are their leaders and how have their ideas evolved? Do they have a vital connection with the women’s movement of the past? And where are feminist groups headed? In this study that brilliantly illuminates the literature and purposes of feminists, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement, Gayle Graham Yates has produced the first comprehensive history of feminist women’s groups.

Concentrating chiefly on the movement from 1959 to 1973, when it erupted in such activist groups as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), the author analyzes in detail their literature, factions, and issues. Her survey encompasses virtually every major expression of the movement’s multiple facets, from The Feminine Mystique, Born Female, and Sexual Politics, to Sex and the Single Girl and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. In a significant breakthrough, the author discerns the pattern underlying this diversity, which should contribute to a fuller understanding of future developments in the women’s struggle. She accomplishes this by identifying three key attitudes informing the movement: the feminist, the women’s liberationist, and the androgynous or cooperative male–female relationship.

The author provides a sensitive, yet critical analysis of the chief spokeswomen in contemporary America, activists like Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. She treats each of the feminist ideologies with balance and respect, yet is refreshingly unafraid to criticize new developments. She bolsters her own conclusions in support of an androgynous or “equal sexual society” with a judicious spirit. Scholars and the general public alike will find Yates’s book not only an indispensable contribution to women’s studies, but also a strong and timely addition to contemporary American life and thought.

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Writing Resistance
Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel´burg Prison, 1884-1906
Sarah J. Young
University College London, 2021
The first extended study in English of the revolutionary memoirs from Shlissel’burg Fortress.

In 1884, sixty-eight prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum-security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St. Petersburg. Inhuman conditions in the prison caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, and over half died. However, the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates’ living conditions. Their memoirs enshrined their experience in revolutionary mythology and served as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy’s loss of moral authority. This book features three of these memoirs—translated into English for the first time—as well as an introductory essay that analyzes the memoirs’ construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance, and renewal. The first extended study of these memoirs in English, this book uncovers an important episode in the history of political imprisonment. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviors, and prison and life writing.
 
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World Film Locations
Florence
Edited by Alberto Zambenedetti
Intellect Books, 2014
Florence, with its rich history, privileged place in the canon of Western art, and long-standing relationship with the moving image, is a cinematic city equal to Venice or Rome. This edition in the well-established World Film Locations series explores Florence as it is manifested in the minds of filmmakers and filmgoers. Contributors to the collection consider a wide range of topics, including the tourist’s perception of Florence, representations of art and artists on screen, the camera-friendly Tuscan countryside and mouthwatering local cuisine, and filmic adaptations of canonical Italian literature. Through scene reviews of films including Bobby Deerfield, A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini, and Under the Tuscan Sun, contributors delve deeper into the makeup of the city, looking at both familiar and unfamiliar locations through the lens of such filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, Mario Monicelli, Brian DePalma, and Ridley Scott.

From the Duomo to the Uffizi gallery, Florence is filled with history, art, and culture. For those who crave a passport to this Tuscan capital, World Film Locations: Florence will take you there without you ever having to leave your library.
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Where the Bird Disappeared
Ghassan Zaqtan
Seagull Books, 2018
This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names—and many traits—of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.
 
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What Role for Government?
Lessons from Policy Research
Richard J. Zeckhauser and Derek Leebaert, eds.
Duke University Press, 1983
The vital debates on government today are concerned with its social role, its participation in the economy, and its redistributive responsibilities. These functions, not defined in the Constitution, reflect the evolution of society and its values and the powerful but jerky hand of the political process.
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Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema
Zhen Zhang
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.
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Working Mandarin for Beginners
, Student's Edition
Yi Zhou with M. Lynne Gerber
Georgetown University Press

Working Mandarin for Beginners is designed to enable English-speaking business students and professionals with no prior knowledge of Chinese to develop the basic communication skills necessary for a business trip to China or another work environment in which Mandarin is spoken.

Major features: • Twenty-four lessons, including five review lessons • Clear objectives for acquiring language skills, grammar, and cultural understanding • Lessons cover important basics such as introductions and greetings, counting, reserving a hotel room, taking public transportation, and asking for directions • Lessons cover business tasks such as coordinating and conducting meetings, selling products, and negotiating agreements—all in Chinese • Lessons provide dialogues and vocabulary lists for reading and listening, language points, cultural points, pronunciation drills, grammar, and interactive homework • Course concludes with a special independent project in which the student applies the language to his or her area of business study • Pinyin is used throughout so students can start speaking Mandarin immediately • Includes some basic lessons in the formation of Chinese characters • Course can be combined with affordable online access to self-grading exercises (available through Quia.com, $24.95 per student for 18 months of access)

Student Book • Includes MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary lists, and audio exercises on CD • Lessons are valuable to the classroom student as well as self-directed independent learners

Teacher's Edition • Includes a CD-ROM with all MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary, and audio exercises found on the students' disk • CD-ROM also provides quizzes and exams (including necessary audio), approximately 300 supplementary PowerPoint slides for classroom use, and creative guidance for conversation practice, mini-immersion, and skit

Online teaching features at Quia.com • Instructor-managed class activities and exercises • Monitoring of student progress • Customized grading options online • Students can complete exercises online, submit their answers electronically to their instructor, and receive automatic feedback • Teachers can also use Quia templates to build their own exercises or use exercises developed by other instructors to provide added help for students • Motivated self-directed learners can also access the self-grading online exercises at Quia.com (no instructor feedback will be provided)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Student's Edition Textbook/MP3 CD (Mac and PC) • CD drive on a computer or conventional CD player with MP3 capability • MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player • Speakers

Teacher's Edition Textbook/CD-ROM Mac and PC • CD drive on a computer • MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player • speakers • Adobe Acrobat Reader (available as a free download from http:///www.adobe.com) PC • Windows XP • Microsoft Office 2000 or higher with Service Pack 3 installed (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files) • Or, to view the PowerPoints only, download Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003 or higher (free from http://www.microsoft.com) • Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial Unicode and Simsun, which are included in all editions of Office 2000/XP/2003 Mac • Microsoft Word, version Office 2004 or higher • Microsoft PowerPoint, version Office 2004 or higher (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files); or view the PowerPoints as PDFs • Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial and Simsun, which are included in Office 2004 and higher

Interactive Exercises on Quia (Mac and PC) • Computer with Internet access, preferably a high-speed connection • Java-enabled browser: Internet Explorer 5 or higher, or any version of Firefox or Safari • The program QuickTime (available as a free download from http://www.quicktime.com) • Microphone to record answers or responses

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Whose America?
Culture Wars in the Public Schools
Jonathan Zimmerman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book. 

In this expanded edition of his 2002 book, Zimmerman surveys how battles over public education have become conflicts at the heart of American national identity.

 
Critical Race Theory. The 1619 Project. Mask mandates. As the headlines remind us, American public education is still wracked by culture wars. But these conflicts have shifted sharply over the past two decades, marking larger changes in the ways that Americans imagine themselves. In his 2002 book, Whose America?, Zimmerman predicted that religious differences would continue to dominate the culture wars. Twenty years after that seminal work, Zimmerman has reconsidered: arguments over what American history is, what it means, and how it is taught have exploded with special force in recent years. In this substantially expanded new edition, Zimmerman meditates on the history of the culture wars in the classroom—and on what our inability to find common ground might mean for our future.
[more]

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When Driving Is Not an Option
Steering Away from Car Dependency
Anna Letitia Zivarts, foreword by Dani Simons
Island Press, 2024
One third of people living in the United States do not have a driver license. Because the majority of involuntary nondrivers are disabled, lower income, unhoused, formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, and the elderly, they are largely invisible. The consequence of this invisibility is a mobility system designed almost exclusively for drivers. This system has human-health, environmental, and quality-of-life costs for everyone, not just for those excluded from it.  If we’re serious about addressing climate change and inequality, we must address our transportation system.

In When Driving is Not an Option disability advocate Anna Letitia Zivarts shines a light on the number of people in the US who cannot drive and explains how improving our transportation system with nondrivers in mind will create a better quality of life for everyone.

Drawing from interviews with involuntary nondrivers from around the US and from her own experience, Zivarts explains how nondrivers get around and the changes necessary to make our communities more accessible. These changes include improving sidewalk connectivity; providing reliable and affordable transit and paratransit; creating more options for biking, scooting, and wheeling; building more affordable and accessible housing; and the understanding the unrecognized burden of asking and paying for rides.

Zivarts shows that it is critical to include people who can’t drive in transportation planning decisions. She outlines steps that organizations can take to include and promote leadership of those who are most impacted—and too often excluded—by transportation systems designed by and run by people who can drive. The book ends with a checklist of actions that you, as an individual living in a car-dependent society, can take in your own life to help all of us move beyond automobility.

When the needs of involuntary nondrivers are viewed as essential to how we design our transportation systems and our communities, not only will we be able to more easily get where we need to go, but the changes will lead to healthier, climate-friendly communities for everyone.
[more]

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Willem Ruys
Arne Zuidhoek
Amsterdam University Press

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Words on the Air
Essays on Language, Manners, Morals, and Laws
John Sparrow
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Proper words in proper places, remarked Dean Swift, make the true definition of style. According to this definition, John Sparrow fully qualifies as a stylist. His skillful compound of wit, pungency, and accurate observation, his irreverence, his ear for language and hatred of cant are unsurpassed. This book brings together pieces broadcast by the BBC, a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and, even, a university sermon. It proves that John Sparrow is one of those rare people whose spoken words lose none of their power when translated to the printed page.
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A Wanderer in the Perfect City
Selected Passion Pieces
Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago Press, 2006
“There is something both marvelous and hilarious,” writes Lawrence Weschler, “in watching the humdrum suddenly take flight. This is, in part, a collection of such launchings.”

Indeed, the eight essays collected in A Wanderer in the Perfect City do soar into the realm of passion as Weschler profiles people who “were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously, they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive.” With keen observations and graceful prose, Weschler carries us along as a teacher  of rudimentary English from India decides that his destiny is to promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist; a gifted poker player invents a more exciting version of chess; an avant-garde Russian émigré conductor speaks Latin, exclusively, to his infant daughter; and Art Spiegelman composes Maus. But simple summaries can’t do these stories justice: like music, they derive their character from digressions and details, cadence and tone. And like the upwelling of passion Weschler’s characters feel, they are better experienced than explained.  

“Weschler seems so hungry for life that the rest of us become hungry for him . . . a magician, a performer, and a scholar. All in one.”—from the Foreword by Pico Iyer 

“Weschler’s essays are exquisitely written—so perfectly and unobtrusively organized that one can’t imagine telling them a better way.” —New York Times Book Review

“Weschler is the owner of a large dose of novelistic vision, and a particularly poetic set of ears, but . . . as important an endowment as a novelist’s eye or a poet’s ear is still the journalistic nose which led him down the proverbial alley.”—National Post (Canada) 

“Weschler is a thoughtful observer and a superb storyteller.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

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Warhol's Mother's Pantry
Art, America, and the Mom in Pop
M. I. Devine
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Gournay Prize
“What are these fragments we’ve Jersey Shored against our ruin?” asks M. I. Devine, remixing T. S. Eliot, in this dizzying collection of essays that pays homage to the cultural forms that hold us steady. These fragments are stored in Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry, which takes us deep beneath the surfaces of pop to explore our shared quest for meaning today. Julia Warhola, an immigrant who arrived as the US was closing its borders a century ago, is the muse of reuse in these essays that cross boundaries—between now and then, high and low. She is the mom in pop who cut tin cans into flowers and taught Andy (and us) how to reshape and redeem our world. In essays as lyrical, witty, and experimental as the works they cover, Devine offers a new account of pop humanism. How we cut new things from the traditions we’re given, why we don’t stop believin’ (and carry on, wayward sons) when so much is stacked against us. Here are Leonard Cohen’s last songs and Molly Bloom’s last words; Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and Philip Larkin too; Stevie Smith, John Donne, and Kendrick Lamar; sonnets and selfies; early cinema and post–9/11 film, pop hooks, and pop art. In Devine’s hands, these literary and cultural artifacts are provocatively reassembled into an urgent and refreshing history that refuses to let its readers forget where pop came from and where it can go.
[more]

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Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
Nathaniel Tkacz
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
 
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
 
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.
[more]

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The World in a Box
The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia
Anke te Heesen
University of Chicago Press, 2002
This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.
[more]

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Ways of Making and Knowing
The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge
Edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook
Bard Graduate Center, 2017
Although craftspeople and artists often work with natural materials, the notion that making art can constitute a means of knowing nature is a novel one. This book, with contributions from historians of science, medicine, art, and material culture, shows that the histories of science and art are not simply histories of concepts or styles, but histories of the making and using of objects to understand the world. An examination of material practices makes it clear that the methods of the artisan represent a process of knowledge making that involves extensive experimentation and observation that parallel similar processes in the sciences. Ways of Making and Knowing offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of the ways in which human beings have sought out, discovered, and preserved their own knowledge of the world around them; it has only been through material and human interaction with (and manipulation of) nature that we have come to understand it.
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What Are the Arts and Sciences?
A Guide for the Curious
Edited by Dan Rockmore
Dartmouth College Press, 2017
What constitutes the study of philosophy or physics? What exactly does an anthropologist do, or a geologist or historian? In short, what are the arts and sciences? While many of us have been to college and many aspire to go, we may still wonder just what the various disciplines represent and how they interact. What are their origins, methods, applications, and unique challenges? What kind of people elect to go into each of these fields, and what are the big issues that motivate them? Curious to explore these questions himself, Dartmouth College professor and mathematician Dan Rockmore asked his colleagues to explain their fields and what it is that they do. The result is an accessible, entertaining, and enlightening survey of the ideas and subjects that contribute to a liberal education. The book offers a doorway to the arts and sciences for anyone intrigued by the vast world of ideas.
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Where Research Begins
Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)
Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea
University of Chicago Press, 2022

Plenty of books tell you how to do research. This book helps you figure out WHAT to research in the first place, and why it matters.

The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate—one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.

Read this book if you (or your students):

  • have difficulty choosing a research topic
  • know your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research project
  • feel intimidated by or unqualified to do research
  • worry that you’re asking the wrong questions about your research topic
  • have plenty of good ideas, but aren’t sure which one to commit to
  • feel like your research topic was imposed by someone else
  • want to learn new ways to think about how to do research.

Under the expert guidance of award-winning researchers Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, you will find yourself on the path to a compelling and meaningful research project, one that matters to you—and the world.

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What We Teach When We Teach DH
Digital Humanities in the Classroom
Brian Croxall
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Exploring how DH shapes and is in turn shaped by the classroom

How has the field of digital humanities (DH) changed as it has moved from the corners of academic research into the classroom? And how has our DH praxis evolved through interactions with our students? This timely volume explores how DH is taught and what that reveals about the field of DH. While institutions are formally integrating DH into the curriculum and granting degrees, many instructors are still almost as new to DH as their students. As colleagues continue to ask what digital humanities is, we have the opportunity to answer them in terms of how we teach DH. 

 

The contributors to What We Teach When We Teach DH represent a wide range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, history, art history, philosophy, and library science. Their essays are organized around four critical topics at the heart of DH pedagogy: teachers, students, classrooms, and collaborations. This book highlights how DH can transform learning across a vast array of curricular structures, institutions, and education levels, from high schools and small liberal arts colleges to research-intensive institutions and postgraduate professional development programs. 

 

Contributors: Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Lauren Coats, Louisiana State U; Scott Cohen, Stonehill College; Laquana Cooke, West Chester U; Rebecca Frost Davis, St. Edward’s U; Catherine DeRose; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Andrew Famiglietti, West Chester U; Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Regis College; Emily Gilliland Grover, Notre Dame de Sion High School; Gabriel Hankins, Clemson U; Katherine D. Harris, San José State U; Jacob Heil, Davidson College; Elizabeth Hopwood, Loyola U Chicago; Hannah L. Jacobs, Duke U; Alix Keener, Stanford U; Alison Langmead, U of Pittsburgh; Sheila Liming, Champlain College; Emily McGinn, Princeton U; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology; James O’Sullivan, U College Cork; Harvey Quamen, U of Alberta; Lisa Marie Rhody, CUNY Graduate Center; Kyle Roberts, Congregational Library and Archives; W. Russell Robinson, Alabama State U; Chelcie Juliet Rowell, Tufts U; Dibyadyuti Roy, U of Leeds; Asiel Sepúlveda, Simmons U; Andie Silva, York College, CUNY; Victoria Szabo, Duke U; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Annette Vee, U of Pittsburgh; Brandon Walsh, U of Virginia; Kalle Westerling, The British Library; Kathryn Wymer, North Carolina Central U; Claudia E. Zapata, UCLA; Benjun Zhu, Peking U.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Writing Philosophy
A Guide to Professional Writing and Publishing
Richard A. Watson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Richard A. ("Red") Watson has published fiction, general nonfiction, and scholarly books. His essay "On the Zeedijk," about Descartes in Holland and first published in The Georgia Review, was the lead essay in The Pushcart Prize XV, 1990–1991: Best of the Small Presses. Red knows writing.

He also knows academe and has written Writing Philosophy as a kind of survival manual for undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty members in philosophy. Also helpful to those in the humanities and the social sciences, the book is a guide to the professional writing and publishing that are essential to an active participation in the conversation and discussion that constitute these professional fields. To the extent that publication is the crucial factor in tenure decisions, it will help the beginning scholar meet tenure criteria.

Despite the importance of the oral tradition in philosophy and the influence of the dialogue, many philosophical points are so intricate and complex that they can be advanced, followed, and criticized only if they are written as stepwise arguments for study and contemplation at length and at leisure. Watson provides a set of basic principles and a plan for writing argumentative papers of 1,500 to 15,000 words (3 to 30 printed pages) and books containing a sequence of sustained arguments of 70,000 to 150,000 words (200 to 300 printed pages).

Because the first book of most professional philosophers is a revised dissertation, Watson presents a plan for writing that dissertation in such a way that its chapters will serve as publishable articles and the dissertation itself will need very little rewriting as a book. His discussion of the principles of reason, clarity, and argument ranges from such topics as dangling participles and the proper usage of ellipses to matters of categorization and univocity.

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What Philosophy Is For
Michael Hampe
University of Chicago Press, 2018
What is the state of philosophy today, and what might it be tomorrow? With What Philosophy Is For, Michael Hampe answers these questions by exploring the relationships among philosophy, education, science, and narrative, developing a Socratic critique of philosophical doctrines.

Philosophers generally develop systematic theories that lay out the basic structures of human experience, in order to teach the rest of humanity how to rightly understand our place in the world. This “scientific” approach to philosophy, Hampe argues, is too one-sided. In this magnum opus of an essay, Hampe aims to rescue philosophy from its current narrow claims of doctrine and to remind us what it is really for—to productively disillusion us into clearer thinking. Hampe takes us through twenty-five hundred years of intellectual history, starting with Socrates. That archetype of the philosophical teacher did not develop strict doctrines and rules, but rather criticized and refuted doctrines. With the Socratic method, we see the power of narration at work. Narrative and analytical disillusionment, Hampe argues, are the most helpful long-term enterprises of thought, the ones most worth preserving and developing again.

What Philosophy Is For is simultaneously an introduction, a critique, and a call to action. Hampe shows how and why philosophy became what it is today, and, crucially, shows what it could be once more, if it would only turn its back on its pretensions to dogma: a privileged space for reflecting on the human condition.
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What Is an Event?
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
University of Chicago Press, 2017
We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.

What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives.
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The Way of Suffering
A Geography of Crisis
Jerome Miller
Georgetown University Press, 1988

This book can best be described as an extended meditation on suffering, phenomenological in method and dialectical in point of view. The angle the author takes is that of moral self-examination rather that conventional scholarly inquiry, and his aim is to think through and evaluate a fundamental claim of our culture, from Aeschylus to Solzhenitsyn, that suffering is the greatest spiritual teacher.

To bring the argument closer to home, Professor Miller focuses on the experience of crisis as the undermining of our attempts, at all costs, to keep control of our lives. This leads him to discuss topics such as the nature of vulnerability, the difference—as sketched by Heidegger—between ordinary fear and metaphysical dread, the ordinary avoidance of suffering, and the heroic willingness to embrace it exemplified by Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

But this is a philosophical essay, not a historical monograph, and Miller's goal is to lead the reader ever deeper in to the heart of crisis where all our illusions about control are stripped away and we forced to face, like Oedipus, the harshest reality of all: that even our existence is not something we can claim as our own. It is here, and only here, Miller claims, the issue of religious conversion can be and must be seriously faced.

This is a demanding book, as exhilarating as it is relentless in its unmasking of the evasions and duplicities with which we shore up our day-to-day lives. The late William F. Lynch, SJ, author of Christ and Apollo, called it "a profoundly moral study of man." To read it is to risk changing your life.

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The World of Thought in Ancient China
Benjamin I. Schwartz
Harvard University Press, 1985

The center of this prodigious work of scholarship is a fresh examination of the range of Chinese thought during the formative period of Chinese culture. Benjamin Schwartz looks at the surviving texts of this period with a particular focus on the range of diversity to be found in them. While emphasizing the problematic and complex nature of this thought he also considers views which stress the unity of Chinese culture.

Attention is accorded to pre-Confucian texts; the evolution of early Confucianism; Mo-Tzu; the “Taoists,”; the legalists; the Ying-Yang school; and the “five classics”; as well as to intellectual issues which cut across the conventional classification of schools. The main focus is on the high cultural texts, but Mr. Schwartz also explores the question of the relationship of these texts to the vast realm of popular culture.

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What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Pierre Hadot
Harvard University Press, 2002

A magisterial mappa mundi of the terrain that Pierre Hadot has so productively worked for decades, this ambitious work revises our view of ancient philosophy—and in doing so, proposes that we change the way we see philosophy itself. Hadot takes ancient philosophy out of its customary realm of names, dates, and arid abstractions and plants it squarely in the thick of life. Through a meticulous historical reading, he shows how the various schools, trends, and ideas of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy all tended toward one goal: to provide a means for achieving happiness in this life, by transforming the individual’s mode of perceiving and being in the world.

Most pressing for Hadot is the question of how the ancients conceived of philosophy. He argues in great detail, systematically covering the ideas of the earliest Greek thinkers, Hellenistic philosophy, and late antiquity, that ancient philosophers were concerned not just to develop philosophical theories, but to practice philosophy as a way of life—a way of life to be suggested, illuminated, and justified by their philosophical “discourse.” For the ancients, philosophical theory and the philosophical way of life were inseparably linked.

What Is Ancient Philosophy? also explains why this connection broke down, most conspicuously in the case of academic, professional philosophers, especially under the influence of Christianity. Finally, Hadot turns to the question of whether and how this connection might be reestablished. Even as it brings ancient thoughts and thinkers to life, this invigorating work provides direction for those who wish to improve their lives by means of genuine philosophical thought.

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The Way of Oblivion
Heraclitus and Kafka
David Schur
Harvard University Press, 1998
If Heraclitus is one of our most ancient writers, Kafka seems especially modern. They share in a struggle between disclosure and obscurity that is perhaps as old as writing itself. In this lucid and engaging volume, David Schur takes us from philosophy to literature and back in a sustained examination of a fundamental philosophical metaphor: the way or path of method. Through close readings of texts by Heraclitus, Plato, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Kafka, he follows the development of a rhetorical commonplace into a distinctly Heraclitean paradox of method, concluding that Kafka's account of the way beyond mortal existence renews Heraclitus's emphasis on oblivion in the search for truth.
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What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?
Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint
Jaroslav Pelikan
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The debate about evolution and creationism is striking evidence of the tensions between biblical and philosophical-scientific explanations of the origins of the universe. For most of the past twenty centuries, important historical context for the debate has been supplied by the relation (or "counterpoint") between two monumental texts: Plato's Timaeus and the Book of Genesis.
In What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?, Jaroslav Pelikan examines the origins of this counterpoint. He reviews the central philosophical issues of origins as posed in classical Rome by Lucretius, and he then proceeds to an examination of Timaeus and Genesis, with Timaeus' Plato representing Athens and Genesis' Moses representing Jerusalem. He then follows the three most important case studies of the counterpoint--in the Jewish philosophical theology of Alexandria, in the Christian thought of Constantinople, and in the intellectual foundations of the Western Middles Ages represented by Catholic Rome, where Timaeus would be the only Platonic dialogue in general circulation.
Whatever Plato may have intended originally in writing Timaeus, it has for most of the intervening period been read in the light of Genesis. Conversely, Genesis has been known, not in the original Hebrew, but in Greek and Latin translations that were seen to bear a distinct resemblance to one another and to the Latin version of Timaeus. Pelikan's study leads to original findings that deal with Christian doctrine in the period of the church fathers, including the Three Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) in the East, and in the West, Ambrose, Augustine, and Boethius. All of these vitally important authors addressed the problem of the "counterpoint," and neither they nor these primary texts can become fully intelligible without attention to the central issues being explored here.
What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? will be of interest to historians, theologians, and philosophers and to anyone with interest in any of the religious traditions addressed herein.
 
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Writings on Church and Reform
Nicholas of CusaTranslated by Thomas M. Izbicki
Harvard University Press, 2008

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance, was born in Kues on the Moselle River. A polymath who studied canon law and became a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote principally on speculative theology, philosophy, and church politics. As a political thinker he is best known for De concordantia catholica, which presented a blueprint for peace in an age of ecclesiastical discord.

This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time, including legal tracts arguing the case of Pope Eugenius IV against the conciliarists, theological examinations of the nature of the Church, and writings on reform of the papacy and curia. Among the works translated are an early draft of De concordantia catholica and the Letter to Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo, which discusses the Church in light of the Cusan idea of “learned ignorance.”

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Wisdom's Apprentice
Thomistic Essays in Honor of Lawrence Dewan, O.P.
Peter A. Kwasniewski
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
In Wisdom's Apprentice, twelve distinguished scholars pay grateful homage to their friend and mentor in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the study of the philosophia perennis
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When Words Are Called For
A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy
Avner Baz
Harvard University Press, 2012

A new form of philosophizing known as ordinary language philosophy took root in England after the Second World War, promising a fresh start and a way out of long-standing dead-end philosophical debates. Pioneered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and others, OLP is now widely rumored, within mainstream analytic philosophy, to have been seriously discredited, and consequently its perspective is ignored.

Avner Baz begs to differ. In When Words Are Called For, he shows how the prevailing arguments against OLP collapse under close scrutiny. All of them, he claims, presuppose one version or another of the very conception of word-meaning that OLP calls into question and takes to be responsible for many traditional philosophical difficulties. Worse, analytic philosophy itself has suffered as a result of its failure to take OLP’s perspective seriously. Baz blames a neglect of OLP’s insights for seemingly irresolvable disputes over the methodological relevance of “intuitions” in philosophy and for misunderstandings between contextualists and anti-contextualists (or “invariantists”) in epistemology. Baz goes on to explore the deep affinities between Kant’s work and OLP and suggests ways that OLP could be applied to other philosophically troublesome concepts.

When Words Are Called For defends OLP not as a doctrine but as a form of practice that might provide a viable alternative to work currently carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy. Accordingly, Baz does not merely argue for OLP but, all the more convincingly, practices it in this eye-opening book.

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Witnessing
Beyond Recognition
Kelly Oliver
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

A new, ethically based theory of identity by a major scholar.

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement-that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition-this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author’s critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing.

Central to this project is Oliver’s contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors’ accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is “beyond recognition.” Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing-the possibility of address and response-which puts ethical obligations at its heart.
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What Is a Person?
AN ETHICAL EXPLORATION
James W. Walters
University of Illinois Press, 1997
      At a time when technology can sustain marginal life, it is ever more
        important to understand what constitutes a person. What are the medical,
        ethical, moral, mental, legal, and philosophical criteria that determine
        protectable human life?
      Following immediately on the publication of his highly praised book Choosing
        Who's to Live, James Walters addresses with depth and wisdom another
        ambitious and complicated matter: determining the nature of personhood.
        By providing a much-needed religious/philosophical context for the discussion--examining
        contemporary thinking on just what constitutes valuable life--Walters
        broadens his inquiry beyond the human to include other animals and deals
        with the phenomenon of anencephalic infants, those who are born without
        higher brains.
      Searching for a measurable and humane standard of personhood, Walters
        looks at the current definition of it and declares it inadequate--offering
        instead the idea of proximate personhood, with criteria for helping to
        determine which individuals possess a unique claim to life.
 
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Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology
Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions
Daniele De Santis
Ohio University Press, 2023

Wilfrid Sellars tackled the difficult problems of reconciling Pittsburgh school–style analytic thought, Husserlian phenomenology, and the Myth of the Given.

This collection of essays brings into dialogue the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars—founder of the Pittsburgh school of thought—and phenomenology, with a special focus on the work of Edmund Husserl. The book’s wide-ranging discussions include the famous Myth of the Given but also more traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology such as the

  • status of perception and imagination
  • nature of intentionality
  • concept of motivation
  • relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences
  • relationship between conceptual and preconceptual experiences

Moreover, the volume addresses the conflicts between Sellars’s manifest and scientific images of the world and Husserl’s ontology of the life-world. The volume takes as a point of departure Sellars’s criticism of the Myth of the Given, but only to show the many problems that label obscures. Contributors explain aspects of Sellars’s philosophy vis-à-vis Husserl’s phenomenology, articulating the central problems and solutions of each. The book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in learning more about Sellars and for those comparing Continental and analytic philosophical thought.

Contributors

Walter Hopp
Wolfgang Huemer
Roberta Lanfredini
Danilo Manca
Karl Mertens
Antonio Nunziante
Jacob Rump
Daniele De Santis
Michela Summa
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Why the Humanities Matter
A Commonsense Approach
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press, 2008

Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and certainly for the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers in a variety of disciplines to affirm essential concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty.

Offering a lens of "new humanism," Frederick Aldama also provides a liberating examination of the current cultural repercussions of assertions by such revolutionary theorists as Said, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, as well as Latin Americanists such as Sommer and Mignolo. Emphasizing pedagogy and popular culture with equal verve, and writing in colloquial yet multifaceted prose, Aldama presents an enlightening way to explore what "culture" actually does—who generates it and how it shapes our identities—and the role of academia in sustaining it.

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Words and Life
Hilary Putnam
Harvard University Press, 1994

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this latest book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal to take. Words and Life offers a sweeping account of the sources of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present, and of why some of those problems are not going to go away. As the titles of the first four parts in the volume—“The Return of Aristotle,” “The Legacy of Logical Positivism,” “The Inheritance of Pragmatism,” and “Essays after Wittgenstein”—suggest, many of the essays are concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history of these problems.

The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of continuing interest in certain past approaches to them. Various supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances, while there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle’s, Peirce’s, Dewey’s, and Reichenbach’s work on some of the problems that continue to exercise us.

A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism, scientism, and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be obstacles to philosophical progress. The titles of the final three parts of the volume—“Truth and Reference,” “Mind and Language,” and “The Diversity of the Sciences”—indicate that the sweep of the problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of contemporary analytic philosophy. Rich in detail, the book is also grand in scope, allowing us to trace the ongoing intellectual evolution of one of the most significant philosophers of the century.

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What's the Use?
On the Uses of Use
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2019
In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.
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The Western Experiment
New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley
Elizabeth R. McKinsey
Harvard University Press, 1973
This essay deals with the Western experience, in the 1830s, of three young Unitarian ministers who were Transcendentalists when the movement was just beginning and before it had a name. After touching upon the symbolism of the West, Elizabeth McKinsey tells the story of three protagonists—James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and William Henry Channing—describing the idealism with which they embarked on their ministries in the Ohio Valley and the progressive disillusionment that led each of them to return East within a few years. The concluding section probes the implications, for the three men and for Transcendentalism as a whole, of the failure of their errand into the wilderness.
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