Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.
In Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa, Karen Brown links the increase of rabies to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her study shows that the most afflicted regions of South Africa have seen a dangerous rise in feral dog populations as people lack the education, means, or will to care for their pets or take them to inoculation centers. Most victims are poor black children. Ineffective disease control, which in part depends on management policies in neighboring states and the diminished medical and veterinary infrastructures in Zimbabwe, has exacerbated the problem.
This highly readable book is the first study of rabies in Africa, tracing its history in South Africa and neighboring states from 1800 to the present and showing how environmental and economic changes brought about by European colonialism and global trade have had long-term effects.
Mad Dogs and Meerkats is recommended for public health policy makers and anyone interested in human-animal relations and how societies and governments have reacted to one of the world’s most feared diseases.
Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The Madness of Vision is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality.
In each of the nine essays that form The Madness of Vision Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s Saint Teresa and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s self-portrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s El Criticón; Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo; the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts.
“Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary is a document of enduring importance and fascination. The product of a young black South African court interpreter, just turned 23 years old when he started writing, it opens an entirely new vista on the famous Siege of Mafeking. By shedding light on the part played by the African population of the town, Plaatje explodes the myth, maintained by belligerents, and long perpetuated by both historians and the popular imagination, this this was a white man’s affair. One of the great epics of British imperial history, and perhaps the best remembered episode of the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902, is presented from a wholly novel perspective.
“At the same time, the diary provides an intriguing insight into the character of a young man who was to play a key role in South African political and literary history during the first three decades of this century. It reveals much of the perceptions and motives that shaped his own attitudes and intellectual development and, indeed, those of an early generation of African leaders who sought to build a society which did not determine the place of its citizens by the colour of their skin. The diary therefore illuminates the origins of a struggle which continues to this day.”
— John L. Comaroff (ed.) in his preface
Finalist, 2019 Weatherford Award (Fiction) • A Great Group Reads Selection for National Reading Group Month from The Women’s National Book Association
Set in Appalachian Ohio amid an epidemic of prescription opiate abuse, Michael Henson’s linked collection tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption, and brings the novel-in-stories form to new heights. Maggie Boylan is an addict, thief, liar, and hustler. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and resilience. The stories follow Maggie as she spirals through her addictive process, through the court system and treatment, and into a shaky new beginning.
In these masterful stories, we rarely occupy Maggie’s perspective, but instead gain a multilayered portrait of a community as we see other people’s lives bump up against hers—and we witness her inserting herself into their spheres, refusing to be rebuffed. The result is a prismatic view of a community fighting to stay upright against the headwinds of a drug epidemic: always on edge, always human.
With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.
The essays collected here explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history. With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Making a World after Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global South, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.
Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.
The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.
Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull
Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi; Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.
Winner of the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for outstanding book on African women's experiences. (African Studies Association)
Honorable Mention, New York African Studies Association Book Prize
In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.
The two major schemes at the center of this study were the modernization project of elite Lagosian women and the salvationist project of British social workers. By approaching children and youth, specifically girl hawkers, as social actors and examining the ways in which local and colonial reformers worked upon young people, the book offers a critical new perspective on the uses of African children for the production and legitimization of national and international social development initiatives.
Making Modern Girls demonstrates how oral sources can be used to uncover the social history of informal or undocumented urban workers and to track transformations in practices of childhood over the course of decades. George revises conventional accounts of the history of development work in Africa by drawing close attention to the social welfare initiatives of late colonialism and by highlighting the roles that African women reformers played in promoting sociocultural changes within their own societies.
Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self–reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature.
Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self–imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Hai’s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.
This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser–known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.
An updated, informative review of the status and biology of the fifty-five species of mammals living wild in Ohio, richly illustrated with photographs, maps, drawings, and original artwork.
This comprehensive reference illustrates how species within each of the seven orders of mammals in Ohio share modes of reproduction, locomotion, and nutrition, providing a framework for understanding the fascinating world of mammalian biology. Presentations of natural history in each account of the various species are enhanced with descriptions of intriguing adaptations for avoiding demise from predators, food shortages, and the frigid conditions of Ohio winters. The book is richly illustrated with range maps, exquisite skull drawings, beautiful photography, and engaging artwork.
Challenges to wildlife conservation are considerable in Ohio, with its vast industrialized urban centers distributed across a largely agricultural landscape. With frequent citations of scientific reports and conservation efforts of the Ohio Division of Wildlife and of other public and private entities, this book instills an appreciation for the rich mammalian fauna of Ohio, as well as knowledge on how to join efforts to protect it.
Covering all of the state’s mammals, from tiny, obscure shrews to the magnificent white-tailed deer, Mammals of Ohio is a definitive resource for professional biologists and students. The narrative style throughout the book is accessible, providing the general reader with an appreciation for the full scope of the rich mammalian diversity in the state.
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—a raw and barren strip-mined landscape—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.
Wally’s story is a charming distillation of the themes that the late, beloved Gene Logsdon returned to again and again in his many books and hundreds of articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.
Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s poetic prose.
The story of Martiniano, The Man Who Killed the Deer, is a timeless story of Pueblo Indian sin and redemption, and of the conflict between Indian and white laws; written with a poetically charged beauty of style, a purity of conception, and a thorough understanding of Native American values.
The Eisenhower administration’s intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of “counterrevolution” to trace the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite.
Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington’s efforts to roll back “communism” in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War represented in reality a short-term strategy to protect core American interests from the rising tide of Third World nationalism.
“Seymon Lyudvigovich Frank, the author of the volume here made available for the first time in English translation, was one of the leading Russian philosophers of this century; some authorities consider him the most outstanding Russian philosopher of any age….
”Man’s Soul is a book which perfectly exemplifies the generous conception of the mission and competence of philosophy characteristic of Frank and the other members of the Russian metaphysical movement. Frank’s stated aim in the treatise is to reclaim for philosophy a field of investigation which, from the time of Plato and Aristotle to that of the Russian Idealists, philosophers had viewed as properly theirs, but which, since the mid-nineteenth century, they had allowed to fall into almost complete neglect: the study of the nature of the human soul (or psyche)….
“The moral message of Man’s Soul is well summed up by its epigraph, quoted from St. Augustine: ‘Let man first of all return to his own self, so that once he has, as it were, stepped therein, he may rise from thence and be elevated to God.’”
—from the foreword by Philip J. Swoboda
Taking power in Nicaragua in 1979 as a revolutionary party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was willing to put its fate in the hands of the Nicaraguan people twice, in 1984 and 1990. The party wrote a democratic constitution and then, remarkably, accepted the decision of the majority by relinquishing power upon its defeat in the 1990 election.
The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy explores the conflicts involving different visions of political and economic democracy, as well as new radical thought on participatory democracy. The latter addresses the problems popular organizations encountered as they moved from subservience to the FSLN in the 1980s to the liberating but disorientating electoral defeat of 1990. Up until the moment of defeat, the Sandinistas saw themselves as the true vanguard of the Nicaraguan people, able to submit themselves to free elections, because they felt they truly represented the general will of the people.
Dr. Hoyt brings to an international audience for the first time a study of the ideas of several Nicaraguan thinkers. She examines the conflicts surrounding the development of ideas within the FSLN, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of its rare combination of democratic and vanguard principles.
The life story of a daredevil who became a war hero will fascinate adventurous young readers with its tales of survival.
At age thirteen, following the death of his father, young Eddie dropped out of school and joined the workforce. Through a combination of smarts, hard work, and perseverance, Rickenbacker would grow up to become an automobile mechanic, a race car driver, a fighter pilot, an entrepreneur, a war hero, a business executive, and a staunch advocate for hard work and personal responsibility.
Along the way he lived on the line between recklessness and courage. He survived dozens of accidents, coming close to death more than once. During the earliest years of American automobile racing, Rickenbacker was “the most daring and withal the most cautious driver” on the circuit. How could he have been both daring and cautious? This book invites young readers to decide for themselves as they follow Rickenbacker on his many hair-raising adventures.
The hazy settings and amorphous auditors of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues are often contrasted—at Tennyson’s expense—with Browning’s more vivid, concrete realizations. Hughes argues that Tennyson’s achievements in the genre are, in fact, considerable, that his influence can be traced in such major figures as T. S. Eliot, and that the monologue occupies a far more central position in Tennyson’s poetic achievement than has hitherto been acknowledged.
Hughes’ study challenges the traditional view of Tennyson’s inferior achievement, and her account of the elements and operation of the dramatic monologue, especially as demonstrated by three of its most important practitioners, will be of interest to all those concerned with the monologue as a poetic mode.
The Marikana Massacre of August 16, 2012, was the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of apartheid. Those killed were mineworkers in support of a pay raise. Through a series of interviews conducted with workers who survived the attack, this account documents and examines the controversial shootings in great detail, beginning with a valuable history of the events leading up to the killing of workers, and including eyewitness accounts of the violence and interviews with family members of those who perished.
While the official Farlam Commission investigation of the massacre is still ongoing, many South Africans do not hold much confidence in the government’s ability to examine its own complicity in these events. Marikana, on the other hand, examines the various roles played by the African National Congress, the mine company, and the National Union of Mineworkers in creating the conditions that led to the massacre. While the commission’s investigations take place in a courtroom setting tilted toward those in power, Marikana documents testimony from the mineworkers in the days before official statements were even gathered, offering an unusually immediate and unfiltered look at the reality from the perspective of those most directly affected. Enhanced by vivid maps that make clear the setting and situation of the events, Marikana is an invaluable work of history, journalism, sociology, and activism.
In Market Encounters, Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.
Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.
With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation.
The legal experts, anthropologists, historians, and development workers contributing to Marriage by Force? focus on the role that marriage plays in the mobilization of labor, the accumulation of wealth, and domination versus dependency. They also address the crucial slippage between marriages and other forms of gendered violence, bondage, slavery, and servile status.
Only by examining variations in practices from a multitude of perspectives can we properly contextualize the problem and its consequences. And while early and forced marriages have been on the human rights agenda for decades, there is today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue, thus making the coherent, multifaceted approach of Marriage by Force? even more necessary.
Eliza Orzeszkowa was a trailblazing Polish novelist who, alongside Leo Tolstoy and Henryk Sienkiewicz, was a finalist for the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. Of her many works of social realism, Marta (1873) is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of the English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women.
Suddenly widowed, the previously middle-class Marta Świcka is left penniless and launched into a grim battle for her survival and that of her small daughter. As she applies for job after job in Warsaw—portrayed here as an every-city, an unforgiving commercial landscape that could be any European metropolis of the time—she is told time after time that only men will be hired, that men need jobs because they are fathers and heads of families.
Marta burns with Orzeszkowa’s feminist conviction that sexism was not just an annoyance but a threat to the survival of women and children. It anticipated the need for social safety nets whose existence we take for granted today, and could easily read as an indictment of current efforts to dismantle those very programs. Tightly plotted and exquisitely translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, Marta resonates beyond its Polish setting to find its place in women’s studies, labor history, and among other works of nineteenth-century literature and literature of social change.
Masked Gods is a vast book, a challenging and profoundly original account of the history, legends, and ceremonialism of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Following a brief but vivid history of the two tribes through the centuries of conquest, the book turns inward to the meaning of Native American legends and ritual—Navajo songs, Pueblo dances, Zuni kachina ceremonies. Enduring still, these rituals and ceremonies express a view of life, of man’s place in the creation, which is compared with Taoism and Buddhism—and with the aggressive individualism of the Western world.
Fifty years after the declaration of the state of emergency, Mau Mau still excites argument and controversy, not least in Kenya itself. Mau Mau and Nationhood is a collection of essays providing the most recent thinking on the uprising and its aftermath.
The work of well-established scholars as well as of young researchers with fresh perspectives, Mau Mau and Nationhood achieves a multilayered analysis of a subject of enduring interest. According to Terence Ranger, Emeritus Rhodes Professor, Oxford, “In some ways the historiography of Mau Mau is a supreme example not only of ambiguity and complexity, but also of redemption of a topic once thought incapable of rational analysis.”
John Lonsdale says in his introduction:
“This is the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom Greet Kershaw lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau ‘Emergency’ in the 1950s, and which is now totally irrecoverable in any form save in her own field notes.
Professor Kershaw has uncovered long local histories of social tension which could have been revealed by no other means than patient enquiry, of both her neighbour’s memory and government archives…
Nobody, whether Kikuyu participant, Kenyan or European scholar, has provided such startlingly authoritative ethnographic insights into the values, fears and expectations of Kikuyu society and thus of the motivation of Kikuyu action…
Her data suggests, as other scholars have also accepted, that there never was a single such movement and that none of its members, even those who supposed themselves to be its leaders, ever saw it whole, not because they did not have a political aim, but because that agenda was contested within different political circles over which they had no control and of which they may scarcely have had any knowledge.
And why is this finding important? It is because others, including almost all the movement’s enemies, did see Mau Mau whole in order to try to comprehend it, a first step towards defeating it.”
The book breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of the Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of the sociology of decolonization and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya. For the first time an account of decolonization in Kenya based on primary sources is offered to the reader.
The Mau Mau was militarily crushed in the mid-fifties, but the struggle for land rights was only contained in the post independence era of Kenya. Kikuyu squatters on European estates who formed the backbone of this movement are the main subject of this book.
Furedi’s account considers how the radicalization of rural protest in the so-called White Highlands led to the Mau Mau explosion and how it was sustained during the subsequent fifteen years.
The book establishes a focus for discussion of these critical events through exploring the relationship between rural resistance and decolonization. The author argues that the main issue facing post-colonial policies in Kenya was to resolve the problems raised by the Mau Mau revolt.
Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a special emphasis on historical and political sociology, this book is aimed at students of African politics and political sociologists interested in rural revolution and revolt.
In 1927, at the peak of his career, Zane Grey bought a three-masted schooner, which he sailed to the Galapagos Islands, later journeying to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji.
As colorful as his characters were, so too was their creator. A consummate explorer, Zane Grey toured the world, was an acclaimed expert on salt- and freshwater fishing, and incorporated the sights and sounds he witnessed into his writings.
As a companion to his biographical work of Grey’s literary life, Zane Grey: Romancing the West, author Stephen J. May now gives as a remarkable look into another aspect of Grey’s existence, the side little known but central to the measure of the man.
Maverick Heart makes use of Grey’s own memoirs and letters to give an enlightening portrait of this larger-than-life American character and a telling insight into one of the key shapers of the cultural heritage of our country.
The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true.
In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir—a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author’s past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered.
The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one’s deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O’Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process.
For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
The memoirs of Marguérite Schenkhuizen provide an overview of practically the whole of the twentieth century as experienced by persons of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry who lived in the former Dutch East Indies. The memoirs provide vignettes of Indonesian life, both rural and urban, as seen through the eyes of the author first as a girl, then as a wife separated from her husband during the Japanese occupation, finally as an immigrant to the United States after World War II.
This self-portrait gives glimpses of the life of Indos from inside their society, glimpses that are valuable for their descendents as well as for outsiders. Written with humor and a positive town, Schenkhuizen’s story sets aside the myth that Indos were denied access to the upper layers of Dutch colonial society or were otherwise disadvantaged. Instead, her life story provides an authentic view of a vital Indo culture and experience that has been unavailable to the general reader of English.
From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.
Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.
By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.
From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.
Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies.
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”
As a black Appalachian woman, Memphis Tennessee Garrison belonged to a demographic category triply ignored by historians.
The daughter of former slaves, she moved to McDowell County, West Virginia, at an early age and died at ninety-eight in Huntington. The coalfields of McDowell County were among the richest seams in the nation. As Garrison makes clear, the backbone of the early mining work force—those who laid the railroad tracks, manned the coke ovens, and dug the coal—were black miners. These miners and their families created communities that became the centers of the struggle for unions, better education, and expanded civil rights. Memphis Tennessee Garrison, an innovative teacher, administrative worker at U.S. Steel, and vice president of the National Board of the NAACP at the height of the civil rights struggle (1963-66), was involved with all of these struggles.
In many ways, this oral history, based on interview transcripts, is the untold and multidimensional story of African American life in West Virginia, as seen through the eyes of a remarkable woman. She portrays a courageous people who organize to improve their working conditions, send their children to school and then to college, own land, and support a wide range of cultural and political activities.
Long famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner.
Mencken was prolific; much of his best work lies buried in the newspapers and magazines in which it originally appeared. Mencken’s America is a sampling of this uncollected work, arranged to present the wide-ranging treatise on American culture that Mencken himself never wrote.
The core of the book is a series of six articles on “The American” published in the Smart Set in 1913-14. Never before reprinted, they embody the essence of Mencken’s views on the deficiencies of his countrymen.
What was the problem with America? For Mencken, it could be summed up in one word: Puritanism. Puritanism accounted for much that was wrong with American culture: the prevalence of “militant morality” represented by Prohibition, by campaigns against prostitution, and by religious fundamentalism. American hostility toward the fine arts led to furious attempts to suppress any work of art that was thought to contravene conventional morality-attempts that Mencken chronicles with impressive scholarship in the essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force.”
Mencken reserved his greatest scorn for American political institutions. Opposed to the very principle of democracy and universal suffrage, he maintained that, in the absence of an educated electorate, all politicians are compelled to become demagogues.
Bracing, infuriating, and pungent, H. L. Mencken’s writings retain their relevance even after the passage of nearly a hundred years, cogently discussing issues with which Americans of the twenty-first century are still wrestling. Sagaciously edited by S. T. Joshi, one of the country’s foremost Mencken scholars, Mencken’s America is a superb example of America’s turning the looking glass on itself.
While there have been many essays devoted to comparing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with that of Jacques Derrida, there has been no sustained book-length treatment of these two French philosophers. Additionally, many of the essays presuppose an oppositional relationship between them, and between phenomenology and deconstruction more generally.
Jack Reynolds systematically explores their relationship by analyzing each philosopher in terms of two important and related issues—embodiment and alterity. Focusing on areas with which they are not commonly associated (e.g., Derrida on the body and Merleau-Ponty on alterity) makes clear that their work cannot be adequately characterized in a strictly oppositional way. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity proposes the possibility of a Merleau-Ponty-inspired philosophy that does not so avowedly seek to extricate itself from phenomenology, but that also cannot easily be dismissed as simply another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. Reynolds argues that there are salient ethico-political reasons for choosing an alternative that accords greater attention to our embodied situation.
As the first full-length monograph comparing the philosophers, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida will interest scholars and students in European philosophy and teachers of courses dealing with deconstruction.
Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, now indispensable to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to architectural theory and practice is well established. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vibrant collection of original essays by twelve eminent philosophers who mine Merleau-Ponty’s work to consider how we live and create as profoundly spatial beings. The resulting collection is essential to philosophers and creative artists as well as those concerned with the pressing ethical issues of our time.
Each contributor presents a different facet of space, place, or architecture. These essays carve paths from Merleau-Ponty to other thinkers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, Ettinger, and Piaget. As the first collection devoted specifically to developing Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of place and architecture, this book will speak to philosophers interested in the problem of space, architectural theorists, and a wide range of others in the arts and design community.
Contributors: Nancy Barta-Smith, Edward S. Casey, Helen Fielding, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Randall Johnson, D. R. Koukal, Suzanne Cataldi Laba, Patricia M. Locke, Glen Mazis, Rachel McCann, David Morris, and Dorothea Olkowski.
Dawn Powell was a gifted satirist who moved in the same circles as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, renowned editor Maxwell Perkins, and other midcentury New York luminaries. Her many novels are typically divided into two groups: those dealing with her native Ohio and those set in New York. “From the moment she left behind her harsh upbringing in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and arrived in Manhattan, in 1918, she dove into city life with an outlander’s anthropological zeal,” reads a recent New Yorker piece about Powell, and it is those New York novels that built her reputation for scouring wit and social observation.
In this critical biography and study of the New York novels, Patricia Palermo reminds us how Powell earned a place in the national literary establishment and East Coast social scene. Though Powell’s prolific output has been out of print for most of the past few decades, a revival is under way: the Library of America, touting her as a “rediscovered American comic genius,” released her collected novels, and in 2015 she was posthumously inducted into the New York State Writer’s Hall of Fame.
Engaging and erudite, The Message of the City fills a major gap in in the story of a long-overlooked literary great. Palermo places Powell in cultural and historical context and, drawing on her diaries, reveals the real-life inspirations for some of her most delicious satire.
Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.
Laura T. Murphy’s insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.
Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered—in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period’s poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms.
The ten essays in Meter Matters showcase the range of metrical practice of poets from Wordsworth and Byron to Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson; at the same time, the contributors bring into focus some of the metrical theorizing that shaped poetic thinking and responses to it throughout the nineteenth century. Paying close attention to the historical contours of Romantic and Victorian meters, as well as to the minute workings of the verse line, Meter Matters presents a fresh perspective on a subject that figured significantly in the century’s literature, and in its culture.
In the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements with a range of topics including ecology, perfume, tourism, art history, sculpture, formalism, classics, and book history. In doing so, Michael Field: Decadent Moderns highlights the modernity, radicalism, and relevance of their work, both within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as in our own cultural moment.
Contributors: Leire Barrera-Medrano, Joseph Bristow, Jill R. Ehnenn, Sarah E. Kersh, Kristin Mahoney, Catherine Maxwell, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Margaret D. Stetz, Kate Thomas, and Ana Parejo Vadillo.
When it came to the Civil War, Michiganians never spoke with one voice. At the beginning of the conflict, family farms defined the southern Lower Peninsula, while a sparsely settled frontier characterized the state’s north. Although differing strategies for economic development initially divided Michigan’s settlers, by the 1850s Michiganians’ attention increasingly focused on slavery, race, and the future of the national union. They exchanged charges of treason and political opportunism while wrestling with the meanings of secession, the national union, emancipation, citizenship, race, and their changing economy. Their actions launched transformations in their communities, their state, and their nation in ways that Americans still struggle to understand.
Building upon the current scholarship of the Civil War, the Midwest, and Michigan’s role in the national experience, Michigan’s War is a documentary history of the Civil War era as told by the state’s residents and observers in private letters, reminiscences, newspapers, and other contemporary sources. Clear annotations and thoughtful editing allow teachers and students to delve into the political, social, and military context of the war, making it ideal for classroom use.
This reprint makes available again Frank Waters’ dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike’s Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth. More than regional history, Midas of the Rockies is a story so fabulously impossible and yet so painfully true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it.
The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet’s travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is “a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father’s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.”
Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.
The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the ensuing communist regime have often been portrayed as a man’s revolution, with women as bystanders or even victims. Midwives of the Revolution examines the powerful contribution made by women to the overthrow of tsarism in 1917 and their importance in the formative years of communism in Russia.
Focusing on the masses as well as the high-ranking intelligentsia, Midwives of the Revolution is the first sustained analysis of female involvement in the revolutionary era of Russian history. The authors investigate the role of Bolshevik women and the various forms their participation took. Drawing on the experiences of representative individuals, the authors discuss the important relationship between Bolshevik women and the workers in the turbulent months of 1917.
The authors demonstrate that women were an integral part of the revolutionary process and challenge assumptions that they served merely to ignite an essentially masculine revolt. By placing women center stage, without exaggerating their roles, this study enriches our understanding of a momentous event in twentieth-century history.
For hundreds of years, military intervention in another country was considered taboo and prohibited by international law. Since 1992, intervention has often been described as an international responsibility, and efforts have been made to give it legal justification. This extraordinary change in perceptions has taken place in only the space of a decade.
Military Intervention after the Cold War: The Evolution of Theory and Practice explores how and why this change took place, looking at how both ideas and actions changed in the post-Cold War period to make military intervention a tool of international security and a defining characteristic of the international system. Although intervention is often touted as a strategy to rebuild collapsed states, successful interventions are rare. Andrea Kathryn Talentino argues that standards of human rights and responsible governance have become part of the definition of international security. She addresses questions that are vital in the post-9/11 world, where weak and collapsed states are recognized as permissive and at times supportive environments for criminal actors.
The specter of terrorism has further emphasized the need to understand why military intervention is undertaken and how it could be more effective. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and readers interested in understanding global interdependence will find Military Intervention after the Cold War an indispensable book.
Kabul, Afghanistan, 1979: CIA station chief Lucius Burling, an idealistic but flawed product of his nation’s intelligence establishment, barely survives the assassination of the American ambassador. Burling’s reaction to the murder, and his desire to understand its larger meaning, propel him on a journey of intrigue and betrayal that will reach its ultimate end in the streets of Shanghai, months after 9/11. A Chinese dissident physicist may (or may not) be planning to sell his country’s nuclear secrets, and in his story Burling, now living quietly as consul, recognizes the fingerprints of a covert operation, one without the obvious sanction of the Agency. The dissident’s escape draws the violent attention of the Chinese internal security service, and as Burling is drawn inexorably into their path, he must face the ghosts of his past misadventures and a present world of global trafficking, fragile alliances, and the human need for connection above all.
Reminiscent of the best work of Graham Greene and John le Carré, Ministers of Fire extends the spy thriller into new historical, political, and emotional territory.
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.
Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
Growing up in Ladora, Iowa, Mildred “Millie” Benson had ample time to develop her imagination and sense of adventure. While still a journalism graduate student at the University of Iowa, Millie began writing for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which published the phenomenally popular Hardy Boys series, among others. Soon, Millie was tapped for a new series starring amateur sleuth Nancy Drew, a young, independent woman not unlike Millie herself. Under the pen name Carolyn Keene, Millie wrote the first book, The Secret of the Old Clock, and twenty-two other Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. In all, Millie wrote more than a hundred novels for young people.
Millie was also a journalist for the Toledo Times and the Toledo Blade. At sixty-two, she obtained her pilot’s license. Follow the clues throughout Missing Millie to discover the story of this ghostwriter, journalist, and adventurer.
Winner of a 2011 “Distinguished Achievement in Literature” award, Missouri Humanities Council
Civil War Missouri stood at the crossroads of America. As the most Southern-leaning state in the Middle West, Missouri faced a unique dilemma. The state formed the gateway between east and west, as well as one of the borders between the two contending armies. Moreover, because Missouri was the only slave state in the Great Interior, the conflicts that were tearing the nation apart were also starkly evident within the state. Deep divisions between Southern and Union supporters, as well as guerrilla violence on the western border, created a terrible situation for civilians who lived through the attacks of bushwhackers and Jayhawkers.
The documents collected in Missouri's War reveal what factors motivated Missourians to remain loyal to the Union or to fight for the Confederacy, how they coped with their internal divisions and conflicts, and how they experienced the end of slavery in the state. Private letters, diary entries, song lyrics, official Union and Confederate army reports, newspaper editorials, and sermons illuminate the war within and across Missouri's borders.
Missouri's War also highlights the experience of free and enslaved African Americans before the war, as enlisted Union soldiers, and in their effort to gain rights after the end of the war. Although the collection focuses primarily on the war years, several documents highlight both the national sectional conflict that led to the outbreak of violence and the effort to reunite the conflicting forces in Missouri after the war.
This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis’s definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis’s history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity.
Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.
Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both “low modern” and “high modernist” British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.
Short-listed for the Fage & Oliver Prize for outstanding scholarly work published on Africa.
Finalist, African Studies Association Book Prize.
Finalist, ASA Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for best book in east African studies.
If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia—the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country’s supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context.
Giorgis explores the varied precedents of the country’s political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative work—a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.
The genesis for this volume was in the bombing of Japan during World War II, where the author, as a young boy, watched the bombers overhead, speculating about the lives of the pilots and their relationship with those huddled on the ground.
From this disturbing diorama, Professor Hiroshi Kojima, the translator of Martin Buber into Japanese, unfolds a new approach to Buber’s “I-Thou” relation, drawing upon insights from Husserl, Heidegger, and others in the tradition of continental philosophy to extend and deepen Buber’s thought.
In chapters that reflect upon a wide range of phenomena—from religion, science, and technology, to imagination, embodiment, and power—Professor Kojima articulates a conception of what it means to be a human being that stands as an alternative to atomism and alienation of the modern world. Analyses of haiku and other aspects of Japanese culture demonstrate how Kojima’s theory can illuminate the spiritual traditions of both East and West.
Original in its thought and revealing in its insight into Japanese thought and culture, Monad and Thou represents the life’s work of one of Japan’s great thinkers.
In Monsoon Postcards, journalist David H. Mould, notebook in hand, traverses the Indian Ocean—from Madagascar through India and Bangladesh to Indonesia. It’s an unpredictable journey on battered buses, bush taxis, auto-rickshaws, and crowded ferries. Mould travels from the traffic snarls of Delhi, Dhaka, and Jakarta to the rice paddies and ancestral tombs of Madagascar’s Central Highlands; from the ancient kingdom of Hyderabad to India’s so-called chicken neck—the ethnically diverse and underdeveloped northeast; and from the textile factories and rivers of Bangladesh to the beaches of Bali and the province of Aceh—ground zero for the 2004 tsunami.
Along the way, in markets, shops, roadside cafes, and classrooms, he meets journalists, professors, students, aid workers, cab drivers, and other everyday residents to learn how they view their past and future. Much like its predecessor, Mould’s Postcards from Stanland,Monsoon Postcards offers witty and insightful glimpses into countries linked by history, trade, migration, religion, and a colonial legacy. It explores how they confront the challenges of climate change, urban growth, economic development, land, water and natural resources, and national and ethnic identity.
At the age of thirty-six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D.C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G. Totten. It was a fateful assignment, both for the nation’s capital and for the bright, ambitious, and politically connected West Point graduate.
Meigs's forty-year tenure in the nation's capital was by any account spectacularly successful. He surveyed, designed, and built the Washington water supply system, oversaw the extension of the U.S. Capitol and the erection of its massive iron dome, and designed and supervised construction of the Pension Building, now the home of the National Building Museum. The skills he exhibited in supervising engineering projects were carefully noted by political leaders, including president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who named Meigs quartermaster general of the Union Army, the most important position he held during his long and active military career.
Meigs believed Washington, D.C., should be the reincarnation of Rome, the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. He endeavored to memorialize the story of the American nation in all the structures he built, expressing these ideas in murals, sculpture, and monumental design.
Historians have long known Meigs for the organizational genius with which he fulfilled his duty as quartermaster general during the Civil War and for his unwavering loyalty to Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. This volume establishes his claim as one of the major nineteenth-century contributors to the built environment of the nation's capital.
In Illinois, the one-hundred-foot Cahokia Mound spreads impressively across sixteen acres, and as many as ten thousand more mounds dot the Ohio River Valley alone. The Mound Builders traces the speculation surrounding these monuments and the scientific excavations which uncovered the history and culture of the ancient Americans who built them.
The mounds were constructed for religious and secular purposes some time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., and they have prompted curiosity and speculation from very early times. European settlers found them evidence of some ancient and glorious people. Even as eminent an American as Thomas Jefferson joined the controversy, though his conclusions—that the mounds were actually cemeteries of ancient Indians—remained unpopular for nearly a century.
Only in the late 19th century, as Smithsonian Institution investigators developed careful methodologies and reliable records, did the period of scientific investigation of the mounds and their builders begin. Silverberg follows these excavations and then recounts the story they revealed of the origins, development, and demise of the mound builder culture.
“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.
Writing in Western American Literature, Charles L. Adams said, “In Mountain Dialogues, we see Frank Waters acknowledging his sources—major influences on a great American thinker and writer. Waters weaves together threads of these influences, adds his own thought, and presents us with a truly cosmic overview. This overview is thoroughly that of an American ‘Westerner’; it also is one that merits international consideration.”
And as the Bloomsbury Review wrote: “Mountain Dialogues is more than just a collection of personal essays. It is an ‘evolutionist’s handbook’ for the sons and daughters of the new West, a guide for those who would transcend the limitations of Western civilization.”
Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.
Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.
Contributors:
Laura Allen, Brian Black, Geoffrey L. Buckley, Donald Edward Davis, Wren Kruse, Nancy Irwin Maxwell, Chad Montrie, Michele Morrone, Kathryn Newfont, John Nolt, Jedediah S. Purdy, and Stephen J. Scanlan.
Residents of the Appalachian coalfields share a history and heritage, deep connections to the land, and pride in their own resilience. These same residents are also profoundly divided over the practice of mountaintop mining—that is, the removal and disposal in nearby valleys of soil and rock in order to reach underlying coal seams. Companies and some miners claim that the practice has reduced energy prices, earned income for shareholders, and provided needed jobs. Opponents of mountaintop mining argue that it poisons Appalachia’s waters and devastates entire communities for the sake of short-term gains.
This conflict is emblematic of many other environmental disputes in the United States and around the world, disputes whose intensity derives not only from economic and environmental stakes but also from competing claims to individual and community identity. Looking beyond the slogans and seemingly irreconcilable differences, however, can reveal deeper causes of conflict, such as flawed institutions, politics, and inequality or the strongly held values of parties for whom compromise is difficult to achieve.
Mountaintop Mining in Appalachia focuses on the people of the region, the people who have the most at stake and have been the most active in trying to shift views and practices. By examining the experiences of these stakeholders and their efforts to effect change, Susan F. Hirsch and E. Franklin Dukes introduce key concepts and theories from the field of conflict analysis and resolution. They provide a compelling case study of how stakeholders challenge governance-as-usual, while offering insight into the causes of conflict over other environmental issues.
This book uses the Kenyan political system to address issues relevant to recent political developments throughout Africa.
The authors analyze the construction of the Moi state since 1978. They show the marginalization of Kikuyu interests as the political economy of Kenya has been reconstructed to benefit President Moi’s Kalenjin people and their allies. Mounting Kikuyu dissatisfaction led to the growth of demands for multi-party democracy.
The book places contemporary Kenyan politics and the 1992 election in their historical context, contrasting the present multi-party era with the previous one during the sixties.
The authors question the hopes for a “second independence” in Africa by demonstrating the problems faced by fledgling opposition parties in weak civil societies.
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of “the people.”
In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.
Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.
She was the daughter of a circuit judge and state senator. He was the youngest son of Virginia’s Civil War governor and was a state legislator himself at the age of nineteen. Their courtship and marriage stands as a portrait of a bygone way of life unique to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. My Dearest Angel is their story, told through their faithful correspondence over the course of their fifty years together.
Piecing together the voluminous letters, their granddaughter, noted author Katie Letcher Lyle, has succeeded in giving us an intimate panorama of the full and oftentimes wrenching lives led by Greenlee and Katie Letcher. Domestic life, family secrets, and visiting luminaries are part of their story. But the abiding appeal of My Dearest Angel is the maturation of a lifelong relationship built on the crest of a changing world.
The role of the telegraph operator in the mid-nineteenth century was like that of today’s software programmer/analyst, according to independent scholar Tom Jepsen, who notes that in the “cyberspace” of long ago, male operators were often surprised to learn that the “first-class man” on the other end of the wire was a woman.
Like the computer, the telegraph caused a technological revolution. The telegraph soon worked synergistically with the era’s other mass-scale technology, the railroad, to share facilities as well as provide communications to help trains run on time.
The strategic nature of the telegraph in the Civil War opened opportunities for women, but tension arose as men began to return from military service. However, women telegraphers did not affect male employment or wage levels. Women kept their jobs after the war with support from industry—Western Union in particular—and because they defended and justified their role.
“Although women were predominantly employed in lower-paying positions and in rural offices, women who persisted and made a career of the profession could work up to managerial or senior technical positions that, except for wage discrimination, were identical to those of their male counterparts,” writes Jepsen. “Telegraphy as an occupation became gendered, in the sense that we understand today, only after the introduction of the teletype and the creation of a separate role for women teletype operators.”
My Sisters Telegraphic is a fresh introduction to this pivotal communications technology and its unsung women workers, long neglected by labor and social historians.
After careful re-reading and analysis of original Old Burmese and other primary sources, the author discovered that four out of the five events considered to be the most important in the history of early Burma, and believed to have been historically accurate, are actually late-nineteenth and twentieth-century inventions of colonial historians caught in their own intellectual and political world.
Only one of these is a genuine indigenous Burmese myth, but it too has been embellished by modern historians.
The author discusses each of these five myths and concludes with an assessment of the current situation in Burma in the context of the new myths springing up today, thereby bringing the thirteenth century into the twentieth.
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