An essential resource for scholars and students
Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.
Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance—a celebration of classical antiquity—also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Upending conventional interpretations of this well-studied period, Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content, once seen as the paradox of the Renaissance, can be better understood as its defining characteristic.
Dempsey describes how Renaissance artists deftly incorporated secular and popular culture into their creations, just as they interwove classical and religious influences. Inspired by the love lyrics of Parisian troubadours, Simone Martini altered his fresco Maestà in 1321 to reflect a court culture that prized terrestrial beauty. As a result the Maestà scandalously revealed, for the first time in Italian painting, a glimpse of the Madonna’s golden locks. Modeled on an ancient statue, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus went much further, featuring fashionable beauty ideals of long flowing blonde hair, ivory skin, rosy cheeks, and perfectly arched eyebrows. In the only complete reconstruction of Feo Belcari’s twelve Sybilline Octaves, Dempsey shows how this poet, patronized by the Medici family, was also indebted to contemporary dramatic modes. Popularizing biblical scenes by mixing the familiar with the exotic, players took the stage outfitted in taffeta tunics and fanciful hats, and one staging even featured a papier-maché replica of Jonah’s Whale. As Dempsey’s thorough study illuminates, Renaissance poets and artists did not simply reproduce classical aesthetics but reimagined them in vernacular idioms.
In the past fifty years, according to Christine So, the narratives of many popular Asian American books have been dominated by economic questions-what money can buy, how money is lost, how money is circulated, and what labor or objects are worth. Focusing on books that have achieved mainstream popularity, Economic Citizens unveils the logic of economic exchange that determined Asian Americans’ transnational migrations and national belonging.
With penetrating insight, So examines literary works that have been successful in the U.S. marketplace but have been read previously by critics largely as narratives of alienation or assimilation, including Fifth Chinese Daughter, Flower Drum Song, Falling Leaves and Turning Japanese. In contrast to other studies that have focused on the marginalization of Asian Americans, Economic Citizens examines how Asian Americans have entered into the public sphere.
"A major accomplishment in the study of Burke." —Choice
More than 200 years after his death, Edmund Burke remains among the most influential conservative writers in the Anglophone world. Burke’s relevance has only grown as the nature of what it means to be a conservative has become hotly contested.
And yet Burke is often discussed more than he is read. Worse, his rhetoric is often pressed into the service of other ideologies. In Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue, Stephen Browne of Pennsylvania State University subjects Burke’s work to the close textual analysis it has never received.
The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the link between rhetoric and action that is key to understanding Burke, his career, his work, and his influence on contemporary conservatism.
Readers interested in the development of conversative philosophy, politics, and writing from its earliest roots will value this rare and illuminating work.
Rand notes that portrayals of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon for immigrants tend to suppress the Statue’s connections to people brought to this country by force. She examines what happened to migrants at Ellis Island whose bodies did not match the gender suggested by the clothing they wore. In light of contemporary ideas about safety and security, she examines the “Decide an Immigrant’s Fate” program, which has visitors to Ellis Island act as a 1910 board of inspectors hearing the appeal of an immigrant about to be excluded from the country. Rand is a witty, insightful, and open-minded tour guide, able to synthesize numerous diverse ideas—about tourism, immigration history, sexuality, race, ethnicity, commodity culture, and global capitalism—and to candidly convey her delight in her Ellis Island snow globe. And pen. And lighter. And back scratcher. And golf ball. And glittery pink key chain.
Empires and the Reach of the Global brings the history of empires into sharp focus by showing how imperialism has been a shaping force not just in international politics but in the economies and cultures of today’s world. Focusing on both the strengths and limits of imperial power, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton describe the creation and disintegration of the reigning world order in the period from 1870 to 1945.
Using the British, Japanese, and Ottoman empires as case studies, the authors trace the communication, transportation, and economic networks that were instrumental to empire building. They highlight the role of empires as place-making regimes that organize geographic space as distinct territories. Militaries and missionaries, workplaces and households, all served as key domains of interaction within these territories, as colonial officials sought to manage the customs and lifeways of indigenous populations. Imperial connections contributed to the shrinking of time and space, but colonial encroachments also provoked opposition, which often played out in locations of everyday activity, from fields and factories to schools and prisons. Colonized territories sponsored a variety of forms of organized resistance, with full-fledged nationalist movements erupting onto the global scene in the interwar period.
Ballantyne and Burton stress that empire was not something fabricated in European capitals and implemented “out there.” Rather, imperial systems, with their many racial, gendered, and economic forms, affected empires in all of their parts—the metropole as well as the farthest outpost.
Renaissance humanists believed that the origins of peoples could reveal crucial facts about their modern political character. Margaret Meserve explores what happened when European historians turned to study the political history of a faith other than their own.
Meserve investigates the methods and illuminates the motives of scholars negotiating shifting boundaries—between scholarly research and political propaganda, between a commitment to critical historical inquiry and the pressure of centuries of classical and Christian prejudice, between the academic ideals of humanism and the everyday demands of political patronage. Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. Humanist histories of the Turks were sharply polemical, portraying the Ottomans as a rogue power. But writings on other Muslim polities include some of the first positive appraisals of Muslim statecraft in the European tradition.
This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and the longstanding European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers.
In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other.” Going beyond the notion of the “savage” as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savage demonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own “civil” image-making practices and the “savage” practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian.
The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry’s engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in between civil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making.
Michael Gaudio is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV
In the sub-field of world history, there has been a surprising paucity of thinking and writing about how to approach and conceptualize the long twentieth century from the 1870s through the early 2000s. The historiographic essays collected in Essays on Twentieth Century History will go a long way to filling that lacuna.
Each contribution covers a key theme and one or more critical sub-fields in twentieth century global history. Chapters address migration patterns, the impact of world wars, transformations in gender and urbanization, as well as environmental transitions. All are written by leading historians in each of the sub-fields represented, and each is intended to provide an introduction to the literature, key themes, and debates that have proliferated around the more recent historical experience of humanity.
Do historians “write their biographies” with the subjects they choose to address in their research? In this collection, editors Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber compiled eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their own research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits, at times inspiring specific questions they asked of the nation’s immigrant past. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large. Most have been pioneers not only in their respective fields, but also in representing their ethnic group within American academia. Some of the women in the group were in the vanguard of gender diversity in the discipline of history as well as on the faculties of the institutions where they have taught.
The authors in this collection represent a wide array of backgrounds, spanning Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. What they have in common is their passionate engagement with the making of social and personal identities and with finding a voice to explain their personal stories in public terms.
Contributors: Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, John Bodnar, María C. García, David A. Gerber, Violet M. Showers Johnson, Alan M. Kraut, Timothy J. Meagher, Deborah Dash Moore, Dominic A. Pacyga, Barbara M. Posadas, Eileen H. Tamura, Virginia Yans, Judy Yung
Dainotto synthesizes a vast array of literary, philosophical, and historical works by authors from different parts of Europe. He scrutinizes theories that came to dominate thinking about the continent, including Montesquieu’s invention of Europe’s north-south divide, Hegel’s “two Europes,” and Madame de Staël’s idea of opposing European literatures: a modern one from the North, and a pre-modern one from the South. At the same time, Dainotto brings to light counter-narratives written from Europe’s margins, such as the Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés’s suggestion that the origins of modern European culture were eastern rather than northern and the Italian Orientalist Michele Amari’s assertion that the South was the cradle of a social democracy brought to Europe via Islam.
Religion is a subject often overlooked or ignored by public historians. Whether they are worried about inadvertent proselytizing or fearful of contributing to America’s ongoing culture wars, many heritage professionals steer clear of discussing religion’s formative role in the past when they build collections, mount exhibits, and develop educational programming. Yet religious communities have long been active contributors to the nation’s commemorative landscape.
Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history. In their zeal to craft a particular vision of the national past, evangelicals engaged with a variety of public history practices and techniques that made them major players in the field—including becoming early adopters of public history’s experiential turn.READERS
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