BiblioVault - Books about Name

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31 books about Name

All the Names of the Lord

Lists, Mysticism, and Magic

Valentina Izmirlieva

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Christians face a conundrum when it comes to naming God, for if God is unnamable, as theologians maintain, he can also be called by every name. His proper name is thus an open-ended, all-encompassing list, a mystery the Church embraces in its rhetoric, but which many Christians have found difficult to accept. To explore this conflict, Valentina Izmirlieva examines two lists of God’s names: one from The Divine Names, the classic treatise by Pseudo-Dionysius, and the other from The 72 Names of the Lord, an amulet whose history binds together Kabbalah and Christianity, Jews and Slavs, Palestine, Provence, and the Balkans.

This unexpected juxtaposition of a theological treatise and a magical amulet allows Izmirlieva to reveal lists’ rhetorical potential to create order and to function as both tools of knowledge and of power. Despite the two different visions of order represented by each list, Izmirlieva finds that their uses in Christian practice point to a complementary relationship between the existential need for God’s protection and the metaphysical desire to submit to his infinite majesty—a compelling claim sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.

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Ancestral Places

Understanding Kanaka Geographies

Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira

Oregon State University Press, 2014

Ancestral Places explores the deep connections that ancestral Kanaka (Native Hawaiians) enjoyed with their environment. It honors the mo‘olelo (historical accounts) of the ancestral places of our kupuna (ancestors), and reveals how these mo‘olelo and our relationships with the ‘aina (land) inform a Kanaka sense of place.

Katrina-Ann R. Kapa‘anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira elucidates a Kanaka geography and provides contemporary scholars with insights regarding traditional culture—including the ways in which Kanaka utilize cartographic performances to map our ancestral places and retain our mo‘olelo, such as reciting creation accounts, utilizing nuances embedded in language, and dancing hula.

A Kanaka by birth, a kumu ‘olelo Hawai‘i (language teacher) by profession, and a geographer by training, Oliveira’s interests intersect at the boundary where words and place-making meet her ancestral land. Thus, Ancestral Places imbues the theoretical with sensual practice. The book’s language moves fluidly between Hawaiian and English, terms are nimbly defined, and the work of the field is embodied: geographic layers are enacted within the text, new understandings created—not just among lexica, but amidst illustrations, charts, terms, and poetry.

In Ancestral Places, Oliveira reasserts both the validity of ancestral knowledge systems and their impact in modernity. Her discussion of Kanaka geographies encompasses the entire archipelago, offering a new framework in Kanaka epistemology.

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960

Richard C. Knopf presents a thorough account of the third campaign of the Indian Wars (1790-1795) told through the correspondence of Major General Anthony Wayne and the three Secretaries of War under whom he served: Knox, Pickering, and McHenry. Knopf relates the international implications of these wars from outset to treaty signing, and their importance to the security and settlement of the American frontier north and west of the Ohio River, from Pittsburgh to Detroit-and the monumental role Anthony Wayne played in this effort.

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Dislocating the Orient

British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921

Daniel Foliard

University of Chicago Press, 2017

While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era.

Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.

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Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives

Identity and the Politics of (Re) Presentation in the United States

Suzanne Oboler

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

"Subtle and provocative. Readers interested in exploring the complex processes involved in ethnic formation and reformation and the increasingly volatile politics of citizenship in the United States will learn a great deal from Oboler's insightful study." Journal of American Ethnic History "An excellent historico-political analysis. Oboler's book provides a good point of departure for broader cross-cultural analysis." MultiCultural Review "The book is also an elegant synthesis of the fundamental theoretical questions and emerging set of concepts in the literature on ethnic identity. An excellent monograph on an important and timely subject, it should be read by anyone interested in the study of present-day intergroup relations in the United States." International Migration Review "Professor Oboler draws on her own heritage as a Peruvian American scholar of Latino/a studies and American literatures and cultures to offer a lucid and well-documented account of the historical emergence and multiple effects of the ethnic label `Hispanic,' as mobilized by the U.S. government in response to Latino/a claims for social justice during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Her combination of thoroughly researched social history and qualitative analysis results in an important, carefully reasoned, and timely contribution to contemporary debates on affirmative action. On the whole, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives is a significant and accessible resource that will serve a wide variety of socially-conscious readers including students and scholars of policy, sociology, gender, women's studies, literature, culture, history, and diversity studies." Canadian Review of American Studies Hispanic or Latino? Mexican American or Chicano? Social labels often take on a life of their own beyond the control of those who coin them or to whom they are applied. In Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives, Suzanne Oboler explores the history and current use of the label "Hispanic" as she illustrates the complex meanings that ethnicity has acquired in shaping our lives and identities. Exploding the myth of cultural and national homogeneity among people of Latin American descent, Oboler interviews members of diverse groups who have traditionally been labeled "Hispanic" and records the many different meanings and social values they attribute to this label. For example, a person of Mexican descent has a different historical relationship with the United States and a different cultural background than an individual of Puerto Rican or Brazilian descent. The different meanings and social values those interviewed attribute to the label "Hispanic" also correspond to their gender and social class position, including racial prejudices and values stemming from their countries of origin. Though we have witnessed in recent years the fading of the idealized image of U.S. society as a melting pot, we have also realized that the possibility of recasting it in multicultural terms is problematic. Oboler discusses the historical process of labeling groups of individuals, illustrating how labels affect the meaning of citizenship and the struggle for full social participation in the United States. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives aims to understand the role ethnic labels play in our society and brings us closer toward actualizing a society that values cultural diversity. Suzanne Oboler, a Peruvian American, is currently assistant professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University.

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The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan

Judith Vitale

Harvard University Press, 2024

The myth that kamikaze, or divine winds, protected Japan against the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 is linked to a belief in absolute victory in the Pacific War in the twentieth century. But what was the representation of a historical past in Japan, and what role did it play as a repertoire of cultural identity before the rise of hyper-nationalism?

The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan is about the names for Japan and the Mongols, the commemoration of battle sites and ancestors, and the antiquarian exchanges within confined circles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Tokugawa culture of appearances, historical writing and related genres affirmed status identity. In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the exploits of thirteenth-century warriors served as a model for propagating revolutionary change in Japanese cities, whereas in the 1880s and 1890s, conservative associations appropriated the defense against the Mongol invasions as a symbol of patriotism. The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan thus points to the continuities and ruptures that marked the emergence of a national culture after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

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How to Name a Hurricane

Rane Arroyo

University of Arizona Press, 2005

There’s no denying it, media culture has ushered in a new era of visibility for gays in America. Yet somehow the gay Latino doesn’t fit into this sound-bite identity and usually isn’t included in national media images. Rane Arroyo offers a corrective. Known primarily as a poet and playwright representing the gay Latino community, Arroyo has also been publishing prose throughout his career and now gathers into this book a storm of writing that has been gaining strength, drop by drop, for more than ten years.

How to Name a Hurricane collects short stories and other fictions depicting Latino drag queens and leather men, religious sinners and happy atheists, working class heroes and cyberspace vaqueros—a parade of characters that invites readers to consider whether one is more authentic a gay Latino than another. Whereas actual hurricanes are given names, the gays given voice in this collection must name themselves—and these narratives in turn reveal something of the "I" of Hurricane Rane. Whether portraying a family gathering as Brideshead Revisited with a mambo soundtrack, recounting the relationship of transvestite Louie/Lois and her bisexual Superman, or bemoaning "feeling as unsexy as an old bean burrito in a 7-11 microwave," Arroyo tracks the heartbeat of his characters through a shimmering palette of styles. Here are monologues, a story in verse, and other experimental forms appropriate to experimental lives—all affirming the basic human rights to dignity, equality, love, and even silliness.

When the AIDS epidemic first hit, many Latino families destroyed any remembrances of their gay and bisexual sons that might betray their pasts to la familia or el pueblo. Arroyo’s writings return the ghosts of those sons to the families, bars, dance clubs, and neighborhoods where they belong. By penetrating to the I’s of narrative hurricanes, these stories honor the survivors of our ongoing cultural storms.

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In the Name of Editorial Freedom

125 Years at the Michigan Daily

Edited by Stephanie Steinberg

University of Michigan Press, 2015

At a time when daily print newspapers across the country are failing, the Michigan Daily continues to thrive. Completely operated by students of the University of Michigan, the paper was founded in 1890 and covers national and international news topics ranging from politics to sports to entertainment. The Daily has been a vital part of the college experience for countless UM students, none more so than those who staffed the paper as editors, writers, and photographers over the years. Many of these Daily alumni are now award-winning journalists who work for the premier news outlets in the world.

In the Name of Editorial Freedom, titled after the paper’s longstanding masthead, compiles original essays by some of the best-known Daily alumni about their time on staff. For example Dan Okrent, first public editor of the New York Times, discusses traveling with a cohort of Daily reporters to cover the explosive 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Rebecca Blumenstein, deputy editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, and author Alan Paul talk about the intensity of the Daily newsroom and the lasting relationships it forged. Adam Schefter of ESPN recalls his awkward first story that nevertheless set him on the path to become the ultimate NFL insider. The essays of this book offer a glimpse, as activist Tom Hayden writes, at the Daily’s impressive role covering historic events and how those stories molded the lives of the students who reported them.

Search and browse the Bentley Historical Library's Michigan Daily Archive, https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/midaily. The free online archive contains stories from 23,000 issues published between 1891 and 2014.

"They say a newspaper is a daily miracle. If that’s so, The Michigan Daily is something beyond that, with the whole operation run by a bunch of sleep-deprived 20-year olds. What could go wrong? Here, Daily alums share their mistakes freely, weaving their stories through a half-century of American history with wit and wisdom--much of it hard-earned--but also justifiable pride in their idealism, their dedication, and the seriousness of the work they did while mere undergraduates. For all they've accomplished since their Daily days, you get the feeling they’d trade it all for another year at 420 Maynard--and you understand why."
--John U. Bacon, bestselling author of Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football and Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football

“I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate 125 years of student journalism than the essays contained in this wonderful volume. Going back some 55 years, the authors, all of whom are successful in their craft, have fashioned for us a unique window into the lives of students at the University of Michigan. Their stories are powerful and remind us of the magic of this place where students both are challenged and challenge others daily to change the world for the better.”
—Mary Sue Coleman, President Emerita at the University of Michigan

“This book provides a truly wonderful collection of essays by alumni of the Michigan Daily, one of the nation’s leading college newspapers, concerning their experiences as students covering some of the most important moments in the history of our university, the nation, and the world. Since many of these Michigan Daily alumni have gone on to important careers in American journalism, their fascinating perspectives provide strong evidence of the educational power of such student extracurricular experiences.”
—James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus at the University of Michigan

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In the Name of El Pueblo

Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán

Paul K. Eiss

Duke University Press, 2010

The term “el pueblo” is used throughout Latin America, referring alternately to small towns, to community, or to “the people” as a political entity. In this vivid anthropological and historical analysis of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Paul K. Eiss explores the multiple meanings of el pueblo and the power of the concept to unite the diverse claims made in its name. Eiss focuses on working-class indigenous and mestizo populations, examining how those groups negotiated the meaning of el pueblo among themselves and in their interactions with outsiders, including landowners, activists, and government officials. Combining extensive archival and ethnographic research, he describes how residents of the region have laid claim to el pueblo in varied ways, as exemplified in communal narratives recorded in archival documents, in the performance of plays and religious processions, and in struggles over land, politics, and the built environment. Eiss demonstrates that while el pueblo is used throughout the hemisphere, the term is given meaning and power through the ways it is imagined and constructed in local contexts. Moreover, he reveals el pueblo to be a concept that is as historical as it is political. It is in the name of el pueblo—rather than class, race, or nation—that inhabitants of northwestern Yucatán stake their deepest claims not only to social or political rights, but over history itself.

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In the Name of Elijah Muhammad

Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam

Mattias Gardell

Duke University Press, 1996

In the Name of Elijah Muhammad tells the story of the Nation of Islam—its rise in northern inner-city ghettos during the Great Depression through its decline following the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975 to its rejuvenation under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan. Mattias Gardell sets this story within the context of African American social history, the legacy of black nationalism, and the long but hidden Islamic presence in North America. He presents with insight and balance a detailed view of one of the most controversial yet least explored organizations in the United States—and its current leader.
Beginning with Master Farad Muhammad, believed to be God in Person, Gardell examines the origins of the Nation. His research on the period of Elijah Muhammad’s long leadership draws on previously unreleased FBI files that reveal a clear picture of the bureau’s attempts to neutralize the Nation of Islam. In addition, they shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the murder of Malcolm X. With the main part of the book focused on the fortunes of the Nation after Elijah Muhammad’s death, Gardell then turns to the figure of Minister Farrakhan. From his emergence as the dominant voice of the radical black Islamic community to his leadership of the Million Man March, Farrakhan has often been portrayed as a demagogue, bigot, racist, and anti-Semite. Gardell balances the media’s view of the Nation and Farrakhan with the Nation’s own views and with the perspectives of the black community in which the organization actively works. His investigation, based on field research, taped lectures, and interviews, leads to the fullest account yet of the Nation of Islam’s ideology and theology, and its complicated relations with mainstream Islam, the black church, the Jewish community, extremist white nationalists, and the urban culture of black American youth, particularly the hip-hop movement and gangs.

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In the Name of Eugenics

Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity

Daniel Kevles

Harvard University Press, 1995

Daniel Kevles traces the study and practice of eugenics--the science of "improving" the human species by exploiting theories of heredity--from its inception in the late nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation within the field of genetic engineering. It is rich in narrative, anecdote, attention to human detail, and stories of competition among scientists who have dominated the field.

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In The Name Of Hawaiians

Native Identities and Cultural Politics

Rona Tamiko Halualani

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A critical and personal inquiry into the historical factors behind Hawaiian identity. Deep within the historical imagination, there lies the image of a Western explorer surrounded by dark and strange natives. In the modern and postmodern spaces of tourism, one finds the reflections of an antiquated nativism that is already dead, however commercially viable. And in the statutes of the State of Hawaii, the Aloha Spirit is codified into the ideology of multiculturalism. Where, among the multiple representations and constructions of what is "Hawaiian," is Hawaiian identity actually lived? Rona Tamiko Halualani analyzes the diverse formations and practices of Hawaiian identity and sociality, on the U.S. mainland as well as on the islands, across several interrelated contexts: museum culture, explorer journals, maps, tourism, census technology, blood quantum mandates, neocolonial administration, and lived community practice. Halualani shows how these contexts represent larger forces from different historical moments that significantly changed the social relations surrounding Hawaiians, the ways in which they have been identified, and how they make sense of who they are. Throughout she interweaves the countering narratives and practices by indigenous Hawaiians as they seek the authorization of their identities, land rights, and culture. Rona Tamiko Halualani is assistant professor of communication studies at San JosÃ© State University.

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In the Name of Humanity

The Government of Threat and Care

Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

Scientists, activists, state officials, NGOs, and others increasingly claim to speak and act on behalf of “humanity.” The remarkable array of circumstances in which humanity is invoked testifies to the category’s universal purchase. Yet what exactly does it mean to govern, fight, and care in the name of humanity? In this timely collection, leading anthropologists and cultural critics grapple with that question, examining configurations of humanity in relation to biotechnologies, the natural environment, and humanitarianism and human rights. From the global pharmaceutical industry, to forest conservation, to international criminal tribunals, the domains they analyze highlight the diversity of spaces and scales at which humanity is articulated.

The editors argue that ideas about humanity find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security. As a site of governance, humanity appears as both an object of care and a source of anxiety. Assertions that humanity is being threatened, whether by environmental catastrophe or political upheaval, provide a justification for the elaboration of new governing techniques. At the same time, humanity itself is identified as a threat (to nature, to nation, to global peace) which governance must contain. These apparently contradictory understandings of the relation of threat to the category of humanity coexist and remain in tension, helping to maintain the dynamic co-production of governance and humanity.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Joao Biehl , Didier Fassin, Allen Feldman, Ilana Feldman, Rebecca Hardin, S. Lochann Jain, Liisa Malkki, Adriana Petryna, Miriam Ticktin, Richard Ashby Wilson, Charles Zerner

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In the Name of National Security

Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America

Robert J. Corber

Duke University Press, 1993

In the Name of National Security exposes the ways in which the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in conjunction with liberal intellectuals and political figures of the 1950s, fostered homophobia so as to politicize issues of gender in the United States.
As Corber shows, throughout the 1950s a cast of mind known as the Cold War consensus prevailed in the United States. Promoted by Cold War liberals--that is, liberals who wanted to perserve the legacies of the New Deal but also wished to separate liberalism from a Communist-dominated cultural politics--this consensus was grounded in the perceived threat that Communists, lesbians, and homosexuals posed to national security. Through an analysis of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, combined with new research on the historical context in which these films were produced, Corber shows how Cold War liberals tried to contain the increasing heterogeneity of American society by linking questions of gender and sexual identity directly to issues of national security, a strategic move that the films of Hitchcock both legitimated and at times undermined. Drawing on psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, Corber looks at such films as Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho to show how Hitchcock manipulated viewers' attachments and identifications to foster and reinforce the relationship between homophobia and national security issues.
A revisionary account of Hitchcock's major works, In the Name of National Security is also of great interest for what it reveals about the construction of political "reality" in American history.

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In the Name of Necessity

Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties

Marouf Hasian

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Analyses the ways American leaders have justified the use of military tribunals, the suspension of due process, and the elimination of habeas corpus
Though the war on terrorism is said to have generated unprecedented military situations, arguments for the Patriot Act and military tribunals following 9/11 resemble many historical claims for restricting civil liberties, more often than not in the name of necessity.

Marouf Hasian Jr. examines the major legal cases that show how various generations have represented the need for military tribunals, and how officials historically have applied the term “necessity.” George Washington cited the necessity of martial discipline in executing the British operative Major André. Tribunals tried and convicted more than 200 Sioux warriors during the Dakota Wars. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for many civilian and military prisoners during the Civil War. Twentieth Century military and civilian leaders selectively drafted their own codes, leading to the execution of German saboteurs during World War II. Further, General MacArthur’s tribunal to investigate the wartime activities of Japanese General Yamashita raised the specter of “victor’s justice,” anticipating the outcry that attended the Nuremberg trials.

In those cases as in current debates about the prosecution of terrorists, Hasian argues that the past is often cited selectively, neglecting historical contexts and the controversies these cases engendered.

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In the Name of Osama Bin Laden

Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood

Roland Jacquard

Duke University Press, 2002

“A must read for all who continue to grapple with the twin legacy of hatred and hope from September 11. . . “*

International terrorism expert Roland Jacquard’s In the Name of Osama bin Laden presents a dramatic portrait of the world's most wanted terrorist and his extensive brotherhood--the network of people who operate “in his name.” Published originally in France the very week of September 11, as events in the United States shook the world, the book has become an international bestseller.
Jacquard details how bin Laden became an international emblem of fundamentalist, pan-Islamic, anti-U.S. fervor and the leader of a brotherhood so passionate that devotees who have never met him will act autonomously in his name. The author explains the global character of bin Laden’s organization, elaborating the extent of his sphere of influence in Europe and Asia. Jacquard reveals the construction of bin Laden’s networks—including a profile of his inner circle—and their collaboration with overlapping webs of banking, drug trafficking, religious, and terrorist organizations. He considers the brotherhood’s access to biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and warns that, with or without bin Laden, this global terrorist force will remain a threat.
Now in English, this edition has been substantially updated in light of recent world events and expanded to include previously unpublished materials, featuring a new introduction and afterword. New documents include an April 2001 interview by the author with bin Laden; a September 24 proclamation by bin Laden to Muslims in Pakistan; and a key page from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s book justifying eternal jihad, which was smuggled out of Afghanistan in October 2001.

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In the Name of Plants

From Attenborough to Washington, the People behind Plant Names

Sandra Knapp

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A vividly illustrated meeting with thirty plants and their inspiring namesakes

Shakespeare famously asserted that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and that’s as true for common garden roses as it is for the Megacorax, a genus of evening primroses. Though it may not sound like it, the Megacorax was actually christened in honor of famed American botanist Peter Raven, its name a play on the Latin words for “great raven.”

In this lush and lively book, celebrated botanist Sandra Knapp explores the people whose names have been immortalized in plant genera, presenting little-known stories about both the featured plants and their eponyms alongside photographs and botanical drawings from the collections of London’s Natural History Museum. Readers will see familiar plants in a new light after learning the tales of heroism, inspiration, and notoriety that led to their naming. Take, for example, nineteenth-century American botanist Alice Eastwood, after whom the yellow aster—Eastwoodia elegans—is named. Eastwood was a pioneering plant collector who also singlehandedly saved irreplaceable specimens from the California Academy of Sciences during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Or more recently, the fern genus Gaga, named for the pop star and actress Lady Gaga, whose verdant heart-shaped ensemble at the 2010 Grammy Awards bore a striking resemblance to a giant fern gametophyte. Knapp’s subjects range from Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (Darwinia), and legendary French botanist Pierre Magnol—who lends his name to the magnolia tree—to US founding figures like George Washington (Washingtonia) and Benjamin Franklin (Franklinia). Including granular details on the taxonomy and habitats for thirty plants alongside its vibrant illustrations, this book is sure to entertain and enlighten any plant fan.

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In the Name of the Father

The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention

Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp. Foreword by Kenneth Chafin

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Conventionbegins with an analysis of the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention, the watershed convention where moderate forces fell before the powerful oratory of the ultraconservative faction, which has remained in power ever since. Communication professors Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp investigate the rhetorical shift from moderate to ultraconservative in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the South and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

Drawing on sermons delivered at national conventions from 1979 to the present, Kell and Camp outline the discourses of fundamentalism, inerrancy, and exclusion. These discourses, the authors assert, point to the SBC leaders’ call for a return to times before feminism and tolerance of varying sexual orientations allegedly brought chaos to society and shook believers from their theological foundations.

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In the Name of the Mother

Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

Samuele F. S. Pardini

Dartmouth College Press, 2017

In the Name of the Mother examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. Samuele Pardini links African American literature to the Mediterranean tradition of the Italian immigrants and examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. This volume emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.

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In the Name of War

Judicial Review and the War Powers since 1918

Christopher N. May

Harvard University Press, 1989

For more than a century, in settings where the political branches of government were unable or unwilling to exercise self-restraint, the Supreme Court was disposed to treat federal war powers legislation as exempt from judicial review, an attitude that permitted numerous abuses from Prohibition to press censorship.

Though the First World War officially ended in 1918, the Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty kept the United States in a legal state of war until late 1921. Exploring the interplay between political and social events and the evolution of legal theory Christopher May tells how during this challenging three-year period, the government invoked the war powers to pursue ends otherwise beyond its reach: with the backing of Congress and seemingly free from judicial scrutiny, the Wilson administration took over the country’s rail and communications systems, outlawed profiteering, prosecuted strikers, suppressed “radicals” and censored the leftist press. None of these measures bore any true relation to the war, says the author, who then describes the course through which the Supreme Court, confronted by this pattern of abuse, finally abandoned its long-standing refusal to review the constitutionality of war powers legislation.

In the Name of War explores the roles played by Woodrow Wilson, Joseph Tumulty, Albert Burleson, and A. Mitchell Palmer—men whose personal ambitions frequently shaped official policy in the late Progressive Era. After analyzing the Court’s more recent record, including the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, May draws some practical conclusions about the use of judicial intervention in time of crisis that are sure to attract the attention of lawyers, legal scholars, historians, and students of the Constitution.

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In the Name of Women's Rights

The Rise of Femonationalism

Sara R. Farris

Duke University Press, 2017

Sara R. Farris examines the demands for women's rights from an unlikely collection of right-wing nationalist political parties, neoliberals, and some feminist theorists and policy makers. Focusing on contemporary France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Farris labels this exploitation and co-optation of feminist themes by anti-Islam and xenophobic campaigns as “femonationalism.” She shows that by characterizing Muslim males as dangerous to western societies and as oppressors of women, and by emphasizing the need to rescue Muslim and migrant women, these groups use gender equality to justify their racist rhetoric and policies. This practice also serves an economic function. Farris analyzes how neoliberal civic integration policies and feminist groups funnel Muslim and non-western migrant women into the segregating domestic and caregiving industries, all the while claiming to promote their emancipation. In the Name of Women's Rights documents the links between racism, feminism, and the ways in which non-western women are instrumentalized for a variety of political and economic purposes.

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The Key to The Name of the Rose

Including Translations of All Non-English Passages

Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a brilliant mystery set in a fictitious medieval monastery. The text is rich with literary, historical, and theoretical references that make it eminently re-readable. The Key makes each reading fuller and more meaningful by helping the interested reader not merely to read but also to understand Eco's masterful work. Inspired by pleas from friends and strangers, the authors, each trained in Classics, undertook to translate and explain the Latin phrases that pepper the story. They have produced an approachable, informative guide to the book and its setting--the middle ages. The Key includes an introduction to the book, the middle ages, Umberto Eco, and philosophical and literary theories; a useful chronology; and reference notes to historical people and events.

The clear explanations of the historical setting and players will be useful to anyone interested in a general introduction to medieval history.

Adele J. Haft is Associate Professor of Classics, Hunter College, City University of New York. Jane G. White is chair of the Department of Languages, Dwight Englewood School. Robert J. White is Professor of Classics and Oriental Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York.

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Latin America

The Allure and Power of an Idea

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

University of Chicago Press, 2017

“Latin America” is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively.

Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat—mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current “Latin Americanism”—which circulates in United States–based humanities and social sciences; and, third, accepting that we might actually be stuck with “Latin America,” Tenorio-Trillo charts a path forward for the writing and teaching of Latin American history. Accessible and forceful, rich in historical research and specificity, the book offers a distinctive, conceptual history of Latin America and its many connections and intersections of political and intellectual significance. Tenorio-Trillo’s book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship.

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Name and Image

An Essay on Walter Benjamin

Gianni Carchia

Seagull Books, 2024

An insightful study of Walter Benjamin, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, by the Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia.

Name and Image crystalizes Gianni Carchia’s lifelong pursuit of the infinite philosophical object in the method and thought of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin. This intellectual biography touches upon the philosophy of language, historiography, aesthetics, temporality, and transcendental philosophy.

The book has the singular distinction of being both Gianni Carchia’s first and last work. In the spring of 1999, shortly before the resurgence of the disease that would lead to his death, Carchia began revising the graduate thesis he had defended at the University of Turin in 1971 with the title Truth and Language in the Young Walter Benjamin. At age twenty-four, the young scholar already demonstrated the incisive, axiomatic style of a master. The final version, retitled Name and Image, would become his testament. With a remarkable inversion, beginning and end seem to conjoin here in an authentically philosophical act, as though all the motifs of Carchia’s late thought—the conception of philosophy as event and witness, critique of method, and messianic finality—resonated together for the first time in this youthful text. The physiognomy of Benjamin that opens the work is the self-portrait of a figure who stands out ever more as one of the most just voices in twentieth-century Italian philosophy.

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The Poet Without a Name

Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History

Henry Weinfield

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Henry Weinfield offers a new reading not only of the Elegy itself but also of its place in English literary history. His central argument is that in Gray’s Elegy the thematic constellation of poverty, anonymity, alienation, and unfulfilled potential—or what Weinfield calls the "problem of history"—is fully articulated for the first time, and that, as a result, the Elegy represents an important turning-point in the history of English poetry.

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The Power to Name

A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa

Stephanie Newell

Ohio University Press, 2013

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers.

The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.

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