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Habitat Threshold
Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn, 2019
With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.”

            Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.
 
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Hagar Poems
Mohja Kahf
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

“Mohja Kahf ’s Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There’s lyricism, there’s satire, there’s comedy, there’s theology of a high order in this book.”

—Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book

“Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf’s new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh’s daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet’s ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry.”

—Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror

“‘Where have all the goddesses gone,’ writes Mohja Kahf, ‘I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq. . . .’ In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf’s hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read.”

—Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America

“This brilliant collection captures all the ‘patient threading of relationship’ between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God. . . . At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes.”

—From the foreword by Amina Wadud


The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts.

Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar’s story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.

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Hajj
Journey to the Heart of Islam
Venetia Porter
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, is the largest pilgrimage in the world today and a sacred duty for all Muslims. Each year, millions of the faithful from around the world make the pilgrimage to Makkah, the birthplace of Islam where the Prophet Muhammad received his revelation.

With contributions from renowned experts Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Hugh Kennedy, Robert Irwin, and Ziauddin Sardar, this fascinating book pulls together many strands of Hajj, its rituals, history, and modern manifestations. Travel was once a hazardous gamble, yet devoted Muslims undertook the journey to Makkah, documenting their experiences in manuscripts, wall paintings, and early photographs, many of which are presented here. Through a wealth of illustrations including pilgrims' personal objects, souvenirs, and maps, Hajj provides a glimpse into this important holy rite for Muslim readers already grounded in the tradition and non-Muslims who cannot otherwise participate.

Hajj does not, however, merely trace pilgrimages of the past. The Hajj is a living tradition, influenced by new conveniences and obstacles. Graffiti, consumerism, and state lotteries all now play a role in this time-honored practice. This book opens out onto the full sweep of the Hajj: a sacred path walked by early Islamic devotees and pre-Islamic Arabians; a sumptuous site of worship under the care of sultans; and an expression of faith in the modern world.

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Hanging by a Thread
A Kite’s View of Wisconsin
Craig M. Wilson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

This full-color book of photographs records Wisconsin from an unusual viewpoint: a camera suspended from a kite and controlled by photographer Craig M. Wilson from the ground. Taken from fifty to a few hundred feet in the air, Wilson’s photos capture natural and man-made views that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The result is a vibrant collection that captures Wisconsin in all its shifting beauty in landscapes and cityscapes, festivals, Door County’s lighthouses, Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, and the crowd at a Badger football game. Captions are provided in English, Spanish, German, and Mandarin Chinese.

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Hard Luck Blues
Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression
Rich Remsberg
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the nation from the northeast to the southwest, the images document the last generation of musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, Hard Luck Blues features photographs by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and others.

Photographer and image researcher Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual details about the persons and events captured, in some cases drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik.

Published in association with the Library of Congress.

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Harker's Barns
Visions of an American Icon
Michael Harker
University of Iowa Press, 2003

Michael Harker drove past old barns on gravel roads and blacktop highways for years. He generally dismissed them as obsolete outbuildings until November 1993, when he felt compelled to photograph a windmill in Clutier, Iowa. This single photograph launched him on a seven-and-a-half-year mission to document Iowa's barns and all they represent. The result is Harker's Barns: Visions of an American Icon.

Each of the seventy-five black-and-white images featured in Harker's Barns beautifully and heartbreakingly captures the glory and ultimate demise of one of rural America's most enduring icons. From square to round, wood to brick, Dutch to Swedish, occupied or abandoned, the barns documented in this stunning collection are a testament to a passing way of life that was once the lifeblood of Iowa and the Midwest.

Complementing Harker's photographs are vignettes by poet and writer Jim Heynen. Both whimsical and endearing, each vignette treats barns as organic and intelligent entities, reflecting the living history that can be found inside each rural structure.
Iowa's barns are disappearing and with them a way of life; Harker's Barns brilliantly documents their heritage for future generations. As Jim Heynen says, “A good photograph can maintain an old barn through blizzards and hail storms and tornadoes. It is the best support beam and wood preservative an old barn can have.”

 
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Harker's One-Room Schoolhouses
Visions of an Iowa Icon
Paul Theobald
University of Iowa Press, 2008
In Harker’s Barns documentary photographer Michael Harker captured the glory and the decay of one of rural America’s most elemental icons. Now in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses he brings another rural American icon back to life. His stark and stunning photographs of these small, neat buildings—once the social and educational center of rural life, now either abandoned or restored to an artificial quaintness—encapsulate the dramatic transformations that have overtaken the Iowa countryside.
      Michael Harker’s goal is to record Iowa’s historically significant architecture before it disappears forever. From Coon Center School no. 5 in Albert City to Pleasant Valley School in Kalona, North River School in Winterset to Douglas Center School in Sioux Rapids, and Iowa’s first school to Grant Wood’s first school, he has achieved this goal on a grand scale in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses.
      Educational historian Paul Theobald tells the story of the rise and fall of Iowa’s one-room schools, whose numbers fell from close to 15,000 in 1918 to only 1,100 in 1960, all of which had ceased to function as schools by 1980. Moving from the state-wide story to the personal, he introduces us to George Coleman, son of a local farmer and school board director, who kept a sparse diary between December 1869 and June 1870.  Young George’s words reveal the intimate way in which one-room schools interacted with the local community, including the local economic scene. Theobald ends by suggesting that these one-room relics of the past may again prove useful.
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Harm
Hillary Gravendyk
Omnidawn, 2012
Offering a new narrative of physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact, Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked- for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. Troubling the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, Harm shifts between warning and error, nature and the body. In the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Moving amid the prose poem and the lyric, Harm navigates a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders.
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Hatch
Poems
Jenny Irish
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Groundbreaking feminist poems featuring an artificial womb and an apocalyptic future

The prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species. This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. More intimately, Hatch considers questions about how motherhood and its cultural expectations shape female identity. Working with avant strategies, Irish crafts a speculative feminist narrative, excavating and reexamining the aspects of the American experience that should have served as a call to action but have not. Part elegy and part prophecy, Hatch warns of a possible future while speaking to the present moment.
 
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Hawking Women
Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture
Sara Petrosillo
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo’s Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.
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He Spoke of Love
Selected Poems from the Satsai
Biharilal
Harvard University Press, 2022

The seventeenth-century Hindi classic treasured for its subtle and beautiful portrayal of divine and erotic love’s pleasures and sorrows.

The seven hundred poems of the Hindi poet Biharilal’s Satsai weave amorous narratives of the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs that bridge divine and worldly love. He Spoke of Love brims with romantic rivalries, clandestine trysts, and the bittersweet sorrow of separated lovers. This new translation presents four hundred couplets from the enduring seventeenth-century classic, showcasing the poet’s ingenuity and virtuosity.

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Headwaters
A Journey on Alabama Rivers
John C. Hall and Beth Maynor Young
University of Alabama Press, 2009
A breathtaking portrait of Alabama rivers

From their primal seepages in the Appalachian highlands or along the broad Chunnenuggee Hills, Alabama’s rivers carve through the rocky uplands and down the Fall Line rapids, then ease across the coastal plain to their eventual confluence with the Gulf of Mexico.
 
Beth Maynor Young’s 155 full-color photographs constitute art through a lens; the colors, the light, and the angles all converge for a tender praise of her subject. Her stunning visuals are supported by tantalizing captions and introductory text from John C. Hall, a master field trip leader. Together, they tell a proud story of the native beauty and complexity of these Alabama watercourses that shepherd fully 20% of the nation’s fresh water to sea.
 
The intimate close-up of verdant mosses or pebbled beaches pulls one into their space just as surely as does a sweeping scene of a watershed valley or a sparkling sunset over water. We all become eager listeners and observers on this guided “paddle to the Gulf,” drinking in the peace, delight, and beauty offered by the experience. At the end, we know we won’t be the same as before beginning the journey.
 
In addition to being a celebration of their richness, Headwaters serves as a call to greater stewardship of these riverine resources. Conservation sidebars describe the current efforts in this direction and encourage further study and protection. This book tells us, in glorious color and instructive word, why we’ll always treasure these wonderful rivers.
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Healing Las Vegas
The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden in response to the 1 October tragedy
McAleer
University of Nevada Press, 2019
On Sunday, October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire from thirty-two floors above a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. The event left fifty-eight people killed, more than 860 injured, and thousands psychologically wounded. To date, this was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in the last seventy years. Despite the chaos and terror, first responders, concert-goers, and passersby aided vic­tims and survivors. Nearby businesses, hotels, and the university provided safety and services. Medical personnel rushed to area hospitals. And as the scope of the tragedy unfolded, the people of Las Vegas flooded blood donation centers and offered food, water, comfort, and care. And they cre­ated a garden—The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden.

The story of the garden unfolds through photographs and the words of survivors, first responders, family members, medical professionals, counsel­ors, and members of the community. In only a matter of days, volunteers and local businesses transformed a vacant downtown lot into a serene urban oasis. Families and friends of those lost in the tragedy soon adopted each of the fifty-eight trees planted in honor of their loved ones, and visitors left behind colorful mementos, including painted rocks, photographs, and orna­ments, as well as words of encouragement, love, loss, and strength.

In the aftermath of 1 October, an often misunderstood city revealed its soul under the most heartbreaking of circumstances. The inspirational voices and stories from a community touched by tragedy provide comfort and encouragement. And the organic response to the unthinkable is a testa­ment to how one community came together at its darkest hour, chose hope over despair, unity over hate.
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Here
Sydney Lea
Four Way Books, 2019
In his thirteenth book of poetry, Sydney Lea gives voice to the deep connection between human life and the natural world as well as their fragility and transience. Here, nature is as much a muse as a trigger for sense memory—as a schoolboy on a playground “breathing in autumn mud, / that cherished aroma” or as witness to a redtail hawk’s attack and the aftermath during which “That poor doomed duckling’s wisps of down / Floated in air like snowflakes, /Diaphanous.” Death is a constant presence in these poems, too, arising from the bittersweet awareness of what eventually will be lost. While there is reckoning, there are few regrets in a life well-lived and closely observed. Here is a title, but it’s also a statement, an incantation and affirmation: “Let’s chant it throughout the year,” Lea writes, “like so much birdsong: we’re here we’re here we’re here.”
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Hero Me Not
The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero
Chesya Burke
Rutgers University Press, 2023

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. 
 
Hero Me Not offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. 
 
With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you. 

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Heroides. Amores
Ovid
Harvard University Press, 1977

Two early works by the consummate Latin love poet.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC–AD 17), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile.

Ovid's main surviving works are the Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration to artists and poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare; the Fasti, a poetic treatment of the Roman year of which Ovid finished only half; the Amores, love poems; the Ars amatoria, not moral but clever and in parts beautiful; Heroides, fictitious love letters by legendary women to absent husbands; and the dismal works written in exile: the Tristia, appeals to persons including his wife and also the emperor; and similar Epistulae ex Ponto. Poetry came naturally to Ovid, who at his best is lively, graphic and lucid.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid is in six volumes.

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Hidden Hands
Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction
Patricia E. Johnson
Ohio University Press, 2001

Tracing the Victorian crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 Parliamentary bluebook on mines, with its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became even more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because she exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.

Drawing on the recent work of feminist historians, Patricia Johnson lays the groundwork for a reinterpretation of Victorian social-problem fiction that highlights its treatment of issues that particularly affected working-class women: sexual harassment; the interconnections between domestic ideology and domestic violence; their relationships to male-dominated working-class movements such as Luddism, Chartism, and unionism; and their troubled connection to middle-class feminism.

Uncovering a series of images in Victorian fiction ranging from hot-tempered servants and sexually harassed factory girls to working-class homemakers pictured as beaten dogs, Hidden Hands demonstrates that representations of working-class women, however marginalized or incoherent, reveal the very contradictions they are constructed to hide and that the dynamics of these representations have broad implications both for other groups, such as middle-class women, and for the emergence of working-class women as writers themselves.

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Hindu Art
T. Richard Blurton
Harvard University Press, 1993
In a survey that stretches back to prehistory, Blurton discusses the religious, cultural, and historical influences that figure in Hindu art. Tracing its evolution, he shows how Hindu art has come to embrace widely varying styles, reflecting differences between regions from Nepal to Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh.
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Hiraizumi
Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in Twelfth-Century Japan
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan
Harvard University Press, 1998

In the twelfth century, along the borders of the Japanese state in northern Honshu, three generations of local rulers built a capital city at Hiraizumi that became a major military and commercial center. Known as the Hiraizumi Fujiwara, these rulers created a city filled with art, in an attempt to use the power of art and architecture to claim a religious and political mandate.

In the first book-length study of Hiraizumi in English, the author studies the rise of the Hiraizumi Fujiwara and analyzes their remarkable construction program. She traces the strategies by which the Hiraizumi Fujiwara attempted to legitimate their rule and grounds the splendor of Hiraizumi in the desires, political and personal, of the men and women who sponsored and displayed that art.

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Hispaniola
A Photographic Journey through Island Biodiversity, Biodiversidad a Través de un Recorrido Fotográfico
Eladio FernándezForeword by Edward O. WilsonIntroduction by Philippe Bayard, Société Audubon Haïti
Harvard University Press, 2007

First, there is a soft rustle in the underbrush, then a low-slung, utterly bizarre-looking insectivore dashes in front of Eladio Fernández. With a reflexive click of digital shutter, he's captured the reclusive (Solenodon paradoxus--a living fossil. A Dominican-based conservationist and photographer, Fernandez is documenting the efforts of a distinguished team of international scientists as they unravel the workings of evolution being played out on the island of Hispaniola.

A short flight from the Florida coast, Hispaniola offers unique opportunities, not just to photographers like Fernández, but to evolutionary biologists as well. At 40 million years, Hispaniola is far older than the Galápagos. Its considerable age, along with a diversity of habitats--from mountains and cloud forests to savannahs and tropical lowlands--makes this island one of the most spectacular, if poorly understood, troves of biota on the planet. The extraordinary richness of species, much of it endangered and yet to be described, is showcased here in nearly 400 spectacular photographs. The photos are accompanied by essays--in both English and Spanish--that make known the Hispaniolan fungi, plants, and animals by the experts who know them best.

Insights gained from Hispaniola's unique flora and fauna, from its rare orchids to its stunningly beautiful bird life, may enrich our understanding of other, more complex, living systems worldwide. What Fernández captures here so vividly is not just the amazing variety of living creatures that have erupted in evolutionary isolation, but the urgency of scientists racing to give that variety a name before it vanishes.

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Historic Watermills of North America
A Visual Preservation
Ken Boyd
University of Alabama Press, 2021
112 full-color artistic photographs of watermills still standing on the North American landscape
 
The scenic beauty of the watermill is undeniable. The iconic waterwheel has inspired romantics for generations with their warmth and charm. Watermills were once ubiquitous landmarks along brooks, creeks, and rivers across North America. Today, only a scattering of the old watermills grace the countryside, but through these mills, and the turning of their wheels and the whirling of their stones, a small but spectacular part of history lives on.
 
Through stunningly beautiful images, Historic Watermills of North America: A Visual Preservation presents 112 watermills still standing on the North American landscape. With idealized full-color photographs, Ken Boyd nostalgically hearkens back to a time after European settlement when these structures were the very heart of the communities whose livelihoods they made possible. These mills turned the power of flowing water into mechanical energy to grind corn and wheat into meal and flour, saw timber, loom wool and cotton cloth, and more for the benefit of their operators and communities.
 
At one time vital to their surrounding regions, most of these surviving mills are in rural areas that have been passed over by modern development. Their designs are as individual as their makers, and their settings are as varied as the landscape. Some have been converted into homes or museums or are part of local tourist attractions. Others have been abandoned but give witness to the significance of their heydays, and others are still in use, doing the same work they have done for generations.
 
Boyd’s beautifully rendered photographs preserve these extant structures and represent a variety of watermills across the United States and Canada. Each mill photograph is accompanied by a description providing the name of the mill, its location, date of construction, and brief comments highlighting its most noteworthy features. Additional photographs and commentary in the afterword explore the inner workings of watermills.
 
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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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History, Memory, and the Law
Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The essays in this book examine law as an active participant in the process through which history is written and memory is constructed. Instead of seeing law as a "victim" of history, the writers treat law as an author of history, not just in the instrumental sense in which law can be said to make a difference in society, but in the ways that law constructs and uses history.
Law looks to the past as it speaks to present needs. In the production of judicial opinions--supposedly definitive statements of what the law is--judges reconstruct law's past, tracing out lines of legal precedent that arguably "compel" their decisions. These essays consider how law treats history, how history appears in legal decisions, and how the authority of history is used to authorize legal decisions.
Furthermore, law plays a role in the construction of memory. The writers here ask how law remembers and records the past as well as how it helps us to remember our past. Law in the modern era is one of the most important of our society's technologies for preserving memory. In helping to construct our memory in certain ways law participates in the writing of our collective history. It plays a crucial role in knitting together our past, present, and future.
The essays in this volume present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices and address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites, and the resultant role law plays in constructing history. The writers also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshalling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process.
The contributors are Joan Dayan, Soshana Felman, Dominic La Capra, Reva Siegel, Brook Thomas, and G. Edward White.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. He is past President of the Law and Society Association and current President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.
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Hodermarsky
Duncan Christy
The Artist Book Foundation, 2024
Daniel Hodermarsky (1924–1999) was the son of Slovak immigrants who emigrated from Hačava to settle and work in the coal fields of Pennsylvania and later in the auto-manufacturing industries of Ohio. He served in World War II on the Western front and was awarded two presidential citations, two Croix de Guerre, and one combat star. He returned home with severe and persistent posttraumatic stress disorder that left an indelible mark on his life and art. Hodermarsky had a distinguished teaching career at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1957 to 1969. Throughout the 1960s, he taught in Cleveland's public schools and started an art program for inner-city youth under the Federal Title 3 Act to promote integration through arts education. From 1969 to 1989 he taught at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts, founding its art department and serving for several years as department chair and director of the school's Hilson Gallery (now the von Auersperg Gallery). He mentored notable artists, including Stephen Hannock and Michael Tracy. Throughout his career, Hodermarsky's work embraced both the representational and the abstract. His early works experimented with new media (such as Dayglo paint) and new styles such as Op Art and performance. In the 1970s and beyond, he engaged landscape—rural, urban, and imaginary—wherein he explored the interplay of terrain (land or water, horizon, and sky). The human figure—Slovak farmers, wounded or dismembered soldiers, and mythical and historical figures—were among his favorite subjects. He was fascinated by how age, human nature, and personality combine to create the physical form. His eclectic themes mirror his own unique complexities and experiences. Later in his career, he focused on abstract works that reflect the intricate spaces of both his psyche and shared human experience. A deeply spiritual man with a strong religious faith, Hodermarsky's abstract paintings ask the existential questions that have challenged humankind across millennia. By showing us his own experience of these great mysteries, his art underscores life's abiding beauty. Over his long career of interpreting the world in which he lived, Hodermarsky invites us to inhabit a realm filled with joy, reverence, and passion.
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Holocaust Graphic Narratives
Generation, Trauma, and Memory
Victoria Aarons
Rutgers University Press, 2020
In Holocaust Graphic Narratives, Victoria Aarons demonstrates the range and fluidity of this richly figured genre. Employing memory as her controlling trope, Aarons analyzes the work of the graphic novelists and illustrators, making clear how they extend the traumatic narrative of the Holocaust into the present and, in doing so, give voice to survival in the wake of unrecoverable loss. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, these graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation and establish a new canon of visual memory. The intergenerational dialogue established by Aarons’ reading of these narratives speaks to the on-going obligation to bear witness to the Holocaust. Examined together, these intergenerational works bridge the erosions created by time and distance. As a genre of witnessing, these graphic stories, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow.
 
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Holocaust Literature
A History and Guide
David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant
Brandeis University Press, 2013
What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core that consists of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, and tales of individual survival? Is it the same everywhere: West and East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and separate, or can it be studied alongside other responses to catastrophe? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now—and why? Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. No less remarkable is the new memorial literature that begins to take shape within weeks and months of the liberation. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: “communal memory,” still internal and internecine; “provisional memory” in the 1960s and 1970s, when a self-conscious Holocaust genre is born; and “authorized memory,” in which we live today. Twenty book covers—first editions in their original languages—and a guide to the “first hundred books” show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.
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Holocaust Mothers and Daughters
Family, History, and Trauma
Federica K. Clementi
Brandeis University Press, 2013
In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughters’ memoirs, which record the “all-too-human” qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. Clementi’s discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of trauma—individual, familial, and collective—among Jews in twentieth-century Europe.
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The Holocaust
Theoretical Readings
Levi, Neil
Rutgers University Press, 2003
The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume.

This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new writings to demonstrate how concerns arising from the Nazi genocide shaped contemporary literary and cultural theory. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:
- Authenticity and experience
- Memory and trauma
- Historiography and the philosophy of history
- Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism
- Representation and identity formation
- Race, gender, and genocide
- Implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics, and aesthetics

The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions, and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Saul Friedlander, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Langer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White, and James E. Young. This multidisciplinary anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of the Holocaust.

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Home Field
Texas High School Football Stadiums from Alice to Zephyr
Photographs by Jeff Wilson
University of Texas Press, 2010

"The promise of an empty football field is an irresistible force for those who understand and revere the game," Jeff Wilson observes. Drawn by the sense of possibility and nostalgia inherent in every stadium, Wilson traveled the state of Texas to photograph high school stadiums for a photo essay that appeared in Texas Monthly in August 2005. The magazine's readers responded with an outpouring of enthusiasm, and Wilson's photo essay was nominated for a prestigious National Magazine Award.

In Home Field, Wilson creates a unique photo portrait of nearly eighty Texas high school football stadiums, ranging from the bright lights, artificial turf, and seating for thousands at Southlake Carroll to the lone set of bleachers under the wide open sky in Veribest. Shot from the fifty-yard line facing the home stands, these photographs invite us to view each stadium from the same vantage point and experience it as an evocative place that holds a community's collective memories. Accompanying the photographs are reminiscences about the fields from players, coaches, team physicians, athletic directors, sportswriters and announcers, school superintendents, principals and teachers, band directors, maintenance workers, booster club parents, students, and fans. Their stories—whether funny, nostalgic, or poignant—reveal just how important high school football is to Texans and how it creates an unforgettable sense of community and camaraderie.

Sure to bring back memories as soon as you open the book, Home Field captures what football is supposed to be—"simple and pure, like a perfect spiral arcing gracefully across the sky."

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Horses
History, Myth, Art
Catherine Johns
Harvard University Press, 2006

The remarkable relationship between people and horses has been evoked in art from the beginning of the bond between them. In this beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Johns explores the horse in art from the ancient world to the modern era.

In early human history, horses were among the wild creatures hunted for meat; they were domesticated comparatively late, around 4000 B.C. As people developed from hunter-gatherers to farmers, the horse offered the potential for a revolution in power and transport—the ability to move farther and faster transformed society. Johns tells the story of the horse and highlights the key roles this animal has played in human warfare, travel, ceremony, hunting, racing, and in myth and symbolism.

The themes are presented in stunning four-color illustrations of British Museum objects that trace our perceptions of the horse through time and space, and convey the wide variety of images that have been created of this magnificent creature: in colossal and life-sized sculpture, in paintings, and in minuscule form on coins, gems, and jewelry; and from the world of ancient Greece and Rome to the arts of India, Africa, China, and Japan.

Horses appear in stone and metal, ceramic, wood, bone, ivory, and textiles. From the Horse of Selene and a gold model chariot from the Oxus treasure to Persian miniatures and prints by Duerer, Stubbs, and Hokusai, this book will inform, entertain, and delight horse lovers and all readers interested in this inspiring animal and its profound contribution to human culture.

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Hostile Humor in Renaissance France
Bruce Hayes
University of Delaware Press, 2011

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.

This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.

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Hot Pants and Spandex Suits
Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books
Esther De Dauw
Rutgers University Press, 2021
The superheroes from DC and Marvel comics are some of the most iconic characters in popular culture today. But how do these figures idealize certain gender roles, body types, sexualities, and racial identities at the expense of others?
 
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits offers a far-reaching look at how masculinity and femininity have been represented in American superhero comics, from the Golden and Silver Ages to the Modern Age. Scholar Esther De Dauw contrasts the bulletproof and musclebound phallic bodies of classic male heroes like Superman, Captain America, and Iron Man with the figures of female counterparts like Wonder Woman and Supergirl, who are drawn as superhumanly flexible and plastic. It also examines the genre’s ambivalent treatment of LGBTQ representation, from the presentation of gay male heroes Wiccan and Hulkling as a model minority couple to the troubling association of Batwoman’s lesbianism with monstrosity. Finally, it explores the intersection between gender and race through case studies of heroes like Luke Cage, Storm, and Ms. Marvel.
 
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits is a fascinating and thought-provoking consideration of what superhero comics teach us about identity, embodiment, and sexuality.
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Hotel
Carl Adamshick
Four Way Books, 2021

Adamshick’s poems are characteristically accessible and navigable. From the political to the erotic and everywhere in between, these poems take us on a sometimes sober, sometimes raunchy ride.

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The Hours of Marie de Medici
A Facsimile
Marie de Medici
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
A stunning facsimile copy of an illuminated manuscript owned by the French queen Marie de Medici.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a specialty of the renowned Ghent–Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or “books of hours,” from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery.

This manuscript owes its name to the French queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. The manuscript was painted by an artist known as the David Master, one of the renowned Flemish illuminators of the sixteenth century. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes, and detailed city scenes form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive.

Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-color facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.
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How to Abandon Ship
Sasha West
Four Way Books, 2024
In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West harnesses poetry as a vessel to ferry the inconceivable, to wreck upon the shores of what we’ve known thus far. Assessing the accelerating emergencies of climate change amid the West’s self-cannibalizing capitalism, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the state of the world and its compounding catastrophes as a new parent. That fierce love becomes her grappling hook into the glut of information and epochal view of time and space we must scale to leave our children a habitable, equitable planet. To approach a perspective too vast for the individual mind, West cycles through personae which collectively metabolize the strands of the past, and the foundational myths of Western civilization, that constructed this looming future. West speaks as a contemporary mother and an ancient proxy, the unheeded Greek oracle Cassandra; gives voice to fossil fuels; and imagines grown children, real and mythological, surviving beyond a world our generation preemptively mourns. “I have taken / my voice past the threshold, past / the lintel,” Cassandra addresses readers and, more broadly, a paralyzed and apathetic public. “I am speaking to you now from / inside the wildfire while it burns the hair / from my body: I don’t expect you will listen.” But while making space for climate grief, holding our faces up to the ever-expanding sinkhole of earthly loss, West liberates us unto joy, enjoining us to remake the narratives that drive our culture, our consumption, and our relationship to the non-human world. Cassandra’s daughter rides the ship as it sinks, declaring, “I am being shaped / into something new, waiting, / listening to birds give out song / before / the songs give out.” And Cassandra’s granddaughter endures to remind us that, when the sails buckle, we need not drown if we choose to swim. “When you were still alive and apt to get weepy over what you saw as rubbled landscapes, I was impatient. Only a tourist fetishizes the ground where tragedy occurred…. What needs to be done, we do. We act in tiny increments.” These splinters compose the timeless story of humanity: we love each other because we cannot help it; we fail, and fail repeatedly; we go on. 
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The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth
Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Christina Lux
Northwestern University Press, 2019
The essays in The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth represent a defense of the social function of the humanities in today's society. Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Christina Lux, the volume explains different ways in which the humanities and the arts, beyond their intrinsic and nonfunctional value, may be a valuable tool in our search for social justice, human empathy, freedom, and peace, all the while helping us answer many of the twenty-first century's big questions. Some essays explore the ways in which the humanities may help us imagine a different, more just world, and articulate politically effective mechanisms to achieve such goals. Others address the place of the humanities and the arts amid the ontological and epistemological uncertainties constantly produced in a fast-changing world. 

While the reader may suspect that these types of lucubration are a desperate reaction to decreased public funding for the humanities worldwide, a decreased enrollment of students, or anxiety over the future of our profession, there is in this volume a coherent argument for the continued need, perhaps more now than ever, to invest in humanities education if we are to have informed and socially conscious citizens rather than just willing consumers and obedient workers. Furthermore, the essays prove that the humanities and the arts are, after all, not a luxury but an integral part of a complete scholarly education.
 
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The Hygienic Apparatus
Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder
Paul Dobryden
Northwestern University Press, 2022
This study traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder.
 
Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, The Hygienic Apparatus explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Reformers worried about the health risks associated with moviegoing but later used film to popularize hygienic ideas, encouraging viewers to see the world and themselves in relation to public health objectives. Modernist architecture and design fashioned theaters into regenerative environments for fatigued spectators. Filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Slatan Dudow, meanwhile, explored the aesthetic and political possibilities of dirt, contagion, intoxication, and disorder. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. As accessible as it is persuasive, the book adds to a growing body of scholarship on biopolitics within German studies and reveals fresh ways of understanding the apparatus of Weimar cinema.
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