Punctuated with remarkable case studies, this book explores extraordinary encounters between hermaphrodites--people born with "ambiguous" sexual anatomy--and the medical and scientific professionals who grappled with them. Alice Dreger focuses on events in France and Britain in the late nineteenth century, a moment of great tension for questions of sex roles. While feminists, homosexuals, and anthropological explorers openly questioned the natures and purposes of the two sexes, anatomical hermaphrodites suggested a deeper question: just how many human sexes are there? Ultimately hermaphrodites led doctors and scientists to another surprisingly difficult question: what is sex, really?

Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex takes us inside the doctors' chambers to see how and why medical and scientific men constructed sex, gender, and sexuality as they did, and especially how the material conformation of hermaphroditic bodies--when combined with social exigencies--forced peculiar constructions. Throughout the book Dreger indicates how this history can help us to understand present-day conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality. This leads to an epilogue, where the author discusses and questions the protocols employed today in the treatment of intersexuals (people born hermaphroditic). Given the history she has recounted, should these protocols be reconsidered and revised?

A meticulously researched account of a fascinating problem in the history of medicine, this book will compel the attention of historians, physicians, medical ethicists, intersexuals themselves, and anyone interested in the meanings and foundations of sexual identity.

A deftly crafted biography of the author of Siddhartha, whose critique of consumer culture continues to inspire millions of readers.

Against the horrors of Nazi dictatorship and widespread disillusionment with the forces of mass culture and consumerism, Hermann Hesse’s stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values. Few today would doubt Hesse’s artistry or his importance to millions of devoted readers. But just who was the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian?

Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Hesse and his psychoanalyst Josef Lang, Decker shows how Hesse reversed the traditional roles of therapist and client, and rethinks the relationship between Hesse’s novels and Jungian psychoanalysis. He also explores Hesse’s correspondence with Stefan Zweig—recently unearthed—to find the source of Hesse’s profound sense of alienation from his contemporaries.

Decker’s biography brings to life this icon of spiritual searching and disenchantment who galvanized the counterculture in the 1960s and feels newly relevant today.

Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artists inevitably misrepresent women. She builds this daring case compellingly through inquiry into many unexpected and delightfully germane subjects—Marilyn Monroe’s walk, for instance, or dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, or the shoulder blades of Degas’s bathers. Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato’s myth of the divided beings and psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets out before us an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division.

By following a developmental, rather than historical, sequence, the book uncovers startling correspondences and fresh insights. It begins by considering Dickens, Lawrence, Harold Brodkey, Peter Handke, and John Berger on the subject of mothers; turns to Degas and the Victorian novelist George Gissing to examine the figure of woman alone, and then to Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock for their perspectives on the battle between the sexes; and then looks at the poetry of Randall Jarrell, the fashion photographs of Cecil Beaton, and the range of artworks inspired by Marilyn Monroe to investigate the central idea of woman as the artist's mirror and secret self.

A chapter on Barbara Stanwyck returns us to an essential premise—that art transcends gender boundaries, that the masculine and the feminine coexist within each individual psyche. The refreshingly open-minded approach of His Other Half finds its corollary in Lesser's lucid and accessible style. With great affection for her subject and her audience, Lesser writes in language that is opinionated yet free of cant. Her book avoids—as the best art avoids—prefabricated schemes and ideological presumptions. At once exploratory and definitive, original and erudite, His Other Half is critical inquiry at its finest.

In this first book-length study of Czech structuralism and semiotics in English, F. W. Galan explores one of the most important intellectual currents of the twentieth century, filling the gap between what has been written of the Russian formalism of the twenties and the French structuralism of the sixties and seventies. He records the evolution within the Prague Linguistic Circle of those theories which concern literature's change in time and the place of literature in society. In doing so, he reveals how the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the years 1928 to 1946 vindicate structuralism against its critics' charges that the structuralist approach—in linguistics, literary theory, film studies, and related fields—is inherently unhistorical. Overcoming this apparent methodological impasse was the main challenge confronted by the scholars of the Prague School–Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, in particular.

Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asiaaddresses provocative themes concerning the experience of particular nations and of East Asia as a whole. It explores the turbulent process of integrating Asian societies and political systems into a global order dominated by the West over the past two centuries.

The authors show that important changes were already underway before the western advance, which had their own internal logic and staying power. They describe how people in China, Japan, and Korea redefined and defended indigenous "traditions" even as they disagreed over what these traditions were and how to transform them. They make it clear that nationalism was a powerful motivating force in the modern development of these countries, but they stress that a wide variety of nationalisms emerged and collided in the dramatic history of modern Asia.

Mira Wilkins, the foremost authority on foreign investment in the United States, continues her magisterial history in a work covering the critical years 1914–1945.

Wilkins includes all long-term inward foreign investments, both portfolio (by individuals and institutions) and direct (by multinationals), across such enterprises as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles, insurance, banks and mortgage providers, other service sector companies, and mining and oil industries. She traces the complex course of inward investments, presents the experiences of the investors, and examines the political and economic conditions, particularly the range of public policies, that affected foreign investments. She also offers valuable discussions on the intricate cross-investments of inward and outward involvements and the legal precedents that had long-term consequences on foreign investment.

At the start of World War I, the United States was a debtor nation. By the end of World War II, it was a creditor nation with the strongest economy in the world. Integrating economic, business, technological, legal, and diplomatic history, this comprehensive study is essential to understanding the internationalization of the American economy, as well as broader global trends.

From the colonial era to 1914, America was a debtor nation in international accounts—owing more to foreigners than foreigners owed to us. By 1914 it was the world’s largest debtor nation. Mira Wilkins provides the first complete history of foreign investment in the United States during that period. The book shows why the United States was attractive to foreign investors and traces the changing role of foreign capital in the nation’s development, covering both portfolio and direct investment. The immense new wave of foreign investment in the United States today, and our return to the status of a debtor nation—once again the world’s largest debtor nation—makes this strong exposition far more than just historically interesting.

Wilkins reviews foreign portfolio investments in government securities (federal, state, and local) and in corporate stocks and bonds, as well as foreign direct investments in land and real estate, manufacturing plants, and even such service-sector activities as accounting, insurance, banking, and mortgage lending. She finds that between 1776 and 1875, public-sector securities (principally federal and state securities) drew in the most long-term foreign investment, whereas from 1875 to 1914 the private sector was the main attraction. The construction of the American railroad system called on vast portfolio investments from abroad; there was also sizable direct investment in mining, cattle ranching, the oil industry, the chemical industry, flour production, and breweries, as well as the production of rayon, thread, and even submarines. In addition, there were foreign stakes in making automobile and electrical and nonelectrical machinery. America became the leading industrial country of the world at the very time when it was a debtor nation in world accounts.

The first comprehensive history of modern poetry in English from the 1890s to the 1920s, this book embraces an era of enormous creative variety—the formative period during which the Romantic traditions of the past were abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created. By the end of the period covered, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Stevens’s Harmonium, and Pound’s Draft of XVI Cantos had been published, and the first post-Eliot generation of poets was beginning to emerge.

More than a hundred poets are treated in this volume, and many more are noticed in passing. David Perkins discusses each poet and type of poetry with keen critical appreciation. He traces opposed and evolving assumptions about poetry, and considers the effects on poetry of its changing audiences, of premises and procedures in literary criticism, of the publishing outlets poets could hope to use, and the interrelations of poetry with developments in the other arts—the novel, painting, film, music—as well as in social, political, and intellectual life. The poetry of the United States and that of the British Isles are seen in interplay rather than separately.

This book is an important contribution to the understanding of modern literature. At the same time, it throws new light on the cultural history of both America and Britain in the twentieth century.

There have been many books on early modernist poetry, not so many on its various sequels, and still fewer on the currents and cross-currents of poetry since World War II. Until now there has been no single comprehensive history of British and American poetry throughout the half century from the mid-1920s to the recent past. This David Perkins is uniquely equipped to provide; only a critic as well informed as he in the whole range of twentieth-century poetry could offer a lucid, coherent, and structured account of so diverse a body of work.

Perkins devotes major discussions to the later careers of the first Modernist poets, such as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, and to their immediate followers in the United States, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane; to W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and the period style of the 1930s; to the emergence of the New Criticism and of a poetry reflecting its tenets in William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, and to the reaction against this style; to postwar Great Britain from Philip Larkin and the “Movement” in the 1950s to Ted Hughes, Charles Tomlinson, and Geoffrey Hill; to the theory and style of “open form” in Charles Olson and Robert Duncan; to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poetry of the 1960s; to the poetry of women’s experience in Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich; to the work of Black poets from Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks to Amiri Baraka; and to Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Perkins discusses some 160 poets, mentioning many others more briefly, and does not hesitate to explain, to criticize, to admire, to render judgments. He clarifies the complex interrelations of individuals, groups, and movements and the contexts in which the poets worked: not only the predecessors and contemporaries they responded to but the journals that published them, the expectations of the audience, changing premises about poetry, the writings of critics, developments in other arts, and the momentous events of political and social history. Readers seeking guidance through the maze of postwar poetry will find the second half of the book especially illuminating.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER TWO-VOLUME PAPERBACK EDITION.

This now classic history of the world in our century has been updated and expanded to take the history almost to the end of our century. It is being published in paperback in two compact volumes, divided at the time of the Cold War. Volume I covers the years 1900 to 1947 while volume II extends from 1945 to 1996. Grenville has also updated the references and index, and has provided new prefatory material. All illustrations and maps have been retained.

In this enlargement of his outstanding history of the world, Grenville stresses the history of nation-states within a world of interdependence and regional groupings. The twentieth century remains an epoch of revolutionary change. Clashes of culture, the impact of technology, the consequences of industrialization all play out within national borders that are also porous.

In this latest enlarged edition, Grenville has updated the history through 1999 and added new material on the demise of Yugoslavia, with its wars and ethnic cleansing; Clinton's policies in Haiti, Somalia, and Asia; his economic policy; Eastern Europe's new democracies; and the progress of Third World countries. Democracy and the market economy are portrayed as the linchpins of a new century.

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain recent transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick's sweeping study of the past century of American historical writing.

Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in the writing of American history. The contributions of earlier scholars, some of them outside the mainstream of the historical profession, reveal that interest in the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class has been long-standing. Whether in the Progressive era's attention to issues of class, or in the renewed concern with Native Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that over the past century historians have frequently grappled with issues that we think of today as innovative.

This reinterpretation of a century of American historical writing challenges the notion that the politics of the recent past alone explains the politics of history. Fitzpatrick offers a wise historical perspective on today's heated debates, and reclaims the long line of historians who tilled the rich and diverse soil of our past.

When Hitler assumed the German chancellorship in January 1933, 34 percent of Germany’s work force was unemployed. By 1936, before Hitler’s rearmament program took hold of the economy, most of the jobless had disappeared from official unemployment statistics. How did the Nazis put Germany back to work? Was the recovery genuine? If so, how and why was it so much more successful than that of other industrialized nations? Hitler’s Economy addresses these questions and contributes to our understanding of the internal dynamics and power structure of the Nazi regime in the early years of the Third Reich.

Dan Silverman focuses on Nazi direct work creation programs, utilizing rich archival sources to trace the development and implementation of these programs at the regional and local level. He rigorously evaluates the validity of Nazi labor market statistics and reassesses the relative importance of road construction, housing, land reclamation, and resettlement in Germany’s economic recovery, while providing new insights into how these projects were financed. He illuminates the connection between work creation and Nazi race, agriculture, and resettlement policies. Capping his work is a comparative analysis of economic recovery during the 1930s in Germany, Britain, and the United States.

Silverman concludes that the recovery in Germany between 1933 and 1936 was real, not simply the product of statistical trickery and the stimulus of rearmament, and that Nazi work creation programs played a significant role. However, he argues, it was ultimately the workers themselves, toiling under inhumane conditions in labor camps, who paid the price for this recovery. Nazi propaganda glorifying the “dignity of work” masked the brutal reality of Hitler’s “economic miracle.”

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance—a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler’s Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions—not ideology—drove Hitler’s Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories.

“The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published…Hitler’s Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different.
—Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later.

In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.

In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive revisionist analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood's formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

On May 10, 1900, an enthusiastic Brooklyn crowd bid farewell to the Quito. The ship sailed for famine-stricken Bombay, carrying both tangible relief—thousands of tons of corn and seeds—and “a tender message of love and sympathy from God’s children on this side of the globe to those on the other.” The Quito may never have gotten under way without support from the era’s most influential religious newspaper, the Christian Herald, which urged its American readers to alleviate poverty and suffering abroad and at home. In Holy Humanitarians, Heather D. Curtis argues that evangelical media campaigns transformed how Americans responded to domestic crises and foreign disasters during a pivotal period for the nation.

Through graphic reporting and the emerging medium of photography, evangelical publishers fostered a tremendously popular movement of faith-based aid that rivaled the achievements of competing agencies like the American Red Cross. By maintaining that the United States was divinely ordained to help the world’s oppressed and needy, the Christian Herald linked humanitarian assistance with American nationalism at a time when the country was stepping onto the global stage. Social reform, missionary activity, disaster relief, and economic and military expansion could all be understood as integral features of Christian charity.

Drawing on rigorous archival research, Curtis lays bare the theological motivations, social forces, cultural assumptions, business calculations, and political dynamics that shaped America’s ambivalent embrace of evangelical philanthropy. In the process she uncovers the seeds of today’s heated debates over the politics of poverty relief and international aid.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.

Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.

Thematically focused analysis of modern architecture throughout Texas with gorgeous photographs illustrating works by famous and lesser-known architects.

In the mid-twentieth century, dramatic social and political change coincided with the ascendance and evolution of architectural modernism in Texas. Between the 1930s and 1980s, a state known for cowboys and cotton fields rapidly urbanized and became a hub of global trade and a heavyweight in national politics. Relentless ambition and a strong sense of place combined to make Texans particularly receptive to modern architecture’s implication of newness, forward-looking attitude, and capacity to reinterpret historical forms in novel ways. As money and people poured in, architects and their clients used modern buildings to define themselves and the state.

Illustrated with stunning photographs by architect Ben Koush, Home, Heat, Money, God analyzes buildings in big cities and small towns by world-famous architects, Texas titans, and lesser-known designers. Architectural historian Kathryn O’Rourke describes the forces that influenced architects as they addressed basic needs—such as staying cool in a warming climate and living in up-to-date housing—and responded to a culture driven by potent religiosity, by the countervailing pressures of pluralism and homogenization, and by the myth of Texan exceptionalism.

Before Austin became the “live music capital of the world” and attracted tens of thousands of music fans, it had a vibrant local music scene that spanned late sixties psychedelic and avant-garde rock to early eighties punk. Venues such as the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters hosted both innovative local musicians and big-name touring acts. Poster artists not only advertised the performances—they visually defined the music and culture of Austin during this pivotal period. Their posters promoted an alternative lifestyle that permeated the city and reflected Austin’s transformation from a sleepy university town into a veritable oasis of underground artistic and cultural activity in the state of Texas.

This book presents a definitive survey of music poster art produced in Austin between 1967 and 1982. It vividly illustrates four distinct generations of posters—psychedelic art of the Vulcan Gas Company, early works from the Armadillo World Headquarters, an emerging variety of styles from the mid-1970s, and the radical visual aesthetic of punk—produced by such renowned artists as Gilbert Shelton, Jim Franklin, Kerry Awn, Micael Priest, Guy Juke, Ken Featherston, NOXX, and Danny Garrett. Setting the posters in context, Texas music and pop-culture authority Joe Nick Patoski details the history of music posters in Austin, and artist and poster art scholar Nels Jacobson explores the lives and techniques of the artists.

The collapse of China’s Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution.

Rojas focuses on a condition he calls “homesickness”—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the “home,” conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.

Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.

First published in 1910 in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, this pioneering work of American social history, reproduced in its entirety, describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation. The town of Homestead, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, developed as a completely separate city—a true mill town settled by newer immigrants and shaped in its attitudes by the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, which significantly set back unionization efforts in the steel industry. Homestead:The Households of a Mill Town not only focuses on the plight of the American steel worker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it also explores the domestic and community aspects of life in that time period.

Lillian Lorca de Tagle is living proof of women's progress in the twentieth century. Born into a privileged, yet circumscribed world in 1914 as the daughter of a wealthy Chilean diplomat, she became a translator and journalist at a time when few women of her class held jobs. Ordered into exile in the United States by her disapproving mother, she became a successful reporter, translator, and editor, while raising two daughters as a single working mother.

In this beautifully written memoir, de Tagle looks back over a fascinating, cosmopolitan life. She describes how her upbringing in various European capitals prepared her for a life of continual change. She remembers the restrictions that upper class Chilean society placed on women and how these ultimately propelled her to a career in the United States that included an editorship at Américas magazine and work for the State Department, as well as a series of posts with the USIA/Voice of America.

Woven throughout her memoir are vivid glimpses of family, friends, husbands, and lovers, including the artist Roberto Matta. This spicy blend of personalities, work, and culture tells a quintessential coming-of-age story of a thoroughly modern woman.

Intellectuals “have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn,” writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: Are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge and wisdom, or out-of-touch elites? Hope and Scorn investigates the role of high-profile experts and thinkers in American life and their ever-fluctuating relationship with the political and public spheres.

From Eisenhower’s era to Obama’s, the intellectual’s role in modern democracy has been up for debate. What makes an intellectual, and who can claim that privileged title? What are intellectuals’ obligations to society, and how, if at all, are their contributions compatible with democracy? For some, intellectuals were models of civic engagement. For others, the rise of the intellectual signaled the fall of the citizen. Carrying us through six key moments in this debate, Brown expertly untangles the shifting anxieties and aspirations for democracy in America in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Hope and Scorn begins with “egghead” politicians like Adlai Stevenson; profiles scholars like Richard Hofstadter and scholars-turned-politicians like H. Stuart Hughes; and ends with the rise of public intellectuals such as bell hooks and Cornel West. In clear and unburdened prose, Brown explicates issues of power, authority, political backlash, and more. Hope and Scorn is an essential guide to American concerns about intellectuals, their myriad shortcomings, and their formidable abilities.