We have long regarded Beethoven as a great composer, but we rarely appreciate that he was also an eminently political artist. This book unveils the role of politics in his oeuvre, elucidating how the inherently political nature of Beethoven’s music explains its power and endurance.

William Kinderman presents Beethoven as a civically engaged thinker faced with severe challenges. The composer lived through many tumultuous events—the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Congress of Vienna among them. Previous studies of Beethoven have emphasized the importance of his personal suffering and inner struggles; Kinderman instead establishes that musical tensions in works such as the Eroica, the Appassionata, and his final piano sonata in C minor reflect Beethoven’s attitudes toward the political turbulence of the era. Written for the 250th anniversary of his birth, Beethoven takes stock of the composer’s legacy, showing how his idealism and zeal for resistance have ensured that masterpieces such as the Ninth Symphony continue to inspire activists around the globe. Kinderman considers how the Fifth Symphony helped galvanize resistance to fascism, how the Sixth has energized the environmental movement, and how Beethoven’s civic engagement continues to inspire in politically perilous times. Uncertain times call for ardent responses, and, as Kinderman convincingly affirms, Beethoven’s music is more relevant today than ever before.

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. 

A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China—now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

Using a replica of Beethoven’s Erard piano, scholar and performer Tom Beghin launches a striking reinterpretation of a key period of Beethoven’s work.

In 1803 Beethoven acquired a French piano from the Erard Frères workshop in Paris. The composer was “so enchanted with it,” one visitor reported, “that he regards all the pianos made here as rubbish by comparison.” While Beethoven loved its sound, the touch of the French keyboard was much heavier than that of the Viennese pianos he had been used to. Hoping to overcome this drawback, he commissioned a local technician to undertake a series of revisions, with ultimately disappointing results. Beethoven set aside the Erard piano for good in 1810.
 
Beethoven’s French Piano returns the reader to this period of Beethoven’s enthusiasm for all things French. What traces of the Erard’s presence can be found in piano sonatas like his “Waldstein” and “Appassionata”? To answer this question, Tom Beghin worked with a team of historians and musicians to commission the making of an accurate replica of the Erard piano. As both a scholar and a recording artist, Beghin is uniquely positioned to guide us through this key period of Beethoven’s work. Whether buried in archives, investigating the output of the French pianists who so fascinated Beethoven, or seated at the keyboard of his Erard, Beghin thinks and feels his way into the mind of the composer, bringing startling new insights into some of the best-known piano compositions of all time.

On the night of January 5, in certain areas of southern Tuscany, a costumed, singing troupe of characters visits residents’ homes, expecting to be fed and feted in a folk custom that has recurred in the region for centuries. This is the Befanata, a mumming tradition centered in Tuscany, whose main character—the Befana—is a kindly old woman or grandmotherly witch who delivers toys, candies, and gifts. Part of the Christmas season, the Befana is familiar in some form in much of Italy, but very little has been written about her, despite sustained interest in European mumming traditions in general.
 
The Pigitliano Befanata is distinct in its emphasis on song and strong in its richly symbolic use of food, which is not only consumed at each home but is also carried away as a gift. The characters who make up the squad are unique to the Italian practice. They always include the Befana and her husband, the Befano, but other members of the befanotti vary from place to place over time. Siporin combines fieldwork and archival evidence to introduce the Befanata and its historical and social contexts: what it is, what it means, and how it feels. The Befana Is Returning is a deeply researched, deftly insightful presentation of this living tradition that adds a large missing piece to the array of contemporary ethnographic scholarship on mumming.

The publication of Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia started the most important theological debate in the Catholic Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The cardinals, bishops, theologians, priests, lay Catholics found themselves on the opposite sides of this crucial and complicated discussion. This book attempts to shed some light on this debate by tracing its genealogy. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal document, the large part of the book is devoted to the theological analysis of the two Synods of Bishops convoked by Pope Francis in the first years of his pontificate: the extraordinary in October 2014 and the ordinary that took place a year later. The main topics for the two synods were determined, however, in the speech given by Cardinal Walter Kasper during the cardinals consistory in February 2014 whose main aim was to prepare the possibility of admitting divorced persons who live in second unions to Holy Communion. The arguments of Cardinal Kasper are presented in the first chapter of the book and confronted with the most significant statements of the Magisterium of the Church on the issue of admittance to the Holy Communion. This book is a study at the intersection of Church history, the history of theology, and systematic theology: dogmatic and moral. Kupczak is interested in the chronology of the events connected to the two synods on the family but in the context of theological problems discussed therein: the theological significance of contemporary cultural changes; the relation of the Church to the world; the understanding of the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage and the Eucharist; the methods of ethically assessing human acts, particularly the concept of so-called intrinsically evil acts (intrinsece malum); and the relation of conscience to the general moral norm. The non-partisan ambition of this book is to serve as a “road map”— a help in navigation for the reader in the complicated discussions leading to publication of Amoris Laetitia. The uniqueness of this book consists in combining the historical analysis of the events leading to the publication of Amoris Laetitia with research of the theological discussion that ensued. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal exhortation, this book rests on the assumption that crucial for its understanding is a thorough analysis of its genealogy. Only in the light of this historical and theological perspective the debates surrounding Amoris Laetitia may be understood.

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China?

Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization.

Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.

Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.

Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History, Texas State Historical Association, 2010
Carr P. Collins Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 2011

On February 26, 1946, an African American from Houston applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law. Although he met all of the school's academic qualifications, Heman Marion Sweatt was denied admission because he was black. He challenged the university's decision in court, and the resulting case, Sweatt v. Painter, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Sweatt's favor. The Sweatt case paved the way for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka rulings that finally opened the doors to higher education for all African Americans and desegregated public education in the United States.

In this engrossing, well-researched book, Gary M. Lavergne tells the fascinating story of Heman Sweatt's struggle for justice and how it became a milestone for the civil rights movement. He reveals that Sweatt was a central player in a master plan conceived by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for ending racial segregation in the United States. Lavergne masterfully describes how the NAACP used the Sweatt case to practically invalidate the "separate but equal" doctrine that had undergirded segregated education for decades. He also shows how the Sweatt case advanced the career of Thurgood Marshall, whose advocacy of Sweatt taught him valuable lessons that he used to win the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and ultimately led to his becoming the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

In this richly illustrated account of black–white contacts from the Pharaohs to the Caesars, Frank Snowden demonstrates that the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because of their color.

For three thousand years Mediterranean whites intermittently came in contact with African blacks in commerce and war, and left a record of these encounters in art and in written documents. The blacks—most commonly known as Kushites, Ethiopians, or Nubians—were redoubtable warriors and commanded the respect of their white adversaries. The overall view of blacks was highly favorable. In science, philosophy, and religion color was not the basis of theories concerning inferior peoples. And early Christianity saw in the black man a dramatic symbol of its catholic mission.

This book sheds light on the reasons for the absence in antiquity of virulent color prejudice and for the difference in attitudes of whites toward blacks in ancient and modern societies.

This groundbreaking book opens the door on the missing record of South Los Angeles juvenile gangs. It is the result of the unique friendship that developed between John Quicker and Akil Batani-Khalfani, aka Bird, who collaborated to show how structural marginality transformed hang-out street groups of non-White juveniles into gangs, paving the way for the rise of the infamous Crips and Bloods. Before Crips uses a macro historical analysis to sort through political and economic factors to explain the nature of gang creation.

The authors mine a critical archive, using direct interviews with original gang members as well as theory and literature reviews, to contextualize gang life and gang formation. They discuss (and fuss and cuss about) topics ranging from the criminal economy and conceptions of masculinity to racial and gendered politics and views of violence. Their insider/outsider approach not only illuminates gang values and organization, but what they did and why, and how they grew in a backdrop of inequality and police brutality that came to a head with the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

Providing an essential understanding of early South Los Angeles gang life, Before Crips explains what has remained constant, what has changed, and the roots of the violence that continues.

Before Fidel Castro seized power, Cuba was an ebullient and chaotic society in a permanent state of turmoil, combining a raucous tropical nature with the evils of arbitrary and corrupt government. Yet this fascinating period in Cuban history has been largely forgotten or misrepresented, even though it set the stage for Castro's dramatic takeover in 1959. To reclaim the Cuba that he knew—and add color and detail to the historical record—distinguished political scientist Francisco José Moreno here offers his recollections of the Cuba in which he came of age personally and politically.

Moreno takes us into the little-known world of privileged, upper-middle-class, white Cubans of the 1930s through the 1950s. His vivid depictions of life in the family and on the streets capture the distinctive rhythms of Cuban society and the dynamics between parents and children, men and women, and people of different races and classes. The heart of the book describes Moreno's political awakening, which culminated during his student years at the University of Havana. Moreno gives a detailed, insider's account of the anti-Batista movement, including the Ortodoxos and the Triple A. He recaptures the idealism and naiveté of the movement, as well as its ultimate ineffectiveness as it fell before the juggernaut of the Castro Revolution. His own disillusionment and wrenching decision to leave Cuba rather than accept a commission in Castro's army poignantly closes the book.

In 2003 the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws across the country, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects private consensual sex between adults. To some, the decision seemed to come like lightning from above, altering the landscape of America’s sexual politics all at once. In actuality, many years of work and organizing led up to the legal case, and the landmark ruling might never have happened were it not for the passionate struggle of Texans who rejected their state’s discriminatory laws.

Before Lawrence v. Texas tells the story of the long, troubled, and ultimately hopeful road to constitutional change. Wesley G. Phelps describes the achievements, setbacks, and unlikely alliances along the way. Over the course of decades, and at great risk to themselves, gay and lesbian Texans and their supporters launched political campaigns and legal challenges, laying the groundwork for Lawrence. Phelps shares the personal experiences of the people and couples who contributed to the legal strategy that ultimately overturned the state’s discriminatory law. Even when their individual court cases were unsuccessful, justice seekers and activists collectively influenced public opinion by insisting that their voices be heard. Nine Supreme Court justices ruled, but it was grassroots politics that vindicated the ideal of equality under the law.

One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims today—of all sects—deny that the incident of the Satanic verses took place. But as Shahab Ahmed explains, Muslims did not always hold this view.

Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth—especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah.

Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do—issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.

Struggling to survive in post­–World War II Germany, Beate Uhse (1919–2001)—a former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and young mother—turned to selling goods on the black market. A self-penned guide to the rhythm method found eager buyers and started Uhse on her path to becoming the world’s largest erotica entrepreneur. Battling restrictive legislation, powerful churches, and conservative social mores, she built a mail-order business in the 1950s that sold condoms, sex aids, self-help books, and more. The following decades brought the world’s first erotica shop, the legalization of pornography, the expansion of her business into eastern Germany, and web-based commerce.

Uhse was only one of many erotica entrepreneurs who played a role in the social and sexual revolution accompanying Germany’s transition from Nazism to liberal democracy. Tracing the activities of entrepreneurs, customers, government officials, and citizen-activists, Before Porn Was Legal brings to light the profound social, legal, and cultural changes that attended the growth of the erotica sector. Heineman’s innovative readings of governmental and industry records, oral histories, and the erotica industry’s products uncover the roots of today’s sexual marketplace and reveal the indelible ways in which sexual expression and consumption have become intertwined.

In Before the Flood Jacob Blanc traces the protest movements of rural Brazilians living in the shadow of the Itaipu dam—the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, local communities facing displacement took a stand against the military officials overseeing the dam's construction, and in the context of an emerging national fight for democracy, they elevated their struggle for land into a referendum on the dictatorship itself. Unlike the broader campaign against military rule, however, the conflict at Itaipu was premised on issues that long predated the official start of dictatorship: access to land, the defense of rural and indigenous livelihoods, and political rights in the countryside. In their efforts against Itaipu and through conflicts among themselves, title-owning farmers, landless peasants, and the Avá-Guarani Indians articulated a rural-based vision for democracy. Through interviews and archival research—including declassified military documents and the first-ever access to the Itaipu Binational Corporation—Before the Flood challenges the primacy of urban-focused narratives and unearths the rural experiences of dictatorship and democracy in Brazil.

The 2012 passage of Initiative 502 in Washington state removed the prohibition on the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes and required the state to regulate and tax a new marijuana industry. This report uses data from multiple sources to estimate the total weight of marijuana consumed in the state in 2013 to provide decisionmakers with baseline information about the size of the state’s market.

All Cub fans know from heartbreak and curse-toting goats. Fewer know that, prior to moving to the north side in 1916, the team fielded powerhouse nines that regularly claimed the pennant. Before the Ivy offers a grandstand seat to a golden age:

BEHOLD the 1871 team as it plays for the title in nine different borrowed uniforms after losing everything in the Great Chicago Fire

ATTEND West Side Grounds at Polk and Wolcott with its barbershop quartet

MARVEL as superstar Cap Anson hits .399, makes extra cash running a ballpark ice rink, and strikes out as an elected official

WONDER at experiments with square bats and corked balls, the scandal of Sunday games and pre-game booze-ups, the brazen spitters and park dimensions changed to foil Ty Cobb

RAZZ Charles Comiskey as he adopts a Cubs hand-me-down moniker for his team's name

THRILL to the poetic double-play combo of Tinker, Evers, and Chance even as they throw tantrums at umpires and punches at each other

CHEER as Merkle's Boner and the Cubs' ensuing theatrics send the team to the 1908 World Series

Rich with Hall of Fame personalities and oddball stories, Before the Ivy opens a door to Chicago's own field of dreams and serves as every Cub fan's guide to a time when thoughts of "next year" filled rival teams with dread.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent—that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present.

Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter’s epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

From June of 1941 through the following summer, Fredericka Martin lived with her husband, Dr. Samuel Berenberg, on remote St. Paul Island in Alaska. During that time, Martin delved into the complex history of the Unangan people, and Before the Storm draws from her personal accounts of that year and her research to present a fascinating portrait of a time and a people facing radical change. A government-ordered evacuation of all Aleuts from the island in the face of World War II, which Martin recounts in her journal, proved but the first step in a long struggle by native peoples to gain independence, and, as editor Raymond L. Hudson explains, Martin came to play a significant role in the effort.

A fascinating book on the origins of writing.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art.

In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era.

Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.

There is no planet B. Activists share how we must inform and organize ourselves to save the future.
 
“Act as though your house is on fire. Because it is.” Following Greta Thunberg, millions of young climate activists have been taking to the streets around the globe as part of the Fridays For Future movement. They demand that we “unite behind the science,” as, for too long, climate scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures, tipping points, and the devastating consequences of extreme weather—but politicians do nothing.
 
So how do you begin to end the climate crisis? Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning begin by telling stories. Neubauer cofounded the youth climate activist group in Germany and has become its most prominent voice. In this book she and Repenning weave in personal accounts of their evolution as climate activists with a thorough analysis of how climate change impacts their generation, and what every one of us can and must do about it. The young and old in the United States and around the world can learn valuable lessons from their European counterparts.
 

The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee.
 
This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions.
 
Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany.
 
Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.
 

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.
 

The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Drawing on an unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music, William J. Mahar explores the racist practices of minstrel entertainers and considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. 

Mahar investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. Locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar reassesses the historiography of the field.

Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents' assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar's older denizens as key to understanding Beijing's recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China's economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history.

“Where is the market?” inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. “Follow the ghosts,” responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. “It’s not called the ghost market for nothing!” And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing—newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. Beijing Time conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider.

The ancient Chinese understood the world as enchanted, its shapes revealing the mythological order of the universe. In the structure and detail of Tian’anmen Square, the authors reveal the city as a whole. In Beijing no pyramids stand as proud remnants of the past; instead, the entire city symbolizes a vibrant civilization. From Tian’anmen Square, we proceed to the neighborhoods for a glimpse of local color—from the granny and the young police officer to the rag picker and the flower vendor. Wandering from the avant-garde art market to the clock towers, from the Monumental Axis to Mao’s Mausoleum, the book allows us to peer into the lives of Beijingers, the rules and rituals that govern their reality, and the mythologies that furnish their dreams. Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.

A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.

Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.

Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.

This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself. From Cape to Batavia, slavery is understood as a diffuse practice. This approach helps unearth 18th and 19th century experiences of being a slave in the Indian Ocean world, but also sheds light on continuities in bondage into the present. Contributors force an often hostile archive to extract traces of the lived experience of slavery in court records, petitions or private letters. They also listen to local voices by prying unexplored primary sources such as oral histories, memories and objects.
 

One of the most important theologians of the modern era, Karl Rahner is best known for his efforts to make Christianity credible in light of the intellectual questions of modern culture. Stephen M. Fields, SJ, now explains how Rahner developed his metaphysics as a creative synthesis of Thomism and the modern philosophical tradition. Focusing on Rahner's core concept of the Realsymbol, which posits all beings as symbolic, Fields establishes the place of the Realsymbol in philosophical theories of the symbol. He particularly concentrates on those key aspects of Rahner's metaphysics-his theories of finite realities and language—that have received insufficient attention.

By examining a wide range of Rahner's works in the context of twelve medieval, modern, and contemporary thinkers, Fields locates the origins of this seminal thinker's metaphysics to an extent never before attempted. He notes the correlations that exist between the Realsymbol and such work as Aquinas's theory of the sacraments, Goethe's and Hegel's dialectics, Moehler's view of religious language, and Heidegger's aesthetics.

Through this analysis, Fields reveals the structural core of Rahner's metaphysics and shows how art, language, knowledge, religious truth, and reality in general are all symbolic. Being as Symbol opens new perspectives on this important thinker and positions him in the broader spectrum of philosophical thought.

The 1911 revolution in China sparked debates that politicized and divided Chinese communities in the United States. People in these communities affirmed traditional Chinese values and expressed their visions of a modern China, while nationalist feelings emboldened them to stand up for their rights as an integral part of American society. When Japan threatened the China's young republic, the Chinese response in the United States revealed the limits of Chinese nationalism and the emergence of a Chinese American identity. 

Shehong Chen investigates how Chinese immigrants to the United States transformed themselves into Chinese Americans during the crucial period between 1911 and 1927. Chen focuses on four essential elements of a distinct Chinese American identity: support for republicanism over the restoration of monarchy; a wish to preserve Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture; support for Christianity, despite a strong anti-Christian movement in China; and opposition to the Nationalist party's alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party. 

Sensitive and enlightening, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American documents how Chinese immigrants survived exclusion and discrimination, envisioned and maintained Chineseness, and adapted to American society.

Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.

Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

An immersive multigenerational memoir that recounts the hopes, injustices, and triumphs of a Black family fighting for access to the American dream in the twentieth century.

The late Chicagoan George Nesbitt could perhaps best be described as an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift for storytelling. In his newly uncovered memoir—written fifty years ago, yet never published—he chronicles in vivid and captivating detail the story of how his upwardly mobile Midwestern Black family lived through the tumultuous twentieth century.
 
Spanning three generations, Nesbitt’s tale starts in 1906 with the Great Migration and ends with the Freedom Struggle in the 1960s. He describes his parents’ journey out of the South, his struggle against racist military authorities in World War II, the promise and peril of Cold War America, the educational and professional accomplishments he strove for and achieved, the lost faith in integration, and, despite every hardship, the unwavering commitment by three generations of Black Americans to fight for a better world. Through all of it—with his sharp insights, nuance, and often humor—we see a family striving to lift themselves up in a country that is working to hold them down.
 
Nesbitt’s memoir includes two insightful forewords: one by John Gibbs St. Clair Drake (1911–90), a pioneer in the study of African American life, the other a contemporary rumination by noted Black studies scholar Imani Perry. A rare first-person, long-form narrative about Black life in the twentieth century, Being Somebody and Black Besides is a remarkable literary-historical time capsule that will delight modern readers.

Founded in Galveston in 1842 with the launch of the Daily News, the Belo Corporation entered the twenty-first century as a powerhouse conglomerate, owning four daily newspapers (including the Dallas Morning News), twenty-six television and cable stations, and over thirty interactive Web sites. The first comprehensive work to bring to life this remarkable success story, Belo blends biography with a history of corporate strategies.

Drawing on company archives and private papers of key figures, including A. H. Belo and G. B. Dealey, former company archivist Judith Garrett Segura brings to life important chapters in the cultural life of Texas, from Galveston's days as the largest and most vibrant town in the Republic of Texas, through the wars that followed statehood, periods of economic hardship, and the effects of sweeping social change. Turning points in the company's history, such as the sale of its Galveston paper when company revenues were dramatically affected by candid reporting of Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1920s, highlight crucial elements of the press's role in the life of a community. Segura also charts technological advances, from the telegraph and the typographers' union to the dawn of the Information Age. Finally, she includes the most complete portrait of the Dallas Times Herald Company to date, documenting the rise and fall of Belo's chief rival.

This is a story of frontier survival and futuristic thinking, marketing genius and historic reporting, nurtured by a family of mavericks.

The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder.
 
Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place – and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art. Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story takes place on both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews.
 

When the Nazis annexed western Poland in 1939, they quickly set about identifying Polish citizens of German origin and granting them the privileged legal status of ethnic Germans of the Reich. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Soviet-dominated Poland incorporated eastern Germany and proceeded to do just the opposite: searching out Germans of Polish origin and offering them Polish citizenship. Underscoring the processes of inclusion and exclusion that mold national communities, Belonging to the Nation examines the efforts of Nazi Germany and postwar Poland to nationalize inhabitants of the contested Polish-German borderlands.

Histories of the experience of national minorities in the twentieth century often concentrate on the grim logic of ethnic cleansing. John Kulczycki approaches his topic from a different angle, focusing on how governments decide which minorities to include, not expel. The policies Germany and Poland pursued from 1939 to 1951 bear striking similarities. Both Nazis and Communist Poles regarded national identity as biologically determined—and both found this principle difficult to enforce. Practical impediments to proving a person’s ethnic descent meant that officials sometimes resorted to telltale cultural behaviors in making assessments of nationality. Although the goal was to create an ethnically homogeneous nation, Germany and Poland allowed pockets of minorities to remain, usually to exploit their labor. Kulczycki illustrates the complexity of the process behind national self-determination, the obstacles it confronts in practice, and the resulting injustices.