For over one hundred years, Navajos have gone to work in significant numbers on Southwestern railroads. As they took on the arduous work of laying and anchoring tracks, they turned to traditional religion to anchor their lives.
Jay Youngdahl, an attorney who has represented Navajo workers in claims with their railroad employers since 1992 and who more recently earned a master's in divinity from Harvard, has used oral history and archival research to write a cultural history of Navajos' work on the railroad and the roles their religious traditions play in their lives of hard labor away from home.
Working Poor investigates the lives and working conditions of migrant farmworkers in seven regions of the United States. The community studies in this volume include descriptions and analyses of the low-income neighborhoods of Immokalee, Florida; Parlier, California; Weslaco, Texas; and Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, where growers and farm contractors put immigrants to work in fruit and vegetable harvests. The authors link farmworker communities that have winter growing seasons with summer labor supply demand regions in the northern United States, in particular south-western Michigan, New Jersey, and the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland and Delaware.
The authors investigate ethnic succession in the farm labor market and the ways individual farmworkers, farmworker families, and networks organize these migrations and attach themselves to farming operations by a variety of social relations. Framing the portraits of crowded households, the histories of networks, and the ethnic vignettes are three chapters placing the community studies into historical and theoretical perspectives. This broad framework underscores the importance of housing, transportation, networks, labor contracts, and ethnic relations in the organization of low-wage labor markets.
De Genova worked for two and a half years as a teacher of English in ten industrial workplaces (primarily metal-fabricating factories) throughout Chicago and its suburbs. In Working the Boundaries he draws on fieldwork conducted in these factories, in community centers, and in the homes and neighborhoods of Mexican migrants. He describes how the meaning of “Mexican” is refigured and racialized in relation to a U.S. social order dominated by a black-white binary. Delving into immigration law, he contends that immigration policies have worked over time to produce Mexicans as the U.S. nation-state’s iconic “illegal aliens.” He explains how the constant threat of deportation is used to keep Mexican workers in line. Working the Boundaries is a major contribution to theories of race and transnationalism and a scathing indictment of U.S. labor and citizenship policies.
Why have some working women succeeded at organizing in spite of obstacles to labor activity? Under what circumstances were they able to form alliances with male workers?
Carole Turbin explores these and other questions by examining the case of Troy, New York. In the 1860s, Troy produced nearly all the nation's detachable shirt collars and cuffs. The city's collar laundresses were largely Irish immigrants. Their union was officially the nation's first women's labor organization, and one of the best organized. Turbin provides a new perspective on gender and shows that women's family ties are not necessarily a conservative influence but may encourage women's and men's collective action.
An unheralded union battle offers new insight into identity politics
In 1991, Columbia University’s one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union-two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women-was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of identity politics in labor movements.
With the Columbia strike as a point of departure, Kurtz argues that identity politics are valuable for mobilizing groups, but often exclude members and their experiences of oppression. However, Kurtz believes that identity politics should not be abandoned as a component in building movements, but should be reframed-as multi-identity politics. In the end she shows an approach to organizing with great potential impact not only for labor unions but for any social movement.
Drawing upon both Freud and theories of the carnivalesque, Galinier argues that the "world below" (the lower half of the body) provides the foundation for an indigenous metapsychology that is at once very close to and very far away from the Freudian conceptual apparatus.
This major summary of the current state of archaeological research on the Swift Creek culture is the first comprehensive collection ever published concerning the Swift Creek people.
The Swift Creek people, centered in Georgia and surrounding states from A.D. 100 to 700, are best known from their pottery, which was decorated before firing with beautiful paddle-stamped designs--some of the most intricate and fascinating in the world.
Comprehensive in scope, this volume details the discovery of this culture, summarizes what is known about it at the present time, and shows how continued improvements in the collection and analysis of archaeological data are advancing our knowledge of this extinct society.
Although they know nothing of Swift Creek language and little about its society, archaeologists have collected valuable information about the
economic strategies of Swift Creek inhabitants. What archaeologists know best, however, is that the Swift Creek people were some of the best wood carvers the world has seen, and their pottery will stand as their lasting legacy for all time. This book presents and preserves their legacy.
Describing and interpreting many examples of flutes as they are found in mythology, poetry, lyrics, and other narrative and literary sources from around the world, veteran ethnomusicologist Dale Olsen seeks to determine what is singularly distinct or unique about flutes, flute playing, and flute players in a global context. He shows how and why flutes are important for personal, communal, religious, spiritual, and secular expression and even, perhaps, existence. This is a book for students, scholars, and any reader interested in the cultural power of flutes.
David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation.
World Inequality Report 2018 is the most authoritative and up-to-date account of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world’s leading economists of inequality, it presents—with unrivaled clarity and depth—information and analysis that will be vital to policy makers and scholars everywhere.
Inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others, many of whom, especially in the West, have experienced stagnation. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This inaugural report analyzes the Lab’s findings, which include data from major countries where information has traditionally been difficult to acquire, such as China, India, and Brazil. Among nations, inequality has been decreasing as traditionally poor countries’ economies have caught up with the West. The report shows, however, that inequality has been steadily deepening within almost every nation, though national trajectories vary, suggesting the importance of institutional and policy frameworks in shaping inequality.
World Inequality Report 2018 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.
Produced by a team of world-leading economists, this is the benchmark account of recent and historical trends in inequality.
World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account available of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of world-leading economists, the report builds on the pioneering edition of 2018 to provide policy makers and scholars everywhere up-to-date information about an ever broader range of countries and about forms of inequality that researchers have previously ignored or found hard to trace.
Over the past decade, inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab, housed at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This new report not only extends the lab’s international reach but provides crucial new information about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.
World Inequality Report 2022 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.
A shift of global proportions occurred in May 1808. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed the Spanish king. Overnight, the Hispanic world was transformed forever. Hispanics were forced to confront modernity, and to look beyond monarchy and religion for new sources of authority. A World Not to Come focuses on how Spanish Americans in Texas used writing as a means to establish new sources of authority, and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.
The geographic locale that became Texas changed sovereignty four times, from Spanish colony to Mexican republic to Texan republic and finally to a U.S. state. Following the trail of manifestos, correspondence, histories, petitions, and periodicals, Raúl Coronado goes to the writings of Texas Mexicans to explore how they began the slow process of viewing the world as no longer being a received order but a produced order. Through reconfigured publics, they debated how best to remake the social fabric even as they were caught up in a whirlwind of wars, social upheaval, and political transformations.
Yet, while imagining a new world, Texas Mexicans were undergoing a transformation from an elite community of "civilizing" conquerors to an embattled, pauperized, racialized group whose voices were annihilated by war. In the end, theirs was a world not to come. Coronado sees in this process of racialization the birth of an emergent Latino culture and literature.
Levi considers lucha libre in light of scholarship about sport, modernization, and the formation of the Mexican nation-state, and in connection to professional wrestling in the United States. She examines the role of secrecy in wrestling, the relationship between wrestlers and the characters they embody, and the meanings of the masks worn by luchadors. She discusses male wrestlers who perform masculine roles, those who cross-dress and perform feminine roles, and female wrestlers who wrestle each other. Investigating the relationship between lucha libre and the mass media, she highlights the history of the sport’s engagement with television: it was televised briefly in the early 1950s, but not again until 1991. Finally, Levi traces the circulation of lucha libre symbols in avant-garde artistic movements and its appropriation in left-wing political discourse. The World of Lucha Libre shows how a sport imported from the United States in the 1930s came to be an iconic symbol of Mexican cultural authenticity.
An intimate look inside Plymouth Plantation that goes beyond familiar founding myths to portray real life in the settlement—the hard work, small joys, and deep connections to others beyond the shores of Cape Cod Bay.
The English settlement at Plymouth has usually been seen in isolation. Indeed, the colonists gain our admiration in part because we envision them arriving on a desolate, frozen shore, far from assistance and forced to endure a deadly first winter alone. Yet Plymouth was, from its first year, a place connected to other places. Going beyond the tales we learned from schoolbooks, Carla Gardina Pestana offers an illuminating account of life in Plymouth Plantation.
The colony was embedded in a network of trade and sociability. The Wampanoag, whose abandoned village the new arrivals used for their first settlement, were the first among many people the English encountered and upon whom they came to rely. The colonists interacted with fishermen, merchants, investors, and numerous others who passed through the region. Plymouth was thereby linked to England, Europe, the Caribbean, Virginia, the American interior, and the coastal ports of West Africa. Pestana also draws out many colorful stories—of stolen red stockings, a teenager playing with gunpowder aboard ship, the gift of a chicken hurried through the woods to a sickbed. These moments speak intimately of the early North American experience beyond familiar events like the first Thanksgiving.
On the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing and the establishment of the settlement, The World of Plymouth Plantation recovers the sense of real life there and sets the colony properly within global history.
How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world.
After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the world’s nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy. Simultaneously, they demanded more not less trade, more not less aid, and offered a development agenda to transform both the developed and the developing world. Eventually, cepalinos established their own form of hegemony, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the orbit of Washington and its institutions. By doing so, cepalinos reshaped both regional and international governance and set an intellectual agenda that still resonates today.
Drawing on unexplored sources from the Americas and Europe, Margarita Fajardo retells the history of dependency theory, revealing the diversity of an often-oversimplified movement and the fraught relationship between cepalinos, their dependentista critics, and the regional and global Left. By examining the political ventures of dependentistas and cepalinos, The World That Latin America Created is a story of ideas that brought about real change.
Today The New Yorker is one of a number of general-interest magazines published for a sophisticated audience, but in the post-World War II era the magazine occupied a truly significant niche of cultural authority. A self-selected community of 250,000 readers, who wanted to know how to look and sound cosmopolitan, found in its pages information about night spots and polo teams. They became conversant with English movies, Italian Communism, French wine, the bombing of the Bikini Atoll, prêt-à-porter, and Caribbean vacations. A well-known critic lamented that "certain groups have come to communicate almost exclusively in references to the [magazine's] sacred writings." The World through a Monocle is a study of these "sacred writings."
Mary Corey mines the magazine's editorial voice, journalism, fiction, advertisements, cartoons, and poetry to unearth the preoccupations, values, and conflicts of its readers, editors, and contributors. She delineates the effort to fuse liberal ideals with aspirations to high social status, finds the magazine's blind spots with regard to women and racial and ethnic stereotyping, and explores its abiding concern with elite consumption coupled with a contempt for mass production and popular advertising. Balancing the consumption of goods with a social conscience which prized goodness, the magazine managed to provide readers with what seemed like a coherent and comprehensive value system in an incoherent world.
Viewing the world through a monocle, those who created The New Yorker and those who believed in it cultivated a uniquely powerful cultural institution serving an influential segment of the population. Corey's work illuminates this extraordinary enterprise in our social history.
In this collection of essays, D’Emilio brings his historian’s eye to bear on these profound changes in American society, culture, and politics. He explores the career of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader and pacifist who was openly gay a generation before almost everyone else; the legacy of radical gay and lesbian liberation; the influence of AIDS activist and writer Larry Kramer; the scapegoating of gays and lesbians by the Christian Right; the gay-gene controversy and the debate over whether people are "born gay"; and the explosion of attention focused on queer families. He illuminates the historical roots of contemporary debates over identity politics and explains why the gay community has become, over the last decade, such a visible part of American life.
World War II marked a turning point for Mexican Americans that fundamentally changed their expectations about how they should be treated by the greater U.S. society. The experiences of fighting alongside white Americans in the military, as well as of working in factory jobs for wages equal to those of Anglo workers, made Mexican Americans less willing to tolerate the second-class citizenship that had been their lot before the war. Having proven their loyalty and "Americanness" during World War II, Mexican Americans in the postwar years wanted to have the civil rights they knew they had earned.
In this book, Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard Steele investigate how the World War II experiences of Mexican Americans galvanized their struggle for civil rights and how the U.S. government responded to the needs and aspirations of Mexican Americans. The authors demonstrate, for example, that the U.S. government "discovered" Mexican Americans during World War II and set about addressing some of their problems as a way of forestalling a sense of grievance and disaffection that might have made the Mexican American community unwilling to support the war effort. The authors also show that, as much or more than governmental programs, the personal wartime experiences of Mexican Americans formed their civil rights consciousness. The book concludes with a selection of key essays and historical documents from the World War II period that collectively gives a first-person understanding of the civil rights struggles of Mexican Americans.
For some women writers and photographers during the two world wars—Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, H.D., and Gertrude Stein—the construction of the female subject as an observer of combat became a vital concern. Their explorations of vision took place against the backdrop of a larger shift in Western culture's understanding of what "seeing" meant in common practice and philosophical discourse alike. The role of visuality in their lives was massively transformed not only by the rigid gender roles of war but by the introduction of new combat practices and technologies such as aerial surveillance, trench warfare, and civilian bombardment.
In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing—and the refusal to see—for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination.
The book begins with two instances of wartime propaganda written by American women in France in 1915. Both Edith Wharton's Fighting France and Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne offer a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer's struggles with authority, resistance, and killing. In the process, Gallagher teases out the role of specular vision and the impossibility of "directly" seeing the war.
Gallagher then turns to literary and visual texts produced by two female journalists between 1940 and 1945. Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field exhibits a range of gendered seeing positions within and in opposition to the visual ideologies of fascism during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue show how Miller constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war by working with and against some of the conventions of surrealist fashion photography.
Gallagher concludes by focusing on the experimental autobiographical prose of H.D. and Gertrude Stein to explore the functions of vision on two World War II "homefronts"—London during the Blitz and Vichy France.
In this wonderfully evocative picture of an urban American high school and its successes and setbacks over the past thirty-five years, Gerald Grant works out a unique perspective on what makes a good school: one that asserts moral and intellectual authority without becoming rigidly doctrinaire or losing the precious gains in equality of opportunity that have been won at great cost.
Grant describes what happened inside Hamilton High (a real school, although its identity is disguised), and how different worlds evolved as the school’s authority system was transformed. After the opening of Hamilton High in the buoyant and self-confident 1950s, the school plunged into a period of violence and radical deconstruction in the late sixties. Grant charts the rise of student power in the seventies, followed by new transformations of the school in the last decade occasioned in part by the mainstreaming of disabled students and the arrival of Asian immigrants. Things got very bad before they got better, but they did get better. The school went from white power to black power to genuine racial equality. Its average test scores declined and then improved. Although test-score means did not return to their former levels, the gap in achievement between the social classes decreased. Violence was replaced by a sense of relative safety and security.
Yet this book is not just a case study. In the second half the author presents a general analysis of American education. He contrasts the world of Hamilton High with other possible worlds, including those at three schools (one public and two private) that exhibit a strong positive ethos. He looks at the way the moral and intellectual worlds have been sundered in many contemporary public schools and asks whether they can be put back together again.
The book is grounded in a creative methodology that includes research by students at Hamilton High, whom Grant trained to analyze life in their school. Later he shared this research with teachers as a means of opening a dialogue about what changes they wanted to make. Grant’s analysis leads to recommendations for two essential reforms, and in an epilogue the teachers who read this hook also tell us what they make of it and offer their own conclusions. Their challenging final words will spur the thinking of educators, policymakers, scholars, parents, and all those who are concerned about our schools today.
During the Rubella Syndrome epidemic of the 1960s, many children were born deaf, blind, and mentally disabled. David Goode has devoted his life and career to understanding such people's world, a world without words, but not, the author confirms, one without communication. This book is the result of his studies of two children with congenital deaf-blindness and mental retardation.
Goode spent countless hours observing, teaching, and playing with Christina, who had been institutionalized since age six, and Bianca, who remained in the care of her parents. He also observed the girls' parents, school, and medical environments, exploring the unique communication practices—sometimes so subtle they are imperceptible to outsiders—that family and health care workers create to facilitate innumerable every day situations. A World Without Words presents moving and convincing evidence that human beings both with and without formal language can understand and communicate with each other in many ways.
Through various experiments in such unconventional forms of communication as playing guitar, mimicking, and body movements like jumping, swinging, and rocking, Goode established an understanding of these children on their own terms. He discovered a spectrum of non-formal language through which these children create their own set of symbols within their own reality, and accommodate and maximize the sensory resources they do have. Ultimately, he suggests, it is impractical to attempt to interpret these children's behaviors using ideas about normal behavior of the hearing and seeing world.
The Moche, or Mochica, created an extraordinary civilization on the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium AD. Although they had no written language with which to record their history and beliefs, the Moche built enormous ceremonial edifices and embellished them with mural paintings depicting supernatural figures and rituals. Highly skilled Moche artisans crafted remarkable ceramic vessels, which they painted with figures and scenes or modeled like sculpture, and mastered metallurgy in gold, silver, and copper to make impressive symbolic ornaments. They also wove textiles that were complex in execution and design.
A senior scholar renowned for her discoveries about the Moche, Elizabeth P. Benson published the first English-language monograph on the subject in 1972. Now in this volume, she draws on decades of knowledge, as well as the findings of other researchers, to offer a grand overview of all that is currently known about the Moche. Touching on all significant aspects of Moche culture, she covers such topics as their worldview and ritual life, ceremonial architecture and murals, art and craft, supernatural beings, government and warfare, and burial and the afterlife. She demonstrates that the Moche expressed, with symbolic language in metal and clay, what cultures in other parts of the world presented in writing. Indeed, Benson asserts that the accomplishments of the Moche are comparable to those of their Mesoamerica contemporaries, the Maya, which makes them one of the most advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian America.
Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.
A diverse group of writers and scholars follow the lead of noted folklorist Barre Toelken and consider, from the inside, the ways in which varied cultures in the American West understand and express their relations to the world around them. As Barre Toelken puts it in The Dynamics of Folklore, "'Worldview' refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it." In Worldviews and the American West, seventeen notable authors and scholars, employing diverse approaches and styles, apply Toelken's ideas about worldview to the American West. While the contributors represent a range of voices, methods, and visions, they are integrated through their focus on the theme of worldview in one region. Worldviews and the American West includes essays by Margaret K. Brady, Hal Cannon, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, James S. Griffith, Barry Lopez, Robert McCarl, Elliott Oring, Twilo Scofield, Steve Siporin, Kim Stafford, C. W. Sullivan III, Jeannie B. Thomas, George Venn, George B. Wasson, and William A. Wilson. Each of the authors in this collection attempts to get inside one or more of the worldviews of the many cultures that have come to share and interpret the American West. The result is a lively mix of styles and voices as the authors' own worldviews interact with the multiple perspectives of the diverse peoples (and, in Barry Lopez's "The Language of Animals," other species) of the West. This diversity matches the geography of the region they all call home and gives varied life and meaning to its physical and cultural landscape.
Celebrate the career of an inspirational scholar and teacher concerned with revealing voices from the margins
This volume of essays honors Susan Niditch, author of War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (1993), “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (2008), and most recently, The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods (forthcoming), among other influential publications. Essays touch on topics such as folklore, mythology, and oral history, Israelite religion, ancient Judaism, warfare, violence, and gender.
Features:
In Wounded Lions, acclaimed sport historian and longtime Penn State professor Ronald A. Smith heavily draws from university archives to answer the How? and Why? at the heart of the scandal. The Sandusky case was far from the first example of illegal behavior related to the football program or the university's attempts to suppress news of it. As Smith shows, decades of infighting among administrators, alumni, trustees, faculty, and coaches established policies intended to protect the university, and the football team considered synonymous with its name, at all costs. If the habits predated Paterno, they also became sanctified during his tenure. Smith names names to show how abuses of power warped the "Penn State Way" even with hires like women's basketball coach Rene Portland, who allegedly practiced sexual bias against players for decades. Smith also details a system that concealed Sandusky's horrific acts just as deftly as it whitewashed years of rules violations, coaching malfeasance, and player crime while Paterno set records and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the university.
A myth-shattering account of misplaced priorities, Wounded Lions charts the intertwined history of an elite university, its storied sports program, and the worst scandal in collegiate athletic history.
This book is an invaluable key to self-understanding. Using examples from her own life and the lives of her clients, as well as from dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature, Linda Schierse Leonard, a Jungian analyst, exposes the wound of the spirit that both men and women of our culture bear—a wound that is grounded in a poor relationship between masculine and feminine principles.
Leonard speculates that when a father is wounded in his own psychological development, he is not able to give his daughter the care and guidance she needs. Inheriting this wound, she may find that her ability to express herself professionally, intellectually, sexually, and socially is impaired. On a broader scale, Leonard discusses how women compensate for cultural devaluation, resorting to passive submission (“the Eternal Girl”), or a defensive imitation of the masculine (“the Armored Amazon”).
The Wounded Woman shows that by understanding the father-daughter wound and working to transform it psychologically, it is possible to achieve a fruitful, caring relationship between men and women, between fathers and daughters, a relationship that honors both the mutuality and the uniqueness of the sexes.
In the last half century, the nature of war has changed dramatically. Wars in the post–Cold War period have occurred mainly within national borders rather than between sovereign states. In these conflicts, civilians are increasingly the deliberate targets of war rather than accidental victims. Women and children in particular have become the intentional targets of murder, rape, and kidnapping.
The book focuses on the impact of war on women and girls, and the potential for women as peacemakers. The text addresses major policy issues facing organizations involved in humanitarian assistance, and highlights actions to address and resolve armed violence and conflict.
Wounds of War presents ten country profiles, along with information on eleven key topics related to the impacts of war, including the economies of war, small arms and light weapons, landmines, violence against women and girls, and missing persons.
The monumental American Guide Series, published by the Federal Writers’ Project, provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers in the midst of the Great Depression. Featuring books on states, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, it also opened an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people during this time. Untold numbers of projects in progress were lost when the program was abruptly shut down by a hostile Congress in 1939.
One of those, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," lay dormant in the Pennsylvania State Library until it was microfilmed in 1970. The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh marks the first publication of this rich body of information. This unique historical study of the city’s black population features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions from colonial times through the 1930s.
Kristin McAndrews states that she “began to suspect that the reason there was so little scholarship on women’s humor was that male researchers didn’t understand it, or perhaps they didn’t recognize it.” To examine the humor of one group of women, she conducted interviews with Winthrop’s female wranglers, collecting stories about their lives as workers and as members of their community. For all these women, professional success depends on courage, ingenuity, a sense of humor, and a facility with language—as well as on an ability to perform within the traditional gender stereotypes evoked by their town’s Wild west image.
Winner, Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement, 2016
Flatboats were the most prolific type of vessel on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during the early 1800s. Thousands of these boats descended the two rivers each year, carrying not only valuable cargo to New Orleans but also western-bound emigrants to newly opened territories. By the late 1800s, flatboats had completely disappeared, and no intact examples were known to exist. Our knowledge of these historic vessels had been limited to illustrations, memoirs, and traveler accounts.
That changed in 2000 after local residents found a wreck on the Ohio River shoreline in Illinois. Archaeologist Mark J. Wagner and his colleagues from Southern Illinois University Carbondale investigated extensively and established that the wreck was a pre–Civil War flatboat, which they named America, after a nearby town.
In The Wreck of the America in Southern Illinois: A Flatboat on the Ohio River, Wagner provides a brief description and general history of flatboats and the various reasons they wrecked—such as poor workmanship and encounters with pirates, storms, rocks, and floating trees. Wagner describes the remains of the America, how it was constructed, the artifacts found nearby and inside—including pewter spoons, utensils with bone handles, metal buttons, and an iron felling axe—and the probable cause of its sinking. Wagner concludes with a history of the America since its discovery in 2000 and a plea that the boat be removed from the riverbank and preserved before the Ohio washes it away.
For millennia, two biblical verses have been understood to condemn sex between men as an act so abhorrent that it is punishable by death. Traditionally Orthodox Jews, believing the scripture to be the word of God, have rejected homosexuality in accordance with this interpretation. In 1999, Rabbi Steven Greenberg challenged this tradition when he became the first Orthodox rabbi ever to openly declare his homosexuality.
Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Greenberg’s ten-year struggle to reconcile his two warring identities. In this compelling and groundbreaking work, Greenberg challenges long held assumptions of scriptural interpretation and religious identity as he marks a path that is both responsible to human realities and deeply committed to God and Torah. Employing traditional rabbinic resources, Greenberg presents readers with surprising biblical interpretations of the creation story, the love of David and Jonathan, the destruction of Sodom, and the condemning verses of Leviticus. But Greenberg goes beyond the question of whether homosexuality is biblically acceptable to ask how such relationships can be sacred. In so doing, he draws on a wide array of nonscriptural texts to introduce readers to occasions of same-sex love in Talmudic narratives, medieval Jewish poetry and prose, and traditional Jewish case law literature. Ultimately, Greenberg argues that Orthodox communities must open up debate, dialogue, and discussion—precisely the foundation upon which Jewish law rests—to truly deal with the issue of homosexual love.
This book will appeal not only to members of the Orthodox faith but to all religious people struggling to resolve their belief in the scriptures with a desire to make their communities more open and accepting to gay and lesbian members.
2005 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, for Religion/Spirituality
The volume covers a vast collection of subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural products such as black newspapers, music, and theater. The book includes individual entries by experts on each subject; a discography and filmography that highlight important writers, musicians, films, and cultural presentations; and an introduction that relates the Harlem Renaissance, the White Chicago Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement.
Contributors are Robert Butler, Robert H. Cataliotti, Maryemma Graham, James C. Hall, James L. Hill, Michael Hill, Lovalerie King, Lawrence Jackson, Angelene Jamison-Hall, Keith Leonard, Lisbeth Lipari, Bill V. Mullen, Patrick Naick, William R. Nash, Charlene Regester, Kimberly Ruffin, Elizabeth Schultz, Joyce Hope Scott, James Smethurst, Kimberly M. Stanley, Kathryn Waddell Takara, Steven C. Tracy, Zoe Trodd, Alan Wald, Jamal Eric Watson, Donyel Hobbs Williams, Stephen Caldwell Wright, and Richard Yarborough.
Anaïs Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur, occupied a singular space in twentieth-century culture, not only as a literary figure and voice of female sexual liberation but as a celebrity and symbol of shifting social mores in postwar America. Before Madonna and her many imitators, there was Nin; yet, until now, there has been no major study of Nin as a celebrity figure.
In Writing an Icon, Anita Jarczok reveals how Nin carefully crafted her literary and public personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her needs and desires. When the first volume of her diary was published in 1966, Nin became a celebrity, notorious beyond the artistic and literary circles in which she previously had operated. Jarczok examines the ways in which the American media appropriated and deconstructed Nin and analyzes the influence of Nin’s guiding hand in their construction of her public persona.
The key to understanding Nin’s celebrity in its shifting forms, Jarczok contends, is the Diary itself, the principal vehicle through which her image has been mediated. Combining the perspectives of narrative and cultural studies, Jarczok traces the trajectory of Nin’s celebrity, the reception of her writings. The result is an innovative investigation of the dynamic relationships of Nin’s writing, identity, public image, and consumer culture.
Women seeking to express concerns about childbirth or to challenge institutionalized medicine by writing online birth plans or birth stories exercise rhetorical agency in undeniably feminist ways. In Writing Childbirth: Women’s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online, author Kim Hensley Owens explores how women create and use everyday rhetorics in planning for, experiencing, and writing about childbirth.
Drawing on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as the results of a childbirth writing survey, Owens considers how women’s agency in childbirth is sanctioned, and how it is not. She examines how women’s rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. Writing Childbirth reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations.
Demonstrating the value of extending rhetorical investigations of health and medicine beyond patient-physician interactions and the discourse of physicians, Writing Childbirth offers fresh insight into feminist rhetorical agency and technology and expands our understanding of the rhetorics of health and medicine.
Exposing little-known facts about the five modes of execution practiced in the United States today, Writing for Their Lives documents the progress of life on death row from a capital trial to execution and beyond, through the testimony of the prisoners themselves as well as those who watch, listen, and write to them. What emerges are stories of the survival of the human spirit under even the most unimaginable circumstances, and the ways in which some prisoners find penitence and peace in the most unlikely surroundings. In spite of the uniformity of their prison life and its nearly inevitable conclusion, prisoners able to read and write letters are shown to retain and develop their individuality and humanity as their letters become poems and stories.
Writing for Their Lives serves ultimately as an affirmation of the value of life and provides bountiful evidence that when a state executes a prisoner, it takes a life that still had something to give.
This edition features an introduction by the editor as well as a foreword by Jan Arriens. Dr. Mulvey-Roberts will be donating her profits from the sale of this volume to the legal charity Amicus, which assists in capital defense in the United States."
Winner of the 2001 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards | Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award
Writing Himself Into History is an eagerly anticipated analysis of the career and artistry surrounding the legendary Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. With the exception of Spike Lee, Micheaux is the most famous—and prolific—African American film director. Between 1918 and 1948 he made more than 40 “race pictures,” movies made for and about African Americans. A man of immense creativity, he also wrote seven novels.
Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence concentrate here on the first decade of Micheaux’s career, when Micheaux produced and directed more than twenty silent features and built a reputation as a controversial and maverick entrepreneur. Placing his work firmly within his social and cultural milieu, they also examine Micheaeux’s family and life. The authors provide a close textual analysis of his surviving films (including The Symbol of the Unconquered, Within Our Gates, and Body and Soul), and highlight the rivalry between studios, dilemmas of assimilation versus separatism, gender issues, and class. In Search of Oscar Micheaux also analyzes Micheaux’s career as a novelist in relation to his work as a filmmaker.
This is a much-awaited book that is especially timely as interest in Micheaux’s work increases.
Writing History in the Digital Age began as a “what-if” experiment by posing a question: How have Internet technologies influenced how historians think, teach, author, and publish? To illustrate their answer, the contributors agreed to share the stages of their book-in-progress as it was constructed on the public web.
To facilitate this innovative volume, editors Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki designed a born-digital, open-access, and open peer review process to capture commentary from appointed experts and general readers. A customized WordPress plug-in allowed audiences to add page- and paragraph-level comments to the manuscript, transforming it into a socially networked text. The initial six-week proposal phase generated over 250 comments, and the subsequent eight-week public review of full drafts drew 942 additional comments from readers across different parts of the globe.
The finished product now presents 20 essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) if and how digital and emergent technologies have changed the historical profession.
The legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights are usually understood and applied in a global context with little bearing on the legal discourse, domestic political struggles, or social justice concerns within the United States. In Writing Human Rights, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary American writers of color—Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Aimee Phan, and others—to explore the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political communities emerge.
Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Pairing the ethical deliberations in such works as Beloved and A Gesture Life with human rights texts like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, she considers why principles articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties—such as the right to self-determination or the right to family—are too often disregarded at home. Human rights concepts instead provide writers of color with a deeply meaningful method for political and moral imagining in their literature.
Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century. In the absence of domestic human rights enforcement, these literatures provide a considerable repository for those ways of life and subjects of rights made otherwise impossible in the present antidemocratic moment.
Here is a celebration and an analysis of four Québécois feminist rebels whose self-conscious revolt against language has put them at the forefront of experimental writing in Quebec. These women—Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, Louky Bersianik, and France Theoret—are attempting to explode male-dominated language and to construct a new language and literature of women.
In this first major study of their work in English, Karen Gould examines in depth these women’s literary visions and the new ways in which they communicate those visions. Gould broadens her book’s appeal by showing how these four women’s works, in modern forms of experimental literature, are shaped not only by Quebec feminism, politics, and culture but by American and French influences as well.
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